Chapter 436. He Was Bought and Paid for Before the First Seed Even Failed

Chapter 436: 436. He Was Bought and Paid for Before the First Seed Even Failed

The implications of the engineering report began to unfurl before William like a poisoned scroll. He spent hours cross-referencing the flood maps with the agricultural output of the era, and the pattern that emerged was nothing short of chilling.

The dam’s failure hadn’t been a random rupture; it had triggered catastrophic flooding that swept through the kingdom’s most vital grain belts with a terrifying, almost surgical precision. The water had poisoned the soil with silt and debris in a pattern that defied all natural logic.

In retrospect, the flooding had spared several less agriculturally significant regions that lay directly in the natural path of the water, according to the terrain regions that, curiously, held no strategic value to the Delmore alliance.

William sank back into his chair, the wood creaking under his weight, staring at his own notes until the ink seemed to blur. Something genuinely sinister was taking shape, a shape he recognized from the darkest corners of his own past.

He had witnessed countless natural disasters—earthquakes that swallowed cities and storms that tore through coastlines—and none of them possessed this quality of deliberate, calculated cruelty.

Nature was chaotic, indiscriminate, and brutally honest in its randomness.

This? This had the fingerprints of a patient predator.

This had the fingerprints of human design.

’They didn’t just wait for the kingdom to fail,’ he thought, his fingers drumming a slow, ominous rhythm on the desk. ’They engineered the collapse, then blamed the weather for the corpse. ’

Three days later, the heavy oak door to his makeshift headquarters swung open with enough force to rattle the candle flames.

Olivia practically stormed in, her eyes bright with a manic, triumphant energy that bordered on dangerous. She looked like she hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours, but she also looked like she could sprint across the entire continent on pure adrenaline.

"You are not going to believe what I found," she announced, dropping into the chair opposite him with a thump.

She spread a thick stack of documents across the table with the theatrical flourish of a conqueror displaying spoils of war.

"Try me," William said, already leaning forward, his pulse quickening.

He could see the hunger for truth in her expression, a hunger he shared.

"I followed the rot, William... All the way to the root." Olivia tapped a finger against the first document, her nail clicking sharply against the parchment.

"Several senior officials responsible for Celestial’s emergency grain reserves at the time of the crisis—men who were supposed to be the kingdom’s last line of defense against starvation—received unusually large payments from an unidentified source in the weeks immediately preceding the harvest failure."

She traced a line through a complex web of notations. "These weren’t simple bribes..."

"These were sophisticated, multi-layered financial strikes... The money was funneled through at least four separate shell transactions, moving through intermediary accounts designed to vanish into the ether."

"It was deliberately obscured, meant to leave no trail."

William leaned in close, studying the intricate web she had reconstructed. Her handwriting was small, precise, and covered in angry red notations where she had connected the dots.

"This took considerable work to trace, Olivia..."

"Most people would have given up at the first shell company."

"I don’t give up," she said, a flash of fierce pride crossing her face before she immediately pivoted back to the grim reality. "I had to call in favors from three separate contacts."

"One of them hasn’t spoken to me in over a year and made me promise an embarrassing number of future favors... But look here, look at the scale of it."

She pointed to a specific entry that made William’s stomach turn. "This official, the one responsible for authorizing the release of emergency grain reserves during any declared crisis, received a payment equivalent to roughly ten years of his official salary."

"It was delivered in three installments, timed perfectly over the two months immediately before the harvest failure officially began."

"He was bought and paid for before the first seed even failed."

"Bribery," William muttered, though the word felt insufficient. "A simple corruption scandal."

"No, William... This isn’t corruption."

"Corruption is a parasite that lives off a system..."

"This was an executioner." Olivia’s grin was fierce, almost feral, as she leaned into the lamplight. "I’m suggesting these officials were paid specifically to ensure the kingdom’s emergency reserves remained locked away while the people starved."

"Someone wanted this disaster to hit with maximum lethality..."

"Someone wanted to guarantee that when the dam broke, there would be no safety net to catch the kingdom..."

"They didn’t just want a crisis; they wanted a massacre."

William sat in silence for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the web of financial treachery laid out before him. The implications were no longer theoretical; they were visceral.

Every line of ink Olivia had traced represented a human life stolen, a family broken, and a village left to starve while their leaders counted blood-stained coins. The full, ugly shape of the conspiracy was sharpening into something monstrous, something that transcended mere politics and entered the realm of atrocity.

"This is genuinely excellent work, Olivia," William said finally, his voice low and rough with restrained emotion. "You’ve found the heartbeat of the beast."

"I know," Olivia replied, entirely without false modesty.

She didn’t even pretend to deflect the compliment; instead, she practically preened, the fire of victory burning bright in her exhausted eyes. "And I’d like that acknowledged properly, for the record."

"This wasn’t some simple ledger check... I spent days chasing ghosts through accounts specifically designed to be untraceable."

"I nearly lost the trail twice! before I found the one contact who actually remembered handling one of those intermediary transfers personally."

"That man nearly had a heart attack when I mentioned his name."

William couldn’t help it; a grim, humorless laugh escaped his throat despite the crushing weight of their discovery. "Duly acknowledged."

"You’re genuinely remarkable at this, Olivia... Most people would have died trying to follow this thread."

"I know that too," she said with a sharp, knowing grin. "But it’s nice to hear, regardless."

"At the Academy, everyone is so obsessed with the flash and thunder of perfect sword forms and devastating elemental affinities that they forget the real power lies in the things people think are beneath them."

"They forget that you can topple a kingdom with a quill faster than you can with a claymore."

"I’ll make sure to sing your praises properly once this is all resolved," William promised, his eyes darkening. "Though I suspect the audience for that song won’t be very forgiving."

"See that you do," Olivia said.

But as she began to gather her documents, the triumphant grin faded, replaced by a cold, hard seriousness that made the air in the room feel suddenly thin. "William, listen to me."

"I want you to understand something... This isn’t abstract anymore."

"This isn’t some academic puzzle for us to solve over tea."

"Whoever orchestrated this was willing to bribe multiple officials, engineer a genuine humanitarian catastrophe, and watch countless innocent people scream in agony and die all to secure a single political marriage years down the line."

Her fingers pressed hard against the parchment as she spoke, her knuckles whitening. "That’s not the work of politicians who fear scandal."

"That’s the work of monsters who fear nothing."

"People who kill thousands for a contract don’t simply back down when someone starts asking questions..."

"They don’t retreat; they eliminate."

"I know," William said quietly, his hand instinctively drifting toward the hilt of the blade resting against his chair. "Believe me, Olivia."

"I know exactly what kind of predators we’re hunting now."

Days later, Albert’s arrival interrupted their grim understanding. His contribution was delivered in the deepest privacy of his study, and it proved to be the final, damning nail in the coffin of the Delmore lie.

When Albert spoke, there was no diplomatic veneer, no measured neutrality. There was only the raw, uncomfortable weight of a truth that could burn the world down.

"I found this buried within a set of old trade agreements," Albert said, his voice carrying an unfamiliar tremor of something approaching disgust.

He slid a weathered, fragile document across the table toward William, handling the aged parchment with a reverence that spoke of its dangerous contents. "A contract between the Kingdom of Delmore and an independent grain shipping company."

"It was signed only weeks before Celestial’s crisis officially began."

Albert leaned forward, his face appearing pale in the flickering candlelight. "It took considerable persuasion to access these files, William."

"I had to frame the request as purely historical academic interest, dancing on a knife’s edge to avoid raising suspicion among the archive’s keepers."

"But once I was inside..." He trailed off, his eyes fixed on William with terrifying clarity. "Once I saw the dates, the signatures, and the terms of delivery... the entire narrative of ’natural misfortune’ collapsed."