Chapter 7: History

Caelan’s eyes flashed with yellow light, his hair floating upward by an inch as the static charge in the room doubled. "What did you say, you little gremlin? I’ll have you know my simulation scored the highest in the entire second-year tactical division!"

"The second-year division is populated primarily by concussed aristocrats whose primary qualification is owning a family crest," Elara replied, not even blinking as she speared a slice of pear.

"A well-trained baboon with a wooden club could achieve median ranking."

"Why you—!"

"Enough," Duke Darius rumbled.

He didn’t shout.

He simply set his heavy silver goblet down upon the table.

A dull thump vibrated through the floorboards, grounding the electrical current instantly and sending a tiny tremor through the table that neatly shattered Elara’s frost layer into harmless powder.

Caelan’s hair dropped back to his shoulders; Elara’s compote stopped emitting frost smoke.

The Duke massaged the bridge of his nose, looking exhausted.

He glanced at his oldest son, a walking electrical transformer, and then at his daughter, an active refrigeration unit, before his gaze finally drifted toward Lucien, who was sitting quietly in the middle, peacefully chewing a buttered roll and minding his own business like an exemplary civilian.

The Duke’s stern expression softened with an intensity that bordered on worship.

"Both of you are absolute menace! How did I end up with kids like this?"

"Look at your brother," Darius said, pointing a thick, calloused finger at Lucien. "Just look at him. Sitting there, chewing his food like a civilized human being. Not an arc of lightning in sight, a single frosty draft freezing the soup. He breathes, he eats, he smiles politely. A masterpiece of domestic tranquility!"

Caelan groaned, slumping back into his seat. "Come on, father, Lucien nearly died five days ago! Of course he’s quiet! He’s probably still numb from the waist up!"

"He is always been calm and serene, unlike you brutes," the Duke insisted stubbornly, reaching across the table to affectionately pat Lucien’s shoulder with enough force to nearly dislocate his collarbone.

"He has an inner peace that you two volatile maniacs will never understand. You two were born with mana reservoirs the size of lakes, and what has it brought this house? Scorched tapestries, frostbitten houseplants, and three hundred thousand gold in damages to the academy’s sparring arenas over the last two semesters."

"Caelan was the one who broke the arena floor," Elara noted coldly. "I merely frosted the ceiling a little bit."

"You froze the plumbing for the entire west dormitory, Elara!" Caelan roared. "The third-year knights had to wash their armor in the ornamental duck pond for a week!"

"They smelled better for it."

Lucien had merely smiled, nodding serenely, taking another delicate sip of his sweet white wine.

’This family is completely unhinged,’ Lucien had thought with deep appreciation. ’They don’t resent Lucien for being normal. Rahter, they view him as the only emotionally stable member of a house populated by natural disasters. He’s the emotional support golden retriever of the Everhart Duchy.’

The realization that Lucien had been groomed not for military conquest, but to be the administrative backbone, the calm, sensible manager who would sit in a warm office, manage the grain tariffs, sign the tax ledgers, and gently prevent his hyper-powered siblings from accidentally vaporizing neighboring territories, had filled Lucien with supreme confidence.

’I was made for this,’ he had realized in the library on day six.

’I have a degree in computer science. I spent four years staring at database schemas and fixing merge conflicts caused by caffeinated juniors. Managing grain logistics and signing tax forms while my siblings blow up mountains is literally my dream job.’

To solidify this glorious destiny of bureaucratic mediocrity, Lucien had spent the entirety of day six barricaded in the grand library of House Everhart.

The library was a breathtaking, multi-tiered canyon of cedar bookshelves, accessed by spiraling staircases and smelling of dried ink, leather bindings, and aged linen paper.

The ceiling featured an enormous glass skylight depicting the foundational history of the empire, through which brilliant shafts of dusty, multicolored sunlight illuminated long oak reading tables piled high with cartographic scrolls and leather-bound annals.

Lucien had dragged sixteen massive volumes to the sunniest table in the west corner, determined to map out the geopolitical landscape and confirm the exact boundaries of his personal safety bubble.

What he found, however, had violently shattered his lingering delusions of grandeur.

He had known, vaguely from the novel, that the social hierarchy was brutal.

But reading the formal historical codices, bound in the hide of drake-scaled oxen and stamped with the Imperial seal, laid bare the terrifying reality of his position.

"Let’s see here..." Lucien had muttered, trailing his finger down the gold-embossed pages of The Peerage and Sacred Bloodlines of the Solaris Empire.

In this world, a Duke was a magnificent entity with a teritorry as big as a small country to manage.

Duke Everhart commanded armies, governed an expanse of land larger than several European nations combined, and answered only to the crown.

...Except when it came to the Seven Ancient Families.

"Oh, perfect," Lucien had muttered, his eye twitching as he read the footnotes. "Just perfect."

The Seven Ancient Families were not mere aristocrats.

They were the primordial pillars upon which the entire empire had been anchored eight hundred years ago.

When the first catastrophic of Dungeon Burst had nearly wiped humanity from the face of the continent, the legendary Sun Goddess, Solaris, had supposedly descended in a pillar of golden fire, bestowing her direct divine blessing upon the founding Emperor and the patriarchs of the seven guardian houses.

While regular noble bloodlines like the Everharts had to rely on the natural lottery of genetic mana inheritance, the Seven Ancient Families carried divine, generational authorities woven directly into their souls.

They were the Guardians of the Throne, the Wardens of the Divine Pillars, and the apex predators of the continent’s military hierarchy.

A direct heir of an Ancient Family outranked a common Ducal heir in ritual precedence, military jurisdiction, and sacred authority.