At that moment, Lionheart City, Triumphal Palace.
The Fallen Angel sat in the position originally occupied by the Stibium monarch, his body constantly steaming with an aura of corruption.
This was not the king's study, normally used for handling state affairs, but the council chamber used to receive ministers or bestow titles upon nobles. The back of the Stibium monarch's throne was crafted from refined stibium and gemstones of every color.
The originally pitch-black and poisonous metal antimony had now been refined into silver-white, pure stibium. It had irregular, sharp, prismatic crystals, with every facet shining a different color under the lamplight. Even slightly changing the direction of the light source would cause them to turn another color.
They tilted upward from the back of the throne toward both sides. In the morning, the sun would shine obliquely upon the throne.
Seen from a distance, it looked as though the colored crystals had transformed into two glittering crystal wings. It possessed a strange, sacred beauty. As those colored stibium crystals refracted the sunlight, countless alchemical arrays carved into their facets would also appear on the walls, slowly rotating and flickering in and out as the sunlight shifted.
That was the dream passed down through the generations of the Stibium Kingdom—
To shed their mortality and ascend into godhood.
But until the fall of the Valentine dynasty, their wish had never been fulfilled.
Now, a true god sat upon it instead—and one who had shed his divinity and fallen into mortality at that. It could not have been a more fitting irony.
Under the contamination of the aura of corruption, the originally silver-gray stibium had turned completely black. It had become Colorful Black, occasionally flashing with a streak of color in the darkness.
Not only that, but the entire palace had