Garling Breaks Out in a Cold Sweat

After the Reverie ended, Mary Geoise did not return to its former calm.

Between the palaces, the stench of blood had been deliberately masked beneath incense, yet traces of it remained.

The attendants kept their heads lowered as they repeatedly wiped the corridors the nobles had walked through with cloths soaked in special solution. Every few steps, Cipher Pol agents in white uniforms and masks stood like statues, their gazes sweeping every corner through the eyeholes, as though the attackers might regenerate from the cracks in the stone.

Thirteen Celestial Dragons had died this time. Four had been killed by the initial high-pressure water jets, while the rest had been taken by poison gas.

It was no longer possible to suppress the news. Fifty kings and their entourages had witnessed the deaths of the World Nobles with their own eyes.

The Five Elders could not kill every witness, just as one could not cut off all four limbs to treat an abscess on the hand.

Power was like a spiderweb; sustaining it required countless anchor points. Killing one or two kings could be explained away as shipwrecks, illness, or pirate attacks.

But fifty? That would mean the collapse of the entire web. Could a World Government with only a ruling body and no member nations still be called a government?

The World Government's only directly governed territory was the Red Line, but crops could not be grown there. Only the modified region of Mary Geoise could sustain plant life. Yet how could the pampered Celestial Dragons possibly be willing to sacrifice their living space just to grow vegetables?

It was the same with other resources, not merely food.

The World Government depended heavily on its member nations for resources and absolutely dared not fall out with them completely. Otherwise, the