I reported my findings to the girls, and decided to leave the three to keep doing what they were doing. Simply holding a place in Alerith was a benefit to me. My residence in the capital was only collecting dust, after all. I should find some people to station there as well. As for his so-called reports, I found out how he was sending them, and corrected them so that the reports would reach me.

Before Lord Aberis left to try to kill me, he had created an information blackout in this city. He shut down the travel guild by claiming there was a need for renovations, and he also made sure no messages left or came to the city. Such a blackout would have been extremely suspicious in my world, but I had to consider it had only been a few months since then.

Any given message sent would normally take months for a response, especially for commoners who couldn’t afford expensive surfaces like the blue mages. The blackout had managed to hold, and the few people who knew something was up only had started to grumble about it. It could be another three months before they started having issues. This was the far west, nearly on the border of the wilderness, after all. Everything this far from the Capital occurred slowly, at least when I wasn’t involved.

I finished with my spy network, which admittedly was subpar. After all, they hadn’t found anything out that a commoner wouldn’t know. It was probably better to call them house sitters. When I was done with Drake and his gang, I left and headed for the mansion. I brought up my map to check the place. I had once been in the mansion, so I had the area once mapped out.

“Nothing…” I sighed.

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As I become skilled, I found I could read more out of the Map skill than I used to. In the past, the map would always just update arbitrarily. For example, I could use an old map, and it would update the Map, but it wouldn’t be until I went to the area personally that the changes that had occurred over time would be reflected in the Map. It was pretty simple to tell if a part of my Map was accurate or not. I just had to send a portal. A portal could only connect if the area was recognizable. If it had changed too much, then the portal would no longer work. This was one of the great advantages of owning a property in a city. As long as it wasn’t knocked down, you could maintain a familiar signature to connect with.

However, I no longer needed to test out a place in such a manner. I could tell instinctively which areas of the map were valid, and which areas were dates. The dated areas were still useful, but you could arrive there only to find it no longer the same. For example, if I went to a mountain and then home, and then someone came along and blue up that mountain, I wouldn’t want to portal into the middle of a now-empty sky. It was that kind of mechanic.

That said, despite the fact I had been in the mansion fairly recently, it was out of date. I don’t believe this is because Lord Aberis started redirecting shortly after I left. There must have been some kind of spell that scrambled the local mana to keep the place from being mapped out in this manner. Perhaps, he had realized after I escaped in Twilight that I was too much of a risk, and used this spell accordingly. That meant that the only way I could enter the castle was the front door.

The last time I had entered the castle without warning, I had ended up nearly losing my life. My soul had been split in two and I had to face numerous trials, some of which I was still coping with today. It had given me a great deal of trauma, and my girls had probably suffered the most.

However, I wasn’t the same man I was back then, and my girls weren’t the same. I took a breath. It was time to face Lord Reign a final time.