The two of them spoke for a bit longer. The allocated for training had not yet concluded, yet the remaining time was far too little to be worth spending on training. Prince Raijun spoke to Rui freely, putting aside his royal bearing as he tried to accommodate Rui's comfort.

The more he learned about this spectacular Martial Artist, the more he realized that this was not someone he wanted aligned against him.

While it was true that a Martial Senior, no matter how prodigious, was small before the might of a political faction, Rui Quarrier possessed boundless potential by all estimates. On top of that, there was the mysterious knowledge of the mechanics of reality that he possessed.

Prince Raijun was never privy to the details of Rui's contributions to the Squire evolution breakthrough procedure as an outsider to the Martial Union. However, the Surgeon had informed him in confidence that it was unlike he had ever seen in his entire life. The unfathomable knowledge that Rui had bestowed upon them was otherworldly.

This was not the first time that Rui had done such a thing, his sources told him. The Pathfinder technique was apparently a revolutionary manner of achieving accuracy and would have changed the landscape of ranged combat if not for the difficulty of mastery.

Even a blind man could see that Rui was a force that could change the world as long as he didn't die early.

Most of the Sects and factions within the Martial Union were highly pleased with him, including the Martial Sects that had joined the Raijun Faction. While other non-Martial patrons and power blocs within the Raijun Faction were in favor of trapping Rui with a loophole in their contract agreement, the Martial Sects and Martial factions that had joined his faction ultimately killed the proposal with great backlash.

"Senior Quarrier has just left the premises, Your Highness," His personal butler informed him. "He refused our offers of transport yet again."

He was wrong.

One of his most trusted patrons and supporters, the Minister of Domestic Affairs, had come across something quite shocking when he searched the Kandrian Intelligence Bureau for intelligence on Rui Quarrier.

An ocean of intelligence reports on Rui Quarrier. Information that not even the Martial Union had.

What shocked all of them was how far back some of these reports went.

Reports on not just his Squire and Apprentice days but also on his early days in the Martial Academy before he broke through to the Apprentice Realm.

"However, that wasn't all…" One of his advisors solemnly reminded Prince Raijun.

"…Minister Grances had also found extensive reports detailing his early life as a child in the Quarrier Orphanage. The chain of commission was redacted, and the supervising agent on all these reports is currently missing," His supervisor informed him. "These files were not classified as highly confidential. They were actually buried deep in the depths of the intelligence archives of the Kandrian Intelligence Bureau and were neither registered nor tagged with unique report IDs. The officers that the Minister had deployed barely managed to find one of them incidentally when looking through old declassified archives for a particular incident."

That was not the extent of the anomalies. "The old reports clearly indicate input from Martial Masters, whose identities are also redacted and scrapped out of the database. Whoever commissioned these reports made use of multiple Martial Masters to collect intelligence on Rui Quarrier for many years and even decades and had enough power and authority to erase any and all records of Their Masteries' identities."

It was shocking and bewildering, so much so that they had yet to piece together everything there was. Yet one thing had become evident to the elites of the Raijun Faction. Someone powerful had been trying to collect this information without alerting anyone of its existence. Someone who had immense influence and control in the Kandrian Bureau of Intelligence. Someone who could deploy Martial Masters without anybody in the nation ever finding out. This belongs to : ©.

Someone very high up in the Kandrian Empire had been spying on Rui Quarrier his entire life.