If you were wondering how Damien figured it all out, let's trace this back to the day of his first meeting and clash with the emperor.

Damien had just ascended to the realm of spirit lord, not even passed his first month. He'd been proud, arrogant, and flush with his recent massive increase in power, and he'd decided that, with his newfound strength, he could just do battle with the emperor one-on-one, and Bam! The emperor, dead, and his massive empire, scattered.

Who could match the genius that had advanced to that prestigious realm at the age of twenty-five? No one had ever done it in the history of the entire world.

The truth was very far from his imagination.

He'd battled the emperor alright; blessed with a very fortunate timing that he luckily encountered the man, and he was even alone, no entourage.

They'd battled, Damien coming up top with superior power. They went at it for hours, tearing up the terrain and their aura blasting out for miles, so far that it alerted the entire empire pillars, with them immediately bearing down on the place in force.

Forced to retreat at the arrival of more enemies than he could handle, he was practically jiggling in happiness. Although he'd failed to accomplish his aim, what he discovered was better. The emperor was not so far beyond his capability to take out.

It wasn't until later when he'd finally sat down and really thought about it, that he thought...the emperor should have totally wiped the floor with his face. Even killed him eventually, if he was in a particularly bad mood

A man as old as the emperor with centuries to his age should have never been struggling against someone who hadn't even gone a month into his powers, And yet that was what had happened. It made him suspicious.

And so he began investigating.

He started with libraries around the continent and even outside. The information he found almost proved him too paranoid for the wrong reasons. The emperor's features were described, clearly and detailed, and it matched perfectly with Damien's experience. Even the description of his techniques matched perfectly with what he'd faced. There was nothing out of place, everything aligned with what he'd seen and experienced, but still, something irked him like he was missing a crucial detail.

So he kept checking.

It wasn't until a long-time friend—one of the very few he had—had traced him, surprisingly looking for protection.

He and Elas had gone waaay back, to when Damien was still at the Lord stage. He and Keilan had encountered Elas during one of their fugitive days. Hungry and completely drained from being continuously hunted by practically every nearby sovereignty that wanted them and was not averse to using force, the empire included. Elas had taken them in, fed them, and gave them a place to lay low.

They didn't stay long of course, but when they'd left, it was with refreshed bodies and full stomachs with more food than they could finish in a week carried on their backs.

The man was just a bar owner.

So when he'd run to Damien for protection, Damien had wondered who would terrify a bar owner enough to seek out Damien instead of reporting to the closest guards or policing forces.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

When he'd asked, adamantly, the man had reluctantly revealed to him his true identity.

A spy.

And not a common one at that. He had a high station in a global organization he worked for. A very high station.

Seeing no reason to hide it anymore, Elas had explained to him that he had been on vacation and had decided to go completely off-grid, with only a select few knowing his true location.

Getting to his pursuers, he described them as an equally large global organization, older and more powerful than the one Elas worked for; and the two organizations had been engaged in a shadow war for more than a century, with only an extremely few political and powerful figures on the globe being aware.

If Damien's interest hadn't been piqued before, it was now.

Enquiring about this organization and the cause of the war had yielded an answer.

Shadow Hall.

A massive and powerful organization that spanned the whole globe, with its headquarters so hidden that no one had been able to decipher its location for hundreds of years.

It was said that Shadow Hall could find anyone in the world, no matter which hole they crawled into, so Elas wasn't too surprised that he'd been made.

What truly scared Elas was that unlike their organization which only specialized in information gathering, that was just a subdivision of Shadow Hall, with their main specialization being in the art of putting people to permanent sleep.

Assassination.

And Elas was very far from any of his organization strongholds powerful enough to shield him.

He was practically a baby chicken sitting ducks under the clear sky, with a bird of prey soon to drop by to say hi.

Damien had been his best option; and since he'd been keeping tabs on his whereabouts, he was fortunate that Damien was only a day away—by Lord stage standards—practically thirty miles away.

Getting to the reason for their war. The two organizations had been giving each other the stink eye for some time; one bad look here, another one there. A feud born from competition, but it had never escalated more than that, until a grand war began in one Greensend continent, where one seemingly small kingdom in the middle of nowhere began a continental war of conquest, swallowing one territory after another.

Elas had described the man leading the charge as a politically devious man with grand ambitions, having politically and through secret means, eliminated his way through to the throne he now sat on. Having taken power from the royals without them even knowing.

Usually, individuals with high political intellect were always lacking in personal power; having sacrificed a cultivator's battle in the wilds for another type of battle, this one done in a court.

Emperor Solar had been different, wielding political power and personal power hand in hand, lacking in none. The man had battled all the spirit lords sent his way, and had either fended them off or slain them, using their deaths for his advancement in cultivation.

By the time the truly powerful were aware enough to rise from their thrones and handle it themselves, it was already too late.

Solar had butchered them all, using their skulls as war banners.

Elan's organization had been contracted by a squabble of an alliance cobbled together just to resist the advance of the new Empire. They were still failing.

Shadow Hall, seeing that their rival organization had taken a side in the war, also took theirs, siding with the Empire.

That was where it escalated between the two organizations.

The war had been brutal, with multiple battles fought both in the light and dark, with both organizations dueling in espionage and counter-espionage. At first, the shadow dueling was just a game of trying to outwit each other, with Shadow Hall engaging in their extracurricular activity of eliminating key figures from the alliance, leaving their rival agents alone. It had been like that until an agent from Shadow Hall decided to eliminate another agent from their rival organization just for laughs. The shadow dueling then turned into a war.

Listening to the story, Damien had pointed out the vast difference between the emperor of before and the present one, seeing the drastic reduction in any large undertaking.

They hadn't even fought in any large-scale wars for dozens of years now, only reducing to small border clashes or the unfortunate small random wars, with no aim whatsoever.

He'd asked, and Elas had replied.

"Oh, him? That's not the real Emperor Solar, that's just his son. Emperor Solar hasn't been seen in years now."

That was when Damien knew, someone had just played the greatest con.