While Elias struggled to maintain his increasingly fragile relationship with Mei Lin, a new piece of information surfaced, a chilling revelation that overshadowed all other concerns. Juro, against Elias's explicit instructions, had managed to send a single, heavily encrypted message before his capture by the Artificer enforcers. The message, relayed through a deep-network contact, finally reached Elias, its contents a dire warning.
The Artificers' "karmic weapon" wasn't just a device for mass destruction; it was a resonance bomb. An Earth Core, amplified and tuned to a specific frequency, designed to disrupt the delicate balance of the Realm's ley lines. The ley lines, the invisible pathways of spiritual energy that crisscrossed the land, were the very foundation of cultivation. Disrupting them would cause widespread cultivation failures, spiritual sickness, and potentially even catastrophic environmental damage.
And the intended target was horrifying: the Sylvans' Verdantshade Grove. The heart of their ancient civilization, a place of immense spiritual power and delicate ecological balance. The Guild, fueled by its own twisted logic, blamed the Sylvans for "stealing" human karma, for hoarding the natural resources that fueled human cultivation. They saw the Verdantshade Grove as a karmic drain, a source of their perceived weakness. And they intended to obliterate it.
Elias felt a surge of cold fury. The Guild's actions were not just about power or wealth; they were about genocide, about wiping out an entire culture based on a twisted, racist ideology. He had to act, and fast.
He couldn't directly warn the Sylvans; that would expose Juro's message and his own clandestine activities. He needed a way to alert the authorities, to trigger an intervention, without revealing his hand.
He decided to leverage the Sutra Corps' own paranoia, their constant fear of internal threats. Working within the midnight window, he crafted a detailed, yet entirely fabricated, blueprint of the resonance bomb. He didn't attribute it to the Artificers. Instead, he subtly implicated the Bloodkin. He knew the Corps viewed the Bloodkin as a volatile, unpredictable force, a potential source of rebellion against the Grand Council.
He leaked the fake blueprint through a compromised Sutra AI node, making it appear as if it had been intercepted from a Bloodkin courier. The Corps, predictably, reacted with swift and brutal force. They mobilized Sentinels, dispatched strike teams, and launched a full-scale investigation into the Bloodkin's territories, diverting their attention away from the Artificers and their true target.
Elias had bought the Sylvans time, but at a terrible cost. He had manipulated the Sutra Corps into attacking the Bloodkin, fueling the flames of inter-species conflict, all to protect the Sylvans from an even greater atrocity. His actions were becoming increasingly morally ambiguous, blurring the lines between justice and calculated cruelty.