Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 62: A Rampaging Beast

"Two nights ago," Eastiel’s voice cut through the uproar, coldly shifting tone, silencing the space anew. "A report from my elite intelligence arrived on my desk. The Delanivis estate was breached. The target was singular. The Lord himself."

The grief was banked, now replaced by the crisp tone of a strategist reading a battlefield report.

"Some of you have already been informed of this... and of its inevitable escalation." His words were swifter now, clipped and businesslike, mapping the chaos for their benefit.

The Delanivis, nursing the humiliation of their failed power grab at Mount Saede, a move they’d justified with the false prophecy of Arkai’s death, had instantly pointed east. The Vasilievs were the obvious, convenient culprit. Two rival powers, clashing over the same imagined vacuum, now had a fresh, bloody grievance.

And then, the very next night, the plot twisted.

Anton Vasiliev, the ailing Tiger King, vanished from his own sickbed. Gone with him were his two most trusted aides. No bodies, only a grim smear of blood on snow in a forest clearing, already being buried by a fresh fall.

The Vasiliev house, in turn, snarled the accusation back at the Delanivis. An eye for an eye, a lord for a lord.

"This," Eastiel declared, "is the most opportune moment." He scanned the assembly. "While they are locked in this dance of mutual blame, while their fangs are bared for each other’s throats... we march north."

A slow smile touched his lips, devoid of any warmth.

"And when they have finished tearing each other apart..." he concluded, "we break what remains past all recovery."

No.

No, no, no.

He had come to this gathering with an expectation burning in his chest. He had anticipated walking into this desert courtyard and finding her there. Saintess Cecilia, alive and well, with the Dragon Lord beside her.

Arkai Dawnoro should be there too, he’d reasoned, the Black Wolf King she had undoubtedly saved alongside Oathran that night. Why else would she have vanished into the volcanic ash if not to pull a king from the fire?

She was alive!

He thought—

He had truly, foolishly thought that this was a council of those seeking justice, a place to pledge to Cecilia and her dragon, to forge a new order under their averted gaze. Not a war council to avenge a dead goddess!

But Eastiel’s story...

It was a narrative too vile, too perfectly grotesque, to be a simple lie. Its very repulsiveness gave it a horrifying credibility. The pieces, the year-long search for the Meleth Flower, Arzhen’s scentless state at the coronation, the flower tumbling from his robes, the brutal logic of saving it for Ruby...

They sounded too much like the truth.

Something in Eastiel’s conviction, in the sheer, unadorned ugliness of the tale, screamed veracity.

Yet if he stood now, in the heart of this rising fury, and roared that Cecilia Araceli was alive... who would hear him? Who would believe the chief of the jungle jaguars over the broken, burning Lion Prince and his airtight tragedy?

Who would accept that she was not only alive, but bonded? To a dragon?

After Eastiel’s account of a heart torn from a chest?

Forget that she would die. Every beast here knew that a bond was a symphony of twin pulses. It required a heart to beat in time with another. You could not sync a rhythm that did not exist.

And to compound the madness, to claim her companion was Oathran Alicei? The Dragon Lord? A figure of myth who hadn’t walked among them in decades?

He weighed the two stories in his mind.

On one side, a tale of betrayal, a stolen flower, and a familiar, barbaric murder. A story as old as power itself.

On the other, a... what, heartless woman? Miraculously alive? Bonded to an ancient dragon-god, wandering the continent incognito?

The question answered itself.

Which story was easier to believe?

"I see the purpose of this gathering now, Lord Edengold."

Qinryc’s voice cut through the charged atmosphere.

"But if my own memory serves, and it rarely fails me, do you even possess the right to carry this banner?"

He remained standing, stern amidst the simmering bestial rage. Every eye swiveled to him.

"You," he continued, his tone sharper, more accusatory, "were among the loudest voices calling for her dusk. You rallied dissent, crafted arguments, and publicly stripped Cecilia Araceli of the very authority you now invoke. You wanted nothing more than to see her dethroned. So I ask again, Lord Edengold... what changed?"

Thanks to Qinryc’s memory, the contrast was thrown into relief. Why was the prince who had never supported her rule now the most consumed by her loss?

"Nothing changed, Lord Lukas," Eastiel answered. His smile was gentle and his eyes held a warmth that seemed directed at some distant, invisible point beyond the Prime Minister, as if gazing at a beloved ghost on the far horizon.

"No one knows this," he began, his voice softening into a forlorn, dreamy cadence, "but my brother here can attest. I could even summon my mother to bear witness. Seven years ago, before Saintess Araceli’s marriage to the Vasiliev prince... I had intended to propose to her myself."

A ripple of shock passed through the courtyard.

"But we all know how that political union came to pass. The story of her ’rescue’ by the prince a year prior. The tale of her ’falling’ for him."

He spoke the words delicately, achingly, placing invisible quotation marks around the lies with a pressure of his voice.

"And we all saw the reality that followed. How he claimed to never want that bond. How her scent always carried his claim, yet she was never seen at his side. Her lone appearances at events. His refusal to let her form connections. His dismissals, his backhanded compliments, his concealed contempt, his... ignorance."

He paused, letting them remember the seven-year spectacle of a brilliant woman withering in a gilded, lonely cage.

"I," Eastiel said, "have always been in love with her."

The court stilled.

From the start, Eastiel was controlled. He was warmth that could chill, calm that could unsettle, a grief so profound it mimed weakness. He had been so deceptively, perfectly still that they didn’t realize...

...they had been standing before a rampaging beast.

A beast torn from his fated mate.

"I thought," he continued, the golden light in his eyes blazing, "that by pulling her down from that throne... I could give her the freedom she truly deserved." 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The light intensified, a sun breaking through the storm.

"I was wrong."

Qinryc closed his eyes.

Ah.

So that was the reason. The missing motive behind the prince’s every public move. Yes, they remembered now.

For all his sharp, persistent critiques that trailed Cecilia’s reign like a shadow, Eastiel Edengold had never discredited her wisdom. Never urged anyone to ignore a prophecy.

His scorn was reserved for the Temple’s machinations, for the society that used her, for the political games of her husband. He criticized the cage, never the songbird inside.

He had been her greatest critic, yet her most secret believer.

"I was wrong."

The words fell again, a verdict he passed upon himself, each syllable heavy with a seven-year weight of misplaced strategy.

"Instead of trying to wrench the crown from her head..." his voice dropped, the genteel prince gone, leaving only the beast’s core truth, "...I should have killed that bastard and torn his heart from his chest seven years ag—"

"Regretting it now?"

The voice cut through his oath like a shard of ice.

Eastiel froze. Every muscle in his ravaged body locked.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The light, unmistakable sound of calm footsteps on stone, approached from the archway behind him.

He turned, the motion slow, as if moving through deep water.

And there she was.

Tilting her head, a familiar curiosity in her eyes. Alive. Whole. Breathtakingly, impossibly there.

"Your Majesty," Cecilia Araceli said, a gentle smile touching her lips. "I never knew you loved me."

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Here’s a meme about the four of them I made this morning, kek------->

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Important A/N:

Let me tell you a story about why the privilege tiers of this book are very expensive. In the app, when you set the tiers of the privilege Chapters, it will also give you the calculated approximation of the tiers coin cost you need to set. So I set it as recommended.

Until I found out that as an author, I am supposed to set it way, WAY lower than the recommended cost. Which is baffling. I found out that the average cost of privilege tiers is only around 300-600 coins for the third and fourth tier. Wild. Why would Webnovel recommend such a high coin cost each tier then? Why not recommend us authors just the average cost? I’m very, very confused.

But I know that this is all totally my fault and thus, I will fix it as much as I can. For my three biggest patrons, Cherie_Valentine, Maggie_Stovall, and Amaterasu_Cross, I am very very sorry that you’ve purchased an overinflated tier price. But you still purchased them without complaints anyway. You are built different. The true OGs. The Greatest of All Time. Since Webnovel will not let me reimburse you with coins, I will do you something special and I beg of you to have the honor to name three first children of Cecilia and the boys.

You can send me an e-mail with screenshot proof that you are my beloved first three generous patrons at [email protected], and you can send me the name and the gender of the child, one each, with a suggestion of which dad you want them to have (Oath, Ark, or East)! I’m begging you, please e-mail me because I will not sleep until you do. It will be a special spoiler only each three of you and I know and you can look forward to them when they arrive in the story.

From next month, I will set the privilege tiers cost to be the average cost like most books in this platform. Again, I am very, very sorry for this blunder. I wish you a happy holiday, and thank you so very much for the gift you’ve given me. Please enjoy the book, and I love you so, so much.