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Adrian\'s breath hitched as the pressure in the air crushed down on him. His knees buckled ever so slightly, but he quickly steeled himself. His heart pounded in his chest, his lungs straining under the suffocating force. Retreat wasn\'t an option now. His eyes flickered with a mix of determination and caution as he forced his voice out, despite the tightness in his throat.

"If I remember correctly..." he began, his voice trembling just a little, "your first disciple\'s name was Liora, wasn\'t it?"

Veda\'s eyes flared with shock, though she masked it quickly. The pressure around Adrian vanished as abruptly as it had come, leaving him standing, unsteady, as the world around them snapped back into focus.

"Could it be... Evangeline is her new name, or a pseudonym?" Adrian pressed, refusing to break eye contact. "Evangeline… is your first disciple?"

For a moment, there was only silence.

Veda stood frozen, her piercing gaze searching Adrian\'s face, as if trying to decide whether to unveil a truth long buried. The hallway felt eerily still, as if the very air was waiting for her response.

Finally, with a weary sigh, Veda\'s hard expression softened, just enough to reveal a glimpse of the pain she carried beneath her sharp exterior.

"You\'re right," she admitted quietly, her voice far more subdued than before. "Evangeline—no, Liora—was my first disciple. I thought she disappeared long ago, vanished without a trace after that… incident."

Her brow furrowed, and a bitter smile ghosted across her lips. "But no… she didn\'t disappear. She\'s been here all along, hiding behind a new face, a new voice, manipulating from the shadows."

Adrian\'s eyes widened in \'surprise\', though part of him had anticipated this revelation.

Still, the weight of Veda\'s admission hit harder than he expected. Evangeline wasn\'t just a rogue alchemist pulling strings—she was Veda\'s lost protégé, someone he had only glimpsed briefly in the novel\'s background. But that incident… the one that sparked it all… even he didn\'t know all the details. The damn author didn\'t write clearly about her which frustrated a lot of readers. Explore more stories with empire

And from the look on Veda\'s face, he wasn\'t sure he wanted to. He took a breath, steadying himself. This was his chance to pry deeper.

"So," Adrian began, his voice careful but probing, "Evangeline—your first disciple—what drove her to this? What could make someone go to such lengths? She was your disciple… surely, someone you trusted."

For a split second, Veda\'s hardened exterior cracked. Her eyes flickered with an emotion Adrian couldn\'t quite place—regret, sorrow, anger, perhaps even guilt?

"Trust..." Veda\'s voice was almost a whisper, the bitterness unmistakable. She turned slightly, her gaze distant as though she were staring at a memory long buried. "Trust is a fragile thing. Liora was… brilliant. More talented than anyone I\'ve ever met. She was beyond anyone else.

But brilliance burns bright, too bright sometimes."

Adrian stayed silent, sensing the depth of her words. There was more to this. More than the cold facts laid out in the novel, more than the tale of a talented alchemist gone rogue. \'I hope she won\'t give me the same answers she gave to the main cast again...\'

"She sought knowledge," Veda continued, her voice growing colder, "knowledge and power far beyond what she should have. I should have seen it earlier. But I was blind. Too blind to see how far she\'d fallen."

Adrian\'s mind raced, piecing together the fragments. This wasn\'t just another power-hungry alchemist. Liora\'s descent into madness—her obsession with power—seemed tied to something deeper. "What exactly was she searching for? What kind of power?" he asked softly, though his heart beat faster with every word. \'Immortality?

Strenght? Control?\'

Veda\'s lips pressed into a thin line.

Her eyes, though distant, were filled with a depth of pain that Adrian hadn\'t expected to see. "She wanted control, Adrian. Not just over knowledge, not just over power, but over life and death itself."

\'Shoot...\' Adrian felt a cold chill crawl down his spine, despite already knowing bits of the truth. The very idea of tampering with life and death—a sacred, unchangeable force—struck a nerve. "Control over life and death? You mean… resurrection? Or something else?"

\'There was no necromancers at this time around...\'

Veda\'s bitter laugh echoed faintly through the corridor, hollow and full of regret. "Resurrection would have been merciful. No, she sought something far darker. She was experimenting with essence manipulation—trying to merge, twist, and reforge the very souls and life forces of living beings."

Adrian stood still, absorbing the weight of her words.

Essence manipulation. A quite complex and vague word.

But it all made sense now—the two twisted creatures they had fought at Myrandor mountains, the cruel experiments she had been doing… all of it pointed back to this.

His voice was softer now, more reflective than before. "And the explosion… was that perhaps... part of her experiment?"

Veda\'s face darkened, her expression tightening at the memory. "Yes," she answered quietly, her voice now laced with bitterness. "It was no accident. Liora had gone too far—far beyond anything I could have predicted. She unleashed something that even she couldn\'t control, and the explosion was the result of her hubris."

Adrian\'s brow furrowed. He had read about the explosion, how it had supposedly killed Liora, but clearly, that wasn\'t the whole story. "But she survived," Adrian said softly, more of a statement than a question.

Veda nodded, her gaze darkening. "Yes. And not only did she survive… she thrived in the shadows. She shed the name Liora and became Evangeline, hiding behind her new identity, continuing her experiments in secret, manipulating from the shadows."

Adrian\'s thoughts raced. Liora\'s ambition, her obsession with reshaping reality itself—none of this had been fully revealed in the novel. Though there might been hints he hadn\'t noticed or forgotten. He didn\'t have a photographic memory after all.

\'But... I am closer to the truth now...\'