SHK CH 751 (Patreon)

The rising sun ushered a new day and with that the start of the festivity. Lustburg was on the eve of an event never seen before.

The wedding of a prince, well this was nothing rare.

But the Prince marrying a witch well

This was extremely big news.

Thousand years ago, the First King, Jupiter luxuria was nearly tricked by a witch or at least this was the story told to children in history class and story told at bed.

The story of the evil witch who fell madly in love with the prince and gave him a potion to control him or how she was an evil witch who thirsted for power and tried to obtain the kingdom through him;

After so many years went by, there were hundreds if not thousands of slightly different versions to this story but at the end of the day, they all said the same things.

An evil witch,

A poor helpless prince

And how that poor prince shattered the curse and rose against the witch by sealing her forever in the Tower of Babel.

Some conspiracy theories even added that the death of the King was most likely because of the witches.

Which technically wasn’t wrong. But they had no way of knowing that.

Because of all the above points, the relationship between the human and the witches had been extremely tense.

It even got worse seven hundred years ago when a Witch and her brother were executed by the paladins for the crime of heresy.

The common people had no way of finding the name of the two who were killed in such a way but it did nothing but sour the relationship between the two sides.

This was why, when the wedding was first announced, more than cheer and happiness, the first thing that plagued the mind of most citizens was worry.

After all, Sol was still young. While he had proven his valor and power as a Crown Prince and future King, there was always the shadow of doubt about his maturity.

This fear was further fueled by nobles in the shadows. Some of those nobles acted because of the weight of tradition and genuine worries. Conservative nobles wished for nothing more than the betterment of the Kingdom and judged that allying with the witches was the wrong move as it would give them too much power.

Other nobles had much less altruistic thoughts. They moved mainly because of all the reform Sol was working on. Land was not infinite and the more land and noble titles were given to the witches, the less land they would have.

The Crown Shadow found those two groups to be extremely difficult to deal with for the simple reason that unlike traitorous nobles, they could not simply threaten or execute them.

Well, they could.

But Sol did not want a Kingdom ruled through fear alone. Fear was a tool that should be used at the right time and place. Not just whenever someone disagreed with you.

The saving grace was that, while many doubted and feared the Witches, many were intrigued and wished to befriend them.

Thanks to the propaganda Sol had been building up and the realization that the new super weapon of the Kingdom, the Rangers, were obtained thanks to the witches, their popularity had been slowly and steadily growing.

In the last few weeks after the war, numerous witches were also seen bringing relief to more unfortunate zones, working on public safety, and helping in strengthening the aerial defense.

When added with the neutral people who simply did not care much about the witches, the Crown Shadow higher up were happy to realize that a crushing Seventy Five percent of the population were either in favor or neutral about the wedding while around only twenty five percent were truly against and even there most of those twenty fives percent were not vehemently protesting. Only be cautious.

When she finished reading the report that was given by one of the executives, Milia found herself releasing a breath she had been unknowingly holding. The white washing of the witches had been an ongoing work for decades now, which started during Mars’ era and now was about to conclude with Sol.

Work had been slow in the past since no matter how much they brought the possibility of the witch being not as bad as everyone thought, there were simply no good or even bad witches to show.

The unknown was sometimes scarier than anything else and the more mysterious the witches were, the harder it was to disprove the lies against them. The fact that some witches were in fact evil and did use their life absorption power on innocent people in the past did not help.

With Salem opening their gate and witch becoming a more common sight, the fear about them naturally lowered greatly. Peasants and commoners alike had more pressing worries like how to bring food on the table and war than worrying about such things.

Milia did not have much opinion on the witches as a whole. She was the result of experiments and knew that there was no such thing as an absolutely evil race. Only evil individuals.

The only thing that mattered to her was Sol’s happiness and she knew that this wedding would make him extremely happy. She wished for this wedding to be blessed by the world and if this was not possible, she would make sure to curate the invitation list so that no dissidents would appear.

This wedding needed to be PERFECT.

And because of this need for perfection, she felt nothing but revulsion as she looked at the updated list of invitees.

There were only five.

But in her eyes, those fives were nothing but seeds of chaos waiting to bloom at the worst possible moment.

The worst was that those seeds could not even be eliminated as most of them were technically allies.

Releasing another sigh, she started to walk.

This was going to be a long day and she had much to do.