12 The scram operation OR the supreme stone 1

I'm leaning on my desk, while writing on a parchment with a feather, while the golems controlled by my AI are making something, hidden by the sparks.

With a distracted air, I ask:

-AI, what is the progression of the last operation?

-Operation "scram" at 69%.

-Good.

I say with a satisfied tone. It'll soon be 3 weeks since the operation started, and I almost finished my parchment. On it are thousands of runes patiently traced with a mix of ink and mana crystals powder. Well, after, I put some colorant, I admit, golden looks much better on a parchment…

But apart from that, my urgency rank 5 spell is ready! This kind of parchment is worthing a fortune, after all, in the Empire, officially, there is only the emperor at rank 5.

If I prepared this spell, it's for this much talked about hidden sect. In fact, this sect is scaring me, scaring me a lot. For a simple sacrifiable pawn as the one stocked in my mana crystal ball to be of rank 4, and for the weaker assassins to be of pinnacle of rank 3, it means that their leader is at least of pinnacle of rank 5.

This constatation is also making me ask other questions:

How did the imperial dynasty, of which the strongest emperor in its history is at maximum at the intermediate stage of tank 5, was able to defend itself against a sect leaded by a rank 6?

To explain this, multiples ideas are coming to my mind, I keep three ideas:

The emperor is of higher rank that what he let people see. It seems quite unlikely as his imperial mage just broke through rank 4.

The imperial family have a treasure or a secret guardian that they use only as a last resort. This ide ais quite realistic, and morover it's absolutely possible that itw as something handed down from an emperor to his heir.

The imperial family is not the real leader of the Empire. It would be unthinkable for an actual member of the imperial family, but I'm coming from a world full of plots, and this is not improbable. Given the power of the gods, they could be the real decision-makers of the Empire, letting the emperor taking care of what they are not judging important.

Or else… The sect is the real shadow ruler!

All these hypothesis are seeming quite probable to me, but it's not part of the informations easy to obtain, so I don't have any way to verify my theories.

There is only one thing I can check: the sect! And this is why I'm preparing since 3 weeks…

[…]

2 weeks, 4 days, 21 hours and 35 minutes later…

-Master, the operation is finished.

-Hmm!

Good! Besides the operation finished 1 minute early!*

-I should be gone for 1 or 2 weeks…

I take my stockage ring, put in it my parchment, food and water for a month (you never know, and I had a bad experience with things longer than expected…), mana crystals (my mana consummation is huge), some spare clothes, and prepare myself to go.

Before leaving, I detach and take my third arm on the experience table, and place it again on my body.

The operation that the AI was carrying out according to my instructions this last 3 weeks was to separate the kid's soul from my arm! He is now in the ball with the other!

The soul doesn't have much secrets for a rank 5, you can say.

*Yes I really calculated, it was fun xD to do something as precise, it just serves to show the calculation capacity of a rank 5 mage (he is calculating that instantly).