After easily overpowering each of those six people, Lothur didn't want to linger any longer than necessary there as he felt worried.
He looked at the son of the patriarch of this family, who should be the person with the best information in this group. "I am in search of an important artifact for me. It looks like a sheet of metal, and many on the continent are searching for a few versions of this thing.
I heard that your family has one of these. Is this true? Where is it?"
Leon heard that and immediately bowed his head to answer his master. "Sorry to disappoint you, my master, we no longer have this Singularity. We had this item stored in the family vault a few decades ago. It was our most valuable item.
However, an incident involving one of our most important members developed here at that time, generating several human losses for us and the loss of this leaf.
After that, it disappeared, and we never got any trace of what happened to it."
"It was stolen by this person?" Lothur frowned.
"Probably. We've investigated his whereabouts for years, but all we know is that he left Leopoldine heading north." Leon said, as his eyes narrowed and the edges of his jaw stood out.
He felt ashamed of that incident but much more angry at the person behind it, one of his uncles.
"I see..." Lothur shook his face and sighed, seeing that getting one of those items would not be easy for him.
'When Anne told me about the Welzel family, she also said that the imperial family had two of those leaves... Is it really true?' He paused momentarily, closing his eyes and remembering old conversations with her.
Anneke had gotten information to him about these leaves and told him to avoid looking for them, given the level of danger they posed.
Thinking about how incomplete the information about the Welzel family's item was, he immediately pondered the possibility that the imperial family might not have any either.
'Could it be that her informants purposely misled her?' He opened his eyes as he realized the possibility behind it. 'That would make someone looking for those items go against those families and show themselves.
Maybe other people looking for those leaves are watching for movements like that?'
He then asked Leon and Fritz. "Do you know if the imperial family has any of these leaves?"
"Impossible to say for sure. We don't know much about other families' high-level items.
Even House Leopoldine didn't know what we had until we lost that Singularity." Leon said, making Lothur look even more serious.
Fritz agreed. "And if it had, given how valuable that is, the families behind House Leopoldine would probably be the real owners of it."
'Makes sense. I wonder if the information Anne got wasn't a trap of one of those families. They want to catch people looking for these items to extract information from them?'
Lothur thought about what he would do if he wanted to improve his information about these items if he were in the shoes of one of these families.
With that in mind, he decided not to look for the local imperial family for now.
There was a high probability that the Leopoldine family did not have what he wanted, and there was still trouble awaiting him.
Since he could no longer casually show himself in public, he preferred not to get into trouble with powers with experts at his level that might expose him.
He and his mother's group had gone to a lot of trouble distracting the high-level staff of the Seraphim Church for him to blow it over some dubious information.
'I will first settle my affairs in Peters City and fulfill that promise. If the family of that fragment no longer exists, I will gain some new Soul Bones to strengthen my family.'
Lothur had no interest in absorbing some of those bones, as he already had half the number of Soul Bones he could have and wanted to become more selective about the quality of the next ones he would absorb.
As of now, he had no interest in absorbing Soul Bones from demons below the Monarch rank!
There were no such bones with the ones that fragment had left for him to pass on to his relatives, so if those people didn't exist, he intended to give them to his women.
"Very well, watch the movements of the imperial family and anything involving me you must do your best to avoid problems for my family.
For the rest, you can maintain communication with the Koch family. They are my subordinates."
"Yes, master!" Those people said simultaneously, moments before Lothur disappeared from that place and the surroundings returned to normal.
The spark of darkness within their bodies would become less intense, but they would remain under Lothur's dominion.
Noticing that he had left, Fritz asked. "What will we do now? If we continue with our plans, we will harm the master. But if we change everything, we will cause Lars to be suspicious."
Leon agreed. "That can't happen. The master wants us to spy on the imperial family, so we must maintain our position in the Third Prince's faction."
"What do you suggest?" Another man asked Leon.
"We will continue with our plans. But we will forge an incident before our forces reach Peters City." Leon suggested, indicating that he would be willing to kill people from his own family and allies to fake his intentions and purposes.
"That's a good idea. How exactly will we do that?"
...
Lothur quickly left that Welzel family city, returning to his group's side in one of the adjacent forests within moments.
Everyone was waiting for him exactly as he had left them minutes ago, without facing any problems.
"Let's go." He said, a little agitated in his manner. "I didn't get anything in that place. But we have trouble in Peters City."
"Trouble? What's wrong?" Rebecca asked.
"Spectres. Spectres attacked the Frost family, and several important people died." He summed it up in one sentence before he started to move, already with Rebecca in his arms.
The people were already carrying ice, and everyone else was running through the space distorted by Lothur.
"That... But that's terrible!" Rebecca commented in a disbelieving tone, shocked at how unlucky this family was.
'They were almost destroyed several times in the recent past, but after they seemed to have overcome everything, they suffered at the 'hands' of spectres?'
"It's really bad," Lothur said in a solemn tone. "Anyway, let's not make any more stops. Let's move directly to Peters City."