Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 974

Chapter 974: Chapter 974 - Taming the Ceremony - 2

Weirdly, Orion wasn’t pushing many advantages that affected the legitimacy of the ceremony...

The attendance protocol was being respected.

Each family within its representation limits, each contingent placed in the sectors the rules established. From a purely formal perspective it remained a ceremony conducted as it should be, the protocol intact, the forms observed, every visible requirement met.

But from any other perspective it was a balance of tensions wearing ceremony as decoration.

Orion occupied the west side of the hall with his elite. A small number compared to the army he’d left outside, but not negligible in individual terms, Julius had assessed them at the entrance with the same attention he’d gave to any data that needed verification before being used.

Gold rank across the majority. Nearly half of them carrying the signs of people who had been active in the last several days and were still fully functional despite it, which said something about the quality and loyalty of the resources Orion had invested in this particular contingent.

The crystal barrier was also active.

Invisible to anyone without sufficient mana sensitivity to feel it, but present in the way the air in the west section of the hall had a different texture from the air in the rest of the room, slightly denser, slightly weird in the way of something that remained filtering what passed through it. Orion had been maintaining it for hours, well before the ceremony started. Julius had not observed a single moment in which it wasn’t active, and he had been watching since before they walked in.

On the opposite side, Luna stood with the posture of someone who had worn protocol clothing enough times that the body knew how to use it correctly without being told. Composed from the outside, giving nothing away, the surface doing exactly what those same protocols required it to do.

Barely enough to keep her from crossing the hall and confronting her uncle directly over what he was doing with her mother’s heart, wearing it so openly, spending it so shamelessly, right in front of her.

He had crossed the line...

To her left, Larissa. To her right, Liora, who was the only one of the three who occasionally looked toward a point in the hall that had nothing of visible interest in it. A specific point that Julius understood perfectly, because he was watching the same one, just a bit more discreetly.

The hidden contingent watching over Ren’s sleeping body was positioned in the upper gallery, behind several artifacts, materials, and pelts that suppressed mana signatures.

Selphira, Victor, Ren.

Victor more recovered than before but still unconscious, propped against the wall. Selphira still waiting for a miracle, even if she couldn’t move right now, if...

Ren, still in the state he had occupied since the interior space returned him to his body, the quiet of something still completing a process that couldn’t be hurried from outside, regardless of what was happening in the hall below.

Julius knew it because Larissa had explained it for him before they entered.

And he knew it because every time his eyes completed their habitual circuit of the hall and reached the gallery point, Liora was looking there, still worried.

♢♢♢♢

Julius had added three time consuming protocols to the opening of the ceremony.

The first was procedural: the formal count of all families present with their verified representations, which was mandatory by rule but which was normally abbreviated by mutual courtesy because everyone in the room always already knew who was there.

Julius did not abbreviate it at all...

He ran it family by family, representative by representative, in the full form the regulation specified, with the unhurried pace of ’someone who considered the procedure worth doing correctly’.

The second was historical: a reading of the negative precedents relevant to the type of rights transfer Orion was preparing to request, a practice that existed in the legal record but that no one had executed in its complete form in several reigns, because it was long and dense and assumed everyone was aware of the cases already.

Julius delivered it in its entirety, watching Orion’s side of the room while the master of ceremonies read, noting who shifted and who didn’t, watching for the reactions that protocol couldn’t fully suppress in people who weren’t expecting to sit through the whole thing.

Orion’s reaction, from the outside, was almost nothing.

Julius noted that too.

The third was ceremonial: an unusually thorough verification of the state of the ceremonial artifacts, each one requiring activation and confirmation by a tamer of sufficient rank before the main session could begin. A legitimate requirement, applied with a thoroughness that was itself a message.

Orion accepted all of it.

From the other side of Luna, Liora’s gaze drifted toward the gallery. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

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