Samir bin Sultan Kajir Pajar, the Fourth Prince of the Pajar Sultanate, stared out the window and sighed, the weight on his chest pressing tighter with each breath.0

"This isn't good," Samir said.0

It had been two months since his eldest brother collapsed. The finest sorcerers and the most renowned doctors—none of them had been able to cure him. 0

Samir recalled the conversation he'd just had with the saintess from the Holy Kingdom.0

"We'll do our best, but... if dark mana has corrupted his soul as well... There are limits to what we can promise."0

He had invited her as a last, desperate hope, grasping at straws to save his brother's life. The process of bringing her to the Pajar Sultanate had been far from easy, too. He had borne the fierce condemnation of his second and third brothers.0

"Brother cared for them so deeply. How could they repay him with betrayal?" Samir muttered to himself.0

Since the Crown Prince's collapse, the two brothers had wasted no time showing their ambitions. Samir couldn't shake the suspicion that they had been involved in his fall. Everything pointed to that.0

The fiercest opponents to summoning the Holy Kingdom's saintess had bbeen those two. And their reasoning had been sound—on the surface.2

Like the Orias Empire, the Holy Kingdom...0