The Sovereign Veil Chapter 21: Chapter 21: The Destiny Abacus

Read chapter 21 of The Sovereign Veil by GodEmperor on NovelPedia.

June 27th, 1900 hours. Lucian returned to Onyx City carrying a stack of encrypted corporate contracts. He had been slightly delayed due to his scheduled "appointment" with the stunning Horizon Airlines attendant, but he arrived home in an excellent mood. He opened the door to the family villa. In the living room, Arthur and Evelyn Croft were locked in a desperate, tight embrace. Lucian froze in the doorway, feeling a twinge of second-hand embarrassment. Can we get a room, please? But he quickly realized the mood wasn't romantic. Evelyn was sobbing violently into Arthur's shoulder, her eyes swollen red, but her face radiated pure, unadulterated joy. Arthur just held her, looking like a colossal weight had finally been lifted from his soul. "Mom, Dad... what's going on?" Lucian asked, stepping inside. "Lucian," Arthur smiled, his voice thick with emotion. "Reginald Blackwood reached out. The estrangement is over. Our families can finally visit each other again." Lucian quickly accessed his predecessor's fractured memories. Evelyn had been the elite heiress to the massive House of Blackwood. She had fallen in love with Arthur a baseline civilian logistics student gotten pregnant while still at the academy, and severed ties with her entire corporate dynasty when they demanded an abortion. An academy pregnancy? A corporate heiress throwing away a billion-credit empire for a baseline civilian? Lucian thought, utterly astonished. This is literally the plot of a trashy holovision melodrama. It also perfectly explained why Arthur had frantically texted him when he and Quinn booked a hotel room weeks ago. The man had stepped on that exact landmine himself and was terrified history was repeating. But Lucian's eyes flashed with a sharper realization. He had specifically deployed the Multi-Dimensional Information Interference Protocol to obscure their history. Logically, Reginald Blackwood should have forgotten Evelyn even existed. Instead, the man had come knocking. "Mom," Lucian asked carefully. "Does the Blackwood family have any high-tier Psions?" "Yes. Your grandfather is an incredibly powerful telepath," Evelyn replied, wiping her tears. Lucian immediately understood. The Veil's Ghost Protocol was set to a shallow, cheap parameter. It worked flawlessly on ordinary baseline citizens and low-tier Catalysts, but a highly trained Psion's mental defenses would aggressively resist the cognitive erasure. The terrifying anomaly the feeling of having an invisible multiversal god forcefully rewrite his memories had likely scared the absolute life out of Reginald Blackwood, prompting him to instantly mend the relationship before he forgot his favorite daughter entirely. "Well, here is a little homecoming gift, Mom," Lucian smiled, not dwelling on the multiversal terror he had accidentally inflicted on his grandfather. He dropped an encrypted datapad onto the coffee table. The contracts displayed on the screen bore the absolute, indisputable seal of the Sovereign Apothecary Consortium. "With exclusive distribution channels from the Consortium... it will be mathematically impossible for my firm to fail!" Evelyn gasped, reading the terms. She looked at her son with entirely new respect. Two days later. Evelyn's corporation officially launched under the banner: Croft-Blackwood Vitality & Bio-Synthetics. The inclusion of 'Vitality' was deliberate. The Sovereign Apothecary lines didn't just produce battlefield trauma meds; they controlled the apex formulas for biological age-reversal, stamina enhancement, and genetic longevity. The profit margins in the elite, high-society longevity market eclipsed standard military pharmaceuticals by lightyears. The Consortium contract was a pair of multiversal aces. Every obstacle a startup normally faced was instantly annihilated. Distribution channels? Major planetary hospitals, bio-pharmacy chains, and corporate syndicates desperately begged for partnerships. Capital? To secure priority access to the Consortium'