Lucius and Kiana stood in front of his lab and he unlocked that door.

~CREAK~

He had not been to the lab in a couple of days and had mostly spent them in his other lab. The lab in the reeducation center was far bigger than this and he also had a lot more privacy there. 

There he didn't need to care much about how much noise he made either as the sound didn't really escape the basement of the building. Still, Lucius had uses for this lab and was going to keep on using it till he felt like he couldn't.

"Why are we here?" Kiana questioned.

"Well, the backup plan for taking care of the arbitrator is here." Lucius answered.

"The backup plan is… here?" Kiana muttered in slight confusion. 

She looked around and couldn't really see anything particular in the lab. Most of the objects were now covered in sheets so that dust wouldn't settle on them and a few things had already been moved into the bigger lab in the basement of the reeducation center.

~shua~

Lucius pulled off the sheet from one of the objects, which was revealed to be the cage. And in those cages were the bore shrews who had been sleeping all this time.

"The bore shrews? This is the backup plan?" Kiana questioned.

"Indeed." Lucius nodded his head and placed his hand over the cage.

"But I thought we were going to let the Priest report his judgment to the church and let the new round of arbitration fix this" Kiana asked not understanding it.

"I know that we did think of doing that. But that is not a plan that has a 100% success rate. Rather than that, I would prefer us having multiple plans that can support each other and increase our overall rate of success." Lucius replied.

"And how will these bore shrews help us with that?" Kiana questioned.

"I thought of it this way. On one hand, we will have father writing letters to the church of Duran and the king, explaining the situation and on the other side we will get rid of the priest when he leaves the city." Lucius revealed.

"Kill him?" Kiana asked in a bewildered tone.

"Yes," Lucius replied.

"But won't that cause even more trouble?" 

"Normally it would, but with me here, it won't. With the letters sent to the church and King, they will know that we had a problem with the arbitrator and they will be aware of it. But if our plan goes well, priest Lyle would never reach the church of Duran.

What will happen after this is likely that they will send out someone to investigate the missing priest and either find out he died or are not able to do that. If they do find out he died, they will then send people to interrogate us.

And if they really do send people to interrogate us, I will answer them that we didn't do anything. If they take it all as I have planned, we will get off scot-free and they will drop the charges as well.

After all, all of this is just a formality from the king. Normally they wouldn't have even bothered with this since we haven't done anything that wasn't unprovoked. Plus I know the king has great trust in father.

Not just because he's a Count but because he is also a colonel. Those two positions combined elevate his position to that of someone who is perhaps even a marquis." Lucius explained.

Kiana frankly felt a bit overwhelmed by the entire explanation and felt that there was a lot of thing of in it. She went silent for a bit and sat down while Lucius did some work on the Bore shrews.

Lucius was checking the conditions of the bore shrews and seeing how they were faring. They had been asleep for about six days straight now and Lucius wanted to see what kind of an effect it had on them.

From the surface, they seemed to be rather normal and the only difference Lucius felt in the end was that the amount of hell energy in their bodies had reduced significantly.

"Hmm… so it does work as I thought. This will make it much easier to take care of the Lost. The same thing should apply to them as well. This way I can feed them hell energy and keep them at standby for days." Lucius muttered to himself in a very low voice.

Kiana was still digesting the information Lucius had told her and was trying to see if there were any problems with the plan. If this was Kiana of the past she would have never done this.

She would have either not accepted the plan saying that it was risky and even if she did, she would have just accepted it straight up without thinking much about it. But Lucius's guidance and changes had made her start to think differently.

Lucius did not just want subordinates who followed orders without thinking. For that, he would have the lost and they will be his foot soldiers. He also needed subordinates that could help him out in the long journey to the top.

As much as Lucius would like to do all of this alone, he knew that this was simply not possible at this point. This world was not something that allowed an individual's power to reign supreme.

In this world, the collective powers of many people were higher than that of an individual. In Lucius's past world, a supremely strong person could alone take care of an entire kingdom and everyone would be scared to oppose them.

The power level of this world was not at the same point and thus Lucius had to take a different route. Though Lucius had confidence that in the future he would reach a point where he alone would be enough to suppress the entire world with just his power alone.

Such was his goal, such was the conquest he had chosen.