It was a murky, suffocating dream, a body wrapped in viscous chill, sinking into a boundless sea and never touching the seabed, forced to drift in a void of despair.

Yet, in the shoreless dark, a different color sometimes bloomed.

It was a calm that smelled of camellias, the human warmth of skin, like someone clasping her hand to say she wasn’t alone in the storm.

Feeling that heat pool in her palm, Adelaide woke in a slow tide.

She blinked at the familiar ceiling. She flexed her arm. It was sore, like a bruised reed, but it held.

She wasn’t the hollow girl from seven years ago, the one who woke weak as paper after the long coma.

She tipped her head. The window stood open. White curtains rose and fell like breath in the morning breeze. Anisa, in her maid’s long dress, stood beside it, words caught at her lips.

Adelaide looked at her, and her smile warmed like sunlight on porcelain.

“Good morning, my dear Anisa. Your face is a delight today. Did something happen?”

Anisa’s gaze slid away. Her fingers clutched the skirt. After a quiet stretch, she lifted her face and shook her head.

“I only worried… if we aired the room this early, would the young lady feel cold?”

“So thoughtful. But it’s still summer, isn’t it? In your eyes, am I that frail?”

“N-no, it’s not that. It’s just… my lady’s only just recovered…”

Adelaide laughed, a soft splash against the hush.

Anisa was right. She had been sick, and badly, burning in bed for over a month. But Adelaide knew the fever had nothing to do with the weather’s warmth or chill.

That night, to erase the trail, she used Blood Magic to sacrifice Toniel—or the parts that had once been Toniel. Her head had split with pain. The hand drawing the magic circle wouldn’t stop shaking, and for a mage, that tremor was poison.

Circle craft matters as much as the chant. If your construction isn’t precise, best case the spell fizzles; worst case, it bites back. Think a fireball blooming right in your face. That’s why most mages use grimoires with pre-inscribed circles.

Adelaide had no grimoire. Recording Blood Magic on paper risked exposure. And a grimoire caps your casting speed. For a bearer of the Sacrifice Domain, that cap is a chain.

So she always constructed circles by hand. That night, it cost her dearly. The patrol would be on her in moments. She knew the circle was flawed, yet she forced mana through, jaw set against the tide. The backlash hit like a whip. She escaped, but her body dropped into a hollowed-out weakness.

After that, the fever took the reins. She had to abandon tracking Skela and the others.

Days in bed were knives. The body ached like iron in winter, and the “dream” tore at the soul like teeth in water.

For a long while, every time she closed her eyes, Toniel’s ashen face rose from the depths. He cried. He cackled. His black lips mouthed the last curse the man in black had spoken, a whisper and a shriek braided together.

She didn’t want to sleep. But her battered body couldn’t hold her eyelids up. It felt like being a lucid madwoman, watching herself tip into frenzy and unable to stop the cyclone in her head.

It dragged her back to the coma years, and, like then, she clawed up from hell again.

Under the quilt, her palm tightened. No clammy sweat clung to her skin. Her heartbeat smoothed like a drum finding its rhythm.

That mischievous god tampered with her mind, tried to drown her in “dream.” She endured. In a month’s climb, she reset herself to true north.

Yes, she was still Adelaide von Douglas. She wasn’t so easily reshaped by another’s hand.

Click.

The golden gavel fell with a bright snap, and the courtroom’s clamor collapsed into hush.

White was everywhere, pure walls flat as frozen lakes. From the chairs to the layout, each corner held an austere chill. The bench rose high, designed so the defendant, looking up, couldn’t avoid the vast scales of justice stamped on the ceiling, nor the ring of countless judging eyes.

As the Empire’s highest court and the shape carved from the word “Justice,” the design was a kind of beauty. But it didn’t please the eye; it pressed the spirit. Many criminals who sneered at the gallows had knelt here and begged, spilling their sins, choosing a quick head on the block rather than linger beneath these eyes. Its record spoke for itself.

Today, though, when the Chief Justice struck the gavel, the crowd packed the galleries, and all gears were set to move on the Empire’s largest case in a decade—the king’s assassination—the machinery hit a snag.

The defendant’s chair sat empty.

It was likely the most awkward day since the court’s doors first opened. They were ready to judge a suspect who looked harmless, a seventeen-year-old girl with milk-smooth features. She was gone.

A suspect that important slipping out of a maximum-security prison was shame enough. The trial time had been publicly announced, which made the scene now feel like farce.

“Skela Triune Purdo, a beneficiary of His Majesty’s benevolence, granted the chance to come to Balad by Imperial grace, and yet, out of greed for the Sacred Heart, committed a monstrous crime—regicide, treason…”

Minister Rockridge’s voice rang bright and hard as he read the charges. The empty dock answered with a silence sharp as frost.

Adelaide sat in the jury box and watched the one-sided play. Her thoughts floated, cool as mist.

This was exactly how the “script” had said it would go. But she now knew the roots ran deeper than that neat outline.

She’d been a fisherman at the bank, reading ripples and thinking she knew the water. That night cracked the picture. In the pond’s dark, it wasn’t a loach chewing weeds—it was a dragon blinking beneath the surface, and she knew nothing of its length.

That didn’t mean she’d lost the path.

She wasn’t one of those “dream” novel heroes who crumble the moment their golden finger is gone. Bedridden, whenever her mind surfaced for air, she thought.

A quick mind finds its new edge fast.

Change.

If her talk with the man in black gave her anything besides nightmares, it was the hint that her knowledge and reality didn’t line up cleanly.

Take the king’s assassination. In her eyes, the king died early. In reality, the man in black had set that time from the start. There was no “early.”

Subtle, yes. But she could mine a mountain from a mote.

First: since their timing deviated from the “script,” a variable existed.

Second: since the organization itself shifted, that variable likely touched them.

Third: the man admitted they killed the king. A plot at that scale isn’t a whim. It’s long-laid.

Logic says such a plan is a caravan, not a sprint. And per him, the plan hadn’t changed, which means the variable shaped it at its birth. In other words, the variable is something old that happened early.

Adelaide tapped her nails on the wheelchair’s hard armrest, a rhythm like rain only she could hear.

Excitement threaded through her. The thinking felt like solving linked equations. Lay all the givens on the table, and the shards form veins under your lamp.

So what variable came early, was stitched to the black-cloaks, and weighed enough to bend the “script,” almost erasing the Neprah line?

The answer rose like a fish breaking the surface. Only one fit.

She lived.

She didn’t die on Mira’s birthday night. After that, she kept decoding sealed Blood Magic scrolls for the black-cloaked organization. She knew exactly what she’d fed them—among it, profane, legion-level Blood Magic.

No doubt, with seven extra years of Blood Magic stock, the Blood Mages stood far stronger than in the “script.” Stronger tends to mean bolder. Boldness shoves the timeline forward. Hence, the assassination moved up.

That matched the man’s claim she was a precious “medium.” He likely meant the role she played in decoding those scrolls.

Seen this way, the threads knot cleanly.

She was pleased with the conclusion. Minister Rockridge’s litany finally waned. She lifted her gaze and met his face, taught with grief and indignation.

“The saddest thing is, after such a crime, she lacks even the courage to face it. She fled. A person like that has no right to defend herself—”

Adelaide listened to his rising cadence. She glanced at the crowd, suddenly restless like reeds in a gust, and quietly covered her ears.

“Chief Justice Paddini, in the name of the scales of justice, please convict Skela Triune Purdo and issue a warrant—”

Rockridge broke off. He saw it too—a green light spearing up in the distance. At first, a dot hung in the sky. In less than half a heartbeat, it swelled in their eyes, then kicked into a second burst of speed.

It smashed straight into the courtroom.