Months after the Magma Forge incident, a rare tide of people pooled at the border where the Amei River meets the Elven Realm.

Every gaze anchored on the white-haired figure by the riverbank.

“Why do we fight?”

Under the star-sown vault, a vein of moonlight drifted down like rain-threads, not loosed at random, but guided by invisible currents. It gathered on the half-clear white jade goose-neck bottle in the white-haired girl’s hand, echoing the glow within.

Standing before the elves’ mother river, she repeated the question from the Trial of Goodness in a voice like soft silk. She bowed her head; pulsing luminescence rippled in her eyes like minnows.

Then she simply loosened her fingers. The priceless treasure she’d bled for slid from her palm and fell into the churning, silt-dark water.

Against the current, the white jade bottle was a petal; the river swallowed it the instant they touched.

But the moon-sheen did not drown.

In seconds, pale light pierced frothing silt and grit, rethreaded to the sky, and fixed itself at the river’s heart. A serene, holy force rippled outward as from a still center, touching both banks. Wherever it met the flow, the water turned to a mirror wiped clean; pollution leaked from the Chaos Rift was scoured away; even the angry torrent gentled, and the mother river of legend breathed again.

On one side lay fouled water, heavy with stain; on the other, old beauty returned. The contrast on either side of the moonlit boundary was stark as night and dawn, and elves and the Nacha Tribe cried out together. Flash mirrors flared; the click and the pusta (stasis) photo spell went off one after another like quick rain.

They weren’t only capturing the water or the Nacha sacred relic. They were capturing the white-haired figure, calm as frost, watching what her hands had made.

“Why do we fight?”

The noisy crowd fell into a shared hush, like wind cut by a blade. They raised their recording slates toward her, tuned their echoing resonance arrays to the highest sensitivity, and waited on her next word.

She opened her mouth, then paused. A thin thread of confusion flickered in her eyes like a moth.

…Right. Now… what am I fighting for…?

The thought flashed and died. She pressed it down, breathed, and resumed the performance like a mask settling.

I think we fight to cut hatred and dissolve misunderstanding—she said, steady as a river stone. Power slipped through her unhurried voice. She delivered the speech she had rehearsed alone a hundred times, and she did it to the utmost she could reach—expression, voice, the swell of feeling, and the weight of meaning.

That wasn’t modesty. She was the finest actor—the tilt of her brow and the lift of her smile outshone the masked clowns of the Imperial Theatre.

Masterful craft, a perfect speech, and the wonder in the river her hands had wrought for the entire Elven Realm—no one present escaped the charm radiating from her. A fever caught in the crowd and ran like fire, until at her final line—this gift of goodwill is not mine alone; it is also the Nacha chieftain’s answer—arms rose and voices broke like surf—

“—Adelaide! Adelaide!!!”

Her name echoed again and again across the night, as if an idol stood ringed by her faithful—even if that idol was neither Elf nor Nacha, but an outsider despised by both.

Yes—the species no longer mattered in that breath.

She hadn’t yet won the second round, but she had, beyond doubt, seized a victory in substance.

By morning, a deluge of reports flooded every elf’s communication slate and seized every headline: the explosive return of the human candidate vanished for months; the legendary road she’d walked; and a kindness more solid than tales of slaying dragons—the offering of Isilia’s Glow to purify the Amei River.

Oh, and sharing the top line was the moment Bingxia clasped her hand in cooperation.

Seeing Adelaide complete the impossible task she’d been given, Bingxia kept her promise. She personally pinned the forget-me-not badge of the Illuin Family to Adelaide’s chest, next to the epiphyllum emblem of the Fana Family. The next day she announced a shift in her family’s stance—tilting from neutral toward the Fana Family—and a storm ripped through the Realm.

Yet Illuin’s support rate didn’t fall off a cliff as Adelaide and Bingxia had forecast.

Abandoning neutrality did cost the Illuin Family. Some fence-sitters wavered. But the damage was small. Adelaide’s brilliant performance in the Trial of Goodness had canceled much of it, and the Nacha Tribe’s decision to offer their sacred relic had eased tensions between the two peoples like rain on embers. The Carne Family’s stance took heavy strain. When the Carne Family’s Flower Dancer candidate warned from the stage of Nacha dangers, boos flitted up from the crowd like cold sparrows.

So the news of Illuin joining hands with Fana lifted both their numbers. For the first time in centuries, they stood near the Carne Family’s total.

In a month—a blink for long-lived elves—their Realm felt like the sky had flipped. And all the shockwaves came from a human once unknown.

Even her opponents had to admit it—Adelaide had become a formidable rival. She started at zero, and now surpassed them in many ways, holding advantages they didn’t have in their palms.

If foes said so, the Fana Family glowed brighter. Day after day, they read the news on their slates like tasting sweet tea. Qingning was so pleased she freed a budget for a celebration feast—rare for the chronically poor Fana Family. In fact, it was their first paid internal banquet since founding, to honor Adelaide’s achievements.

She alone, the honoree, didn’t go.

“Mm… the radicals agree to suspend the plan, attempt negotiations…”

Adelaide sat in her room, the element lamp turned to half-light. Shadows lay like ash on the yellow stationery. She murmured the Nacha chieftain’s handwriting like tasting salt.

The Fana celebration roared at the city’s largest tavern. She sat alone, letter after letter passing through her hands like leaves in a stream.

She’d told Qingning she felt unwell and needed rest. In truth, she just wouldn’t spend her time that way; her hours were arrows, not coins.

Since the team returned, the world had upended. Most changes favored her, but the work had multiplied like knots on a net. That was why she handled each letter, one by one, with patient teeth.

In theory, most of it could be handed to the Fana Family. She could breathe easier. The thought came in the weariness of reading like a breeze, but she pushed it down each time, like a lid on a simmering pot.

Not because she was a saint trying to ease their burdens.

She read everything herself because she didn’t want—couldn’t afford—to miss a single thread of useful information.

She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, pressed a palm over the unrest, wrote the reply to the Nacha chieftain, then pulled the next unopened envelope from the stack.

“Clivia…?”

There was no sender’s name, but the red family flower seal said enough. Adelaide frowned and opened it. As expected, it was from the Carne Family—and in the hand of their head, Silan.

She weighed it a moment, then read.

Truth be told, the letter held almost no nourishment. Flowery, insincere congratulations, and a page-long heap of false gratitude for purifying the Amei River. The meat of it was two lines at the end.

—Three days hence, regarding the celebration banquet prepared for you, Miss Adelaide, we ask you to grace us.

—And there will be a ball after the banquet. If possible, please don’t come alone.

A ball… don’t come alone…

Color drained from Adelaide’s face like ink in water.

She bit down, crushed Silan’s letter into a hard knot, and hurled it to the far corner.

“Damn…!”

She pressed a hand to her brow. For a while, only her anxious breath filled the room, ragged as a trapped bird. Slowly, the rhythm eased, like a tide drawing back.

And this reaction wasn’t because this “banquet” couldn’t be refused the way the Fana one could. Her unrest wasn’t even the trap marked so plainly on the invitation. It was… another reason.

Her gaze slid to the bookcase, where a pure red envelope bled through the gap. She bit her lip.

Inside lay the drive that made her handle every reply with her own hands, the urge not to miss a single useful thread or tie. The same drive was the spring of her panic now.

Because inside that envelope… lay the new “script.”

A single glance, and the actor who had just conquered half the Elven Realm with her charm found her fingertips shaking. A flood of sharp anxiety swept her heart like winter wind.

Enough. She’d had enough—enough of being danced in another’s palm.

The feeling rose to a blaze, breeding a rebellious thought like a lit fuse. It burned through her reason like dry grass, until she—

made the wrong choice.