In the days that followed, the Elven Realm sank into a strange quiet, a hush like snow muffling a forest.

It wasn’t normal—the campaign, whipped into a storm by Adelaide’s dark-horse arrival, suddenly slammed to a halt like a cart hitting a wall.

Newsrooms that usually milked scandal from lost cats and petty spats went silent, shutters drawn like eyes avoiding a gaze.

Early in the third trial, those elf reporters had dared to chatter because they thought it would be like every year—heat without real fire, at worst a messy love life.

No one expected a detonation that leapt from rumor straight into crime, a shock that made every tongue fear the wrong stance and every pen feel heavy.

That hush held for several days, until a small, near-bankrupt paper—barefoot, fearless—tucked two sharp lines into a corner about what Silan said at the debate.

Another newsroom with a strong heart followed, then a third, a fourth, a fifth—like pebbles loosening a hillside.

Soon the slope gave way. The dam burst.

Screens on every elf’s slate flooded with official reports, whispers, and conspiracy weeds sprouting overnight.

Once someone broke the ice, the others pushed off; every carne of policy from the Carne Family was dissected, and the din rivaled the start of the Trial of “Truth.”

Under that roaring pressure, Silan was finally opened for investigation.

She appeared on camera gaunt and dim, like a lamp guttering before dawn—no more grinding the point that “Adelaide, the outsider, can’t be trusted.”

Her voice was tired, a river running shallow. She publicly admitted Adelaide’s charges were true.

Under some invisible weight she could no longer bear, she confessed hiding the circulation of the Stimulant Elixir.

She admitted forging the Apothecary’s death. She admitted erasing the human convoy’s memories.

But she refused one thing: she denied the motive Adelaide had reasoned out, and she told another story from her own sunless corner.

She said she held no personal grudge against the Nacha Tribe, and her decisions had nothing to do with Princess Pris of the Nacha Tribe stealing Bingxia’s heart.

Her hand moved against the Nacha because of one origin point—the Nuhaman Massacre.

The Nuhaman Tribe’s settlements press against the border of the Sealing Array. Policy kept elves and Nuhaman apart on the surface.

Even so, elves with collecting habits would quietly acquire Nuhaman high-grade silk—Silan among them, famed for her aesthetic taste like a gardener of light.

She never wore that silk in public, but in private she loved it, silk that lifted mood like spring wind through bamboo.

More than once she disguised herself and slipped across the border, walking their villages like a shadow, studying their customs, trying to learn their weaving.

No matter how she tried to copy it, the cloth felt like a song missing a note. Now she knows why—she lacked Nuhaman blood for the dye bath stage.

Then, she only felt stubborn heat rising. She kept returning to learn, until the last trip—the night of the massacre.

Yes. By her account, she crossed during the Nuhaman festival, hiding in the crowd like a leaf among leaves.

She used her longest-lasting disguise spell, and with gold bought a family workshop’s trust, planning half a month as an apprentice from knots to loom.

She had barely stepped over their threshold. The welcome dinner was warm, laughter like lamps. She hadn’t even finished it when the night turned to blood.

She still remembers the omen—a scorched smell, not from meat left on a flame, but something older, crueler, like hair and hope burning.

During the Chaos Uprising that scent was common. As one of the First Generation, Silan felt the wrongness bite like frost.

Screams and fire rode the wind a heartbeat later. Something vile was happening; certainty snapped into place like a drawn bow.

She set herself to fight. Kingdom law forbade elves revealing identity abroad, but she’d eaten their food, accepted their kindness, watched them for years—she couldn’t stand aside.

Fire leapt from her palm, the first spell built—and then the world tilted.

Her head swam; her knees failed. Power bled out of her like water from a cracked jar, and her mind dimmed to dusk.

In the last blink before dark, she saw the women who had hosted her rush in, faces stamped with shock and helplessness, lifting her from the floor.

Then nothing. A black curtain.

When she woke, she lay in a half-dried pool of brown blood, the earth sticky and cold.

Around her were bodies she could no longer name. A few faces still whole wore the same fear and confusion she saw before falling.

They never knew what happened. The irony cut sharp—only the one who fainted knew.

It was the food.

One dish had carried a special drug, a potent anesthetic that hits elves like a hammer, and touches only elves.

They ate the same meal, drank the same cups, yet only she dropped. Someone had salted a trap just for her, unseen, precise.

That trap wasn’t to avoid conflict, nor to kill her.

It had one purpose: a warning carved like a scar.

Even now, as Silan spoke, her cheeks were bloodless. Whoever killed those women could have torn her apart as easily as dry silk.

But she lived—unscathed, clothing intact, only soaked in the blood that wasn’t hers.

The message was plain: you can do nothing. Even spared, you pose no threat to us.

Arrogant and cruel—Silan confessed it with eyes dark, hate and fear braided like night vines.

She looked at the women who had treated her gently, now cold at her feet. Her first instinct flared hot—return inside the Sealing Array, rally the realm, hunt the culprit fast.

She did. Under her command, elf troops reached the site, sealed every road near the Nuhaman village, rounding up the slaughterers who lay sprawled like drunkards.

That part of history matches what most elves and Nacha remember.

It was meant to be a quiet morning; relations between tribes weren’t yet this bitter. Nacha folk inside the kingdom even watched the soldiers depart.

None foresaw the emergency lockdown that followed, a net drawn tight in the name of crisis.

Today, the truth behind that famous event is finally shown whole.

The lockdown and curfew fell because the killers were Nacha—on the surface. That wasn’t the whole reason for a blade that sharp.

Silan wasn’t settling a private score, nor punishing a people in one sweep. Even after most culprits were caught, she locked down because she was sure a mastermind still nested in the dark.

Someone who spared her alive only to mock her wouldn’t be the moon-cursed Nacha in a madness frenzy.

She knew it, but she couldn’t tell anyone what she had seen.

No one in the Carne Family’s upper circles had heard that Silan herself witnessed the massacre. She’d never told anyone about her secret visits to Nuhaman villages.

Yet someone knew enough to dose her on that exact night.

With an unknown hand that intimate with her private life, broadcasting the truth wouldn’t help; it would invite risks like snakes under the floorboards.

So she didn’t correct the rumors. She let the wind of gossip blow, using “the Carne matriarch seeks vengeance for a stolen love” as a veil.

Under that cover, she searched like a comb through hair, careful not to alarm the prey.

She even risked a scandal at the public hangings, laying a glamour over the gallows, pretending to put the slaughterers to death while saving a few in secret.

Those she sealed in the deep dungeon and questioned, trying to pry open a path to the real foe.

The path stayed closed.

The lockdown turned up nothing. The interrogations yielded less—every prisoner remained in a drunk-like stupor, either mute or muttering shards of nonsense.

No threat nor promise could mine useful ore from their tongues.

Meanwhile, with each extra day of curfew, tensions rose like heat in midsummer, from traded shouts to flying fists.

Seeing the slope slide toward chaos, and with the search in shadows yielding nothing, Silan eased the lockdown.

With the curfew gone, relations slowly stitched back together under the old chief and elf inclusivists, the air cooling, and no thread leading to a hidden loom.

Even so, in her heart, she never considered the mastermind a phantom of her mind.

She kept interrogating, quiet and relentless—and proof came like a cold splash.

At this point in her story, Silan’s voice turned urgent, a bell trying to warn those watching, as she explained the second lockdown.

First: the Stimulant Elixir.

She noticed it spreading across Sanda, a tonic with a whiff of chaos like smoke in the brew.

Its effect matched the prisoners’ drunk-stumbling state almost perfectly, a mirror in a dark pool.

That alone told her the hand behind it still walked free. But the reason that forced her, despite the risk of stoking tribal anger, was more direct.

There was a jailbreak in the deep dungeon.

Every prisoner vanished at once, without a trace—among them the one called the Apothecary.

Unlike the Stimulant Elixir, she couldn’t lay this bare. The weight beneath it pressed heavier than any tonic, like storm clouds bruising the horizon.

If people learned they were still alive, the scandal would burst like rot under silk.

More than scandal, the hand behind the curtain had slept for years, then struck brazenly, like a blade drawn at noon.

Preparations were in place. A vast, unseen plot felt ready to walk onto the stage.

Silan didn’t want to wake to corpses again, blood like fallen petals around her bed.

So she braved pressure, pushed an emergency lockdown act, and doubled patrols, trying to sweep danger like sand from a threshold.

Her fixation on the desert village slaughter was the same cut of fear: it rhymed too closely with the Nuhaman massacre, echoes like hoofbeats across dunes.

She rushed the victims inside the border—no, into that inn’s closed belly—then sped to the frontier, wind at her heels, to investigate in person.

After real questioning, the facts doubled down on her worst dread, a drumbeat in her chest.

That made her even more afraid to go public, fearing rumor would mushroom into riot, and riot into fog.

So she erased the caravan’s memories once the record was taken, and crushed any fresh news of the Stimulant Elixir, like snuffing out sparks in dry grass.

If people learned the source of chaos drugs still flowed, and the authorities knew nothing—panic would turn the river muddy.

Just as Adelaide’s recording argued, blind terror only churns the water and cloaks the culprit, like silt hugging a snake.

So Silan decided to hold the news down for now, at least until the Carne Family confirmed the supply line.

Even with all that effort to clear the field, she still hit a ridge she couldn’t cross.

Adelaide appeared—an outsider like a sudden wind that flips a banner.

After that, it stopped being “history” and became today’s “news,” still warm to the touch.

“I didn’t expect… after all my countings, I’d be outplayed by someone like you.”

When she said it, Silan looked at Adelaide. The combative light had gone out, her lashes lowered like shutters.

Yes. As she’d said at the debate’s start, it all turned pointless—like a sword struck into water.

Their debate wasn’t even the last, yet the rest felt hollow, shells after a tide.

As head of the Carne Family, the only true rival to the Illuin and Fana Families, once Adelaide laid out that chain of proof, any reason, any excuse, fell like leaves.

“So the ‘mysterious elf partner’ at your side was truly the lone Nuhaman survivor?”

Two days after Silan’s confession came the day of the flower ceremony.

At an old wooden vanity, Adelaide adjusted the last touch of hair and paint, moon-pale fingers careful as moths.

Behind her, Bingxia—an androgynous Elf with short hair—leaned on the cabinet, eyes on a paper lantern’s calm glow, and asked the first question.

“Mm.”

Adelaide’s answer was soft, like a pin dropped on silk.

In that confession, Silan finally spoke of what Adelaide had always hidden: the scandalous “elf partner” was a Nuhaman in disguise.

By the time Silan’s credit collapsed and she herself was detained for questioning, it no longer bruised Adelaide’s standing.

The outsider dark horse still won the Flower Dancer election in a landslide, and became the kingdom’s first non-Elf Flower Dancer, a tremor in old stone.

From Silan’s face that day, she wasn’t tossing this to sabotage Adelaide at the last moment.

At the banquet, she’d tried to keep the Nuhaman not to threaten, but to glean survivor’s clues, like sifting ash for embers.

Now discredited and likely facing a long stretch behind bars, she dropped her guard and begged Adelaide:

Let the Nuhaman tell whether she was there that night, how she lived, and what threads she held to the hand behind it.

What happens to me doesn’t matter. What matters is to find the mastermind and stop the plot before seed becomes tree.

With that as her last line, Silan was escorted away by the guard, steel shoes ringing like cold rain.

From the witness stand, Adelaide watched her back and gave her answer into the cameras, a dove feather on a scale.

“So, will she really come?”

Adelaide raised a brow brush, tidying lashes white as her hair, voice steady as winter light.

“As I said in public, she’ll come. And I’ll make sure she speaks without reserve. Don’t worry.”

“You sound very sure of her.”

“Of course. She’s my sister—my pride.”

“…”

Bingxia fell silent. Only the small clinks of bottles and jars moved the room, like beads sliding on a string.

After a long breath, Bingxia broke the hush.

“So, how much of Silan’s story do you think is true?”

“Heh… you look like you can’t let it go. That’s why you came before the ceremony, right, Lady Bingxia?”

The mirror caught Adelaide’s fox-bright smile, playful as a flicked fan.

Called out, Bingxia’s ice-still face shifted a hair, then nodded and went on.

“Most people don’t believe her. Most media think it’s a lie—spun to save her headseat.”

“I get it. She never told anyone her reasons, not even the jailers who questioned the killers.”

Adelaide’s hands didn’t stop. Powder fell like dawn-fine dust.

“And in her own story, she’s too spotless. At the end, she pleads like a martyr, asking her rival to help warn of a coming storm.

Under that lantern, suspicion blooms easily.”

Bingxia’s brows pinched, a quiet disappointment like winter frost.

“So you think she lied?”

“No.”

The flat denial stunned Bingxia. Adelaide didn’t leave space for doubt.

“You asked how much. My answer’s ten out of ten—full faith.”

“You’re saying…”

“She didn’t lie. I believe her.”

If you know she isn’t lying, why humiliate her in court?

Bingxia’s lips tightened on the question, but the answer rose on its own like smoke in a still room.

“Adelaide… what makes you cling so hard to the Savia Rose?”

Through the mirror’s silver, Adelaide met her gaze.

“To mend a heart.”

“It won’t mend yours!” Bingxia’s breath snagged; her voice climbed, rare lightning on ice.

“The Savia Rose doesn’t heal outsiders. You don’t know—”

“Oh? And how do you know?

Right—because you tried. Your beloved, Princess Pris, was terminally ill.

You fought and won the Flower Dancer election, only to learn the Savia Rose did nothing for a Nacha Tribe body.

The next year, she passed. You don’t need to retell that sorrow—I know it.”

Hit in the old wound, Bingxia’s face went cold as a still pond.

“If you know, why chase the Savia Rose so madly?

Why set that vile self-proof trap for Silan, just to win the Trial of Truth?”

Adelaide only shrugged, the gesture light as a leaf.

“Well, how do you know unless you try? Maybe the Savia Rose fails on Nacha, but works wonders on humans.”

“For a mere possibility, you’ve thrown our Elven Realm into chaos?”

“No, Lady Bingxia. You’ve misspoken.”

Adelaide capped the brow pencil. Her grooming was done.

She rose from the wooden table and turned with a calm smile, spring ripples under frost.

“It isn’t a possibility. It’s a certainty.”

She walked toward the door, and as she passed Bingxia, she tossed a scroll into her hands, a cylinder heavy as a stone oath.

“Keep that safe. Don’t misplace it.”

“…”

Bingxia stared at the scroll. Her pause had nothing to do with the last debate line.

It was the aura—an evil heat rising like iron steam from blood.

Not only Blood Magic sigils burned on it; the stench said it swallowed corpses on the order of ten thousand.

A pinnacle Blood Magic defense scroll, refined with a charnel’s worth of dead.

“Where did you get this?”

“Someone handed it to me. But I doubt I’ll need it.”

Adelaide reached the threshold, smoothed her collar, and lifted the Ceremonial Sword from its hook, testing the weight like rain on the palm.

“You, my friend—I’m sure you’ll need it soon.”

What did she mean? The words felt like smoke—visible, untouchable.

Bingxia, a First Generation who’d seen a century of storms, found herself unable to read this wind.

She reached toward Adelaide, instinct tugging her sleeve.

Just then, a bamboo flute sang—the Flower Dancer ceremony’s call, clear as a river over stones.

No time. Bingxia’s hand froze in midair like a bird held by its own hesitation.

“Adelaide, after the ceremony, please give us an explanation.”

Adelaide didn’t turn. She slid the Ceremonial Sword back into its sheath with a quiet, satisfied click.

“I will, of course~”

Her tone was so light it felt like peach blossoms on water.

Bingxia watched her back, fingers tightening, brows knit deep, words dropping like pebbles.

“You’re… a madwoman.”

“Am I? Thank you for the compliment, Lady Bingxia.”

“That isn’t praise.”

At that, Adelaide turned. Her features stayed warm and flawless, yet a thin, feral smile cut across them like moonlight on a blade.

“Isn’t it? To me, right now, it’s praise in full.”

After all, right now… I have to become a lunatic, through and through.