Chapter 313 --313
He leaned in, his face inches from hers. "But I cannot understand... how did you suddenly become so incredibly smart?"
Elara simply looked at him, unblinking. She had died as the CEO of NetVault Security and woken up as Princess Yue Lian, but her fundamental processing power remained unchanged. "Continue the story, please," she said.
Seeing her completely unhurried, emotionless expression, Ken let out a harsh bark of laughter. "Well, that’s not the main point. We kept observing you. We saw your obsession with the collars, and we worried again. But then you ran away."
His face shifted into cold, unadulterated fury, his ears pressing flat against his skull. "You know, at that time, we wished we had choked you before. We were furious. How could you run away after promising us so much? We needed somewhere to vent that anger. So when the masquerade happened..." He smiled darkly. "We killed everyone."
"Ah," Elara said, her hand lifting to touch her shoulder lightly. "As I suspected."
"You knew?" Ken asked, his tail lifting slightly in surprise.
"It wasn’t a difficult deduction," Elara replied, her voice flat and clinical. "How else could the entire palace be cleaned out without an invading army? It had to be the internal security apparatus. The beastmen guards were the only ones with the training, the positioning, and the motive to execute such a large-scale liquidation while leaving the infrastructure intact."
"Exactly," Ken agreed, a twisted sort of pride in his voice. "But we still needed someone on the throne to deal with the nobles, so it wouldn’t cause administrative problems. We found the most useless prince, led him to ’victory,’ and sat him on the throne. Everyone thinks he won the fight. We thought we could wait years controlling him from the shadows, but then he turned back into the capital after just one year. And the moment I saw you, I knew it was you."
Ken gestured to the locked room around them, the stone walls that held the weight of centuries of royal secrets. "Everything was going perfectly. But then, yesterday, you figured out the truth. It was irritating. Thank the gods Mahir works fast. The moment he saw you pulling away and realizing the truth, he understood the risk and kidnapped you."
Elara absorbed the entire timeline, slotting each new piece of data into its proper place. There was no anger. No fear. Just pure, unadulterated data processing. The board had been reset, the players were revealed, and she was currently at a significant tactical disadvantage.