Chapter 400 --400
The door to the study remained shut, and for a moment the room was filled only with the quiet rustle of pages and the faint sound of the wind pressing against the windows. Elara stood near the desk, one hand resting lightly on the edge of a report she had not yet finished reading, her expression as unreadable as ever.
Then, from behind the tall bookshelf near the far wall, a figure slowly stepped out.
Demerti.
He looked mildly annoyed, as though he had been hiding there far longer than he had intended. His gaze slid first to Elara, then toward the window she had been standing by a moment ago, and finally back to her again. His face did not change much, but the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth gave away enough to suggest that he had already lost whatever argument he had been preparing to make.
Elara turned her head slightly, glanced out of the window once more, and said in an even tone, "Come to think of it, it looks like I won the bet."
Demerti closed his eyes for a brief moment and exhaled through his nose. He looked like a man who had just realized that the world had once again decided to be inconvenient in a way that only Elara could predict.
Then, with obvious reluctance, he said nothing.
Instead, he reached into his coat, took out a small pouch of gold, and placed it into her hand.
Elara accepted it without hesitation.
The pouch was not particularly heavy, but she weighed it briefly in her palm anyway, as if assessing whether it justified the expense of having to listen to Demerti complain later. It did. At the very least, it was one month of Demerti’s salary, and free money was never wasted.
Especially not by someone who understood economics as efficiently as Elara did.
The matter of the bet had begun during the year the system vanished.