Chapter 83: Why? 14 (Flashback)
"Now that your mind is calm," she began, her voice steady—like a thread trying to hold together fraying fabric—yet it still held that unmistakable softness only a mother could carry, "let’s continue our conversation."
Alex remained motionless. His hands had finally stopped trembling, fingers now curled loosely over his knees, but the crushing tightness in his chest lingered, like a hand pressing down on his lungs. His throat felt dry. Still, he listened—because how could he not?
"As I said before, it wasn’t your fault, so don’t let it bring you down."
Her eyes, gentle just moments before, gradually hardened—not with anger, but with something more controlled. A resolve forged in silence and sorrow. The warmth in her voice cooled like cooling embers, and her expression shifted from the fragile tenderness of a mother to the unreadable calm of someone who had long since accepted the storm that never stopped.
"Now... to the real issue."
Something in the room changed.
The air, once heavy with grief, took on a new shape—dense and sharp, like the moment before a lightning strike. Nyxara, ever alert despite her quiet posture, lifted her head. Her golden eyes flicked toward the screen. Ears twitched once, twice. She felt it too. The shift. The weight behind the words. The truth about to be unsealed.
"There was always one question I couldn’t get out of my mind," she said, her eyes narrowing slightly, as if even recalling it caused her skin to bristle. "Why did Lie Yan do what he did?"
"At first, I thought it was just Lei Yan being Lie Yan—paranoid, power-hungry, and wanting to expose the truth about the other clans. Maybe he just wanted to prove that the rest of us were lying about our children’s talents."
Her voice dipped lower, softer, as if it wasn’t meant for anyone but herself—a confession whispered to the past. It trembled with restraint, as though she stood on the edge of a memory too painful to name.
"But everything changed the day your father went to speak to the Thunder God."