Chapter 72: Close Enough to Fool Them

Helia. If you’d only told the truth earlier, I’d still have wanted to help you. But now, Lucian murmured to himself, a faint smile touching his mouth that felt more like a wound than an expression.

There had been a moment, not long ago, when some part of him had genuinely pitied her, watching Retave and Varka close in on her from both sides.

If Helia had simply admitted the truth to her own father, that Lucian was the one who’d helped her, he would have kept his end of the agreement anyway, still standing before the Emperor to swear she’d done it alone, still lending his voice to protect her public image.

But watching her fight this hard to save herself, and watching Kaelyn stand beside her in perfect, rehearsed unity, whatever was left of that impulse died where it stood.

He understood now, slowly and completely, that he’d been used from the very beginning, the betrothal agreement itself likely part of some plan laid long ago by someone inside his own family, engineered to bleed his skill for their own purposes.

Pieces he’d never thought to question started falling into place. Over the past year, he and Helia had barely crossed paths, a distance he’d felt but never quite examined.

He hadn’t realized, until this very moment, that the silence between them had marked the beginning of their relationship’s slow collapse. Whenever Helia had come to see him at all, it had only ever been to check on the Pocket Orb’s progress.

He’d never once imagined it would end like this, not for the Orb, and not for the engagement built around it.

Rumelia had warned him, back at the very start, not to sign away his rights to the Pocket Orb. He hadn’t listened.

"Kaelyn. If all you have to offer as proof is your own word, then surely I can do the same. I could just as easily stand here and testify that someone in this hall is the Pocket Orb’s real creator."

"And perhaps there’s someone here still too frightened to admit it, someone who doesn’t dare claim what’s rightfully his."

Retave stepped forward to challenge Kaelyn directly.

Kaelyn’s expression darkened, plainly unhappy with how relentlessly Retave kept cornering him and Helia both.

"Prince Retave, do you have proof? You sound as though you suspect House Sarnel of manipulating someone into silence."

"I have no physical proof. But tell me, do either of you have proof that Helia is the one who made it?"

The two traded blow after blow, neither willing to yield an inch.

Then the masked figure standing behind Helia finally moved, stepping forward past her, closing the distance to Varka, and bowing his head low.

"Your Majesty. On the matter of proof for the Pocket Orb, I have something far more convincing. Proof that Helia is truly the one who made it."

Rhaiven spoke the words with unshaken confidence, his voice pitched to carry.

"I hope for your own sake, Rhaiven, that this isn’t just more empty talk."

Varka’s voice alone was enough to intimidate him. Rhaiven, who only a moment ago had spoken with such confidence, now stood bowing at Helia’s side, unable to meet the Emperor’s sharp, unwavering stare directly.

Helia herself was caught off guard by what Rhaiven had just done. As far as she’d understood, he had some way of proving her claim, some plan already in motion. What struck her as strange was this: if he’d truly had such a plan all along, why hadn’t he said so before she’d become the center of every eye in the hall?

"Rhaiven. Do you actually have another plan?"

She kept her voice to the barest whisper.

Rhaiven glanced at her just long enough to answer without words, a look that told her plainly he did have some way to see her through this.

"Princess. Simply follow whatever I do from here."

They spoke low, heads bent close together, and as they did, Rhaiven’s hand pressed something into hers, passed between their joined fingers where no one else could see.

Helia felt its shape at once, formless, wrapped in a scrap of paper so small it barely registered against her palm, the contents inside faintly liquid.

"What is this... is this really what Rhaiven meant when he said he had proof?"

She murmured the question to herself, plainly confused. The little parcel was round and gave slightly under her fingers, and she had no idea at all how it was meant to be used. But holding it, she noticed something odd, a faint, persistent warmth radiating from inside the paper.

"Princess, inside that paper is a liquid, my own blood mixed with Adenium nectar. All you need to do is break the packet open against the chisel. I’ll be the one carving the pattern from here, without anyone knowing it."

Disgust flickered across Helia’s face the instant she understood what the liquid actually was.

But according to what Rhaiven had just explained, once that mixture touched the chisel, he would be able to control the blade himself, as though Helia’s own hand still held it.

The idea behind it, he’d told her once, had come from the Crimson clan, whose bloodline let them seize control of an object through their own blood. But the truth of what Rhaiven could do fell far short of that.

His blood carried none of a true Crimson’s freedom, none of their ability to seize a living creature’s very body. What he had could only reach into things that had never lived at all. And by chance, the nectar of the Adenium flower had a strange property of its own, masking the Dark Mana in his blood well enough to let it bind to an object and answer to his will. Almost no one on this continent understood what that nectar was truly capable of.

"Princess Helia will carve the three-layer pattern of the Pocket Orb herself, in front of everyone, to prove her claim."

Rhaiven said it loudly, his voice carrying, echoing faintly off the hall’s high ceiling.

Retave’s mood had already begun to sour. Why, he wondered, would Helia suddenly volunteer to demonstrate the Relic’s construction now, when only moments ago she’d stood frozen, unable to answer even a single question from Varka?

Without any visible hesitation, Helia lifted the Orihalcum and let it hover in the air before her.

The stone answered at once, its white vein glowing faintly through the gray, as though it were already bracing itself for the blade.

While every eye in the hall stayed fixed on that light, Helia’s fingers moved, quick and unremarkable, breaking the little packet open against the chisel.

She began the first stroke slowly, tracing what looked like the opening line of a pattern into the Orihalcum’s surface. In truth, the chisel was moving on its own now, and Helia did nothing but hold it and let the world believe otherwise.

One stroke in, and her hand began to burn, the skin beneath it prickling as though something were eating it away from within.

It was no surprise that it hurt her so. The blood and nectar carried Dark Mana buried inside them, and Dark Mana, left to touch human skin directly, corroded living tissue on contact.

She wanted to scream. She kept her face perfectly still instead, because Rhaiven had told her to hold on just a little longer, until the first layer’s pattern was complete.

It didn’t take long after that. The first layer finished itself beneath her unmoving expression.

Beneath the handkerchief she’d already wrapped around her palm, her skin had begun to melt away entirely, and she hid it from view the moment the carving stopped.

The rest of the hall, meanwhile, had fallen half under a spell of their own, watching the mechanical elegance of the pattern take shape before them, unfinished as it still was.

Lucian, watching from below, understood immediately that something was wrong with it.

That groove is too shallow, and it’s cut at the wrong angle besides. On the real first layer, the second ring has to be carved almost twice as wide as the first, wide enough to hold three full turns of mana thread instead of one.

Cut it that narrow, and there’s nowhere for the current to pool before it branches off toward the second and third layers.

It won’t fail outright. It’ll just starve. The visual mapping will flicker at the edges of its range instead of holding steady, and the sound transmission underneath it will lose maybe half its distance without anyone ever knowing why.

Whoever’s really holding that chisel learned the shape of my work without ever learning the reason behind it.

He wanted badly to say it aloud, in front of everyone. But he knew that if he did, every assumption people held about him would shift in an instant, and not in a direction he could afford.

"Wait. Isn’t the pattern on this first layer incomplete?"

Retave stepped closer, studying it with narrowed eyes.