Elara’s brows knit ever so slightly, not in confusion but calculation. "If you begin from the start," she asked, "how long will it take?"

He paused, tapping a finger lightly against his arm as if sorting through memories. "Not long," he replied after a moment. "At least, not if I spare you the unnecessary details. I can give you a version... concise enough to keep your interest."

Her gaze did not soften, but there was a quiet permission in it now. A silent command.

"Then begin."

For a brief second, the air between them shifted—his smile thinning, losing its earlier ease. Whatever he was about to say, it was no longer just a story.

"The starting point isn’t much, you know," Ken began, his voice surprisingly soft, lacking the rough, hoarse edge she had heard when he begged to touch her. "Just ten, maybe twenty years ago, we started to feel discomfort. It started with a knight who fell in love with your father’s sister—your aunt."

Elara’s mind cataloged the data point. She searched the historical records she had absorbed since her awakening—the accounts of the thirteen years of the Crimson Phoenix Dynasty and the seven princesses fighting in the shadows—but she found no mention of an aunt’s romance with a beast. It was an undocumented variable, a secret buried beneath the white marble of the palace.

"She was a neat girl," Ken continued, a dangerous smile touching his lips as he watched Elara for a reaction. "He didn’t know what to name the feeling. Didn’t understand it. Not until she was married off to another kingdom. That knight felt regret. He felt heartbreak. And for the first time, the suppression started to crack."

Ken’s hand moved to the thin band of metal around his neck—the collar that Elara had first observed as a functional mark of property, a leash of magic that kept the beasts obedient.

"If you are caged for too long, you long for freedom," he said, his voice tightening. "Our beast nature could never be completely suffocated by this collar and this uniform."

He dropped his hand from his neck, his gold eyes flashing with a predatory light. "Thanks to this, we could never act against the royal family. So we formulated a plan to slowly break it. We thought no one noticed. But someone did. Your mother. The Fourth Consort."

"She noticed the collars were failing," Elara stated. It wasn’t a question; it was a deduction. Her mother, Imperial Consort Mei, had been the best magician in the empire after the royal family, a woman who spent her time on magic experiments rather than politics.

"She was one of the problems," Ken said, his expression darkening. "A good woman, really, but she looked at us once and caught on. Strangely, she didn’t tell anyone. She just started researching it."

Ken paced the small room, the sound of his boots on the stone a rhythmic thud that echoed the ticking of a clock. "We literally wanted to kill her. But we found out her so-called lover—the one the previous Emperor died for—was a friend of the previous Empress. We knew she wouldn’t cause much trouble, so we kept working from the shadows. Years went by."

"Then my mother died," Elara noted. The official reports had suggested poison or a mismatch of magic, but the lack of clarity had always been a red flag in Elara’s mind.

"Yes," Ken said, dismissively. "And then you grew up. When you turned fourteen, you started doing the exact same thing she did. Researching the collars."

Elara recalled the hidden diary she had found in the Azure Lotus Palace—the writings of the original Princess Yue Lian, who spent her time with "experiments and strange tools," coaxing sparks out of resonance stones. The girl who noticed the way a beastman’s ears flattened when a human raised a hand and how their collars hummed in the sun.

"We were furious, but since you were a royal, we couldn’t touch you," Ken said, leaning closer until Elara could see the micro-tension in his jaw. "Until you found out the truth. You realized we were on the verge of breaking the spell completely. You were going to tell the Emperor."

His voice dropped to a harsh whisper, the intensity of it pressing against Elara’s senses like the weight of the Emperor’s own aura. "We had no choice. We had to choose between killing you or dying ourselves. If you died, one life was lost. If we died, thousands of us would be slaughtered for treason without a second thought."

"So you chose yourselves," Elara said calmly. She analyzed the pragmatic decision with the same detachment she had used when Richard Morrison explained that she was a "weapon" he had built and then decided to discard. "A logical preservation of assets."

"Yes," Ken said, his eyes searching hers for a flicker of fear, of betrayal, of anything human. "We poisoned you."

Elara looked at him coolly, her pulse steady. "If I recall correctly, the imperial physician found no poison in my blood," she said, recalling the diagnosis of "severe exhaustion and strain" that had followed her collapse. "Furthermore, you couldn’t simply smuggle foreign toxins into the inner palace. How did you do it?"

Ken actually laughed, a short, sharp sound that held no mirth. "Dear Your Highness, you are really funny. Do you honestly think we beast knights only possess the physical traits of our beasts?"

He gestured vaguely toward the door. "The snake beastman who worked in your palace—the one you saw on your first day here?" 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Elara accessed her visual memory files, scanning the images of the red-coated guards in the courtyard, the twenty-three visible positions she had cataloged when she first walked through the palace. "The one with the green teeth," she said.

"Exactly," Ken nodded, his ears perking forward. "Because you humans become so overconfident, you don’t even notice the obvious. We are beasts. We possess their powers. A snake beastman’s power is venom. Why would we need to buy poison?"

He grimaced, his tail going still as he recalled the event. "It was agonizing for him. After poisoning your tea, the collar’s backlash for harming a royal nearly destroyed him. He was writhing in pain, groaning, literally on the verge of death. But because he wasn’t a personal knight, no one caught it. We hoped that if you died, his pain would subside."

"And I did die," Elara noted. She remembered the needle in her neck in the penthouse office, the darkness creeping in, and the final realization that she had lost everything. "My heart stopped."

"You did. You lost your breath," Ken said. "We weren’t worried because everyone would naturally point their fingers at the First Princess. Two birds with one stone."

He stopped pacing and stood directly in front of her, his golden eyes narrowing into thin slits as he studied her face as if trying to decipher a corrupted line of code. "But then... you woke up."

Ken’s gaze was intense, analytical. "You woke up, and you fought with the First Princess. But what was truly strange was that after you woke, I never saw a genuine expression on your face again. I thought it might be brain damage from the venom—that you had lost your memories and emotions."