Chapter 32: Beware the Rift’s Deception

Zoria moved toward Kai first, reaching for him, some half-formed instinct to help. Kai batted his hand away before it ever landed. Wounded as he clearly was, he still managed to stay upright on his own, swaying only slightly as he crossed toward Yunxi.

She was already watching him, gaze sharp and unblinking, by the time he reached her. He’d barely opened his mouth to deliver his report when her voice cut in first, cold enough to stop him cold.

"Don’t tell me you failed to get anything on that woman, Kai."

Yunxi hadn’t raised her voice, hadn’t so much as let a thread of mana slip loose around her. She didn’t need to. Whatever showed on Kai’s face in that moment said enough on its own, the unmistakable look of a man genuinely afraid of the person standing in front of him.

He understood, better than most, what failure here would cost him. Not just his own fate hanging in the balance, but Silver Needle’s future along with it.

Supreme or not, there were still exactly two things in this world capable of making him afraid, and Yunxi was only one of them. The figure standing behind her made up the other.

Kai’s nod came slow, and his hands trembled through it, an admission that he’d come back empty-handed. Yunxi’s eyes narrowed further at that, and this time her mana did stir, just enough to make her disappointment unmistakable.

"A Supreme, unable to pry a memory loose from someone that far beneath him. Is this some kind of joke to you?"

Kai’s head dropped low, both hands rising in a gesture of apology, pleading for her patience even as he admitted the failure outright. He hadn’t been able to claim the whole of Miyu’s memory through the talisman, that much was true.

But he had found something, he explained. A silver-haired woman, buried somewhere in what Miyu refused to speak of. The trouble was, the woman he’d glimpsed and the one Yunxi and Miyu both seemed to be picturing didn’t match at all.

The woman in the memory had been young, far younger than the one they were hunting, barely twenty by the look of her, someone who’d crossed paths with Miyu only briefly, once, when Miyu had been a lost child wandering the desert and this stranger had been the one to find her and bring her home. If that was the case, then Miyu’s silence made sense on its own, born out of fear that the woman who’d saved her might turn out to be exactly the one they were hunting.

"Are you certain she wasn’t disguising herself as someone younger?" Yunxi asked.

It wasn’t an unreasonable question. Someone with real power could manage that kind of illusion without much trouble at all.

But Kai shook his head, firm in his answer. He hadn’t misread what he’d seen, he insisted, the girl in that memory carried real strength of her own, certainly, but her Core sat nowhere near the level of the woman they were after.

He explained further, laying out exactly how the talisman worked: it let him view a memory’s owner without any trace of manipulation clouding the image, and if someone had tried to alter what he was seeing, the interference would have left its own mark behind, plain to spot. There’d been no such trace here.

The trouble had come later, when he’d tried pushing deeper. The dark mana coiled inside Miyu ran too thick to approach safely, thick enough that it had blocked him from going any further.

He’d pressed forward anyway, forcing his way past it, and that was when something had struck back, a creature shaped entirely out of that same dark mana, lashing out without warning. The blow had torn through his internal energy and ended the attempt outright.

"I don’t actually mind hearing more of this nonsense a little while longer," Yunxi said.

"But I can’t promise how many more breaths you’ll get to explain it in, Kai. The one standing behind me might not share my patience."

The threat came plainly from her own mouth, and Kai’s hands shot up at once, a silent plea for her to hold off, buying himself room to lay out one more piece of what he’d found.

"Wait, Your Grace. This part might sound strange, and I honestly don’t know if it came from her real memory or somewhere else entirely."

"I didn’t find the silver-haired woman we’re looking for. But I saw something else while I was moving through her memories. Something strange."

"Something strange?" Yunxi’s anger had already begun to cool by the time she echoed the words back, something closer to interest creeping into her voice instead.

Kai, sensing the shift, let himself settle a little, and pressed on. He described it carefully a boy, faint and half-formed at the edges, hair the same shade of silver, standing alone somewhere dark.

The moment Rhaiven had tried approaching him, reaching out to touch him, the boy had simply vanished, like smoke caught in wind.

Rhaiven’s voice cut in from behind Kai before he could say anything more.

"You’re willing to go this far, spinning a story convincing enough to save your own skin in front of Her Grace? Couldn’t you have come up with a better lie than that?"

"You think silver-haired children are some kind of rarity? There were countless children like that in this world. And half the Forest Elves are born with hair that color."

The jab landed with obvious contempt, but Yunxi’s expression told a different story entirely, she was taking every word of it seriously, weighing the girl’s identity, the creature born of dark mana that had somehow managed to wound a Supreme, all of it.

Something about the boy nagged at her too, whether it belonged to Miyu’s memory at all or came from somewhere else, and she filed the thought away regardless, something worth carrying back to report once she returned to the palace.

Rhaiven, watching the two of them walk away with exactly what they’d come for, made no effort to hide his growing displeasure. He turned on his heel and crossed straight to Zoria, seizing him by the collar and hauling him close, his voice dropping to something low and furious.

"You bastard. I didn’t travel all this way just to sit through this kind of garbage. You told me this girl knew something about the silver-haired woman."

The paladins behind Zoria snapped their swords up at once, leveling them at Rhaiven, demanding he release the Archbishop immediately. Rhaiven didn’t so much as loosen his grip.

Zoria was the one who called them off, waving the paladins down and offering something close to an apology in Rhaiven’s direction.

"Forgive me, Lord Rhaiven. I truly didn’t realize the silver-haired woman you’re searching for was someone different from the one in her memories. Miyu used to speak of that woman often, so I assumed she had to be the one."

Rhaiven wasn’t finished. He shoved Zoria loose, letting him drop hard onto the floor, and kept tearing into him in front of the very people who still looked to him as their Archbishop, stripping away whatever dignity the man had left without a second thought.

Another voice rose behind them before Zoria had even managed to push himself upright.

"You son of a bitch, Zoria. If you already knew about the silver-haired woman, why didn’t you say something sooner?"

Kai’s fury cut through the moment, sharp with the sting of realizing he’d been played for a fool. Had Zoria simply explained it from the start, none of this, forcing his way into Miyu’s memories, the wound he was still nursing, would have been necessary at all.

Zoria, helped back to his feet by the paladins flanking him, admitted as much. That part, at least, was on him.

But he hadn’t withheld it out of malice, he explained, only out of doubt that Kai would have believed him without seeing it for himself. Better, he’d reasoned, to let Kai stumble onto whatever else might be hiding in there that even Zoria himself didn’t know about.

There was some logic in that reasoning, maybe, but it did nothing to soften how much the whole ordeal had cost Kai in the end.

Rhaiven, who’d walked away with nothing at all to show for any of it, wasn’t in a mood to be reasoned with either.

"Talking to you was a waste of breath, same as building your little war for you. I’m done. I’m pulling my creatures out of this city right now. Handle the rest of your damned ambition on your own."

His voice carried none of its earlier restraint, every bit of frustration finally breaking loose, the grand plan he’d apparently laid the groundwork for, in service of Zoria’s ambitions, collapsing now that their bargain had fallen through.

Without waiting for a response, Rhaiven turned and started walking, already leaving Zoria behind him.