Chapter : 901
The thought was so absurd, so far beyond the bounds of anything his logical, strategic mind could possibly have conceived, that a strange, hysterical, and utterly inappropriate bubble of laughter began to rise in his chest. He was going to laugh. He was going to stand in the throne room of the most powerful and most dangerous man in the kingdom, and he was going to laugh like a madman.
He ruthlessly, brutally, and with a feat of will that was almost as impressive as his battle against the Jahl, suppressed it.
He looked at Amina, at the woman who was Sumaiya, at the kind, compassionate friend who had been his partner, his advocate, and who was now, apparently, his… his betrothed. He looked at her, and his mind was a complete and utter blank, save for one, single, screaming, and endlessly repeating thought.
I. Am. Already. Married.
The political, diplomatic, and personal catastrophe that was now brewing was of a scale so monumental, so epic, that it made the threat of the assassins, the mystery of his own transmigration, seem like small, trivial, and almost comforting problems in comparison. He had not just walked into a trap. He had walked into the single greatest, and most beautifully constructed, romantic comedy of errors in the history of the world. And he was the star.
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The throne room of the Zakarian Royal Palace was a place that had witnessed a great deal of history. It had seen declarations of war, the signing of peace treaties, the crowning of kings, and the sentencing of traitors. But it had never, in its long and storied existence, been the stage for a moment of such profound, surreal, and deeply awkward silence as the one that now gripped it.
Lloyd stood in the center of the vast, marble Go board, a man whose entire universe had just been neatly, elegantly, and completely inverted. The revelation that the Jahl Challenge was a matrimonial trial was a concept so far outside his operational parameters that his mind was still struggling to find a file in which to place it. It was like a master engineer being told that the fundamental laws of physics had just been repealed by a royal decree. It simply… did not compute.
His mind, in a desperate attempt to find some solid ground in this new, swampy landscape of romantic, political absurdity, latched onto the one, single, tangible piece of the puzzle that still seemed to make sense. The prize. The Lilith Stones. The entire reason he had walked into this beautiful, insane, and gilded trap in the first place.
“The prize,” he croaked, his voice the rough, unused sound of a man who has just been woken from a very, very strange dream. “The twenty-five percent share of the mine.”
He looked at Amina, his eyes a desperate, pleading prayer for a single, solitary piece of rational, predictable information in a world that had just gone completely, wonderfully, and terrifyingly mad.
Amina, the Princess who was also Sumaiya, the master strategist who was also, apparently, the grand prize in a deadly reality television show, regarded him with an expression of profound, and almost sympathetic, amusement. She knew she had just dropped a conceptual bomb on him that had shattered his entire worldview, and she was now preparing to drop the second one that would pulverize the remaining rubble into a fine, indistinguishable dust.
“Ah, yes,” she said, her voice a soft, gentle, and utterly devastating murmur. “The prize. I am afraid there has been a small… misunderstanding about the details of the arrangement. A matter of… sourcing.”
She turned and gave her father, the Sultan, who was still sitting on his obsidian throne with the serene, satisfied expression of a man who has just watched his favorite play reach its glorious, dramatic conclusion, a small, almost conspiratorial, smile.
“You see, Lord Zayn,” she began, her voice taking on the patient, explanatory tone of a master scholar gently guiding a student through a particularly complex and counter-intuitive theorem, “the kingdom of Zakaria, for all its wealth and power, is a responsible and fiscally prudent state. The royal Lilith Stone mine, our most valuable and most strategic asset, is a resource that is managed with the utmost care. Its output is strictly controlled, its distribution a matter of national security. To simply give away a quarter of its annual yield, even as a prize for a contest as prestigious as the Jahl Challenge, would be… well, it would be fiscally irresponsible. It would set a dangerous precedent.”
Chapter : 902
Lloyd could only stare at her, his mind a slow, grinding, and deeply confused machine. Was she saying…? Was she telling him that the entire prize was a lie? That he had gone through all of this, had revealed his power, had tied himself in a knot of royal, matrimonial intrigue, for nothing? A new, and very different, kind of horror was beginning to dawn.
“However,” Amina continued, her voice a smooth, silken, and beautifully timed piece of narrative misdirection, “my father, the Sultan, is a man of his word. And he is also a man of… profound, and very personal, generosity. The prize you have won is real. The twenty-five percent share is yours, by right of victory. The misunderstanding was not about the prize itself, but about the… the account from which it was to be drawn.”
She paused, letting the final, beautiful, and exquisitely cruel piece of the puzzle fall into place.
“The twenty-five percent share of the royal mine that was offered as the prize for the victor of the Jahl Challenge,” she declared, her voice a clear, final, and world-shattering bell of revelation, “was never intended to come from the treasury of the kingdom.”
She gestured to herself, a small, elegant, and utterly devastating movement.
“It was always intended to come from me.”
Lloyd’s brain, which had just begun to tentatively reboot, crashed again, this time with a puff of metaphorical, and deeply pathetic, smoke.
“I… I do not understand,” he whispered, the words the final, dying gasp of his own, once-formidable intellect.
Amina’s smile was a thing of pure, unadulterated, and almost sympathetic beauty. “It is quite simple, my Lord. As a part of my own personal inheritance, my dowry, granted to me by my father upon the occasion of my future marriage, I was given a fifty percent share in the annual output of the kingdom’s richest, and most secret, Lilith Stone lode. A small, personal fortune to ensure my own security, and the prosperity of my future house.”
She looked at him, and her dark, intelligent eyes were now shining with the triumphant, beautiful, and utterly inescapable light of the final, perfect, and glorious checkmate.
“The twenty-five percent share you have so bravely, and so magnificently, won,” she concluded, her voice a soft, gentle, and utterly final whisper, “was never a prize from the Sultan. It was always intended to be my own, personal wedding gift… to my new husband.”
The silence that followed was not a silence. It was a sound. It was the sound of Lloyd’s entire, complex, and beautifully constructed universe folding in on itself, crushing him in its silent, logical, and absolutely, beautifully, and horrifyingly perfect collapse.
The prize. The mission. The cure. The stones. The marriage. They were not separate things. They had never been separate things. They were all one and the same. A single, intricate, and perfectly constructed trap. And he had not just walked into it. He had fought, and bled, and performed miracles to get to the very heart of it.
He stared at the woman who was a princess and a friend, an advocate and an ally, a mystery and, apparently, his future wife. And the only thought his poor, battered, and utterly defeated mind could produce was a single, silent, and deeply profound prayer to any god that might be listening.
Oh, hell.
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The throne room of the Zakarian Royal Palace had become a strange, surreal stage for the complete and utter demolition of one Lord Lloyd Ferrum’s sanity. The final revelation—that the prize he had fought for was not a prize at all, but a dowry, a wedding gift from his new, and very unexpected, fiancée—was not a simple plot twist. It was a conceptual bomb that had vaporized the very foundations of his reality.
He stood in the center of the vast, marble Go board, a man adrift in a sea of pure, unadulterated, and almost comical absurdity. His mind, which had always been his greatest weapon, a finely-honed instrument of logic and strategy, was now a sputtering, smoke-filled wreck. It was like watching a supercomputer trying to process the concept of a rubber chicken. The data was simply incompatible with its core programming.
He was betrothed. To a princess. Of a foreign kingdom. While he was already married. The sheer, breathtaking, and almost beautiful diplomatic and personal catastrophe of the situation was a thing of almost mythic proportions. He felt a strange, detached sense of admiration for it. He had always been a connoisseur of complex, high-stakes problems, and this… this was a masterpiece. A true, museum-quality, once-in-a-generation cluster of a problem.