Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 393 --393

The woman nodded. "Very well. The world once relied on a line of sovereigns who did not merely govern. They sealed, moderated, and contained things that should never have been allowed to bargain with the living. One of those rulers became too close to the burden. In the act of sealing the Hollow Crown, she split herself—part of her will remained in the ward, part passed onward, and part was lost." She looked at Elara again. "If the archives are honest, you are one of the pieces that survived."

Elara stared at the mirrors without seeing them.

That explained too much and too little at once.

The old woman folded her hands. "The Hollow Crown did not sleep. It learned. It watched the descendants of the world above. It waited for a mind that would recognize its language. It found you."

Mahir’s expression hardened. "Then why not tell us sooner?"

"Because if I was wrong, I would have condemned an innocent woman to become a symbol," the keeper said. "And if I was right, I would have invited the thing beneath to listen."

No one spoke for a while.

Then Elara said, "Why send for me now?"

The woman lifted the sealed page from the table and placed it in Elara’s hand. "Because the archives are failing. Someone has been removing records. Not with fire. With revision. Names vanish from ledgers. Whole histories rot while the shelves remain intact. The Hollow Crown is reaching outward through memory."

Elara looked down at the note.

It remembers you.

Now it sounded less like a threat and more like an instruction.

The woman’s voice dropped. "If it fully awakens, it will not come as a monster from the earth. It will come as a rightful ruler. A voice people want to obey. That is its true danger."

Elara’s face changed then, subtly but unmistakably. Not fear.

Recognition.

Because that kind of power—quiet, persuasive, dangerous—was something she understood too well.

Mahir saw it too. "Elara..."

She did not answer immediately.

At last, she looked at the old woman and said, "Then take me to whatever remains of the first seal."

The keeper of names nodded once. "I was hoping you would say that."

Outside the archive, the wind had begun to rise.

And far below the cliff, somewhere beneath stone and sealed memory, something ancient shifted in its sleep and smiled with Elara’s face.

The next day, Elara received a letter from the palace.

It was Samuel’s first letter to her.

She opened it and read it in silence. The letter was simple, almost too simple. He asked how she was doing, said the work was going well, and mentioned that the nobles were still talking nonsense as usual. There was nothing urgent in it, only an ordinary report about his health and the daily affairs of the court.

Elara folded the letter and placed it in a drawer.

She never replied unless it was truly necessary. Still, she had to admit she was impressed.

Samuel was only seventeen or eighteen this year, yet he already carried himself like a proper emperor. Elara was proud of him.

Of course, he still could not walk and had to use a wheelchair, and many nobles were against him taking the throne. But Elara did not care about their objections. She was still there, and that alone was enough.

Whenever the nobles complained too much, she told them they were free to challenge her if they had a problem.

Of course, that did not mean challenging her directly.

It meant challenging the beast knight standing behind her.

And no one was foolish enough to try.

With strong administrators, the support of the common people, the loyalty of half the nobility, and the backing of the beast knights, the objections of a few stubborn nobles meant nothing. So even if they disliked it, Elara had retired and placed Samuel on the throne.

Even then, most of the real work was still done by Elara herself. She made sure Demerti and the others worked *with* Samuel, not under him. Samuel was not being treated as a puppet or a figurehead — he was being shaped into a real ruler.

As for war, Elara had never believed the emperor needed to go to battle personally. That was why she had generals for war and beast knights for protection. There was no reason for the emperor to waste time on the battlefield when others were already capable of handling it.

---

Elara had come to this place for a specific matter she needed to check, but the situation before her quickly made her frown.

Something about this place was wrong.

Her brows furrowed as she looked around, and after a brief pause, she decided to stay a little longer. Whatever was happening here, she wanted to understand it fully before leaving.

She needed to know what the hell was going on.

And until now, she still did not have a clearer answer.

She had brought Mahir, Ken, and the panda beastman with her for one reason, and one reason only. She had known going in that what mana could not decipher, these beastmen could. Her body — the original princess’s body — carried mana in it still. She was a mage in that sense, able to feel the threads of magic, the faint shifts in the air that a practitioner would recognize. She had brought her own tools for that.

But the beastmen were something else entirely.

They did not run on mana. They worked on alchemy — a different system, a different sense, one that operated on principles a mage’s instincts simply could not reach. What she felt with magic, they might not feel at all. And what they felt, she might walk straight past without ever noticing. That was precisely the point.

She had brought all three of them because she wanted every angle covered.

And also because she did not trust these bastards left unsupervised. Who knew what they would do the moment her back was turned. Not while she was here. Not without her eyes on them.

"Well, whatever. I survived. That’s it."

Elara looked at the old woman again.

She had been called here today — the woman sitting in her chair the same way she had been sitting yesterday, before Elara had left in the middle of the conversation without particularly caring to finish it. Most of the talking yesterday had been done by Mahir and Ken anyway, because Elara did not trust this woman. Not even a little.

She believed in evidence. Proof. Something tangible, something she could hold up and examine. If you wanted her to believe what you were saying was the truth, you gave her something real. That was how it worked.

This woman had given her nothing. Just a story. An interesting one, maybe, but a story nonetheless.

She was supposed to believe all of it simply because it was entertaining?

No.

As for why she had not been particularly shocked by the monsters, by whatever else they had stumbled into — well. She had thought about that. This world ran on entirely different logic than the one she had come from. She did not know what had happened here, what was buried here, what had been sealed or forgotten or left to rot under the ground for centuries.