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

Chapter 407: Chapter-407

Even though she had stepped down, even though Samuel sat on the throne and wore the crown, the shadow of the woman who had single-handedly dismantled the old noble factions and forced the empire into stability still loomed large over every corridor. To them, she wasn’t just a retired princess; she was the architect of their current reality.She reached her private office, pushing the door open without a knock.

Predictably, Demerti was already there. He was sitting at his auxiliary desk, sorting through a neat stack of parchment, but the moment the door opened, he practically bolted to his feet. He looked tired, the dark circles under his eyes contrasting with his sharp, professional attire. He looked every bit the thirty-three-year-old man who was balancing the weight of an imperial administration with the domestic demands of a young family.

"Master," Demerti greeted, his voice a mix of profound respect and palpable relief. "You’re here."

"I am always here at this hour, Demerti," Elara said, walking over to her massive oak desk.

The desk, which used to be piled so high with documents that she could barely see across the room, was remarkably bare. There was only a single, neat stack of folders resting in the center, alongside a freshly filled inkwell and a polished quill. The ten percent.

"His Majesty, Emperor Samuel, sent an envoy earlier this morning," Demerti began, stepping forward with a leather-bound folder. "The river case involving the recent nobleman... Samuel is having difficulty establishing the legal precedent for the land seizure. The nobleman’s lawyers are arguing that the inheritance rights predate the current imperial decree."

Elara sat down, her posture perfectly straight, her hands resting calmly on the dark wood of the desk. She didn’t look at the folder Demerti was holding out. She didn’t need to.

"Samuel is overthinking the opposition," Elara stated flatly. "The inheritance rights are irrelevant. The nobleman signed a clause three years ago during the grain distribution crisis, granting the crown temporary administrative access to the riverbanks in exchange for a tax exemption. That temporary access was never formally dissolved. Tell Samuel to cite Section Four of the crisis decree. The land belongs to the crown. The nobleman has no legal standing."

Demerti blinked, a helpless, familiar expression crossing his face. He lowered the folder, a soft, exhausted sigh escaping his lips. "You haven’t even read the brief, Master."

"I wrote the crisis decree, Demerti. I do not need to read the brief."

"Of course," Demerti muttered, rubbing his temples. He looked up at her, his expression softening into that sentimental, worried look he always had when he looked at her lately. "Samuel was... anxious. He handles the court well enough, but whenever a complex legal dispute arises, he still panics."

"He panics because he fears conflict," Elara said, her eyes tracking Demerti’s movements as she picked up her quill. "Conflict is a necessary variable in statecraft. If he cannot learn to tolerate the friction of the nobility, he will remain an ineffective ruler. I will not always be here to provide the answers."

Demerti pressed his lips together, his gaze drifting to the window, where the mid-morning sun was shining brightly over the palace gardens. "The people still ask about you, you know. The commoners, the lower-ranking administrators. They wonder why you spend so much time in the training grounds or locked away in your quarters. They think you are planning something."

"People naturally seek a narrative when faced with an anomaly," Elara replied, her tone completely neutral as she dipped her quill into the ink. "A ruler who willingly abdicates power without a biological or political necessity is an anomaly. They assume there must be a hidden motive, because they cannot comprehend a mind that does not covet authority."

"And you truly don’t?" Demerti asked, his voice quiet, almost hesitant. He had asked variations of this question for years, yet he always seemed to be searching for an answer she couldn’t give him. "You don’t miss the throne, Master? The power to shape the world with a single word?"

Elara paused, her quill hovering just above the parchment. She looked up at Demerti, her eyes completely devoid of ambition, pride, or regret. They were entirely empty, yet perfectly steady.

"Power is merely a tool to achieve stability," she said simply. "The stability has been achieved. The tool is no longer required in my hands. To retain it would be a waste of cognitive resources."

Demerti stared at her for a long moment, before letting out a soft, defeated laugh. He shook his head, looking older than his thirty-three years, but there was a deep, underlying fondness in his eyes. "You really haven’t changed at all, have you?"

"Change without purpose is inefficient," Elara stated, lowering her quill to the paper and signing her name with a sharp, practiced flourish.

As Demerti gathered the initial set of signed documents to deliver to Samuel’s court, Elara looked out the window. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. Down in the courtyard, she could see the distant figures of guards running drills, their movements sharp and synchronized.

Her mind was completely quiet. There was no joy in the silence, no profound sense of fulfillment or happiness. But as she thought about the horse riding lesson Ken had promised for tomorrow, and the heavy, unyielding warmth of Mahir’s embrace waiting for her that evening, she decided that the quiet was perfectly acceptable. She didn’t need to feel the world to live in it; she just needed to know where her anchor was. And for the first time in her life, the anchor wasn’t the throne.

Elara sat calmly at her desk, the faint aroma of herbal tea drifting through the quiet room. To anyone else looking at her track record, her life would look like a violent, unpredictable roller coaster—assassination attempts, a collapsing empire, a sudden rise to the throne, and an equally sudden abdication. But Elara didn’t experience her life as a ride. To her, it was simply a sequence of events to be cataloged and processed.

Even when she had been deep in the middle of restructuring the imperial line, with political minds screaming around her and the constant threat of civil war looming, her internal state had remained a flat, unwavering line. This mind condition of hers—this absolute inability to register the peaks and valleys of human emotion—was often called a flaw by others. To her, it was an armor that kept her entirely grounded.

When the courier arrived with an urgent dispatch bearing the seals of five separate neighboring kingdoms, Elara didn’t feel a spike of anxiety. She didn’t feel annoyed.

She simply accepted the parchment, cracked the wax, and began to read.

At first glance, it seemed like routine statecraft. Samuel had been sitting on the throne for a few years now. It was perfectly normal for foreign delegations to come and go, establishing new trade agreements or paying their respects to the young emperor.

Samuel was also at the age where the court was whispering heavily about marriage, succession, and securing the bloodline. A delegation arriving to pitch foreign princesses for Samuel would have been a standard, predictable variable.