The chilling revelation about the Artificers' Union and their insidious core-tracking strategy left Elias feeling exposed, even with the bootleg core safely buried. He was fighting a war on too many fronts. His focus, however, was quickly drawn back to the elusive Naga spy. The false trail he'd laid months ago had remained undisturbed, a testament to the Naga's caution. But that caution evaporated with a sudden, brazen move.
A new case blazed across the Bureau's priority feeds: the accusation of murder against Ambassador Rylen, a highly respected human diplomat known for his calm demeanor and impeccable karmic record. The Ledger, inexplicably, was now showing overwhelming evidence of his guilt, implicating him in the brutal assassination of a minor foreign dignitary. Elias immediately recognized the tell-tale signs: the same subtle, elegant manipulations, the invisible threads of distortion woven into the karmic record. The Naga spy had struck again, directly accusing a human diplomat of murder using falsified Ledger entries.
This was an unprecedented escalation. Fabricating treason was one thing; fabricating murder was another entirely, risking a diplomatic incident and potentially a full-scale inter-species conflict. The Naga was actively trying to destabilize the Realm, and Elias's counter-trap was finally in play.
Elias moved with a cold precision, his fingers flying across the holographic interface. He didn't just reverse the Naga's edits; he performed a meticulous, layer-by-layer unraveling of their illusion, restoring Ambassador Rylen's true karmic integrity. But as he did so, he activated the karmic "tripwire" he had embedded months ago. This was more than just a flag. It was a digital mirror. If the Naga dared to tamper with Rylen's case again, or any connected case, their own edits would reflect back onto their personal record within the Ledger, creating an accumulating karmic debt that would, eventually, expose them to the Bureau's default oversight protocols. It was a silent, insidious form of karmic boomerang.
He completed the reversal, the Ledger humming with the restored balance of Rylen's innocence. Then, he waited.
The immediate outcome was telling. The Naga's manipulation of Ambassador Rylen's karma caused a brief, but intense, diplomatic stir. The Sentinels launched a preliminary investigation, but without the fabricated Ledger evidence, it quickly fizzled into bureaucratic confusion. Rylen's name was cleared, though the lingering shadows of suspicion remained.
More importantly, Elias observed a significant shift in the broader Ledger activity. For the next two weeks, the Naga completely stopped manipulating cases. No more subtle edits, no more phantom entries. They had noticed. They had sensed the trap, the karmic backlash embedded in their own manipulations. The silence was deafening, a confirmation that the phantom was real, that they were observing Elias, and that they had chosen to retreat, for now.
Elias felt a grim satisfaction. He had confirmed the Naga's presence, forced them into hiding, and revealed a powerful new countermeasure. But the pause was just that—a pause. The game was far from over, and the Naga, unlike the others, was elusive and cunning, a master of unseen warfare.