The catastrophic scream of the ley lines was the last thing Elias heard before the violent tremor shook the very ground beneath the ruined lab. The Guild's resonance bomb had detonated on the Stoneborn border. It wasn't a localized explosion, but a fundamental tearing of the spiritual fabric. The border ley line shattered, unleashing uncontrolled surges of raw Prana, causing massive, devastating earthquakes in Stoneborn territory. Cities crumbled, mountains fractured, and the very ground groaned in agony.
The immediate aftermath was chaos. The Stoneborn, a proud and resilient people, felt the devastation not just in their physical land, but in their very being, their deep connection to the earth brutally severed. Their rage was a primal force, cold and unwavering.
The response from the Titanic Assembly, their ruling council, was swift and terrible. They mobilized 50,000 Stoneguard—elite warriors, their bodies forged from living rock and imbued with immense geomantic power. This was not a punitive strike against a specific Guild facility. This was an invasion. And their target was not the Alchemists' Guild, but Jadeheart itself. The Stoneborn, with their rigid sense of collective responsibility, believed all humans were complicit, that the entire Realm of Jadeheart was responsible for this unforgivable act of aggression.
Elias, emerging from the aftermath of the blast, Mei Lin still recovering, knew he had mere hours before the Stoneguard descended upon the city. He couldn't stop the invasion, but he could try to redirect its initial, most devastating impact. He had to create a scapegoat, another layer of deception to protect the innocent.
Working with frantic speed, his mind racing through the Observer's last whispered insights and the remnants of Juro's data, Elias accessed the Ledger. He crafted a meticulous, highly detailed forged entry, a digital phantom of a contract that appeared to prove beyond doubt that the Bloodkin had supplied the bomb's core components to the Guild, acting as rogue, extremist agents. He leveraged existing, minor Bloodkin dealings with obscure elemental suppliers, amplifying them into a damning chain of evidence.
He then ensured this "evidence" was discreetly, anonymously, but undeniably "discovered" by the Stoneborn's elite diviners, through channels he knew they monitored.
The forgery worked. The Stoneborn, already enraged, seized upon the "proof." Their initial, devastating raids, instead of falling upon the unprepared civilian districts of Jadeheart, were diverted to Bloodkin outposts and trade routes near the border. The screams of battle now echoed from the wilderness, not the city streets.
Elias had bought Jadeheart time, but at a terrible price. He had fueled another inter-species war, pushing the already strained relations between the Bloodkin and the Stoneborn to a breaking point. The cycle of violence spiraled wider, consuming more factions, all driven by the lies Elias was forced to weave to survive and fight.