The king studied Shin for a long moment—long enough that the silence had weight—and then something in his expression settled.
"I believe you," he said simply.
He turned to Alice.
She met his eyes and spoke without hesitation.
"He's the real thing, Father. I've never said that about anyone. I'm saying it now." A beat. "Our empire needs him. I think he's the one Mother was talking about—the one she foresaw."
The king went still.
"Your mother said that," he murmured. "Word for word—she told me that one day, someone would come. I always assumed she meant the Spirit King returning." He exhaled slowly. "Apparently I was wrong about that."
He turned to the minister behind him and gave a single nod.
"Take over the ceremony. We have something to handle."
The minister bowed and withdrew. The soldiers who had been watching Shin with their hands on their weapons lowered them and stepped back—not quite relaxed, but no longer ready to act on instinct.
Alice fell into step beside her father, and her voice dropped.
"He's genuinely stronger than anything in this empire. Stronger than anything on this continent, probably. He also brought back every person he killed in our guild without leaving a trace that it had ever happened." She paused. "I fought him at full strength, Father. It wasn't close."
The king absorbed that in silence. He had always known what Alice was worth in a fight. If she was saying it wasn't close, then he wasn't going to argue with the arithmetic.
"And the Four Heavenly Kings?" he asked.
Shin answered before Alice could.
"That was a misunderstanding. I thought they were there to take Lucy by force. I moved before I had the full picture." He kept his tone straightforward. "I'll revive them. That's already decided."
The king glanced at him sideways.
"You killed four of the most powerful mages in this empire by accident."
"More or less."
The king said nothing for a moment.
"Walk with me."
——————————————————
The route he took was not the one that led to the throne room or the audience halls. It wound through a quieter part of the palace—narrower corridors, older stone, the kind of passage that didn't appear on any official map. At the end of a small side path, the king pressed his hand against what looked like solid wall.
A panel shifted inward.
Shin noticed Lucy's expression change the moment the door opened. Not dramatically—just a small tightening around her eyes, the kind that happens when something real is about to become real.
He didn't say anything. He just noted it.
The room beyond was nothing like the rest of the palace. Small, carefully tended, every surface clean. Flowers everywhere—more varieties than Shin could identify, arranged without any particular system but somehow not chaotic. Like someone had placed them the way they'd naturally grow.
At the center, on a low stone bier wrapped in pale cloth, lay a woman.
The king stopped just inside the doorway.
"She's been like this for eleven years," he said. "I never moved her. Never changed anything in here." He said it without self-pity, just as a fact. "She made me promise, before the end."
Shin stepped closer and looked.
The resemblance to both sisters was unmistakable—Lucy more than Alice, but present in both. She looked younger than he'd expected. Preserved, somehow, beyond what a normal body would allow.
"I need to ask you something before I begin," Shin said. "You mentioned she was a flower spirit. But I want to hear the full truth—Lucy told me the spirits lost their power all at once. That kind of collapse doesn't happen without a cause."
He looked at the king directly.
"If there's something I don't know going in, I might miss something that matters. So if there's more to this story, now is the time."
The king didn't look defensive. He looked tired.
"You're right," he said. "There's more to it."
He glanced at Shin, then at both his daughters standing behind him.
"She wasn't just a flower spirit." A pause. "She was the Spirit King's daughter."
The room went quiet.
Shin turned to look at Lucy.
Lucy looked back at him with the expression of someone who had known this their entire life but had never fully understood what it meant until just now.
"Her mother..." Shin said slowly, "was the Spirit King's daughter?"
"Yes," the king said.
Shin stood with that for a moment.
'Which means Lucy and Alice are the Spirit King's granddaughters. Which means the spirit power Alice released in the fight—that wasn't just a legacy technique. That was inherited directly from royalty of the spirit bloodline.'
He exhaled.
"Then I need to understand the full picture," he said. "The Spirit King. The spirits. What actually happened to them—not the public version. What do you actually know?"
The king looked at him.
Then at his daughters.
Then he shook his head once—not in refusal, but in the way people do when they've been keeping something contained for a long time and are finally deciding to open the container.
"You're family now, as far as this palace is concerned. All of you." He said it matter-of-factly, without ceremony. "So I'll tell you everything."
He pulled up a chair from the corner of the room and sat down in it like a man who had been standing for too long.
"But first—what's your honest assessment? Can you bring her back?"
Shin looked at the woman on the bier. He ran his senses over her the way he'd learned to—checking for the threads that Rinne Rebirth needed, the faint residue of what had been.
"Yes," he said. "Ten out of ten. No conditions."
The king closed his eyes for just a moment.
"Then ask me whatever you need to know."
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