Elias was reviewing a backlog of minor appeals when the communal screen in the Bureau's main hall flickered to life, interrupting the usual stream of market reports and Guild announcements. A news broadcast, marked "Urgent Sentinel Bulletin," dominated the display.
A hush fell over the vast chamber. On screen, flanked by two grim-faced Celestial Sentinels in their gleaming ceremonial armor, was a familiar face. It was the Bloodkin merchant from Chapter 5, Lord Valerius. He looked gaunt, his usually impeccable robes rumpled, but his eyes still held that unnervingly calm intensity. The Sentinels' announcement was terse: "Known Bloodkin operative apprehended attempting infiltration of critical ley line nexus. Prisoner to face public trial for espionage and subversion."
A surge of shock, then a cold calculation, coursed through Elias. He had leaked a false karmic report, making Valerius appear as a potential asset, ensuring he was quietly monitored, not publicly exposed. The Sentinels, clearly, had discovered his true nature. But there was something more. Valerius was alive. Elias had assumed he'd simply vanish into a black site, or worse. His reappearance as a public prisoner was a colossal surprise.
Elias immediately pulled up Valerius's updated karmic ledger. What he saw made his blood run cold. The Bloodkin's karmic thread, though now tightly bound and heavily weighted with accusations of treason, showed signs of deep, extensive tampering. There were remnants of a prior, near-complete erasure, followed by a crude, almost violent re-insertion of his identity into the Ledger's flow. Someone had indeed tried to erase him, just like the Naga informant. But in Valerius's case, they had failed. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, they had been interrupted.
This meant the mysterious Ledger manipulator, the one who left him the note, wasn't omnipotent. They had limits. Or perhaps they had a rival.
A public trial for a Bloodkin spy was unprecedented. It would be a spectacle, a rallying cry for human unity against the perceived demonic threat. And it would draw immense scrutiny onto the Bureau, onto the very records of Valerius's past dealings. Elias saw his chance.
He discreetly composed a message, encrypted and routed through a complex series of dead drops in the Bureau's internal communication network, designed to appear as an accidental misfile. The recipient: Captain Aris, a rising star in the Sentinel Corps, known for her rigid adherence to protocol and her distrust of any process that smacked of secrecy. She also had a reputation for leaking information if she believed it served a greater, more public justice.
The message contained a single, tantalizing detail: "Urgent advisory regarding Valerius. Review source code for initial 'contraband' flagging. Suspect intentional misdirection to prevent true nature disclosure. Refer to 'Crimson Veil Asset Profile, Section 7, Sub-protocol Gamma-9' for full scope of identity."
Elias knew that "Crimson Veil Asset Profile, Section 7, Sub-protocol Gamma-9" was a fabrication. But Aris, in her zeal for absolute transparency, would see the implied cover-up. She would dig. And in doing so, she would unearth enough legitimate, damning information about Valerius's true identity as a spy that the public trial would become unavoidable.
The outcome was swift and predictable. Within hours, the news channels were ablaze. The "simple" trade sanction case exploded into a full-blown espionage scandal. The Sentinel Corps, caught off guard by the public revelations, was forced to put Valerius on full public display. The Bureau, in turn, found itself under intense pressure. To demonstrate its own transparency and commitment to justice, the Grand Council immediately ordered a comprehensive audit of all recent Bloodkin-related cases.
Elias watched the flurry of activity around him, the frantic scramble of adjudicators and analysts poring over old files, reviewing every Bloodkin interaction, every trade deal, every karmic assessment. The pressure was immense, the workload crippling. But it was exactly what Elias needed.
The audit, focused entirely on potential Bloodkin infiltration and the integrity of related Ledger entries, served as a perfect smokescreen. It would effectively distract from Elias's own exploits, burying his subtle manipulations under a mountain of urgent, high-stakes investigations. No one would be looking for a quiet analyst subtly re-weighting karmic values when the entire human-Bloodkin conflict was about to be laid bare in a public courtroom. Elias had weaponized transparency, using it to create the very obfuscation he needed.