The near-catastrophe with Juro's brother underscored the dangers of direct manipulation. Elias needed a new strategy, a way to uncover his shadowy counterpart in the Bureau without risking further self-exposure. The Naga spy, the phantom Ledger user, was still out there, subtly weaving their own distorted threads into the karmic tapestry. Elias's trap, the false trail he'd laid, remained untriggered. Until now.
A high-profile case hit the Bureau's main data feeds, jarring Elias from his analysis of the Artificers' Union's curious stockpiling. It was a loyalty audit of Lord Kaelen, a respected, albeit minor, noble known for his meticulous adherence to the Grand Council's decrees. The Ledger, inexplicably, had begun to flag him with a rapidly escalating karmic deficit, implying treasonous intent. Elias immediately recognized the signature. The subtle, elegant distortions, the whisper-thin threads of manipulated karma – it was the Naga's work. They were implicating a human noble in treason.
This was a bold, dangerous move. Such a high-stakes accusation would trigger a full Sentinel investigation, potentially destabilizing a noble house and causing widespread panic. The Naga was pushing the limits, using the Ledger's inherent biases against human cultivators to sow discord.
Elias acted swiftly. He pulled up Lord Kaelen's file, delving past the surface layer of manipulated data. He found the Naga's elegant edits, the subtle re-weighting of past interactions, the misdirection of communication flows that now painted Kaelen as a conspirator. He reversed the edits, carefully, precisely, restoring Kaelen's karmic ledger to its true, loyal state. But he didn't stop there.
He added a hidden trigger. A layer of code, deeply nested within the Ledger's self-correction protocols, linked directly to the noble's karmic signature. If Lord Kaelen were to be arrested for treason, if the Sentinel investigation reached a point of formal indictment despite Elias's reversal, then this hidden trigger would activate. It would not only revert the accusation, but it would also instantly flag the Naga's tampering to a specific, high-level diagnostic sub-routine, one known only to a select few in the Sutra Corps – a routine that Elias, thanks to his recent "invitation," now had a conceptual understanding of. It was his counter-trap, a digital snare designed to identify his elusive foe.
The plan was a gamble. If the Naga didn't attempt another edit, or if Kaelen wasn't arrested, the trigger might never activate. But Elias was betting on the Naga's boldness, and on the inherent sloppiness of unchecked power.
The immediate blowback was swift and unexpected. Lord Kaelen's noble house, sensing the shifting tides of political favor and the unspoken accusations hovering around their patriarch, wasted no time. Before the Sentinel investigation could even fully materialize, they bribed the Bureau to bury the case. Not with overt payments, but with an immense "donation" to the Bureau's obscure "Karmic Research and Development Fund," swiftly followed by the quiet reassignment of the initiating adjudicators and the official closure of Lord Kaelen's loyalty audit.
The noble house, in their desperation, had effectively cemented Elias's hidden trap within the Ledger. They were unaware of Elias's trap, oblivious to the dormant trigger he had embedded. They thought they had bought silence and safety. Instead, they had merely ensured that if the Naga touched the case again, or if any hint of the treason ever resurfaced, the phantom's identity would be revealed. Elias had turned their desperation into his advantage, a new layer of complexity to his ever-growing web