The engineering of the Kakin guardian spirit beast system was, in retrospect, a remarkably clear-eyed piece of institutional design.
The ancestor who had set it up had understood the specific failure mode they were designing against: a future king, stupid or compromised, who might try to actively direct the protective spirit beast. A king who could see their own spirit beast might give it orders. Orders from an incompetent king, or from a king under duress, would be worse than no direction at all. The solution was elegant: the beast was invisible to its own host. The host could not see it, could not consciously interact with it, could not interfere with its autonomous judgment. It operated on its own read of what protected the king's interests.
The second design choice followed from the first: the beast fed on the host's aura passively. It didn't draw down a reserve. It lived on the naturally radiating aura of the king's body, the slow ambient leak that every living person produced regardless of Nen training. As long as the king was alive and their aura was flowing, the beast was present and functional.
Which meant that if the aura stopped flowing, the beast entered dormancy.
"I know," the king said, quietly, to the air near his left shoulder.
The spirit beast had been watching him with ten sets of eyes since the garden incident, patient and increasingly suspicious in the way of a guard dog who has noticed that the person it's guarding smells slightly wrong but hasn't identified the specific wrongness yet.
"Don't be anxious," the king said. "Not yet."
He closed his eyes, and through the Star Mark's forced-open pathways, Liam drew the fat king's naturally radiating aura inward, pulling it back through the body until the exterior surface was as quiet as a held breath.
Zetsu. In a body that had never been trained to do this, accomplished via possession.
The spirit beast faded. Not gone permanently. Just dormant, pushed back to wherever spirit beasts resided when their food source disappeared temporarily. The ten sets of eyes closed one by one until only the garden remained, and the fountains, and two servants who had been sent to handle the afternoon's paperwork and were pretending very hard that the last twenty minutes had been routine.
Through Rihan's eyes and Vincent's eyes, captured in the palace guards' grip, Liam confirmed the dormancy and released the king's Zetsu, letting the aura flow again.
Dormant. For now.
He noted the limitation: any time Liam needed privacy from the beast's scrutiny, he could suppress the king's aura. A useful window.
Rihan and Vincent were kneeling on the garden path with their hands secured, which was the appropriate response from palace guards who had just watched two men put a blade on a prince and a gun on a king. They were face-down at the instructions of the senior guard, and they were not speaking.
Liam left commands in both of them and withdrew the possession.
The two men came back to themselves. They were on the garden path. The first prince was in a pool of blood three meters away. The palace guards were holding them down. They looked at each other across the gap.
They tried to speak. Nothing came.
They tried to write. Their hands were secured.
Rihan's tongue found the back molar on the left side. He looked at Vincent once more, and Vincent gave him the very small nod of two people who had served the same master for the same number of years and understood each other's math without needing to explain it.
Neither of them was going to be anyone's testimony.
The poison worked quickly. The guards scrambled. The senior guard would spend the next week explaining to a succession of investigators how he had failed to check for concealed capsules on two men he'd arrested for assassinating a prince.
"King" did not look in their direction.
"This is suspicious," the king said, aloud, for the benefit of the servants and the remaining guards. "Two assassins who shout the Fourth Prince's name and then immediately take poison. It's all very convenient." He lowered his head. "I don't believe my son would do this. I believe he is innocent. That is exactly why I need a thorough investigation. If he is the culprit, an investigation will prove it. If he is innocent, he has nothing to fear from coming home."
The senior guard was writing this down.
The palace maids confirmed, when asked, that they had heard the word "fourth prince" during the incident. Both of them. Clearly.
The first prince was taken to the palace medical wing. He was alive. The neck wound was manageable. The head wound was less severe than the volume of blood suggested, as scalp wounds tended to be. He would recover, probably, if the wound didn't introduce an infection that the palace physicians failed to catch.
Whether he remembered much of what had happened before his eyes cleared was a separate question.
In a forest in Krafua, Tserriednich received a tablet from Theta and looked at the surveillance screen.
The clock in the reflection of the glass was running a loop. Same seven seconds, cycling. He had noticed the reflection because he was the kind of person who noticed details, which was one of the reasons he was still alive.
"Pariston," he said.
"I've been found out," Pariston said, with the tone of someone who had expected to be found out eventually and had made his peace with the timeline. "May I have the tablet?"
The fourth prince handed it over with the expression of someone exercising considerable restraint. Pariston clicked through several screens and handed it back.
The queen ant was lying in the delivery room, motionless except for breathing. Her abdomen had expanded beyond any normal parameter. It was almost translucent now: stretched thin over the contents, and through the translucency, visible to anyone looking closely, was the shape of something curled and formed and nearly ready.
Pariston clasped his hands behind his back with the cheerful composure of a man who had been planning this longer than anyone in the room had been paying attention.
"The world is more interesting when the ant king exists," he said. "Don't you think so?"
"The world," Tserriednich said, "where you are no longer in it is more interesting to me."
Theta pressed her headset. Her expression shifted in the way it shifted when the news was relevant to operational planning rather than background noise. She came to the fourth prince and lowered her voice.
He took the tablet, navigated to the Hui Guo Rou Broadcasting Corporation's news feed, and read.
The broadcast anchor was composed and professional. The headline was large.
In summary: an incident at the royal palace today had resulted in injuries to the First Prince and the deaths of two alleged conspirators. The conspirators had been heard invoking the Fourth Prince's name. An investigation had been opened. The Fourth Prince, currently out of contact for multiple days, was formally summoned to return to the capital before August 26th to cooperate. Failure to comply within five days would constitute grounds for a treason charge.
Tserriednich looked at the date. He looked at Pariston.
Pariston's smile had not changed in any way that could be pinned down.
The fourth prince looked at the three oversized eggs in front of him, each one containing something that would not, according to his original arrangement, have been allowed to reach this stage. He looked at the queen ant's abdomen, visible through her surveillance feed, and the shape inside it that had not been there a month ago.
"Five days," he said.
He put the tablet down.
Good context secured. Now let me write the chapter.