The door closed behind me with a soft click, and the room fell into silence.
Not the calm kind. This silence felt heavy—like the air itself was pressing down, waiting for me to understand something I hadn’t quite grasped yet. I took a few steps forward before stopping, my hand still resting against the door.
"...That worked?"
The words slipped out under my breath, quiet and uncertain. Even as I said them, they didn’t feel right. I pushed away from the door and walked further in, my gaze drifting briefly toward the loose floorboard... then away.
Not yet. First, I needed to understand.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning forward with my elbows resting on my knees. Slowly, I lowered my head and let the scene replay in my mind.
Elena. Not just one version of her—but all of them at once. The anger in her voice. The sharp edge of jealousy. The confusion in her eyes. The way her breath hitched when I got too close. The way she couldn’t decide whether to look at me... or look away.
And then the numbers. They hadn’t just risen. They had surged. Faster than anything I’d seen before.
"It wasn’t just care..." I murmured, my brows tightening. "And it wasn’t just anger either."
If it had been that simple, my body would have reacted the same way it always did. But it didn’t. This time, it felt like something had clicked.
[NOTICE: DUAL-FEED STATE ACHIEVED]
"Does it mean instead of getting positive from one and negative from the other, it is better for me to get both from one person?"
I thought about the engine analogy again.
Before, I was trying to hook up two different batteries from two different rooms. But Elena just became a self-contained generator.
By making her feel protective "Care" and territorial "Jealousy" at the exact same moment, the friction within her own heart was feeding both of my bloodlines simultaneously.
"Then I just need to focus on one person at a time."
My eyes widened. The efficiency of it was staggering. I didn’t need to run all over the palace balancing Laila’s hate with Elena’s love. I just needed to make each of them feel a chaotic, inseparable mess of both.
"Wait," I whispered, the realization hitting a cold, hard wall in my mind.
Isn’t Elena my sister? Like, she is still blood-related to this body.
If the "Care" side of the scale keeps rising alongside her "Jealousy," what does that turn her into?
The thought sent a sudden chill down my spine, sharper than the draft from the window.
"She won’t turn into someone who is freakishly obsessed with me... right?" I muttered, rubbing my face with my palms. "Like a yandere? Or a tsundere? This isn’t some cheap webnovel."
But the look in her eyes—that fractured, desperate intensity—suggested the boundary was already blurring. If I kept pushing her buttons, making her feel that toxic cocktail of protective instinct and territorial possessiveness, I wasn’t just stabilizing myself. I was rewriting her.
"Well," I exhaled. "I’ll just take breaks. I won’t let her get too attached."
I could have used someone else’s emotions, but there is no one else in this cold, gold-plated family who cares about me genuinely. The servants fear me, my siblings evaluates me like a broken tool, and the King... the King probably already has the ink dry on my death warrant.
So even though it is effective—terrifyingly so—I can’t just turn my sister’s soul into a buffet.
Meanwhile, outside the window, the sky began its slow transition into purple, the sun was going down and the moon was rising.
As I lay back, the dimming light felt like a heavy blanket. My eyelids flickered, and I drifted into deep sleep.
But while my world went quiet, hers was screaming.
Across the palace, in a room filled with the scent of sandalwood and the cold gleam of trophies, Elena was losing a war.
She had already changed into her simple brown sleeping tunics, the rough fabric a sharp contrast to the silk-lined armor she wore by day. She had blown out the candles an hour ago, but the darkness was no sanctuary. It was a canvas.
She turned to her left, pressing her face into the cool pillow. "It’s not like you’re my girlfriend." The words echoed in the silence, vibrating with that mocking, intimate tone someone had used.
She growled and rolled to her right, throwing the covers off her legs. "Be sure of yourself before worrying about others."
She snapped back onto her back, staring up at the dark canopy of her bed. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw those dark eyes—sharp, calculating, and dangerously distant. She felt the ghost of his fingers on her chin and the brief, electric heat where his shoulder had brushed hers.
"Arrggg!" she let out a frustrated cry, "What is happening to me?"
She clutched her head, her fingers tangling in her loose hair. She was a master of the blade, a woman whose will was supposed to be as tempered as steel. She should have been thinking about the training drills for tomorrow.
Instead, her mind was a whirlpool, circling a single point of gravity.
"I am trying to sleep," she hissed into the empty room. "GET OUT OF MY MIND!"
She sat up abruptly, her chest heaving as if she had just finished a three-hour spar.
She looked at her hands in the moonlight. They were trembling.
"I... Don’t care about him."
Those words were quite the opposite of the feelings she was feeling.
She stood up, her bare feet hitting the cold floor. She didn’t head for the door. Instead, she walked toward her balcony, her eyes instinctively drifting toward the dark silhouette in the North—toward ’someone’s’ room.
"You’re making a mess of everything, Rio," she whispered, her voice trembling with a terrifying blend of resentment and a hunger for answers she couldn’t name.