Two days passed in the Sea Empire palace, and life gradually settled into a quiet yet tense rhythm.
Yue Yue had been summoned by the Empress several times during these days.
The Empress always smiled gently, spoke calmly, and treated Yue with a strange mix of curiosity and approval, yet Yue could feel that nothing in this palace was ever truly simple.
Alongside those meetings, she had also crossed paths with Liran many times.
That woman appeared graceful and harmless on the surface, always approaching Yue Yue with soft words and a friendly demeanor, but Yue was not blind.
She could clearly sense the probing beneath those smiles, the deliberate attempts to get closer, to test her reactions, to find an opening.
However, none of it truly affected her. Yue neither confronted nor entertained her. She simply responded when necessary and ignored everything else.
Compared to the storm quietly building in her life, such shallow tactics were not worth her attention.
