The King received them in his private study, the same room where Yuan had first stood accused of treason months earlier, and something about the symmetry of returning here now, evidence in hand rather than suspicion hanging over his own head, struck Yuan as almost unbearably fitting.
Lei laid out the case methodically, the same careful, unhurried precision that had once cracked the forged evidence against Yuan Wei now turned toward a considerably more devastating target. The timeline discrepancy. The seven witnesses confirming Kang could not have legitimately known the formation's failure point. Han's careful comparison of cultivation signatures, the precise, unmistakable match between Kang's own qi and the residual traces still lingering in Yuan's healing meridians. Lian's testimony, corroborating everything with the weight of a princess who had suffered directly at Kang's hand.
