Dumuh Khan gripped my hand and asked if there was any way to reclaim what he had lost. I knew exactly what he meant. I shared with him a plan that had long brewed in my mind, and we spent most of the night discussing it in detail. In the end, he agreed to support me completely.
The ease with which everything unfolded surpassed my expectations. Initially, I had abandoned the idea of overthrowing the king; my sole aim was to enter the source to find Jocelyn and the others.
Yet, it felt as though some invisible force was steering everything forward, and events were aligning just as the prophecy. During this period, I had been investigating how the mermaids discovered the drifting bottles left by Jocelyn and Selina. With my current status, entering the source via the palace was out of the qu
