Cho Igyeom left,

and a heavy silence settled over the office.

Seo Woojin sat with his arms folded, deep in thought.

Across from him, Woon Seorin toyed with a teacup that had long gone cold.

For a long while, neither of them spoke.

"Three days..."

Seo Woojin broke the silence.

"Can you come up with something in three days?"

Woon Seorin gave a bitter smile and shook her head.

"It'll be hard. The Alliance Lord can't very well skip his own inauguration."

That was the problem.

If the Murim Alliance had sent an embassy for anything else, he could have made an excuse and stayed out of sight.

But the inauguration was the one event the Alliance Lord could never miss.

"They're coming to get a look at me, aren't they?"

Woon Seorin let out a faint sigh.

She'd always known this day would come. Just not this soon.

Hadn't she clamped down on every scrap of news leaving Hangzhou for exactly this reason?

And the inauguration date had only just been announced.

Yet the Murim Alliance's embassy was already three days out.

"It seems they've been watching us all along."

"Because they know I'm a fake?"

"It's unclear."

"Unclear?"

Woon Seorin closed her eyes, thinking.

"Once I realized Young Master Seo was a fake, I never stopped looking for the real Young Lord. I tried to reconnect with our spies inside their Alliance, and I sent Cheongeum Envoys all over Hubei. Nothing turned up."

"And what does that tell you?"

She opened her eyes.

Her answer was firm.

"That the Murim Alliance genuinely has no interest in the Dark Alliance."

Seo Woojin tilted his head.

"But you just said they'd been watching us..."

"That's why I said it's unclear. On the whole, they look down their noses at the dark path. And yet someone, out of sight, has been watching us all the same."

Seo Woojin groaned under his breath, then shook his head.

"Either way, that's not what matters right now. What matters is that they'll see my face and know I'm a fake. And if that comes…