Chương 283: Chapter : 283

Iris nodded and resumed her pacing. Laxmi watched her with concern from across the room. The princess had barely eaten all day, and dark circles were forming under her violet eyes. Laxmi quietly slipped out and returned with a sandwich, which she placed on the windowsill beside Iris without comment. Iris glanced at the sandwich, and a small, grateful smile touched her lips. She picked it up and took a bite while continuing to pace. It was the first food she had accepted since breakfast.

Risa had set up a small medical station in the corner, analyzing the dried flower petals that she had found in Carrion's secret chamber. She worked quietly and carefully, her pink hair bent over her equipment as delicate instruments hummed and clicked. She occasionally made small sounds of surprise as her equipment revealed the petals' unusual properties. The cellular structure was unlike anything she had seen before, resilient and adaptive in ways that defied conventional botanical science.

"The cellular regeneration rate is extraordinary," Risa murmured, adjusting a dial.

"These petals are still biologically active after years of storage. Whatever preservation method Carrion used, it's beyond anything I've ever studied." She looked up from her equipment and caught Zinia watching her.

"The compounds in these petals, they're attacking and destroying simulated cancer cells in my test samples. It's working. Even after all these years, the cure is still active." Zinia's eyes widened.

"So Carrion really did it? He really created a synthetic cure?"

"The petals are proof," Risa said softly.

"The natural Devil Flour plant went extinct from the market, but Carrion found a way to reproduce its healing properties synthetically. He succeeded. He actually succeeded." Sayma had her nose buried in the encrypted journal, cross-referencing botanical terms with historical trade records. Every few minutes she would mutter something under her breath and flip to a different page, her sharp eyes scanning the faded ink for connections. Laxmi yawned and stretched, nearly knocking over a stack of documents.

She had been reading through Benjamin Group shipping manifests for hours, and the numbers were starting to blur together. She rubbed her eyes and reached for her cup of tea, only to find it had gone cold hours ago. Naomi noticed Laxmi's grimace at the cold tea and quietly heated it with a small flame spell from her fingertip. Laxmi blinked in surprise, then smiled gratefully. Even in the middle of a crisis, Naomi looked after people. It was just her nature. It was nearly dusk when Sayma's pen stopped moving.

The sudden silence was more dramatic than any sound could have been. She stared at the page in front of her, her eyes widening slowly behind her glasses.

"I found it," she said softly. Then, louder, her voice rising: "I found it! Devil Flour! I know what it is!" Laxmi jerked awake so fast she nearly toppled off her chair, a piece of agricultural report stuck to her cheek. Ken's mystery novel slid off his face and landed on the floor. Even Naomi looked up from her work with visible interest. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"What is it?" Iris demanded, crossing the room in three long strides.

"What did you find?" Sayma pushed her chair back and stood, holding up a yellowed page from a historical botanical encyclopedia. Her hands trembled slightly, but her voice was steady.

"Devil Flour is not a weapon. It's not a dark magic catalyst. It's not even remotely what the name suggests."

"Then what is it?" Laxmi asked, peeling the paper off her cheek. Sayma took a deep breath.

"It's a medicinal herb. A completely normal, entirely natural, incredibly rare medicinal herb that was historically used as a highly effective treatment for aggressive magical cancers." The library went silent. Several people blinked. Ken sat up on the couch, his brow furrowed.

"Wait. Devil Flour is... medicine? That sounds like the worst marketing in history."

"Who names a miracle drug after the Devil?" he added, scratching his head.

"The name comes from the Old Bel dialect," Zinia explained, pulling up her own notes.

"Devil referred to anything that grew in harsh, nearly impossible conditions. The plant only grew in volcanic soil at extreme altitudes."

"Early settlers called it the Devil's flower because it thrived where nothing else could survive. Flour is a corruption of the Old Bel word for bloom. So Devil Flour literally means the flower that blooms in hellish conditions." Risa gasped from her corner.

"A cure for magical cancer? A natural treatment? That would change everything. Millions of people suffer from magical cancers across the continent. Entire hospitals are dedicated to treating them."

"It did change everything," Sayma said, her voice dropping.

"For about thirty years, it was the most sought-after medicine on the continent. Patients given weeks to live were walking out of hospitals fully recovered."

"And then?" Iris prompted.

"And then it went extinct from the public market," Sayma said grimly. She held up a corporate acquisition record stamped with the Benjamin Group seal.

"Or more accurately, it was deliberately driven to extinction."

Sayma spread the acquisition records across the table like a prosecutor presenting evidence. Each document told a piece of the story, and together they painted a picture so monstrous that it took everyone's breath away.

"The Benjamin Group systematically purchased every single remaining supply of Devil Flour across the entire continent," Sayma explained, pointing to a hand-drawn map showing the acquisition pattern.

"Every farm. Every greenhouse. Every wild harvest territory."

"They didn't just buy the existing stock," Zinia added, her voice unusually sharp.

"They bought the seeds, the cultivation rights, and the growing territories. They made it biologically impossible for anyone else to produce the medicine."

"The acquisitions happened over twelve years," Sayma continued, flipping through the records.

"Small purchases at first, scattered across different regions to avoid attention. Then larger ones. Then aggressive corporate takeovers of the remaining independent growers."

"Anyone who refused to sell was driven out of business through predatory pricing and regulatory manipulation. Within fifteen years, the Benjamin Group controlled one hundred percent of the world's Devil Flour supply. A complete, watertight monopoly." Naomi looked up from her translation work, her green eyes narrowing.

"That explains the shipping manifests I decoded. The DF-Extract entries weren't importing Devil Flour. They were the last remaining stockpiles being moved to secure Benjamin Group vaults."

"Exactly," Sayma confirmed.

"And once they had total control of the supply, they stopped producing the cure entirely. They announced that the plant had gone naturally extinct due to overharvesting, which was technically true but completely misleading."

"The plant went extinct because they made it extinct," Laxmi said, her voice hard.

"They killed it deliberately. They murdered a species to protect their profits."

"And they covered it up beautifully," Naomi added, her voice bitter.

"The official story is that overharvesting by desperate patients destroyed the wild populations. It's half true, which makes it the most dangerous kind of lie." The public had believed the narrative because the alternative, that someone would deliberately suppress a cure for cancer, was too monstrous to contemplate. And that was the Benjamin Group's greatest protection. The sheer audacity of their crime made it unbelievable.