The air in the room seemed to shift as soon as the door closed behind Dom Orsini. The ceremonial formality gave way to a different tension—more intimate, laden with secrets and dangerous possibilities. The afternoon light, now golden and oblique, streamed through the high windows, illuminating dust particles dancing in the heavy air.

  Carlos waited a few seconds, his sharpened hearing trying to catch any sound from the corridor. Then, he looked at Paula.

  "Can you check for any prying ears nearby?"

  Paula was surprised for a moment, then a smile of intelligent complicity touched her lips.

  "Did you notice that the contact lenses with the Vision Gem, which you suggested in a letter, are ready?"

  "No," Carlos replied, a half-smile on his lips. "I noticed you couldn't take your eyes off the box Specter is carrying. And from what little I know of your... appetite for novelties, I deduced you would have already developed the lenses I mentioned months ago."

  Paula let out a genuine laugh, a surprisingly light sound that illuminated her tired face.

  "And that would be the reason for kicking everyone out? To show me a divine artifact'?"

  Specter, without a sound, approached and placed the simple wooden box on the table. With careful gestures, he opened it. Inside, resting on dark velvet, was a dagger. The blade was a dark purple, almost black, that seemed to suck the light around it, pulsing with a nearly imperceptible energy.

  Paula stood up and approached, her fingers hesitating in the air before touching the edge of the box. She didn't need special lenses to feel it—the air around the object vibrated with a strange frequency, familiar yet alien at the same time.

  "It's... the same energy signature," she whispered, more to herself, her dark blue eyes focused on the gem. "The same pattern of magical interference that artifacts from your world emanate. But more intense. More... pure."

  "Exactly," confirmed Carlos, watching her. "We discussed it and believe this gem is, in some way, the key to the crossing of objects from my world to this one. It has the same aura, but concentrated, as if it were the source. We wanted to know if you, with your archives and research, know anything about it. Any historical record, any myth..."

  Paula examined the dagger without touching it, her mind visibly speeding through mental catalogs of knowledge, forbidden treatises, explorers' accounts.

  "No... I have no records of anything like this." She shook her head, frustrated. "I know the same as you, perhaps less. Gems of unusual color have always existed, but this vibration... is unique. How did you get it?"

  Carlos sighed, a sound of frustration and worry. He closed the box with a soft click, as if wanting to contain the strange energy emanating from it.

  "An immigrant brought it. A young man, too thin, covered in new scars over old ones. He could barely speak. He said only that he was a miner from the Gemas Gerais." Carlos paused, his face serious. "We tried to question him, but... he closed up. His look... was of someone who has seen things the mind refuses to remember." He looked up at Paula. "I didn't insist. Humanity before curiosity. It's not the priority at the moment."

  He let the sentence hang. The silence that followed was filled with the unspoken meaning.

  "The priority..." Paula completed softly, moving away from the table and looking out the window again, towards her city, "...is our relationship with the Church."

  She felt a flush of shame and gratitude mixed rising to her face.

  "I... am sorry for that, Carlos. For all this theater. And thank you. For not mentioning the knowledge you've already shared with me. It was... loyal. More than I deserve, considering the role I need to play."

  Carlos smiled, a wide and genuine smile this time, which transformed his face and seemed to relieve some of the tension in the room.

  "Loyalty is a two-way street, Paula." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "And speaking of sharing knowledge... I have one more. A gift. I want you to spread it to the world. With your name, your credit, your credibility, it will be accepted and implemented quickly."

  He raised a finger, his gaze becoming serious.

  "But this time, you will say it was a joint discovery with us. That the Republic of Brazil collaborated. Our name needs to be associated with something good, not just steel and weapons."

  Paula's curiosity was instantly hooked, dispelling any shadow of guilt. Her eyes shone with the famous spark of scientific interest.

  "And what discovery would that be? Something medical? A new application of the healing gem?"

  "This," said Carlos, turning in his chair with a theatrical gesture, "will be explained by the Minister of Agriculture, Tassi."

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  Tassi, who had been watching everything in absorbing silence, jumped in her chair as if stung.

  "Me? Explain? Here? Now? But... President, wouldn't it be our greatest trump card? Our food security?"

  "Precisely because it is our greatest civilian trump card," replied Carlos, his tone gentle but firm, pedagogical, "that it cannot stay only with us. And because it is so fundamentally good, that the world needs to know. Hunger is a greater enemy than any army, Tassi. And you have found a weapon against it."

  Tassi looked at him, then at Paula, who was watching her with an almost palpable intellectual hunger, her hands already moving as if holding an imaginary quill. She took a deep breath, feeling the weight of responsibility, but also the impulse of the greater purpose Carlos had just given her discovery.

  And she began to speak.

  What followed was a passionate, vivid explanation that transformed the meeting room into an experimental field. Tassi spoke with her hands, drawing shapes in the air. She spoke of agroforestry—not as an abstract concept, but as a symphony of roots, leaves, and flowers. She explained symbiosis, natural succession, the role of each layer. And then, the heart of the discovery: the use of the Grass Gem not as a crutch to sustain artificial plants, but as a catalyst.

  "Magic is not the soil, the water, or the sun," she explained, her eyes shining with conviction. "It is the hand that plants the seed at the right time, in the right place. It helps set up the system, but then... the system lives on its own. Because it respects nature's rules, it just accelerates its rhythm."

  Paula listened, absorbing, interrupting only to ask precise and incisive questions. "And pollination?" "How do you deal with pests without continuous magic?" "What's the success rate of second-generation seeds?" Within minutes, she had a notepad covered in diagrams, formulas, and observations, her handwriting a frantic mix of scientific Latin and colloquial Portuguese. The smell of fresh ink mixed with the incense.

  When Tassi finished, breathless but radiant, the light in the room was already reddish, announcing twilight. Paula lowered the quill, looking at the filled pages not as a treatise, but as a revelation.

  "This is... magnificent," she whispered, reverently. "A philosophy. It's not just agricultural technique, it's a way of thinking about magic. As a partner of nature, not a dominator." She looked up at Carlos, genuine admiration in her gaze. "But this brings me back to a doubt. Why did you accept the deal with Orsini so easily? You don't strike me as the kind of man who hands over your most strategic secret—the steel—without fighting to the last resource."

  Carlos leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his fingers interlaced. His smile now was strategic, the smile of a general before a battle map, illuminated by the amber light of sunset.

  "Because the deal is a fiction, Paula. A smoke screen." His voice was low, clear. "Orsini thinks he gained time for Alba to give a verdict. I gained time to act."

  He paused, letting the words echo.

  "Simple. We just need to take White Sand before the Church or Portugal can cut off our trade. With our own port, our own access to the sea... who needs intermediaries? We will sail our own ships, sell our own steel. Directly."

  The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the distant toll of a bell for evening prayer. Paula was dumbfounded, her scientist's mind processing the brutal audacity, the perverse simplicity of the plan. Tassi and Specter exchanged a look of pure shock.

  "You... intend to launch a large-scale military attack? Against the second most important city in the captaincy?" asked Paula, finally finding her voice, which sounded hoarse.

  "I intend to guarantee the survival and sovereignty of the Republic," corrected Carlos, his voice as impassive as the blade of the purple dagger. "By any means necessary. White Sand is the key. Without it, we are a caged animal, depending on the goodwill of our jailers to feed us. With it... we are a nation."

  The silence in the room was so thick one could hear the distant crackle of torches in the corridors. The twilight light tinted everything a blood-red.

  Carlos observed Paula, who was paralyzed, processing the monstrously audacious and logical thing she had heard. He leaned forward even more, his voice dropping to an almost confessional tone, but with an edge of steel.

  "I ask you, not as president to Popess, but as Carlos to Paula... Are you loyal to this Church... or are you loyal to God? To this machine of power, money, and control... or to the divine act of creation, of discovery, of healing that you practice every day in your laboratory?"

  "Paula," he said, her name sounding like both a question and a statement at the same time. "You are a person of science. Of logic. So let me be absolutely clear, because I think you deserve that, after everything."

  He paused, his eyes fixed on hers, which were now two wells of conflict on her pale face.

  "You are not just choosing between two political allies. You are choosing between two visions of the future." He gestured softly. "One: the Church maintains its monopoly, we hand over our secrets, and we become a controlled workshop, an exotic curiosity that will be sucked to the marrow and then discarded when no longer useful. Our slow death, in exchange for your temporary survival inside a golden cage."

  He then pointed towards the window, in the direction where his people were.

  "Two: we prosper. We create. We discover. And we share—as you saw today—what is good, not just what is profitable. We create a world where the science you love so much doesn't need to hide behind dogmas, but can walk hand in hand with true faith, not the institutional one."

  He let the question hang, heavy, in the air between them. Paula's eyes were wide open, the internal struggle visible on her face.

  "Because in the end," continued Carlos, his voice almost a whisper now, "you are not choosing between right and wrong. You are choosing between our life... and our death. And your life, Paula. The life of your mind, your work. Do you think men like Orsini, like Henrique, will let you play with your microscopes and gems when they have what they want? You will be the first to be silenced, because your mind is the most dangerous weapon they do not control."

  He leaned back, the sound of the chair creaking abrupt in the silence.

  "The warning is not a threat. It's a diagnosis. I see the cancer growing within your own institution. And I'm telling you: you can try to cut it out from the inside, and be devoured in the process... or you can help build something new from the outside, where the disease hasn't yet reached."

  Paula couldn't speak. Her hand trembled slightly where it rested on the agroforestry notes—the symbol of the "good" that Carlos promised. His words echoed her worst fears, her deepest suspicions about the direction Alba was taking.

  "I..." she began, but her voice failed.

  "You don't need to give me an answer, just think about it. We have time, after all."