Then the answer was obvious.
The solution lay in the riddle itself.
It was meant in the literal sense.
Could the Gold Princess be fake?
But that was impossible, wasn't it? That breathtaking beauty was indeed hard to ignore. But then again, she felt as though she had gradually gotten used to the other girl's beauty by now... That was right, wasn't it?
"..." The Gold Princess seemed not to have expected Irena to see through things to this extent.
"Impossible! Even if one's appearance can be disguised, beauty like this itself—?!"
Reines found it impossible to believe.
"—So it's about to end. Like Cinderella's magic, it ends when midnight strikes, right?" Irena said. "I don't know what this illusion is all about, if it can even replicate the essence, but it's magic either way. More or less the same thing."
Reines knew that, in Irena's mind, the magic of the Mage World was basically equivalent to the stage magic understood by ordinary people.
The essence of magic was "deception."
Reines suddenly felt that there really was nothing wrong with that.
The most crucial element of magic was "mystery."
From a broader perspective, mystery meant that the fewer people who knew about it, the better.
Just like when those mundane "magicians" performed: the fewer people who knew the principles behind the trick, the more miraculous the "magic" seemed.
—No, understood in that sense, they could even be said to be exactly the same.
"No wonder Brother insisted on keeping her by his side..."
Otherwise, it would be far too easy for something to go wrong.
—Whether for Irena herself or for the magi around her.
What a miscalculation.
On a whim, she had brought this little demon to this place and caused such a huge mess.
No, that wasn't right.