Dia Lan's Family Affairs
To be fair, Dia Lan's career could be called highly successful. She handled everything with meticulous precision, rewarded and punished fairly, dealt with internal affairs decisively, and spoke appropriately abroad. She had somehow made the White Candle Autonomous State, a civilization not even the size of a third-rate power, carry itself like a great nation on the interstellar stage.
But when it came to her personal life, it would be charitable to say Dia Lan had achieved nothing. At the very least, it was utterly barren.
In seventeen years of politics, aside from a few rumors involving Grand Commander Lioz Dominate, who had promoted and valued her, she had practically never been linked to anyone intimately. No matter how outstanding the young noble, academic heir, oligarch's son, or Colonial Governor who approached Dia Lan might be, she always gave the same response: "Thank you, can't do it, goodbye."
Besides her nonexistent love life, Dia Lan's social relationships were likewise limited to strictly businesslike interactions. Perhaps due to the particular detachment of a Long-lived Species, she almost never took the initiative to socialize with anyone.
Naturally, some people spread rumors that Dia Lan was actually Lioz's secret girlfriend. The reason was that they had graduated from the same university, from the same department and class, and had even been undergraduate students in the same year. But President Lioz had entered society early and begun building up industries, while Dia Lan had gone abroad for further study at an advanced institution of the Crystal Tower.
It was hard not to associate that experience with the story of "a man working to support his girlfriend through graduate school." Such things were far too common in life, so people instinctively cast Lioz as the provider and even hoped this story