"Did you do this?"
Geya turned straight to Bruto.
With his "cause" out in the open, Bruto had little left to hide.
He felt around in his belt pouch and took out a notebook.
"But I still have my manuscript. Clearly, I wasn't the one who leaked it."
"You're just going to show it to me openly?"
"We're in the same boat." Bruto knew she had a manuscript too.
"But not on the same river." With little room in her seat, Geya could only move her shoulders farther away from him.
She had copied the Journal's contents solely to study Tang Qi's writing style.
At most, there had also been a little yearning for a life of adventure.
But she had no desire to get tangled up in some "great cause" that sounded destined to capsize—
"Don't you think our academy's system needs reform? Don't you think bards should weave truths rather than lies?"
Bruto asked in earnest,
"Aren't you sick of writing those rotten verses flattering the nobility?
"This piece you're working on, Love and Hate, supposedly examines the lives of ordinary people and the strictures of family in today's Tyron Empire—but do you dare write so much as a single fault of the nobles?
"You can't even write about their illegitimate children scattered throughout the empire. What gives you the right to say you're examining ordinary people's lives?"
Geya recalled the poems locked away in her drawer—
"The nobles get all their money back; the subjects' money is split thirty-seventy."
She wanted badly to throw those poems in Bruto's face and tell him he had no right to mock her.
But she couldn't.
Because she still wanted to live comfortably within those confining "rules."
"So this is your 'great cause'? But you aren't the empire's ruler, or a