Just moments earlier, the Red Queen had completed all her preparations.
She had made King K formally abdicate, then succeeded him as ruler of the duchy, going directly from queen in name to queen regnant.
Using this as a turning point, the Red Queen began integrating her witchcraft with the witchcraft known as In the Name of God.
The Red Queen's witchcraft was founded on the idea that the excellent could rule the world.
This fell within the moral domain—elite theory.
The reason this argument had previously struggled to succeed was that, although the Red Queen was outstanding, she was not overwhelmingly more outstanding than everyone else.
If it were judged by exams, the Red Queen could score ninety-five points on the same test.
The commoners and others who would come under the Red Queen's rule, meanwhile, might score seventy, or sixty—a passing grade.
Only those "poor students" who could not even pass could be directly controlled by the Red Queen's witchcraft and turned into cards.
For someone like King K, who had once been able to score over eighty, nearly ninety, but after years of pampered living could now only score seventy, the Red Queen needed more than a decade of covert erosion. Even then, she had only transformed him into a card ahead of time by taking a dangerous gamble.
But things were different now. The Red Queen had been enlightened by the Littlefolk's various materials.
Though her position had changed, it had to be said that her understanding of the world now made her a sage, a prophet, in the eyes of most people in this world.
She had seen the world's destruction, its course, and the path she needed to seek.
That superiority of perspective meant she could now score one hundred and five points on