Six months. A mere half-year of carefully poured tea, of whispered condolences and strategically deployed silences, was all it took to unravel centuries of lineage. An entire history, extinguished with the clink of porcelain and the faintest trace of poison. And for what? For this… this purgatorial holding pen for the broken and the bland. To be subjected to the company of these buzzing, insignificant creatures. To have my intellect dulled by their tedious concerns. I, who once held the fate of a dynasty in my hands, am now reduced to navigating the petty squabbles of addicts and the saccharine ministrations of well-meaning fools. Yes. I toppled a notion, a deeply ingrained societal construct, with a quiet elegance these… bugs… could never comprehend.

Fifteen years. A meticulous tapestry woven with whispered secrets, forged alliances with discontented wives and ambitious daughters, each thread a carefully gathered piece of data. The hunt, the exquisite tension of the unveiling, the domino effect of carefully placed revelations – a symphony of societal collapse conducted without a single drop of blood spilled by my own hand. And it all culminated… in a single, anticlimactic day. A miscalculation. A monarch's heart, weaker than anticipated, stealing six months from my grand design.

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Now, this… this void. This sterile, predictable existence. These… bugs. Their petty dramas, their transparent manipulations, their utter lack of sophistication. They are a dull, buzzing static compared to the intricate dance of the nobility. The thrill of exposing centuries of carefully guarded secrets, the subtle power of influence wielded over generations – that was a game worthy of my intellect. This? This is merely… tedious. A pale imitation of the intricate webs I once spun. Even their downfalls are predictable, their motivations transparent. The nobles, at least, possessed a certain… flair. A delicious complexity in their betrayals and their vanities. This place… it offers nothing but the monotonous drone of the mundane.