Princess Mia’s life has been rather busy lately, what with being the student council president, founding her own school, and trying to stave off an upcoming famine (which she knows all too well could trigger a revolution and the removal of her head). Even her pleasure cruise vacation has taken an exciting turn! While I don’t think any of Mia’s companions expected to be stranded on a deserted island, what they discover deep in the island is even more surprising and may alter their entire fight against the Chaos Serpents in the process!
Nozomu Mochitsuki has had some trouble ending past volumes at a good point in the story but here it feels like they’ve gotten better at that, even if volume 6 isn’t the end of Part 3 (“A New Oath Between the Moon and Stars”) like they initially planned. Volume 4 had left off in an odd place, with Mia and company still stranded on the deserted island but that story (and Part 2 of the story, “The Lodestar Girl”) does wrap up partway through volume 5 and with an interesting revelation indeed. If Part 1 of the story was Mia putting into motion plans to subvert the events that lead to her death in her original timeline (and averting a revolution in Abel’s kingdom of Remno in the process), Part 2 was the discovery and beginning of the fight against the Chaos Serpents who were determined to start a revolution in at least one country, not that they were giving up on their plans for Tearmoon (aka, another potential bad future for Mia). On this deserted island Mia learns that this conspiracy actually goes all the way back to the founding of the Tearmoon Empire, that the first emperor was actually someone who embraced the Chaos Serpents’ teaching of, well, chaos, and that’s why the country has always had such a virulent strand of anti-agriculturalism, the country was designed to be arrogant and fall from the start!
Mia isn’t about to let that happen however and she and her advisors start planning to shore up her connections with the dukedoms that make up the highest level of nobility in Tearmoon (and who might’ve remembered that ancient pact longer than the imperial family did). She’s already made good inroads with two of them, with her friendships (?) with Sapphias and Esmeralda, and the second half of volume five is largely Mia preparing for a horse race against another ducal scion, Ruby, whom she manages to extract an interesting prize from afterwards. And, since Ruby is riding a special breed of extra fast horse, Mia has to do the same and the one option she has at school is rather a character so don’t worry, hilarity ensues for a more light-hearted end to the volume.
Volume 6 largely concerns the last dukedom and Citrina Yellowmoon, Bel’s new best friend, and also the previously mentioned, life-altering mushroom stew served at the school’s winter festival. Mia, and Bel, are a little confused at how Bel is still in existence since the copy of the “Princess Chronicles” that she brought into the past (and that Mia is using like she used her old diary in the first two volumes) keeps changing and reporting earlier and earlier deaths for Mia, long before she and Abel can tie the knot, let alone get to producing children and grandchildren! But, well, the series has never tried to explain how Mia went back into the past in the first place (or how many characters seem to have dream-like memories of this first timeline) so I’m not particularly bothered by it. I’m not sure if Bel will still be around by the end of the story but we still have some time before we get to that.
I do think we have a hint as to what that end story will be however: Mia’s advisor Ludwig has discovered that while each Chaos Serpent carries a book around with them on the group’s teachings, like the revolution for dummies book in Remno, it’s never the same book and all of them seem to be copies of another work. He has a theory about a spiritual leader of the Serpents, one with a central book that all others are copied from, and with the way this is brought up I’m sure that someday Mia and company will face this person down and destroy that book.
However, when that will be, how many sweets and/or mushrooms Mia will consume along the way, and what other changes she’ll bring to Tearmoon and the rest of the world in the meantime are still to be determined. It seems like the famine Mia feared is beginning and the summary for volume seven promises more trouble along those lines, time for Mia to make sure that everyone can eat both bread and cake!