A sword can take a city. A treasury can hold it. But only a voice can make it yours. Valluvar has already told us what a minister must know, what a king must possess, what an envoy must survive. Now he names the single instrument that makes all of it work: the tongue. Not speech as ornament or persuasion as trick — speech as the foundational technology of governance. The chapter opens by declaring eloquence the supreme wealth, then immediately warns that the same faculty destroys. What follows is not a rhetoric manual but a field guide to verbal power: how to bind listeners who are present and summon those who are absent, how to read your audience before you open your mouth, how to forge sentences no counter-argument can crack. Then Valluvar executes a devastating reversal. Having built the tower of eloquence to its full height, he spends the final two kurals demolishing those who lack it — the verbose who mistake volume for force, and the learned who bloom in clusters but carry no scent. The chapter does not end with triumph. It ends with a flower that fails to smell.