Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP

Chapter 406: Chapter 406 : The Misunderstanding

The tiny toddler walked quietly through the long corridors of the mansion. For the past few minutes she had been searching for the two voices she wanted to hear most.

When she finally heard them, the sounds were nothing like the warm, gentle ones she was used to.

Her mother’s voice suddenly cried out. “Ahh! Why are you being so aggressive tonight…?!”

Her father’s calm reply followed. “Because I need to give you a punishment.”

“It stings… ahh… slow down…! At this rate I will die—”

Slap… slap… slap…

The sharp sounds made little Athanasia freeze in place. Her small hands clutched the front of her nightgown as fear crawled up her spine.

From another space, the older Athanasia watched the same memory and immediately recognized it. This was the exact scene from the dream that had twisted her understanding of her parents for years.

Plap… plap… plap…

“Mmmh… ahh… ahhh…!”

With that final, broken moan from Lysia, everything went silent.

The sudden quiet left the little girl unable to move.

A few moments later the door opened. Lysia stepped out with her cheeks puffed in clear anger, roughly tying the knot of her loose sleeping robe while muttering under her breath.

“You will pay for it the next time…”

Then her eyes landed on the small figure standing in the corridor. The worried look on her daughter’s face made her expression change instantly. She rushed forward, dropped to her knees, and pulled the child into a tight hug.

“What are you doing here, Athy? I told you never to walk around alone, especially at night. There are ghosts that roam and scream in these halls after dark.”

Little Athanasia’s voice came out small and shaky. “But Mama… Athanasia was scared. Mama and Papa were missing, so I…”

Lysia gently patted her head. “Sorry, dear. Mama and Papa had some important work that came up suddenly.”

The child’s eyes filled with tears as she stared straight at her mother. “Mother… will you leave me again? Will you die?”

Lysia’s voice rose sharply. “Who told you those things?”

She quickly softened her tone and cupped her daughter’s face. “No, dear. Mama is never leaving you again.”

Little Athanasia lifted her small hand and held out her pinky. “Promise?”

Lysia linked her pinky with her daughter’s and gave a firm nod. Then she stood up, still holding the child’s finger, and began leading her back toward the bedroom.

“Let’s go back and sleep. Remember, if you don’t sleep properly you won’t grow well.”

Athanasia was about to reply when her eyes caught something on her mother’s neck. A dark mark sat there, and a thin line of blood was still peeping out from it.

She looked up at her mother’s face. There was no pain in it at all… only a gentle smile.

In that moment everything connected in the child’s mind. Her father had beaten her mother, and now her mother was trying to hide it.

She remembered the hushed conversations she had overheard from the caretakers and household staff. They had called her mother the Duke’s slave. Other quiet remarks she never fully understood suddenly made sense.

Her eyes stayed glued to the hickey while pity for her mother filled her small heart.

What the little girl did not know was that her “saint” of a mother had drawn far more blood than the Duke ever had.

Lysia was masochistic to a degree that left Athanor with no choice but to stay inside the room and quietly heal himself. The wounds on his body made a single hickey look like nothing.

Several deep purple hickeys marked his neck and collarbone. Long scratches from her nails ran across his shoulder.

Athanor sat on the edge of the bed, using his celestial essence to close the marks before anyone could see them and start asking questions.

-x-X-x-

A few more days slipped by, and at last the moment Athanor and Lysia had spent years waiting for arrived.

The Primordial Ascension.

The strongest pairs from every corner of Luminera gathered to fight in it, one of the grandest events the upper realm knew, held once every twenty-two years with only one rule attached participate in it once and after that you were barred from ever entering again.

It brought two things to the realm. A wish. And an entire kingdom’s worth of entertainment.

Though in truth, the official wish had always been reserved for the four great families, no matter which pair actually spilled blood to win it.

And by now that wish had shed most of its weight. It had been claimed so many times over the centuries that it no longer felt like anything special at all. These days, it served a different purpose entirely.

Revenge And rankings.

Because what truly counted here was pride. Luminera held a strict law forbidding the four great houses from ever raising a blade against one another.

No wars. No open dominance. Nothing left to settle the endless pecking order except this tournament, where the ordinary citizens of each kingdom stood in as proxies for their masters and bled on their behalf.

Win, and you earned the right to look down your nose at the other three houses for the next twenty-two years. And the wish itself had curdled into a slow cycle of revenge.

Twenty-two years ago, when Zeus’s representative took the crown, Zeus had used his wish to demand the woman who was about to be wed as the next wife of Ravana, the asuran king.

He’d done it purely for revenge, since Ravana had once carved the most prosperous stretch of land clean out of his kingdom.

So Zeus had waited. Twenty-two long years, just to snatch the asuran beauty out from under Ravana’s betrothal, take her as his own wife, and then parade the whole thing around to twist the knife a little deeper.

The wish with few restrictions, in the end, was nothing more than a toy for their grudges.

But for Athanor and Lysia, it meant everything. It meant their life. Their future. The one door out. Which left them no option in all the realm but to win.

For the first time in either of their lives, they were nervous. They stepped into that arena shaking at the mere thought of losing, of everything they’d built collapsing in a single afternoon. And yet neither of them let a soul catch even a flicker of that weakness.

Each victory fed the next. Every fight carried them one step closer to the future they’d stayed up whispering about, and for a little while, it almost felt like nothing can stop them. It almost felt like the world might, just this once, let two people keep what they’d fought for.

But.

As the old saying goes, no plan ever walks out of this cursed world the same way it walked in.

In the end, they lost.

They lost the fight, and their dreams, and everything they’d carried into that arena, all in the same breath.

Athanor had no choice left but to surrender. His body had already given out beneath him, and still he refused to lay down, right up until the moment he saw Lysia squaring off against Ravana’s son, knowing with perfect, sickening clarity that she stood no chance against him.

He could not watch her throw her life away. So he took the only step left to him and yielded.

And the two of them wept in the middle of that field for hours afterward, side by side without exchanging a single word, mourning a future that had been close enough to touch.

Meanwhile, Ravana collected his own revenge.

He took Zeus’s daughter, Hestia, though not as a wife this time. As a slave, for torture.

He couldn’t lay a finger on Zeus’s children born of the main bloodline, their pure blood put them beyond his reach due to the restrictions of the wish, so Hestia was simply the best piece left on the board.

A famous face, adored across the continent. And breaking her in full view of the people, and of Zeus himself, would finally soothe the anger he’d nursed for two decades.

So Ravana walked into Zeus’s own palace and took the resisting girl right there in front of him. Hestia struggled, twisting to beg her father to do something, anything. Zeus said nothing at all. And Ravana, the happiest man in the realm, only smiled.

“Thank you for raising such a fine piece for me,” he said. “I’ll be sure to repay the favor. I’ll send you her video soon enough.”

Hestia was hauled off by one arm, and even then she turned back, her voice cracking. “This is all your fault, father. I told you. I told you not to put your trust in that damned fool. I even told you he was off living his happy little life with his slave, and the child growing inside that slave, and you ignored every word of it. And now look. Look at the shame he’s brought down on you, and what… what…” Her words dissolved into sobbing, the girl weeping now for no one but herself.

Zeus clicked his tongue. “Tsk.”

He had known. He’d known for years that Athanor shattered one of the realm’s most fundamental laws the day he planted his seed in the womb of a mere slave.

Even before Hestia’s spies came whispering it into his ear, he’d already known all of it. Nothing stayed hidden from Zeus for long, not within his own territory.

And still, he’d held his tongue. Because he’d judged it the smarter play to stay silent, to let his strongest eligible warrior fight his way to the win, and only then quietly erase Athanor afterward for his foolishness.

He simply couldn’t afford to lose so valuable a pawn before the tournament. Nor could he risk a single move that might rattle Athanor’s focus, or spook him into fleeing before the fight.

It had been, he’d been certain, the correct decision.

And now, watching his daughter dragged screaming from his hall, Zeus sat in his silence and regretted every part of it.

That’s when the face of the eve appeared.

The son of Ravana stepped forward and bowed low before his father. “Father, the preparations for our departure have been completed.”

Ravana patted his shoulder, then roughly pushed Hestia toward him. “I am granting you not only the full backing of your new dark venture, the slave empire, but also the perfect model for its advertisement.”

His son’s eyes scanned Hestia from head to toe, a slow grin spreading across his face.

Ravana added, “She will attract customers with the deepest purses in our territory.”

“Thank you, Father, for such a generous gift.”

But before the son could take her, Ravana’s hand shot out from behind and squeezed Hestia’s face hard. His other hand slipped under her clothes and roughly forced two fingers deep inside her pussy. Hestia’s body jerked as a broken sound escaped her throat.

Ravana leaned in, still looking at Zeus from the corner of his eye, and spoke with a cruel smile.

“But before that, she needs proper training. And what better place is there for training than our army’s training grounds?”

He turned fully toward his son. “Announce to the battalion that a wonderful feast will be served tomorrow to the first one hundred soldiers who arrive.”

Hestia’s tears fell freely now, her body trembling under Ravana’s hand.

Zeus’s face twisted in pure rage. He slammed his fist down and roared across the hall.

“Athena! I want the heads of the three responsible for this disgrace laid before me before this day ends!”