Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1883: The Secret Ingredient

Her legs decided on their own.

The backs of her knees found the throne, and the Goddess of Purity sat down hard in her own sanctum, eyes wide, while the wailing of a nameless mortal went on faintly through the starlight.

A hell that outlives its keeper.

Permanence was the ink her own sphere rationed above every other. She had petitioned for less and been refused.

A mortal girl had spoken it tonight as a promise, and her class had simply kept it.

"It’s not possible," she told her empty sanctum.

’He cannot use that seed. It is dormant. It is a knot of raw entropy that would burn him hollow if he so much as pulled on it. I have watched him not use it for months. That is the single reassuring thing about the man.’

And yet.

She made herself file the evidence as she filed everything: plainly. The seed had moved tonight. She had felt it move, every scrap of ash in her cheek leaning toward Thalorind, and the Withered Flame had come hunting.

’Somehow, the seed helped that girl evolve. A sliver of it went into her remaking. Any true draw would have hollowed him where he stood, so it gave exactly as much as was needed and settled back down... as if something meted it out.’

Then the older truth arrived, and it was worse.

’No. This is not the first sign. It is only the loudest.’

’Ever since that Bloodfather class of his, his women have been wrong. Blessed-wrong. Marks that read their bearers and author fitting gifts. A reservoir that moves his strength into their bodies across any distance. Boosts with no divine source, day after day, in my own handwriting.’

Her eyes narrowed further. ’His blessed.’

There was that. ’The [Blessed Seed].’

The methodology.

Triple growth, arrested aging, delivered by... She declined to complete the thought, alone, in her own sanctum, where it was safest.

Drafting the relevant complaint had required a cold compress.

’But the red-eyed girl...’

Lilyanna sat up and looked at the girl properly through the mirror.

No seed. She checked twice; on that subject her thoroughness was a matter of record.

The pills came back nearly as bare. The girl had swallowed one, once, gaining half a day of borrowed speed that burned out of her before the next dawn, and it left nothing of him behind.

Which left the mark on her spine, one sliver of sleeping corruption, and nothing else at all.

The stain on her cheek went cold.

’His physique.’

Her cosmic eyes went distant. She had his entire blasphemous portfolio memorized. It was for the complaints.

’The Abyssal Genesis Physique. It was the Primordial Breeding Physique once, before he conquered the demoness and it changed with her. It had to become what it is to let him keep his anomalous growth speed up, and in the process, it became what allowed him to house the Bloodfather class.

’A reservoir seated over his heart, moving his essence out along every bond he owns.’

’A pump.’

Her hand came up and pressed flat over her own sternum, over the place her grace rose from whenever one of her blessed called on it.

’Like me. It works like me.’

"He has a me." She heard herself say it aloud. "He grew himself a me."

True agitation took the Goddess of Purity then, and it was a different creature from her tantrums entirely.

He had grown an organ to do a seat’s work, taught his blood to write blessings as marks, and let his class sign the Records in place of a covenant.

He did not even know he was doing it.

On instinct, on appetite, on love, the boy was assembling, piece by blind piece, a path that ran beside divinity, paid none of its tolls, and answered none of its restrictions.

And it was arriving.

Her radiance had begun to flicker in time with her breathing, dawn-bright and dim by turns. She pressed both hands together in her lap to stop them from moving.

’A path without restrictions.’

She had heard hunger for such a path before, voiced long ago, in a brighter hall than this one. Her hand was at her cheek before she noticed it had moved.

Lilyanna put the memory down carefully, face-down, and did not look at it again.

"...But no." She breathed in deep. "Let me be fair."

"He is talented. Genius, even. I admit it freely, into this empty room, where he cannot hear me."

"The instincts. The luck. The grit, the willpower, the affinity. All of it exceptional, all of it real."

Her breathing went heavy again. "But nobody builds a road beside the divine because he feels like it. Nobody keeps a road like that standing by accident."

’That realm of his is crude. It is young, it strains, and it should tear a little every time he performs one of his impossibilities. The seed alone should have soured it by now. So why...?’

The question finished itself in a direction she did not like.

’Unless one of his impossibilities is mending the others. Or...’

Her cosmic eyes narrowed to slits. ’Or somebody is.’

’Her.’

The file arrived with the thought: the Primordial Demon of Lust, progenitor of demons, conquered by the boy and coiled inside his soul ever since. Lilyanna had kept records on her since before the first kingdoms existed, and the records were property damage from end to end.

’Her? Mending? Tending?’ Lilyanna nearly laughed at her own hunch. ’Impossible.’

But the hunch would not lie down.

The Goddess of Purity scooted forward on her throne, set both hands flat on the starlight, and went to check.

She looked all the way in.

Past the mortal shell, past the crimson lattice scripted across his heart, down into the dark of the villain’s soul realm.

She found a decorated sky.

Constellations no Records had ever issued hung painted over the dark, arranged to be seen from the door. Beneath them, every seam she had expected to find torn was bound.

She looked closer. Old essence, older than the seed it caged, ran along every fault line in neat dark stitches. Some of the repairs had healed so long ago they had become structure.

And the seed, the famous, terrible, dormant seed whose single achievement was her cheek, lay at the bottom of that realm the way an old hound lies by a hearth: fed, warm, watched.

A little dryad slept curled against it, nails freshly painted, and even in sleep one small hand rested on the seed’s shell.

Beside them, on a throne that matched nothing else in that realm because she had clearly built it to her own taste, sat the demoness herself.

Pink eyes, half-lidded, luminous in the dark.

A long tail hung off the armrest, swishing lazily. She was petting the sleeping dryad’s head with one idle hand, and she was chuckling under her breath at a joke she had shared with nobody.

The hunch had come looking for a mender. It had found a keeper.

Nyxara, breaker of ten thousand homes, was keeping one.

The whole picture reassembled itself around that throne in one silent turn.

’The stitches are hers. The sky is hers. The little warden at the seed keeps a schedule, and the schedule is hers.’

’He tears holes in the world’s order every other week, on instinct, without ever once looking down. And billions of years of patience sit in the dark behind him, closing every one of them by hand, without ever once telling him.’

’It is her. She is how the impossible road stays standing. The secret backer, mending the path behind the man while he walks it looking only forward.’

Quinlan Elysiar walked a road no being had ever walked, and she had finally met the reason he had never once fallen off it.

The tail stopped swishing.

In the dark of the soul realm, the demoness’s chin lifted. The pink eyes opened the rest of the way, unhurried, and found Lilyanna through every careful layer of a goddess’s scrying.

Nyxara smiled.

"Kukuku..." The chuckle crossed dimensions without asking permission. "Peeping into other women’s homes, little goddess~? And they call you the pure one..."

She waved the way adults wave at a child caught at a keyhole, small fingers folding one after another.

Lilyanna moved faster than she had moved in the entire battle.

The scrying tore shut under her palm. Starlight scattered across the dais, and the Goddess of Purity found herself pressed into the back of her own throne with both hands clamped over a dead mirror.

"Scary. This woman is scary."

But then her curiosity quickly overwhelmed her shock.

"Evil Boy..." she muttered under her breath, scrying already underway. "Just what are you up to now...?"

And just like that, under a hypocrite woman’s scrutinizing gaze, it was time for the Primordial Villain to take over the continent!