Chapter 633: Aki’s First Kiss [Bonus - ]

Chapter 633: Aki’s First Kiss [Bonus Chapter]

"So Aki... have you, like ever kissed someone before?"

Aki’s eyes snapped wide.

A bright wave of crimson exploded across her cheeks, rushing up her neck and burning hot enough to singe the silk beneath her head.

"W-What?!" she squeaked, her hands frantically knotting into the sheets at her sides. "N-No! Of course not! I’m the King’s own daughter! My father has had four high-tier maids stationed outside my residential pavilion since I was six years old... I haven’t even held a man’s hand without an armed escort present so why are you asking that right n—"

"Good," Silas said softly.

Before the final syllable could leave her lips, Silas leaned forward.

He didn’t give her time to retreat, and he didn’t give her room to hesitate.

His right hand slid smoothly from her chin with his fingers tangling deep into the silky cool azure tresses behind her neck, gently tilting her head back against the pillow as his lips came down firmly, hungrily upon hers.

Aki’s world violently unraveled...

The impact wasn’t gentle at all.

His mouth captured hers with an effortless certainty with his warm lips parting hers and his tongue sweeping forward to claim the moist trembling sweetness of her mouth with dominance.

"Mmph~"

Aki’s sapphire eyes dilated in dizzying shock and a soft strangled whimper escaped into his throat as the sensation tore through every sensory nerve in her body.

Her mind went blank, bleached clean of thoughts, of treaties, of logic, of her maids too...

Her small hands, which had been clutching the sheets in panic, slowly rose.

Her fingers reached out, trembling against the rough worn fabric of his clothes, before her palms flattened firmly against his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart hammering against her fingertips.

And beneath the dizzying, breathless ecstasy of the kiss, as Silas’s tongue traced the roof of her mouth, a microscopic burning spark of pure gold mana flowed smoothly from his breath, crossing the threshold of her lips, sinking deep into the cold dormant center of her chest.

’Wh...’ Aki’s thoughts fragmented into breathless, spinning starlight as he pulled her closer against his body, drowning her senses in heat. ’...what does he mean... "good"...?’

SMACK! SMACK!

The room was lacking any other sound save for the uneven rhythm of their breath and the soft rustle of silk sheets yielding under their shifted weight.

For Aki, the world had shrunk down to the burning point of contact where their lips met.

It was an uncoordinated clumsy affair on her part.

SMACK!

She had spent twenty five years of her life in the high towers of Rhyx City reading treatises on royal court etiquette, memorizing foreign trade dialects, and studying how the world was before the Apocalypse, but none of those leather-bound folios had ever prepared her for the reality of an actual kiss.

She didn’t know where to tilt her chin, she didn’t know what to do with her teeth, and her tongue felt rigid, trembling in panic every time his lips shifted with effortless certainty.

’Why is he so good at this?!’ The thought spun through her dizzy mind like a top.

Silas was eighteen.

He had grown up an orphan in the concrete gutters of the Europa slums, probably scavenging copper wire and eating stale bread... not that she minded yet the way he tilted her head, the confident pressure with which he parted her lips, the subtle pull that drew a soft embarrassing whimper from the back of her throat... it carried an effortless experience that completely dismantled her defenses.

’So... so good~’

Then, through the hazy fog of her sensory overload, a memory flashed unbidden behind her closed eyes.

When she had been in Blessed Land, she had overheard atwo girls talking... They had been gossiping about Lord Silas with a woman, specifically about the breathtaking Former Spirit of the World Tree, Lady Eluned.

The rumors had spoken of how the two of them were practically inseparable in the Keep, how the divine tree-spirit looked upon him with worshipful adoration, and how they shared private chambers beneath the high arbor.

’Oh.’ A sudden sharp pang of realization struck Aki’s chest, followed immediately by a flush of heat that rushed from her neck to the tips of her ears. ’He must kiss Lady Eluned all the time over there.’

Before she could dwell on the thought, a strange sensation began to spread from her mouth downward.

A pooling warmth settled low in her abdomen making a dizzying moisture gather between her thighs that made her toes curl tightly against the sheets.

"Mmmph~"

That feeling was accompanied by an intense suffocating heat that bloomed directly behind her breastbone, it was scorching hot and a bit painful too, if Aki had to put it into words... it would be like an overwhelming furnace that expanded behind her ribs, dragging the air from her lungs until her vision began to blur with dark spots.

Her trembling hands, which had been clutching the fabric of his clothes, reached up and tapped twice against his shoulder.

’S-sorry...’

She didn’t want the kiss to stop.

A selfish desperate part of her wished she could freeze this exact second for an eternity but her lungs were screaming for oxygen, and the strange radiating fire behind her ribs was threatening to overwhelm her senses entirely.

Silas noticed immediately.

With a soft reluctant sigh that brushed warm against her damp lips, he gently broke the seal of their mouths.

A thin glistening silver thread of saliva connected their parted lips in the warm afternoon light, lingering for a fragile heartbeat before snapping softly against the corners of their mouths.

"Haah... Haah... Haah..."

Aki’s chest heaved with rapid gasps with her lips swollen and bright crimson while her large eyes were glassy, completely out of focus and staring blankly at the ceiling above his shoulder.

Silas propped himself up on one elbow, his dark eyes looking down at her flushed face with soft genuine concern.

"Aki?" he murmured, his voice sounding low and slightly husky. "Are you alright?"

Aki blinked with her gaze slowly traveling down as it landed on his face, before snapping to the right and staring resolutely at the carved mahogany wardrobe across the bedroom.

Her face was burning with enough heat to smelt copper.

"W-We..." she squeaked, her voice trembling like a plucked violin string. "...we kissed."

Silas let out a soft rueful chuckle, his knuckles coming up to rub the back of his neck in mild embarrassment.

"Yeah. We did. Sorry, I probably should have warned you before diving in like a barbarian..."

"N-No!" Aki blurted out, her hands flying up in a small, flustered flutter. "It was fine! Really! It was... fine."

She trailed off, her eyes darting back toward him.

Her nose subtly twitched.

She sniffed the air once, then twice, and the romantic breathless haze in the room suddenly thinned.

Beneath the lingering scent of his clothes, an undeniable potent odor was radiating from the man sprawled across her pristine ivory linen.

It was a ripe suffocating combination of damp sweat and the unmistakable stench of burnt blood that had clung to his body after several days of warfare.

’It seems his smell passes over to his real body.’

Aki slowly turned her head, looking him dead in the eye with an expression of deadpan horror.

"Silas," she said with her voice sounding flat.

"Yeah?"

"You stink."

Silas blinked.

"What?"

"You smell like a burnt armory that sat in a stagnant swamp for three weeks," Aki stated with royal authority, wrinkling her small nose. "You smell terrible... Honestly, it’s a miracle my nose didn’t fall off during that kiss."

A heavy silence settled over the bed and for three seconds, neither of them moved.

Then, slowly, a vibrant unmistakable wave of red crawled up Silas’s neck, burning across his cheeks and settling right into the tips of his ears.

’C-cute...’ Aki thought.

The great Lord Silas looked like an eight-year-old boy who had just been caught tracking mud across his mother’s clean kitchen floor.

"I... uh..." Silas stammered, looking down at his dust-caked tunic with sudden mortification. "...Can I use your bath?"

Aki pressed her lips together, fighting a desperate losing battle against the bright grin threatening to split her face.

She pointed a slender, trembling finger toward a set of arched double doors carved from frosted glass and gold leaf at the far corner of the bedchamber.

"Through there," she giggled softly. "Straight ahead and please, use the lavender salts... All of them..."

"Right. Lavender. Got it," Silas muttered under his breath, scrambling off the bed with a haste that thoroughly lacked dignity, practically sprinting across the Persian rug before ducking through the frosted glass doors.

The heavy latch engaged behind him.

Silas stood in the center of the bathroom, let out a massive shuddering breath, and stared around him.

"...What in the hell is this ridiculous luxury?" he muttered aloud.

Even with his new life outside from the slums, the sight before him looked like the treasury vault of an ancient empire.

The entire chamber was forged from seamless slabs of rose-veined white alabaster that hummed with a dormant heating ward beneath his boots.

The faucets were sculpted from solid, polished orichalcum in the shape of leaping sea-drakes, their eyes set with tiny luminescent aquatic pearls.

The primary tub was not a tub at all but an indoor sunken pool, deep enough to submerge a grown man to his chin, already steaming with crystal-clear mineral water covered in a thick fragrant blanket of frothing white bubbles that smelled faintly of crushed sweet citrus and mountain mint.

"Fucking hell..."

Dominating the western wall was a massive floor-to-ceiling mirror carved from polished celestial silver, framed in intricate gold filigree.

Silas walked over and stopped before the glass, looking at his reflection.

His hair was slightly wild but his dark eyes were clear and the heavy dragging exhaustion that had plagued his temples for a while had begun to settle into a focused quiet.

’It’s about time,’ Silas thought, his gaze turning serious.

He hadn’t made an experimental spatial jump upon arriving in Rhyx City just to play around with royal toys.

Helping Aki awaken her dormant core had been lingering in the back of his mind for a while.

Ever since the summit of the World Council, ever since he had watched her been oppressed by everyone, he had resolved to break the biological cage she had been trapped in since birth.

’I’ve been researching with the System ever since we cleared the second sector in Khemet,’ Silas mused, his brow furrowing deeply. Yet every single time he had submitted a direct inquiry regarding Princess Aki’s specific physical blockage, the interface had behaved erratically... I’m a bit confused though, The System, an omnipresent database capable of decrypting the classified divine lineages of the Sovereign Realm for a handful of Upgrade Points, had consistently refused to yield a clean direct answer regarding her core."

Silas stared into his own reflection with his jaw setting hard.

’What sort of entity does the World King have to be able to solicit this kind of evasive deadlocked reaction from the System of all things?’

Aki was the biological daughter of the current World King.

Her bloodline was directly descended from the highest authority on the terrestrial plane.

If her core had been intentionally locked, if someone had suppressed her spiritual pathways before she had even taken her first breath in the cradle, it wasn’t the work of a petty rival lord or a jealous concubine.

It was the work of something vast, something lurking in the deep shadows behind the World Council’s throne.

"Whatever," Silas grunted, shaking his head. "One problem at a time."

With a lazy, fluid movement, his body seemed to flicker.

His dust-stained clothes, boots, and everything else vanished, dropping into a neat folded pile on the stone bench as he slipped into the steaming water.

The heat hit his skin like an electric shock of pure relief as Silas sank down until the warm mineral bubbles reached his lower lip, letting out a long rumbling groan of transcendent bliss that resonated through the tiled dome.

’At least I’m done with that northern nightmare for now.’

Well, not entirely done.

Technically speaking, he had abandoned his post.

The moment Number 5 had successfully routed the last four thousand refugees through the southern extraction arrays, the masked woman had turned around, cleared her throat, and begun drafting a new military directive ordering Kara and some others to fly north to hunt down six stray Tiers 5s that were currently wandering through the empty salt flats.