Chapter 637: Princess Aki’s Boyfriend? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 637: Princess Aki’s Boyfriend? [Bonus Chapter]

"These were originally the gifts I had prepared for you," Aki explained, her voice bright and proud as she opened the heavy lid. "I had my maids scour the private auctions across Europa and the maritime ports for the past few weeks... Even with the shortage caused by the Khemet incursion, I managed to secure quite a haul."

Silas leaned forward, looking into the velvet-lined interior as his eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

Sitting inside, tied neatly in thick bundles of gold ribbon, were stacks upon stacks of thick summoning tickets embossed with the iridescent silver runes of the Sovereign Realm.

"One hundred and fifty Hero Summoning tickets," Aki said casually, lifting a heavy stack in her small hand, "and about a thousand Troop Summoning tickets."

She reached deeper into the chest, pulling out three compact miniature space capsules that hummed with mana.

"These are compressed capsules," she continued, setting them on the duvet. "Enough quarried titan-stone, reinforced timber, and refined copper to construct twelve Tier 3 structures... I was going to hand all of this to you as a reward for saving Khemet, but well, since I’m descending today, I might have to borrow all of them for my own territory!"

She giggled, playfully dumping several thick bundles of tickets across the white sheets like poker chips.

"Though, obviously," Aki added with wisdom, "a territory’s summoning capacity depends heavily on its initial radius... It doesn’t make sense to crack hundreds of Troop summoning tickets on day one if your central hall can’t feed them. You’d just cause a famine before the first wave hits."

Silas stared at the glowing mountain of summoning tickets covering the mattress as a dry whistling breath escaped his teeth.

"What a ridiculous collection you have," Silas muttered, picking up a pristine gold-edged Hero summoning tickets with his fingers tingling from the pure, dormant potential locked inside the tickets. "Princess, if the World Council saw this pile... Well what do you think they’d say? Including your father."

Aki puffed her cheeks out, looking thoroughly pleased with herself.

"My father doesn’t know about half of these! I purchased them using the independent revenue from my personal pearl fisheries! Every single ticket here was bought with a clean unmonitored allowance!"

She scooped up a massive armful of tickets, at least a hundred Hero tickets and eight hundred Troop tickets, and pushed them firmly into Silas’s lap.

"Take them," Aki smiled, her sapphire eyes shining with earnest generosity. "You did amazing impossible work in Northern Khemet, Silas... You saved hundreds of thousands of people so you deserve this, and so much more."

Silas looked down at the fortune in his lap.

He didn’t take them all.

Without a word, he split the massive pile in two so he took seventy-five Hero tickets and five hundred Troop tickets, sliding them gently back across the linen into her hands.

"Fifty-fifty," Silas said firmly, meeting her gaze with an immovable smirk. "You’re entering an active territory, Aki and the novice trial doesn’t care that you’re a royal princess... You need elite guards, and you need laborers to dig your trenches."

"Silas, no!" Aki protested, pushing the tickets back toward his chest. "I already told you, my initial territory radius won’t be able to sustain that many units! Ten Hero summoning tickets and two hundred troops is more than enough for my novice perimeter... You’re the one managing Blessed Land! You have a lot of acres to defend!"

"And I have more than ten people who can cleave mountains in two," Silas retorted, pushing them back. "Take the tickets, Aki. Don’t be stubborn."

"I am a royal princess... Being stubborn is my birthright—"

The heavy mahogany bedroom door swung open.

"Princess Aki, the port authority sent the revised—"

Mira stopped dead in her tracks.

The head maid, holding a leather folio in her hands, stood frozen in the open doorway as her sharp middle-aged eyes swept across the room in a single second.

She saw the bed. She saw the tangled, rumpled silk sheets. She saw Princess Aki, flushed bright red, kneeling on the mattress in a disheveled gown and sitting right beside her, sprawled in a VIP hotel bathrobe with his collar hanging wide open, his dark hair damp and messy, was a young stunningly handsome man with sharp dark eyes and a casual dangerous presence.

The bedroom fell into a silence so absolute that the rustle of the curtains sounded like thunder.

Mira’s hands tightened around her leather folio until the seams creaked.

’This is the man the Princess has been stalking? Her boyfriend, Silas Graves?!’

He was dangerously good-looking.

Even draped in cheap terrycloth with damp hair, the man carried an immovable gravity that made the hair on Mira’s forearms stand on end.

For half a second, an absurd inappropriate flutter of feminine jealousy brushed against the veteran maid’s chest.

Then her gaze dropped back to the bathrobe... the damp hair... the rumpled sheets and the flushed cheeks too.

’Did they just?! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON?! BEFORE THE OFFICIAL BETROTHAL TREATIES WERE EVEN DRAFTED?!’

"MIRA, SHUT UP!" Aki shrieked, her face exploding into crimson.

Mira snapped her mouth shut instantly, though her eyes remained wide as saucers, darting frantically between Silas’s bare collarbones and Aki’s swollen lips.

"It is NOT what it looks like!" Aki yelled, scrambling off the bed so fast she nearly tripped over the hem of her gown. "We weren’t, he was just, I AWAKENED!"

Mira blinked once. "You... what?"

"Look!"

Aki raised her trembling hand, pointing her finger at an ornamental brass paperweight resting on the vanity table.

Her royal-purple mana surged once more, the air crackling as well and the brass paperweight groaned as a tiny dark-purple spark ignited against the metal, and slowly, the solid brass began to unbind, crumbling into a neat fine pile of metallic purple dust that drifted onto the polished wood.

Mira’s jaw dropped.

The leather folio slipped from her numb fingers, hitting the Persian rug with a heavy thud.

"Destruction," Mira whispered, her voice trembling with unvarnished shock. "The royal lineage mana... Princess, you awakened?"

"Yes!" Aki cried, her eyes shining with triumphant tears once more. "I have a Purple Core, Mira! A real, unblemished core!"

’Isn’t she crying a bit too much...?’

"By the heavens," Mira gasped, pressing both hands over her heart, tears of genuine joy welling in her eyes as she took three hurried steps forward. "Praise the ancestors... Praise the high tides! Oh, Princess, your mother would have wept... We must inform the King immediately! The royal fleet must be summoned! A grand celebration across the entire province—"

"NO!" Aki cut her off sharply as Mira paused, looking confused.

"You will not report a single word to my father," Aki commanded firmly, stepping between Mira and the bed, her small frame radiating unyielding resolve. "Not yet... You will draft the formal dispatch, but you will hold the transmission until after I have entered the Sovereign Realm and initiated my novice trial."

Mira’s eyes widened.

"Princess! The novice trial is perilous! If you enter without something—"

"I am entering under the sovereign protection of Blessed Land," Aki stated, her chin lifting with quiet pride. "My territory is an official vassal domain so I’ll be safe."

’I guess it’s alright for her to say that.’ Silas thought, It wasn’t like the World Council knew much about it to question anything... If they asked him how he did it, he would tell them he had a Gold core so they could go figure. ’That’s a sufficient answer...’

She stepped closer to her maid, her sapphire eyes narrowing with deadly seriousness.

"And most importantly, Mira, you did not see Silas Graves in this room... If a single whisper of his presence reaches the city guards, I will strip you of your pension and banish you to the salt docks. Do you understand me?"

Mira looked at the fierce, glowing young woman standing before her then she swallowed hard, slowly dropping into a deep flawless court curtsy.

"By your command, My Princess," Mira murmured with obedience. "My lips are sealed."

She retrieved her folio from the carpet, offered one last suspicious glance toward Silas lounging on the bed, and backed out of the bedchamber, pulling the heavy mahogany doors shut behind her with a soft click.

The room fell quiet once more.

Silas let out a low, amused whistle.

"Fierce... Remind me never to get on your bad side, Princess."

Aki turned around, her fierce expression instantly melting back into a soft flustered pout.

"Oh, hush. We have a schedule to keep."

After five more minutes of quiet negotiation, they finally reached a compromise.

Silas adamantly refused to let her leave with bare pockets and Aki reluctantly accepted two hundred Troop Summoning Tickets and ten Hero Summoning Tickets, alongside four of the material containers.

Silas swept the remaining seventy-five Hero tickets and eight hundred Troop tickets into his own spatial ring with a broad satisfied grin.

’This should be enough... not too much... not too less.’

He would keep them on hand in case.

Aki tapped the air before her chest and the air unfolded making her breath hitch, it was a shimmering blue interface that only she could see.

With a few delicate taps of her manicured fingers, the stacks of parchment tickets and the heavy iron material boxes vanished into thin air, absorbed smoothly into her newly initialized Lord Inventory.

She stared at her empty palms, her sapphire eyes wide with childlike wonder.

"It really works," she whispered softly. "I have an inventory..."

She turned toward Silas, her breath catching slightly as she looked into his dark eyes.

"I guess," Aki murmured, her voice dropping into a quiet tender melody, "I’ll see you back in Blessed Land, My Lord."

Silas smiled warmly, nodding his head.

"I’ll have the welcoming banquet ready. Good luck, Aki."

Aki took a deep steadying breath.

Her finger rose, hovering over the pulsing rune at the center of her interface.

[DESCEND]

Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.

This was the moment every person of the mortal realm dreamed of, the terrifying, magnificent leap into the unknown, crossing the veil into a world of infinite monsters, ancient treasures, and thrones.

She tapped the rune.

A blinding vertical pillar of royal-purple spatial light erupted from the bedroom floor, enveloping Aki’s body in a swirling weightless cyclone of dimensional ether.

The system’s descending confirmation began to chime in the air with the spatial displacement pulling at her hair, whipping her blue locks into a wild luminous tempest.

And then, right before the veil closed, Aki didn’t close her eyes in fear. She lunged forward.

Her soft trembling lips pressed firmly, warmly against Silas’s right cheek, leaving behind a lingering sweet spark of purple mana that tingled against his skin as she pulled back with a brilliant breathless laugh, her sapphire eyes shining through the light.

"Heh..."

The pillar of purple light collapsed inward and the wind died as the Persian rug was now empty.

Silas sat alone on the edge of the massive down bed with his hand slowly rising to touch his cheek where her lips had landed.

He let out a long quiet breath through his nose with his dark eyes looking at the empty space where she had stood.

’Well, fuck,’ Silas thought, a wry, slightly anxious smirk touching his lips. ’I hope she rolls a good starting sector... An Unknown Zone with high-tier resources would be ideal, somewhere quiet where she can build her walls without getting ambushed by a roaming behemoth on day one.’

He shook his head, running a hand through his damp brown hair.

’Either way, it’s time to go home.’

Silas rose to his feet. He reached into his pocket, slipping the disguise ring back onto his finger.

The optical illusion blurred across his frame, the bathrobe vanishing, replaced once more by the high-collared traveler’s mantle of Kara White, with the empty left sleeve pinned neatly across his chest.

He stepped toward the open balcony doors with his boots making no sound against the carpet.

Behind him, the heavy mahogany bedroom door swung open once more.

"Princess Aki?" Mira’s voice called out hesitantly from the threshold. "Forgive the intrusion, but the port marshal requires your personal wax seal to clear the—"

Mira froze.

She stepped into the bedroom and the bed was neatly rumpled.

The tall, handsome young man in the bathrobe was gone and Princess Aki, the Royal Family’s first daughter, was nowhere to be found as well.

Mira stood alone in the empty sunlit suite with her mouth falling open as her eyes darted between the open balcony doors and the vacant bed.

"Princess...?" Mira stuttered into the quiet breeze, her voice rising in panic.

"...Princess Aki?!"