Chapter 645: A Deceptive Territory [Bonus - ]

Chapter 645: A Deceptive Territory [Bonus Chapter]

Harper froze with her spoon suspended halfway to her mouth.

Her violet eyes blinked twice as the teasing smirk dissolved from her face, and her lower lip began to tremble with tiny tears welling along her dark lashes.

"F-Flat?" she choked out, her voice cracking in agonized devastation. "I spent four hours roasting the marrow bones... I harvested the thyme from the estate’s private conservatory myself and I—"

A stray tear spilled over her cheek and dripped onto the silk of her sleeve.

"SILAS GRAVES!" Lia screamed, slamming her spoon onto the table hard enough to rattle the bowls. "You are a MONSTER!"

"An uncultured barbarian," Penelope chimed in, glaring at Silas with icy contempt. "My sister bled over that stove... Apologize to her this instant or I will salt your tea for a month."

’You don’t even handle my tea though...’

Martha crossed her arms, shaking her head in solemn disapproval.

"Master Silas, that was remarkably unkind. Lady Harper’s efforts were magnificent."

Silas blinked, the smirk vanishing as cold panic seized his chest.

"Wait, Harper, no," Silas stammered, his hands coming up in a frantic wave. "I was joking! I was joking! It’s incredible! It’s the one of the best stews I’ve had in six months, I swear to my ancestors! The wine reduction is perfect! Don’t cry, please—"

SNICKER!

The weeping ceased as Harper lifted her head, wiping the stray tear with her thumb, and her face split into a triumphant wild grin.

"Aha!" she cheered, her eyes sparkling with wicked delight. "Got you! The invincible Lord Vespera, brought to his knees by a single teardrop! You really are the sweetest boy, Silas!"

Silas sat frozen with his mouth hanging slightly open.

Lia and Penelope let out matching, disgusted groans and returned to their bowls, while Silas’s eye twitched with homicidal intent.

’I am going to throw her off the balcony,’ Silas thought, his fingers itching to summon a gust of wind-mana just to blow her soup into her lap.

Before he could retaliate, Harper leaned across the cushions, broke off a piece of the warm sourdough, dipped it into the rich stew, and held it against his lips.

"Say ah, My Lord," she purred, batting her eyelashes with exaggerated innocence. "Open wide, or I might shed another tragic tear~"

Silas glared at her for three long seconds, but the smell of roasted garlic and rich beef was undeniable.

He leaned forward and snapped the bread from her fingers, chewing with stubborn enthusiasm while she laughed like a chime in the quiet house.

By ten o’clock, the apartment had settled into the deep stillness of late night.

The dishes had been washed, dried, and stacked in the cedar cupboards.

Penelope had dragged her pillow and extra quilt into Lia’s room, where the muffled sounds of the two girls bickering over a history documentary could still be heard through the door.

’It can’t be helped...’

Silas stood at the base of the staircase in his violet pajamas with the little golden stars winking across the silk and his hands tucked into his pockets.

Beside him, Harper stretched her arms with her knuckles cracking softly in a set that matched his exactly.

On her it looked unfairly cute but on him, he suspected, it looked like a constellation had lost an argument.

"I’m taking the master suite," Harper announced with airy certainty. "I need a large bed to accommodate my newly acquired meridians."

"You have a guest room with a queen mattress right down the hall," Silas countered dryly.

"The guest room faces the western alleyway," she retorted. "The street lamps buzz and it disrupts my mana cultivation... I require executive accommodations."

"The master suite or like we call it," said a calm voice from the kitchen pantry, "has belonged to Master Silas since the day he signed the lease."

Martha stepped out with silent efficiency and came to a halt beside them with her chin held high.

"The guest room has been aired, the sheets have been changed, and I have personally closed the western shutters against the street lamps." She handed Silas his clean laundry basket and, as she did, her fingers subtly flicked as a small tin was pressed discreetly into his palm.

Silas looked down.

[CHAMOMILE AND VALERIAN, FOR PERSONS WHO HAVE CARRIED ENOUGH IRON FOR ONE SEASON!]

A muffled hysterical snort escaped Harper’s nose as she clapped both hands over her mouth with her shoulders shaking.

"Rest is of paramount importance to the household," Martha stated with deadpan gravity, not a single muscle in her face twitching. "Good night, Master Silas... Good night, Lady Harper..."

With that, the older woman turned on her heel and began methodically checking the deadbolts on the front entrance.

At the first bolt she paused with her hand resting on the cold brass.

For a moment her composure slipped, and she pressed her palm to her warm cheek and let out a small startled breath.

’Good heavens, Martha,’ she scolded herself silently. ’You are a grown woman and the head housekeeper.’

She straightened her apron, smoothed her expression back into perfect neutrality, and moved to the second bolt as though nothing had happened.

Silas stared at the tin in his hand, then at the spot where she had been standing, then at Harper, who was biting her lower lip to keep from laughing aloud.

"Unbelievable," Silas muttered, shaking his head. "I am surrounded by lunatics... a bit..."

He walked Harper down the hallway to the guest room anyway.

At the door she stopped, and the teasing faded from her face.

The light from the corridor sconce picked out the dark crescents under her eyes, and she looked suddenly much smaller than the woman who had bowed to him on the doorstep.

"Silas," she said quietly. "Thank you. For today."

"Are you really okay?" Silas asked. "With the white sand? With the changes?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"I am," she murmured, and her voice was steady, stripped of all theatrics. "Truly... When I was trapped within Ititus, I thought I was going to be erased... I thought House Whitmore would receive a sealed urn, and Penelope would be left alone in this world... Today, being here with you, with the girls, with Martha, is the first time in a while my chest hasn’t felt like an open wound... I enjoyed today more than I have words for."

A faint smirk tugged at her lips.

"And besides, we’re wearing matching pajamas. That practically makes us a crew under common maritime law."

"Captain Harper," Silas said, bowing slightly. "I’ll try to be worthy."

She laughed, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck in a brief tight hug.

"Protocol requires physical anchoring for optimal rest," she mumbled against his shoulder.

"Granted," Silas said, and hugged her back until the last tension drained out of her spine then she slipped inside, and the door clicked softly shut.

Down the hall, in Lia’s room, two small lamps burned low.

Lia lay on her stomach across the quilt in her oversized green pajamas, a sheet of heavy calligraphy paper spread in front of her, a pot of lavender ink at her elbow and her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth.

She had crossed out the first line four times.

"What are you writing?" Penelope asked from the pillow beside her, though she plainly already knew.

"A letter to Miss Eluned." Lia did not look up. "Dear Miss Eluned, thank you for catching the building... Also, I am sorry about the part where I was rude to you in the grass."

She scowled at the page. "I wasn’t rude. I just asked a lot of questions. Is that rude?"

"It is thorough," Penelope said diplomatically. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

After a while her voice went smaller. "Lia. Do you think my sister is going to be all right?"

Lia put the brush down.

She was eleven, and she had spent a long time being the one who held the family apart so she knew exactly what a question like that sounded like when it was really asking for something else.

"She hugged my brother on the doorstep like she’d been holding her breath for two weeks," Lia said. "And then she tried to make him eat flat soup, I think people who do both of those things are going to be fine..."

Penelope let out a shaky little laugh. "The soup was not flat."

"The soup was perfect. He’s a liar." Lia picked the brush back up, then paused. "Write your own letter, if you want... I’ll share the ink."

The two of them bent over the paper together with the lavender ink drying in long careful strokes, while the house settled and the lamps burned low.

In the master bedroom, Silas set the tin of tea on the nightstand and plugged his phone into the charging dock.

He lay on top of the covers, staring up at the shadowy molding of the ceiling.

’I’m not even that exhausted...’

On a whim he swiped open his territory ledger and tried to query the incubator bay, picturing the cluster of spider eggs sitting in their warm stone cradles.

The interface blinked back at him.

[Remote Territorial Inspection Unavailable Outside The Sovereign Realm... Please Return In Person.]

He sighed and swiped it away.

Whatever had hatched or not hatched would have to wait for morning, and he made a mental note to warn the girls to knock before opening any door in the west wing.

’Tomorrow morning I’ll slip through the spatial coordinates and return to Blessed Land,’ he decided. ’Hopefully Thor hasn’t burnt down the brewery while I’ve been gone.’

His thoughts drifted outward.

’I wonder how Aki’s doing.’

However, the next moment, the door opened and Silas looked to it as he blinked.

"Harper, why are you here?"

...

In the Sovereign Realm, the wind that blew across the rolling hills didn’t carry the necrotic chill of the Umbral Basin.

It didn’t reek of rot, petrified bone, or anything at all... Instead the air was crisp and clean, with the sharp invigorating fragrance of crushed wild mint and blooming mountain laurel.

Princess Aki stood at the crest of a low grass-covered knoll, the hem of her loose white traveler’s tunic snapping gently in the breeze.

Her long crystalline lapis-lazuli hair whipped around her shoulders like strands of liquid sapphire, catching the pale golden sunlight of an afternoon sky that looked deceptively peaceful.

This was an Unknown Zone.

In the brutal geography of the Sovereign Realm, an Unknown Zone was a double-edged sword.

It meant her territory was isolated, separated from the established borders of rival lords by hundreds of leagues of untamed wilderness. There were no foreign scouts watching her perimeter and no tax assessors drafting liens against her hall.

And unlike the Umbral Basin, which was choked with twisted lightless black trees and jagged basalt spires, the landscape before her looked almost like a pastoral gift from the gods.

Vast undulating meadows of vibrant emerald grass stretched toward a dense ancient forest of broad-leafed oaks and silver-barked willows.

In the distance, a crystal-clear river cut through the valley floor, sparkling under the golden sun like a ribbon of diamonds yet as Aki looked out from behind the shimmering translucent dome of her territorial barrier, her sapphire eyes were narrow and intensely vigilant.

"What a deceptively terrifying place," Aki murmured softly, shaking her head.

Her senses didn’t lie to her... Scattered throughout the tranquil, sunlit meadows, barely two hundred yards beyond the perimeter line of her barrier, were silhouettes that belonged in a nightmare.

Crouched near the edge of the silver willows was a pack of Iron-Spined Thorn-Stalkers, their twelve-foot quadrupedal bodies covered in thick overlapping plates of dark green chitin that mimicked the forest floor.

Their whip-like tails ended in heavy jagged bone-clubs that twitched with restless mana.

Further down by the riverbank, half-submerged in the crystal water, was a massive six-eyed amphibian behemoth whose leathery back was crowned with jagged basalt coral.

Every beast her eyes tracked carried an aura firmly in the Tier 2 range.

For an unranked novice lord who had initialized her central boundary stone barely forty minutes ago, an ecosystem full of Tier 2 predators at her doorstep was a serious threat.

Aki’s lips curved into a self-satisfied smirk as she flicked open her Lord’s interface to confirm it.

Three acres of territory, one boundary stone, two hundred troop tickets sitting patiently in her inventory, and ten Hero summoning tickets she had been told to spend wisely.

It looked pitifully small written down but it was also hers.

"Haah..."

She thought carefully about her next move.

A reckless lord would crack every ticket at once and starve before the first wave but a careful one would summon a single Hero, let her set the tone of the hall, and build outward from there.

Aki had read about both kinds of lord in the online archives, and she knew which of them was still alive at the end of every account.

’Tier 2 on day one,’ she mused, adjusting the leather bracers on her forearms. ’The Sovereign Realm’s trial algorithms must have calculated my Purple Core’s output... Am I really considered that much of a threat already? I’m almost flattered.’