Chapter 292 – Re: Align

Day 33 

"Are you okay? *Sniff* You smell like sex." Riana said, running her hand down his chest to his waist.

"Yeah... just... a little tired." He replied, stifling a yawn. He was feeling as run-through as he had when he had given Shizuka the Substance X ball a long time ago.

The eight of them had torn apart the bath area last night, the seven women valiantly attempting to sate his lust. It wasn't a fair fight, since they had a full team to cycle through while he was alone, but he persevered. By the end, he had left seven very content-looking women collapsed on the floor in various states of lethargy, and Little John had finally stopped being hard as a rock. With the aid of the guards, he carried each of them to bed, then collapsed on a couch in the theatre, watching some nature documentary narrated by that British guy, which put him to sleep immediately. 

He awoke to Aqua and Riana cuddled into his sides, a blanket laid over them. They were chatting quietly about this mana spring they had been making, so he allowed his mind to slowly wake up while he enjoyed the cuddles. He was happy and content. Despite being in an Ogre's body, he felt he could live out his days here in peace, loving those around him and being loved in return.

It was a good life.

That was when Riana noticed he was awake and jumped up to kiss him. Aqua followed soon after, kissing his cheek, though he had no idea why she was so eager about it. Still, when two of the most beautiful women he had ever met kissed him, it wouldn't do to not kiss them back.

A good life.

"Can you come out to my tree this morning? I need your help finishing my mana pool." Riana asked, not seeming to care that he was covered in the odour of other women right now. 

"My help? Sure, though I don't know what I can do for you."

"You just need to feed me more of your energy, though if you're too tired from last night, we can wait a bit. I'm just excited to see if it will work!" She replied, looking up at him with those beautiful green eyes of hers. 

"Please, Rou. I want to see if it works too." Aqua added, her aquamarine eyes shining brightly in the dimly lit room. She seemed no less excited than Riana was.

"Since you both asked so nicely, why wouldn't I? Just let me get cleaned up and some food into me, then we can go." 

With that, he returned to their room and used the ensuite shower, put his loincloth back on, and moved down to the kitchen for a bite to eat. It was sometime near noon, and the provisioner and the two new cooks, the beautiful blonde twins Felicia and Alma (At least, he thought those were their names) were working on making meals for everyone in the village. 

After begging for some toast and a coffee, and nearly being chased out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon for sampling the soup they were making, he made his way outside to the back of the mansion where Riana's tree was. At least he thought it was her tree; it no longer looked anything like the tree the storeroom used to be in and where the women were held captive. 

Towering well over a hundred feet tall, the nearly dead tree now looked healthy, with a new layer of bark and ivy climbing its exposed roots up to the lowest branches, the vines covered in white and blue blooms. The mouth of the cave, once foreboding, now looked warm and inviting to enter, with a slight blue glow emanating from within.

He stepped into an oasis of green vines covered in a variety of flowers, with no hint of the jumbled stores that had been here before. There was a shallow pool in the centre of the room with a few dozen lily pads floating on it, running all the way to the back where the dungeon had been, which was the source of the blue glow.  

"Riana? Sui? Are you here?" He said, looking around for the two women. 

"In the back! Just wade through the water." He heard Sui call out.

Shrugging, he stepped into the pool, which was about knee-deep for him, and walked to the back. Upon entering, he paused, taking in the magic sight in front of him. Once a prison, the room was now mostly an oval pool, with a narrow stone walkway around its edges and more vines covering the walls, bearing large glowing blue flowers with bright purple stamens at their centres. At the back of the cave was a larger pile of stones that made an elevated area with another hole inside of it. Aqua and Riana were standing beside it, with the latter casting some sort of spell while the former watched what she was doing. 

"This place looks incredible. So what am I seeing here?" He asked, wading his way through the ever deeper water before climbing out and standing beside them. 

"The foundations of a pool of healing. Once we finish it, we should be able to heal just about anything that touches these waters." Aqua said, not turning her attention away from what Riana was casting. "There were other options, but I know you wanted to turn this village into a place people could come and heal their wounds and recover from traumas, so I've been using what divinity is left in me to guide Riana into casting the spells required to make the mana pool into what you wanted."

She turned away from the spell for a moment and looked up at him with a pleading look in her eyes. "I hope... you are okay with that. I know you are like me in some ways, that you want to see people healed and don't want to see needless suffering happen to others. With everything else that's been happening with the village, it felt like we were losing track of what you wanted to do here, so I took the liberty of setting this up like this. Please... don't be angry with me."

He cupped the side of her face with his hand and smiled down at her. "This is exactly what I wanted. Thank you for remembering that, Sui." He leaned down to kiss her cheek, but she turned her head so their lips met. She didn't back away, and they held the chaste kiss for a few moments before he pulled back a little and rested his forehead on hers. "You're full of surprises this morning, darlin'."

"I know what it meant to you, to be more than the monster this world was making you, making us. I can't remember everything, but I remember that. I... I love you, Rou." She said, sliding forward and hugging his frame.

"I love you too." He replied, wrapping his arm around the former goddess and holding her close. He expected her to say something soon, but he hadn't expected her to be part of creating what sounded like a fountain of life to show him how she felt about him. 

They held each other silently beside the glowing blue waters while Riana chanted away, forming intricate patterns of magic that seemed somewhat familiar to him, yet far beyond his current understanding of how magic worked. Aqua would correct the Dryad from time to time, sometimes feeding her own magic into the glowing patterns to adjust something, but she never let go of him.

He could never understand how she could recall these things, yet forget other things within a day or two. He had a sneaky suspicion that she didn't remember her actual name most days, or the time they had spent together in her world, not that he was going to ask. He knew she was doing her best with the poor stats she had, and responded well to positive reinforcement.

After some time had passed, Riana opened her eyes and looked over at them. "I think it's ready."

"Ready for what?"

"Your energy."

"Okay, how is this going to work... did you want to have sex right here?"

"I do, but not right now. So... think of your energy like the sun, and I'm a plant. You're going to funnel as much of it into me as you can, and I'll convert it into the mana needed to start this thing. Once it's going, it will continue to draw in mana from the surroundings naturally, pouring its excess through this spout into the pool below. After a few days, the waters should be infused with enough mana that we can use it to heal people or for a variety of other things."

"We could even bottle it and make very effective healing potions. And... we might be able to return your arm to you, though that will take a higher dose of the liquid than a bottle." Aqua added.

"You can grow limbs back?"

"We should be able to, though it will take a bath in the waters to make it happen, and possibly another infusion from your Ki. I was hoping we could grow Mi's arm back too. She has been struggling so hard to be useful with just the one limb; she doesn't have the same powers that you do to overcome the lack."

"I noticed she has spent a significant amount of time in the library. Though you're right, and I think she needs it more than I do." He replied, trying hard not to get excited about possibly finding a way to replace his missing arm. He turned back to Riana. "So you want me to feed you my ki through my hand?"

"Whenever you're ready. This will take some time, but it shouldn't make you any more tired than when you made love to me that first night."

"And this won't harm our children in any way?" 

"No. They will be fine. You have fed me so much recently, it's almost been too much for me to handle. There is a reason we started to build this pool way sooner than I expected. I needed to put the energy somewhere."

"Well, let's get started then." He replied, placing his hand on her bare shoulder. She grasped it then slid it over so he was gripping her neck.

"Feed it right into my spine; I should be able to funnel it better that way. Just don't squeeze too tightly. We aren't playing around right now." She said, sticking her tongue out at him for a moment before she started to cast a spell.

He just shook his head and pushed his Ki down his arm and into her body. The flower covering her head started to glow with blue, silver, and gold motes of energy billowing out of its centre. Aqua returned to watching the process, telling Riana where to channel her powers as certain portions of the matrix in the hole were apparently ready for the next stage. All he could see were glowing runes along the walls, so he turned his Truesight on to see if he could get further information. 

It was like watching a waterfall of power: pure energy left Riana, hit the spells, and made them spin like gears. There had to be several dozen gears of magic within the well, if not hundreds, all slowly beginning to spin up as the power coated them. It was as mesmerizing as it was beautiful to watch, and time seemed to slip away from him as the energies cascaded downward into the hole.

He had no idea how much time had passed, or how any of that had worked, but sometime later, a hand clasped his wrist and pulled him away from Riana. He blinked a few times, shutting the Truesight off. In front of him was an impossibly deep pool of blue mana, the little overflow spout pouring the excess directly into the pool below. 

"Did it work?" He asked, then quickly grabbed Riana as she started to collapse.

"It did, my Sun." She said, giggling happily in his arm. "Thank you so much. This was something only a handful of Dorians have been able to accomplish, and I couldn't have done it without you. Both of you." She said, spreading her arms to add Aqua into their embrace, who eagerly accepted it.

"I was just a battery; you both deserve the credit. I'm still trying to figure out what everything was doing in the matrix of magic you created."

"It was mostly you; I just corrected a few things I'm sure you would have figured out soon enough," Aqua added, hugging the Dryad.

"You two make interesting mates; neither of you is willing to accept credit when you obviously both helped me significantly."

"Mates?" He and Aqua said at the same time.

"You're not? Then why did you have his seed all over your body when we went to sleep last night?" She asked Aqua.

"Huh? What is she talking about?" John asked, confused. 

"Hah... well... I was the one under the table last night," She said, laughing nervously. 

"What?"

"Umm...Surprise!" She said, her cheek turning rosy red even in the blue light given off by the well.

He just shook his head and embraced them both as best he could, watching the mana run out of the fountain into the waiting pool below.

It's a good life.