Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 850: House Hunting In Valoria City [III / Bonus Chapter]

It rose from the highest terrace of the ridge like it had grown there.

Three stories of pale limestone and dark timber stretched across the plateau in long, graceful terraces, wrapped in wide balconies and walls of tall glass that caught the afternoon sun and threw it back in gold.

Stone paths wound down through manicured lawns, weeping willows and sculpted hedges toward crystal-clear water gardens, where fat orange koi drifted lazily beneath lily pads the size of dinner plates.

...It looked like the kind of place where legends went to retire.

Harper parked on the crushed white gravel of the circular drive, cut the engine and turned to look at Silas.

He hadn’t moved as he was sitting forward in his seat with his palms flat on his knees, staring through the windshield.

”Silas?” she asked softly.

”Yeah,” He said though his voice came out a little rough. ”Yeah. I’m here...”

On the dashboard, Nitocris stood up, stretched luxuriously, and gazed out at the mansion with her violet eyes narrowed in deep consideration.

”This,” she said slowly, ”is the first building I’ve seen in this era that doesn’t make me want to weep, Nyaa~”

Waiting at the foot of the grand front stairs was a poised middle-aged woman in a tailored navy skirt suit with her dark hair pinned up in a neat chignon and a slim glowing tablet held against her forearm.

Harper climbed out first.

Silas followed, with Nitocris bounding up onto his left shoulder and settling her tail around the back of his neck like a scarf.

The woman offered them an elegant measured bow.

”Good afternoon, Miss Whitmore. Master Graves,” she said. Her voice was smooth and free of the desperation of the earlier agents. ”I’m Rosalind Hale, senior director for Celestine Heights Estates... It’s an honor to show you the property.”

Silas looked up at the three-story entrance framed by pillars of polished white stone and felt his throat go dry.

”Thank you,” he managed. ”Lead the way...”

The tall front doors of bronze and frosted glass parted without a sound and opened onto a grand foyer floored in seamless pale marble, faintly veined with silver and warm under their feet.

A suspended spiral staircase curved up along the eastern wall beside a two-story indoor garden full of rare white orchids, and the air smelled faintly of vanilla and clean stone.

”The main residential wings hold twenty-six bedroom suites,” Rosalind began, leading them past the orchids. ”Each has its own private bath, a walk-in wardrobe and individual climate control... The western wing can be used as an independent guest wing or staff quarters, and there’s more than enough room for future household expansion.”

...Twenty-six bedrooms?

Silas followed her through arched hallways, his eyes tracking the flawless woodwork and the soft hum of the climate arrays.

Twenty-six separate suites with each one bigger than his current living room... It felt less like a house and more like a small town that had been folded up and tucked under one roof.

”Twenty-six,” Nitocris mused on his shoulder. ”One for each of your future concubines, Nyaa~.”

Harper tripped over absolutely nothing.

”Nito...!”

”I only state the obvious,” the cat said serenely. ”Twenty-six rooms with one handsome Lord... The mathematics are very simple, Nyaa~”

Rosalind, to her enormous professional credit, didn’t even blink. She simply kept walking down the corridor without breaking stride.

The woman led them up the spiral staircase to the master suite on the top floor, and Silas stopped in the doorway.

’Ah...!’

The bedroom was enormous and full of light.

One whole wall was glass, opening onto a private balcony that looked out over the entire city... A huge bed sat against the far wall under a canopy of pale linen, with a sitting area by a fireplace, and through an archway, he could see a bathroom with a freestanding stone tub big enough for three people and a shower he could have stood in with his arms stretched over his head.

He walked over and looked up at the ceiling and it was still a good fifteen feet away.

”I could do jumping jacks in this shower...” he said.

”Please don’t, Master Graves,” Rosalind said politely. ”The tiles are imported.”

Harper wandered over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, testing the mattress with both hands then she lay back across it with her arms spread wide and her violet hair fanned out over the linen.

”Hubby,” she said to the canopy. ”Come here and check the bed. For research...”

”Harper, the agent is right there.”

”The agent is a professional,” Harper said serenely. ”She’s seen everything.”

Rosalind turned and gazed out the window at the view with the perfect, unseeing calm of a woman who had, in fact, seen everything.

”There’s no ceiling beam to hit your head on,” Harper went on, rolling onto her side to look at him. ”No walls to crawl over and plenty of room.”

”Plenty of room for what?”

Harper’s mouth opened as her face went slowly red from the collar up.

”For... rolling over,” she said weakly. ”In your sleep... Like we discussed, for science of course. I’m just going to research you a bit...”

”...Mm-hm.”

”STOP SAYING MM-HM LIKE THAT.”

On his shoulder, Nitocris let out a long put-upon sigh.

”You two are exhausting,” she said. ”Just throw her on the bed and I’ll wait in the hallway, Nyaa~”

Silas laughed while Harper buried her face in a pillow and screamed into it.

”Beyond the bedrooms,” Rosalind continued smoothly once everyone was back in the hallway, ”the home offers a full range of recreational facilities.”

She waved her hand over a bronze panel, and a pair of pocket doors slid open into the wall.

Inside was a private home cinema with tiered velvet recliners for thirty people, facing a wall-sized mana-crystal screen.

Next to the cinema, a long sunny room lined with windows opened onto a small terrace, and the whole floor was striped with warm afternoon light.

Nitocris took one look at it, leaped off Silas’s shoulder, walked straight into the brightest patch of sunlight on the floor and lay down in it.

”This one is mine,” she announced, eyes already closing. ”I claim this room in the name of the Khemet Dominion. Leave me here, Nyaa~.”

”...We’re still touring.”

”Then tour without me... I’ve found my throne room, Nyaa~.”

Silas scooped her back up anyway, to her loud and lengthy disgust.

Across the hall was a full gym with gravity-weighted machines, free weights of dense spirit-steel and a pair of recovery ice baths.

Next to the gym was a two-story library lined floor to ceiling with walnut shelves, complete with a rolling brass ladder and a green soapstone fireplace.

”And for evenings,” Rosalind smiled, touching another panel that revealed a lounge with plush leather seating, a softly glowing amber bar, and beyond it, a fully soundproofed karaoke room with a stage and its own lighting rig. ”Completely soundproofed... You could hold a brass band recital in here at three in the morning without waking a soul upstairs.”

”A karaoke room,” Silas echoed with a slightly dazed laugh. ”Kaede and Penelope would scream into those microphones every weekend until they lost their voices...”

”And Lia would sing harmony in the corner and pretend she wasn’t having fun,” Harper added.

She was walking beside him with her hands clasped behind her back, and her violet eyes were fixed on his face, quietly watching every one of his reactions with deep satisfaction.

”I’ll be singing,” Nitocris announced. ”I was famous for my voice... Ten thousand soldiers wept when I sang, Nyaa~.”

”Were they weeping in a good way though? What if they were disgusted?”

”How dare you, Nyaa~”

They went down a wide flight of stairs to the lower terrace, into a huge glass pavilion paved in warm sandstone.

Stretched out before them was a heated indoor swimming pool, its water glowing soft blue from lights set beneath the surface.

Glass walls slid open onto a stone terrace outside, where an outdoor infinity pool seemed to pour straight off the edge of the ridge into the sky above the city.

Tucked into the corner was a cedar sauna lined with dark volcanic stone, and beside it, a steam room that smelled of eucalyptus.

Harper leaned over and murmured into Silas’s ear, just loud enough for him alone.

”I’ve got a new swimsuit, by the way. It’s violet...”

Silas let his eyes slide over to her looking slow and appreciative.

”I’ll need to see it before I believe it...” he said.

Harper’s cheeks went pink.

”I thought you’d say that, pervert... You’re just trying to see me in a bikini, huh?”

But it was the heavy, reinforced steel door at the end of the lower hallway that stopped him dead.

Rosalind keyed in an access code, and the four-inch-thick door rolled aside with a deep, echoing hiss.

PSSSSSHHH!

”The private combat facility,” she said, stepping back.

It was an enormous underground training chamber, eighty feet across and thirty feet high, reinforced with layers of shock plating and floored with tiles etched in dense glowing stabilization runes.

The air inside hummed as it was sealed off from the rest of the city by its own dampening fields.

”It was built specifically to high-tier Lord specifications,” Rosalind explained. ”The reinforcement arrays can withstand heavy impacts, high-voltage elemental discharges and dense mana spikes... You could spar at full strength without leaving a hairline crack in the foundations above.”

Silas walked slowly into the middle of the chamber with his footsteps echoed off the dense floor.

He looked up at the runes pulsing along the ceiling beams and felt the rock-solid stability of the shielding all around him.

In his apartment, he always kept his aura pressed down tight so that a careless flare of his Mythic Gold Core wouldn’t blow out the plumbing or crack the plaster but here, he could train at full strength...

He could spar until the stone smoked, huh?

Harper came to stand beside him.

”Imagine sparring in here,” she said softly. ”No holding back and no pulled punches...”

”You’d lose,” Silas said.

”That obvious, I’d make you work for it though as I’m not going down as easily as Sera did...” Harper shot back. ”And then afterward, there’s a sauna right down the hall.”

Silas looked at her and she looked very innocently at the runes.

From there, they went back up to the main floor and through the kitchen, and if the rest of the house had stunned him, the kitchen nearly finished him off.

It was huge and full of light, with honed stone countertops, two big central islands with built-in warming zones and cabinetry in warm cherry wood.

Cold-storage vaults lined one wall beside a pair of brass ranges and a stone wood-fired oven for baking bread, and a little glass-roofed alcove full of growing herbs drank in the afternoon sun.

...There was enough pantry space to feed an army for six months.

Silas stood in front of the main island and lightly brushed his fingertips across the cool flawless stone.

”Martha would cry,” he said softly. ”She’d take one look at this kitchen, drop her apron on the floor and cry for an hour then she’d throw everyone out and bake twelve pies.”

”And she’d deserve to,” Harper murmured, leaning her shoulder against his arm. ”Think about how happy she’ll be, waking up to this every morning...”

Finally, Rosalind led them around the eastern wing to a private underground garage with polished floors, recessed lighting and enough space to comfortably park twelve cars.

”Twelve,” Harper said, sounding pleased. ”I have four... That leaves you eight.”

”...I have one with Martha having the one you bought for her.”

”For now, handsome.”

”Just don’t buy really expensive cars...” Silas sighed, ”You’re going to increase my blood pressure, a car just needs to take you from Point A to B... Why the supercars?”

They stepped back out onto the gravel drive as the afternoon sun was warm on their faces, and the whole city glittered far below.

Silas walked to the edge of the lawn and looked out.

From up here, he could see the whole of Valoria spread beneath him, the towers of the city center, the river winding through it like a silver thread, the rooftops of Silverleaf small and neat in the distance.

Just below the far side of the ridge, through a gap in the trees, he could make out the pale stone spires and green playing fields of Valoria Academy.

He could see the path, too... A narrow trail of pale gravel winding down through the maples, golden and red, all the way to the Academy’s back gate.

He pictured Lia walking down it in the mornings with her bag bouncing on her back, kicking through the fallen leaves, with Kaede and Penelope beside her and his chest warmed.

’This is really good... a bit extra but I like.’

Harper came to stand beside him however she didn’t say anything... She just slipped her hand into his again and looked out at the city with him.

Nitocris, on his shoulder, was quiet too, for once.

Behind them, Rosalind cleared her throat politely, and they turned around.

She was holding her tablet level against her chest with a calm professional smile.

”The estate sits on just over four private acres, protected by Class-A ward arrays, with round-the-clock security and its own emergency leylines,” she said. ”The full price, fully furnished and including all deeds and land rights, is one hundred and fifty million Spirit Credits.”

The number hung in the air like a dropped anvil.

...One hundred and fifty million.