Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1809: Melting Iceberg

Quinlan stepped into the lamplight. ”I need a brew that has never been brewed. The recipe doesn’t exist, and it might not be possible at all. I just have a hunch.”

”A hunch, you say,” Gideon spoke up, adjusting his monocle. He was already as invested as can be.

”What’s the base?” Naomi asked.

Quinlan raised his hand. Wind gathered at his fingertip, thinned to an edge no eye could follow, and opened a clean line across his own palm.

Blood welled up, catching the lamplight.

It was a shade of crimson that had no business in a living body, deep and dark, somehow heavier than the light falling on it. Every alchemical instinct in the room leaned toward it at once, the way compass needles lean north.

”My blood.”

Nobody spoke. Somewhere on the bench, a burner hissed softly under a cauldron.

Gideon’s voice had gone reverent and clipped at once. ”A brew from primordial blood. Purpose?”

A pocket ring flashed, and between Quinlan’s raised fingers, catching the lamplight, sat a single pearl-white pill.

”To replace this little thing.”

Both parents’ eyes lit up in the same instant. Gideon crossed half the workroom in three steps, monocle first. Naomi didn’t move at all, but her eyes had gone bright enough to read by.

”[Blessed Seed Pill],” Gideon breathed. ”Aurora’s concentrate.”

Naomi’s stillness finally broke. ”The unaging pill,” she said, and reverence sat plain in it. ”Aurora’s masterwork.”

”The very pill she has never once needed for herself, of course,” Gideon added with scholarly precision, ”given her standing access to the source material in its fresh, unrefined-”

”DAD!”

Aurora had achieved a shade of red no reagent on the shelves could reproduce.

”He means we’re proud of you, sweetheart,” Naomi translated.

Quinlan rolled the pearl once across his knuckles, then closed his fist, and it vanished back into the ring. ”I need what it does, without the [Blessed Seed] being its ingredient, replaced by my blood. Or whatever else you theorize could make it work. All that matters is that it has to hold a dying man’s age where it stands.”

Behind the king’s eyes, the whole night reassembled itself one door at a time.

The refusal of the pill. Try something else. The midnight gate, the zero answers, the town, the inn, the theater of it all, and at the end of the corridor, this: a workroom, three alchemists, and the man he spent months hunting opening his own veins to keep him alive.

”You...” the king said quietly. ”Will you really go that far?”

”Felicity would be sad.” Quinlan grinned.

”You don’t want to watch your only friend die,” Aurora corrected, smiling softly at her lover. ”Why make such a weak excuse?”

”Nonsense, I care for Felicity’s happiness.” Quinlan denied instantly, prompting his platinum-haired lover to smile even brighter. ”And he promised to help me conquer Iskaris and what’s beyond. I’m protecting my investment.”

”Mhm,” Aurora nodded along. ”Sure.”

Naomi Lorien, however, entered professional mode while looking at the blood dripping from his hand. She asked the only question that mattered.

”How much can you give?”

”How much do you need?”

...

The answer took the three Loriens half a notebook, one shouted argument about reduction ratios, and two ruined test batches to produce, and when it finally came, Naomi delivered it.

”All of it. Every drop your body can spare without dying, distilled to essence. And if the essence collapses in the heat, we start over, so best assume this won’t just be an hour-long ordeal.”

”Alright,” said Quinlan.

He settled onto a stool beside the largest cauldron, held his arm over the copper, and gave.

The first problem announced itself within minutes: his own body fought him. His high Vitality tried to seal the shallow cut, so he cut again, and again, wind parting flesh every few minutes.

For a while he kept up his usual commentary, rating Aurora’s stirring form together with Gideon while asking how Iris felt about giving him a shoulder massage.

”Would that help?” The response greatly surprised Quinlan. But he wasn’t called an opportunistic scumbag for nothing.

”It’d mean the world to me.”

”...” Iris studied his face for a long second, her mouth a flat line. Then she stepped up behind him and, with amateur motions, squeezed.

”What a pleasant surprise...” Quinlan muttered, leaning back against her.

But within an hour of constant bloodletting, the commentary grew shorter. Then it stopped altogether, and the workroom belonged to the hiss of burners, the scratch of Aurora’s pen, and the slow ring of blood on copper.

The color left him by degrees.

His lips went grey ahead of his face, a tremor moved into his forearm and had to be pinned in place by will alone, and sweat beaded at his temples in a room not nearly warm enough to explain it.

Aurora’s pen had stopped. ”Quin, please speak up when you need a break. This is not the time to be cool.”

”I understand.” The grin made it about halfway up his face. ”But it’s okay.”

”[Awaken].”

Two of his Elite souls stepped out of ghostly pale flame, healers in life, robes and unhurried calm intact in death.

They took station on either side of his stool without being told a thing, and soft light sank into his shoulders and chest, coaxing his body to keep pace with the cauldron’s appetite. It helped, though nothing about it came close to painless.

Neither soul asked Iris to move. They settled in around her hands as though their orders had included her from the start, and she understood, without a single word said out loud, that they had.

The ease of it bothered her. She was reading him through his summons now, through nothing but the way two dead healers chose to stand, and it had taken her no effort at all. Since when? Since when did she understand this bastard better than she understood most living people?

She found no answer she liked, so she kept kneading, amateur grip and all.

On the benches, the three alchemists had stopped being three separate people. Aurora called temperatures and timing windows without looking up, Gideon’s hands were already moving before her sentences ended, and Naomi folded the reductions together in figure-eight strokes that never broke rhythm. Vials passed between them blind and never collided.

The man under Iris’s hands had broken armies and cowed kings, but none of that power was worth anything on this stool.

This was a fight with no enemy to hit, a battle of sitting still while his strength drained out of him drop by drop. Hour after hour, grinning through grey lips, for the sake of one old man’s tomorrow.

Iris watched him do it, and for a rare, unguarded moment, her expression was unrecognizable.

And by the door, the King of Vraven stood witness to the strangest sight of his reign.

There the creature sat. The monster he had hunted across a continent, holding his own wounds open, emptying himself into a cauldron so that one old man could stay on his feet long enough to matter.

The tightness that had been climbing the king’s throat for hours finally demanded motion, and Alexios pushed off the wall.

”Villain.” It came out rough.

”What, you got bored?”

”...No. I’ll initiate the Ravenclaw investigation. Open your gate and let me repay a fraction of this by working instead of watching. Whenever you need me back, just let me know.”

Quinlan held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, and two fingers of his free hand flicked sideways. A [Warp Gate] unfolded against the workshop wall, its edges a touch less crisp than usual, and nobody was unkind enough to mention it.

Alexios squared his hood and stepped through.

”Iris. Why don’t you go with him?”

”...” Her hands stopped on his shoulders. ”What do you mean?”

”Have him name you a secret agent. Or whatever he thinks will work best.” The grin he aimed at her was pale but entirely his own. ”Have the investigation answer to you. Lead it yourself.”

Iris didn’t respond right away. She had gone very quiet.

He was placing the entire machinery of a kingdom underneath her revenge and stepping out of her way, exactly as she had demanded it in that freezing cellar. Hers, top to bottom, with nobody deciding a single thing over her head ever again.

She looked down at him for a long moment, the ridiculous man under her hands with bloodless lips and dead healers at his sides, still bleeding, still grinning like tonight was a holiday.

”What about the massage...?” Iris asked with a tone she didn’t quite recognize.

”It was wonderful. Truly wonderful,” Quinlan smiled. ”Perhaps you can finish it another day?”

”...I’ve been at it for hours. How greedy can you be?”

”Well-”

Before he could reply, she leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to the top of his head.

For once, she was taller than he was. The Child of Reckoning seemed to have made good use of that.

”...Maybe this’ll help you,” she muttered, and was through the gate before anyone could see her face.

The gate winked shut behind them.

Quinlan sat very still. His free hand rose, slowly, to the exact spot. ”I’ll be damned... Iris...”

”The ice wall is melting~” Aurora giggled.

”Focus, you two.” Naomi didn’t look up from her stirring. ”Young man, you still owe this copper a few more hours of you. Young lady, break time hasn’t arrived yet.”

”I know,” the duo spoke together in perfect sync.

The night wore on. The cauldron drank, the burners hissed, and Quinlan’s grin grew quieter by the hour, held up by stubbornness and soft necromantic light.

He was fine.

There was, however, one detail the plan had not accounted for.