At this point, the sun was starting to set. It had been an extremely busy day for me. I had accomplished so much, but it felt like it wasn’t nearly enough. I had hoped to make it to Chalm today, but I still had a lot that needed to be handled here. Astria was still shaken, and Celeste had only just appeared. I still had to do something with the fort Astria had started to build, as well as the fairy army.
Since Celeste had emerged from the mana spring, its strength had severely declined. Now, it was little more than a sputtering crack of mana, and I had a feeling it wouldn’t survive much longer. In Celeste’s final push of evolution, she had consumed the majority of the remaining mana. It proved that Astria’s actions hadn’t been in vain, and she had succeeded in making Celeste more powerful than before.
The three of us left the area where we had battled and walked toward the castle. As it grew closer, I shot Astria a look. She seemed to wither under my stare.
“I know what Master is thinking. Master is thinking I was building the fairy palace to satisfy my own vanity.”
“And?”
“Master is correct!”
“You admit it?”
“S-sorry! I just felt that if I was going to protect this land, I should rule it from a proper position…” Astria cried. “I was weak!”
That was quite an understatement. This palace was only started, but I could see that it would have been many times larger than my mansion once it was complete. Furthermore, the way it had been positioned, it was being showered with mana, which likely soaked into the building materials and also changed the nature of this palace. Then, there were the fairies that had been fluttering around it, weaving mana into its very seams. It was an incredibly ambitious project, started by an uninhibited dark fairy going all out.
The fairies weren’t in the sky currently. Instead, after having been knocked out of the sky once by me, and then denied flight by the wind fairy Celeste, they had all watched us from a distance. They looked on curiously, but at one point I heard one of the fairies call out.
“It’s him! It’s Mistress’s Master! He’s returned!”
All of the fairies kept their distance, but they all looked on with curiosity and excitement, as well as a certain degree of reverence. All of the bitterness they had shown before had been gone. It seemed like some of the fairies that had evolved were fairies that had known me from months before, and had come to recognize me. At the time, I would have said there were maybe thirty fairies around the fountain, and now I saw close to two hundred, so they had definitely multiplied since I had last seen them, and many of them would have never seen me before. Plus, it hadn’t been long after my body had changed that I left the city of Chalm.
The fairies weren’t the only ones waiting at a distance. The people who had been tasked with building the palace and taking care of the children, Astria’s slaves, had stopped their construction and were now watching us with a bit of hope and confusion. Everyone could see that the once proud and overbearing fairy queen that had bullied the entire district from above was now walking alongside and deferring to two others.
As I looked upon the project that Astria started, I slowly nodded to myself. “I think we should continue to build this palace. It’s in a good spot, and I have a feeling my mansion isn’t going to be large enough eventually.”
With that, I had staked the location of my new home.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from fre𝒆webnove(l).𝐜𝐨𝗺