Chapter 528: New World—3
Leon was about to leave — had already formed the intention of teleporting to find Seraphine and share the news — when something pulled his attention back.
Before he could even frame the question about the dungeon location, a thread of information arrived directly in his mind. Not words exactly — an image, precise and clear, the location of the forming dungeon mapped into his awareness as if he’d been there himself. Xyra’s doing, obviously, her voice accompanying it briefly.
This is where it is.
Leon stood with the image in his mind for a moment, genuinely surprised by the delivery method. Voice transmission he could do himself — he’d copied the technique from the Kirin. But projecting a spatial image directly into someone else’s mind was different, more precise, and he filed it away as something worth learning from her later.
He turned toward her with a slight smile.
"Xyra." He meant the next part sincerely. "Thank you. For all of this. I genuinely appreciate everything you’ve done."
He meant it more completely than the words conveyed. The world fragment merger, the eight days of sustained focus, the physical manifestation she now wore, the rank three outcome, the dungeon forming — all of it connected back to her work and her capability. He’d been thinking of her as his lucky charm recently, and the thought felt accurate. Since he’d met her, things had been going remarkably well by any reasonable measure.
He glanced at Loriel to signal they were leaving.
Loriel was already gone.
He blinked at the empty space where she’d been standing, then decided she’d simply teleported back on her own, which was completely plausible, and turned to follow.
Xyra’s voice stopped him.
"You can’t just leave like this, Leon."
Something in the register was different from her usual tone — quieter, with an edge he couldn’t immediately categorize. He turned back.
"I’ve done a good job." She was looking at him steadily. "Eight days. I sacrificed eight days of complete focus. I deserve a reward, don’t I?" A pause, and her voice dropped slightly. "You don’t think I’m just a tool?"
The last question landed differently from the rest.
Leon looked at her face — the slight sadness on it, the particular quality of someone who was genuinely asking rather than performing — and felt the honest pull of someone who owed a debt and knew it.
She’s right, he thought simply. She earned something.
The problem was that he had no idea what to give her. Not from reluctance — from the genuine difficulty of identifying what would mean something to a being of her depth and age. His entire inventory, his causality reserves, his accumulated treasures — set against what she was and what she’d experienced, nothing obvious presented itself as adequate.
He was about to ask her directly — name what she wanted, and he’d provide it if he could — when she spoke again, softer, her gaze angled slightly away.
"I won’t ask for much. Don’t worry."
Then his vision blurred.
The spatial element moved around him from the outside — he recognized the signature of teleportation being applied to him rather than by him, which was a disorienting sensation. He reached instinctively for his mana and found nothing accessible. Holy energy similarly unavailable. Not blocked aggressively — simply set aside, the way you’d move something fragile out of a path, gently and without particular effort.
He didn’t fight it. The contract between them was clear. She couldn’t harm him or anyone close to him. Whatever this was, it wasn’t that.
He let himself be moved.
They arrived together in a room he’d had no awareness of existing, which itself surprised him — his spatial sense covered his entire dimensional world continuously, and he’d never detected this space. She’d built it somewhere his passive awareness hadn’t reached. Just behind the tower, he realized now, the back face of it that he’d never had cause to examine.
The room was large. Not room-sized — the part he’d arrived in was only a fraction of a considerably larger connected space that his awareness now mapped beyond the immediate walls. The color throughout was deep red: upholstery on furniture that understood what luxury meant and had no interest in moderation, paintings carrying the same color through the walls, rugs with red threading that felt like they’d been chosen by someone with very specific aesthetic convictions.
A king-sized bed occupied the center with the settled authority of furniture that had never questioned its own importance.
Xyra was seated on one of the sofas — legs crossed, posture easy, watching him with the composed directness that was simply how she looked at things.
Leon stood and took the room in. Then looked at her.
She cleared her throat.
"Just show it to me for a while," she said. "I wouldn’t mind that."
Leon’s processing paused. "Show what?"
Her voice dropped a register. Her face remained completely composed, giving away nothing about whatever was happening behind it.
"Undress."
The word arrived into the silence and sat there.
Leon went still.
I heard that correctly, he thought. That is definitely what she said.
But the distance between hearing it correctly and fully believing it was large enough that he found himself asking anyway, because the alternative was simply accepting that this was happening without verification.
"What did you say just now, Xyra?"
She made a brief sound of mild displeasure — someone who had found saying it once difficult enough and did not welcome the request for a repeat performance.
"Take off your clothes." Her tone was entirely matter-of-fact, the tone of someone explaining something self-evident to a person who should already understand it. "That’s what undress means."
Leon looked at her.
She looked back at him with the patient composure of someone who had made a request and was waiting to see what happened next.
The shock settled in fully — not the dramatic kind, not the kind that produced visible reaction, just the quiet internal variety where the mind encountered something it hadn’t prepared for and needed a moment to construct a response. He’d braced for something unusual when she’d said she had a reward in mind. His bracing had not produced this particular scenario.
He was standing in front of the most powerful being he’d ever encountered across two lifetimes of existence, in a secret red room she’d built behind his tower, and she had asked him to take his clothes off so she could look at him.
Several seconds passed.
His mouth opened.
Then closed.
He looked at the room again — at the deliberate luxury of it, the red sofa she was sitting on, the bed in the center, the space she’d clearly spent real thought constructing — and then back at her, sitting there with absolute composure, watching him process.
"You’re serious," he said.
It wasn’t really a question. He could read her well enough by now to know she wasn’t performing anything. The slight hoarseness in her voice when she’d said it the second time, the way she’d angled her gaze briefly before clarifying — those were the only signs that the request had cost her anything to make.
She was completely serious.
Xyra held his gaze and said nothing, which was itself an answer.
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