Chapter 861: Funny Reunion
‘Alright, as promised, you have been reunited with your honeys.’
[Yay!]*3.
‘This next part is all on them and you. I hope you guys won’t be disappointed if your hearts get broken in the process.’
[We won’t!]*3
…
[So…your logic is that it’s easier to get someone to betray others for the sake of love, than say the sake of money?]
‘Kinda? It’s more like…if you indulge a certain desire strong enough, it can trump all other desires.
[Ah… magnitude of want, got it.]
________________________________________
The way the Fourth Young Master said the word, “reunite”, sounded very odd to Victor and his friends.
After all, how could it really be a reunion of they only met the one time?
It’s not like they spent over a decade with each of these unknown living statue women and had felt more fulfilled by their sides than they had by themselves in years.
Well…not in this reality at least.
“Now then, please remain seated as I do my do,” Zhen Liu said as he walked over to the inert puppets.
In(voluntarily/stinctually), Victor, Simos and Graff all felt themselves wanting to lunge forward as Zhen Liu walked his way over to the inert aether puppets, in a manner similar to how one would react with anger at the sight of their loved one being held hostage and about to face some painful form of torture.
It didn’t make sense on any logical level, but then again, nothing about this situation was logical in the slightest.
“Now then, what did I need to do to reawaken my puppetd? Was it just a quick aether infusion or…”
Once Zhen Liu was close enough, the observing trio was certain that he was taking this long on purpose, for the sake of pissing all three of them off.
That or he honestly had forgotten how to activate these puppets outside of combat mode, but they weren’t sure.
“Ah, now I remember.”
Clap-clap
Zhen Liu simply clapped his hands two times, as if he was summoning a servant to come and take away his finished supper.
Once he clapped though, all three inert aether puppets suddenly jolted and twitched in their special designed seats.
After this short twitch though, all three of the puppets began to slowly sit up straight with their eyes closed. It was in this moment though that each of the thieving trio realized that they were sitting right across from one of the statues.
“Here…we…go.”
One by one, the puppets(zakos) opened their eyes, and stared directly into the eyes of the respective men that caused them to develop sentience in the first place.
What followed was…well…let’s say Pygmalion and Galatea weren’t the only people who represented the love between a man and a statue brought to life, anymore.
…
Simos and his rock.
[Nice to see you again, my darling crystal.]
“Y-yeah…same here.”
Tall, muscular and beautiful.
That was Simos’s dream girl.
One could say he liked those traits in a woman because he himself lacked those traits.
Simos was shorter than most, was rather thin and had a face that was so plain that could’ve easily confused him for another person altogether.
However, the type of women who fulfilled these particular criteria of his, were also the type of women who would never give him the time of day. That or he would have to pay those type of women to even have a drink with him.
But now, like a gift from the gods or a test by the devils, his dream girl was sitting right across from him.
Emphasis on the word, “dream”.
In weirdly vivid detail, Simos could remember a whole dream of being married to this girl, living in something called an apartment and raising a child together.
Granted, the girl in the dream was a flesh and blood person like himself, while the girl sitting across from him was clearly made of marble with chiseled and sculpted features.
There was absolutely no way to make this work.
Then again…there were aether poisons designed to turn people into stone and vice versa…maybe it could make a sentient statue into a real person.
Scratch that, did it matter if the rest of the world saw her as real, if he already did?
It may have sounded absurd, but…
…
Graff and his million dollar copper.
[Gold dollar!]
“Copperbottom! No, wait, what?’
Graff liked his women on the bottom heavy side, like a pear or a bell.
And now, lol and behold, a girl built like a literal copper bell was sitting right across him.
Copper…huh.
[Hey, hey. Once we’re out of here, do you wanna go and start that farm?]
‘Farm? What far…wait.’
When Graff was young, he remembered earning his first copper coin.
It was dull as a rock due to age, showed clear signs of being clipped and had been his pay after shovelling shit for a day.
And yet, it was the most valuable coin he had ever gotten…at the time at least.
At that point in his young life, that coin was a reminder that hard work eventually pays off.
Maybe not in the ways he wanted, but it was enough to survive on at least.
As time went on and Graff grew up, came into contact with significantly more money that ha significantly less work involved, that little copper coin became less and less valuable in his eyes.
Even the lesson attached to the coin was lost.
Graff eventually forgot all about that little copper coin and it’s honest origins, opting instead to go on the endless pursuit of silver and gold, regardless of its source.
But…when he had that shared dream with the pretty copper girl sitting across from him,of a life of simple labor and harvest, of a world where his children and their children could live off of a land he cultivated over years and years, he suddenly remembered that first copper piece.
And he realized that maybe there were things in this world, more valuable than silver and gold…
…
Victor and his roots.
“So…you were okay with living in a house made of wood?”
[I mean…you liked having a chair made of bones.]
“Fair.”
[Do you still want to try and reconnect with your old family?]
“I don’t know.”
[Fair.]
Victor wasn’t always a Bloodliner thief on the run.
In fact, decades past, he was once a member of a small yet noble family on the Umbral Spider continent.
Of course, he couldn’t really remember any of that because at around the tender age of eight, his family got more or less wiped off the face of the planet because of a good old fashioned power struggle.
That and his father was caught embezzling and falsifying records, but that was neither here nor there at the moment.
He did find out that he had some distant relations years later, but that was also besides the point.
One refugee passage ship to Stampeding Bison, a lifetime on the streets and the death of a mother from a completely treatable disease later, and Victor went from a child borned to an uncommon bloodline to a theig and fencer with “infinite” pocket space.
For all intents and purposes, Victor was on a one way trajectory of dying in a ditch somewhere because he stole from the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place.
Instead, after stealing the wrong thing from the right person in the wrong place, his life’s trajectory had taken a dramatic turn.
Instead of being an eternal loner, he had a pair of friends who were willing to stick by him.
Instead of being a thief forever on the run, he had decided to quit the criminal life for the life of a porter/informant.
And now, after doing a job he couldn’t refuse, he had been given a glimpse, a chance at a life that was not only significant safer, but more fulfilling than anything else he had uo to his point.
And all of it seems to revolve this woman made of wood, and the life they dreamed together.
One where he continued his delivery and information lifestyle but taken to a grander scale.
One where he could reconnect with a family that he thought was gone and lost forever.
One where he and her this impossible girl who was built finer than even the most comely of escorts, built a life together.
And what was the price for all this?
Pissing off some incredibly scary international underworld organization, and throwing his fate into the hands of a strange young master.
One that he now realized was much nicer than he acted.
…
|Notice: powerful desires have been detected. However, the sources of the desire have already been connected to zakos. As such, desire condensation will not take place, but will be channeled into their respective zakos to facilitate growth.|
‘Huh…that’s a new announcement.’
<=You would've gotten it sooner if you had bestowed a zako on someone before now.=>
‘I thought I did.
