Chapter 176: Blind Empress...?
"Who are you again?"
The empress’s words were lazy, almost bored — and they stabbed straight into Melissa’s heart, nearly making her trip over her own feet.
"I-I am the elder of the venom tribe," Melissa said, steadying herself both physically and mentally, "the one that requested your aid after winning in the 135th grand feast, empress."
She felt humiliated. Every bone in her body screamed it. But she swallowed it whole and kept her voice level, and the empress responded with nothing more than a soft, non-committal hum.
The blinding light that had been swallowing the empress’s figure slowly began to recede, pulling back into her like a tide returning to the sea.
Aaron stared. He couldn’t help it — he was completely helpless against the impulse, his eyes wide and unblinking as the glow peeled away to reveal her.
An intricately designed black dress came into view first, hugging every curve of her figure as though it had been made with nothing else in mind. Her hair followed — midnight blue and littered with what looked like stars trapped within each strand, cascading down her back in slow, gentle waves, like a calm ocean at the end of a long day. Two straight horns jutted from her forehead, giving her a presence that sat somewhere between divine and deeply, disturbingly dangerous.
Aaron’s gaze naturally drifted upward, searching for her eyes. He had already decided, with some embarrassing certainty, that he was going to get completely lost in them.
Instead, he found a strip of black silk.
It was tied neatly over her eyes, smooth and clean — more like a sleep mask than any kind of intentional fashion, and certainly not what he expected from someone who radiated the kind of power that made the air itself feel heavier.
He blinked. Surely a primordial being — a high race ranked mythical by human standards — wouldn’t be walking around genuinely blind?
He thought of Eva. She had told him plainly that after enough rank and level ups, she’d be capable of regrowing limbs, of pulling someone back from the edge of death with her own two hands. And Eva was barely a footnote in the grand scheme of power.
If she could do that, then what exactly was stopping the empress from healing something as straightforward as blindness?
He shook the thought loose. He was getting sidetracked.
His attention settled back on the empress, and he hated how easily it did.
Her chest was large but not absurdly so — it sat in that specific range that Aaron had always found himself unable to ignore, proportional and entirely impractical to think about in the current situation. And when she shifted her weight slightly, the line of her silhouette told him enough about what the dress was concealing beneath it. The forbidden peach, as his very unhelpful brain chose to label it, was almost certainly worth risking his life over.
Almost.
"Oh."
The empress turned toward Melissa without a trace of awareness that she’d just been studied from head to toe, her lips parting slightly around the small sound. Plump, red, and effortlessly perfect — the kind of lips that made short words land with more weight than they deserved.
Melissa’s tiny legs had finally carried her the rest of the way. She stopped, dropped into a precise ninety-degree bow, and every last trace of her haughty, scheming persona vanished entirely — as if it had been deleted on the spot.
Not suppressed. Gone.
"Well..." The empress raised one hand and let it drift over her mouth, leaning back slightly with the kind of ease that made the gesture look closer to a yawn than anything formal. "Why did you call me?"
Melissa did not care about the laziness. She did not care about the obvious disinterest radiating from every syllable. She raised her finger and aimed it directly at Aaron.
"Empress, that man is ruining my whole tribe! I have already fed him the gold rot poison, but his body is too strong — it would take at least four more days for it to take effect! He would destroy everything by then! Please, save us!"
"..." The empress was quiet for a moment. "You should’ve just given him a fake antidote."
"He would have realized it, your grace." Melissa shook her head. "The gold rot poison is too detectable when it’s still active in the bloodstream. If he didn’t feel it dying out, he would have put the pieces together immediately."
Throughout all of it — the accusations, the scheming laid bare, his own poisoning discussed as casually as the weather — Aaron said nothing.
He kept his gaze fixed on the empress and quietly decided that the trial’s extra condition was starting to seem considerably more worthwhile than it had an hour ago.
It was a shame, really, that they’d had to meet like this.
"Haah..." The empress exhaled slowly, the sound long and genuine. "Remind me not to offer the summoning cauldron in the grand feast from now on. What a drag." She turned toward Aaron.
Even with her eyes hidden beneath the silk, Aaron felt it — that sensation of being looked at. Not just looked at. Studied. Taken apart piece by piece, every layer of him peeled back and catalogued without ceremony.
His instincts lit up all at once, a dam somewhere deep inside him breaking open and flooding everything with that particular brand of discomfort that came from being completely, inescapably seen.
He didn’t move. Didn’t step back.
Partly because he understood, on some animal level, that running wasn’t an option. She was strong enough that the idea of escape didn’t even fully form before it dissolved. But more than that — if running was already pointless, then why waste the energy on it?
He offered a calm bow instead.
"Greetings, Empress of Serenity."
"Hm." She tilted her head slightly, and his instincts gave another sharp tremor. "A human? You shouldn’t be here. This pocket dimension should be inaccessible to outsiders." The last part seemed directed less at him and more at herself, like she was turning the problem over privately.
"I was sent into this world through a class trial, m’lady." Aaron took the opening without hesitation. "My name is Aaron. I come from a world called Solaris."
"A class trial." She considered that. "What grade is the class being upgraded?"
He weighed it briefly — the instinct to be cautious, to keep something back — and then let it go. Holding secrets from a woman who could reduce him to ash on a whim seemed like the least productive use of his energy.
"Currently common," he said. "It’ll be upgraded to mythic, if everything goes well."
"Common to mythic?"
Her tone shifted, just barely — a note of something that could have been surprise colouring the edges of the words. But her face gave away nothing. She looked exactly as she had since the light receded: unhurried, faintly bored, tipping just slightly toward sleep.
Aaron stayed quiet. He couldn’t decide whether to keep explaining — the class, how he’d ended up hunting the venom tribe, everything happening back home — and the silence stretched out between them, not quite comfortable and not quite tense.
He didn’t have to sit in it for long.
The empress snapped her fingers.
The destroyed buildings of the venom tribe lurched back into existence. Crushed walls inflated and re-formed themselves with a low groan, sections that had been kicked across the ground flew back into their original positions as if the last several minutes had simply been rewound. The mushfolks who had been dead — genuinely, completely dead — stood up from where they’d fallen, steady on their feet, as though the concept of dying had been gently walked back and corrected.
It should have looked impossible. It should have felt like something worth reacting to.
Somehow, it only felt appropriate. The bare minimum, for someone like her.
With the city restored, the empress turned her silk-covered gaze back to Melissa.
"All your damages have been dealt with, and this man will not hunt your tribe anymore," she said simply. Then, before Melissa could open her mouth to press further — to angle for something more, to try and have Aaron removed entirely — the empress continued without pause.
"I also noticed an unnatural amount of goldshrooms in your tribe’s vicinity. They are to be returned to the tribes they were stolen from, along with sufficient labour for any reconstruction and assistance those tribes require."
She snapped her fingers a second time.
A brilliant light erupted from her, white and total, swallowing everything in Aaron’s field of vision in an instant. He squeezed his eyes shut on reflex.
When the light faded and Melissa blinked the spots from her vision, the clearing where the empress and Aaron had been standing was simply empty. No footsteps. No disturbance in the ground. Just the restored city around her, and the quiet that comes after something overwhelming has passed.
***
Aaron hit his knees the moment he arrived, coughing hard, one hand braced against the ground as his stomach turned itself inside out. His senses were scrambled, directions meaningless, the nausea arriving fast and brutal like something that had been waiting for the right moment.
Then his nose caught something.
Floral. Soft. The kind of scent that didn’t just smell pleasant — it reached down into him and actively undid the discomfort, pulling it apart thread by thread until he could breathe steadily again. He straightened up on shaking legs and looked ahead.
There she was.
The empress sat in a wooden hammock chair, swaying gently back and forth with the particular ease of someone who had nowhere else to be and no particular interest in pretending otherwise.
A second chair appeared directly beneath Aaron, materialising without ceremony.
"Sit," she said. "I have some questions for you."