Chapter 194: No More Fish In The Sea?
Chapter 194: No More Fish In The Sea?
The shore of the Secret Realm was dead silent, save for the crackle of localized lightning. Both Frigg and Sara stood frozen, their eyes wide with sheer, unadulterated shock. Before them towered the massive, shadow-wreathed form of the Sky King. In my hand, Neptune’s Trident hummed with ancient power, arc-lightning dancing across its prongs and casting a sharp glow over my smirking face.
"Queen Blue," I said, leaning on the artifact as if it were a casual walking cane, "do I look more handsome to you now?"
She started to nod automatically, a flush creeping up her neck, before she vigorously shook her head to clear her thoughts. "You are always handsome as Loki Sky, my King Neptune. But yes... I can feel it in my very core. You are the true sovereign of the seas now. Your status is higher than mine."
Amused, I turned my gaze toward Frigg. "Frigg, dear? How about you? Do I look more handsome like this?"
She crossed her arms, tilting her chin upward in that stern, stubbornly loving way of hers. "If you haven't reached the 7th Circle as a Summoner, then you're just uglier. Humph."
It was a perfectly comical moment. The great, terrifying Sky King and I looked at one another at the exact same time. My pride had taken a direct hit right in front of my newest beast summon.
"Pfft—okay," Queen Blue muttered, clearing her throat to save face. "This trial was faster than I thought it would be. Let’s return on this legendary Sky Soaring Ray you found. We have to let all of Atlantis meet their new ruler."
The Sky King—which was its new official name—lowered its massive, dark head, allowing the two women to climb aboard with me. Nearby, Sara's personal mount, a timid white ray, flew back into the safety of the upper clouds. It was a rare sight on land, but when the Mermaid Kingdom went to war, they rode scores of those albino rays into battle, dark shapes cutting through either the deep ocean trenches or the open sky.
As Queen Blue reached for her royal artifact to open the boundary and let us pass, I held up a hand to stop her. Pointing Neptune's Trident toward the heavy portal, I waved it with dramatic flair. Just like the Myst side could see the sunny sky of this realm, the illusion peeled back. We could now see the lower city of Myst directly through the rift.
"I’ve got this," I said, offering her a reassuring smile. "And from now on, Queen Blue, you have permanent access to this realm—even if you eventually pass the crown to the next Mermaid Queen. Now, shall we go greet our subjects as husband and wife?"
With a powerful tilt of its wings, the Sky King dove down into the colossal portal. We transitioned seamlessly, flying directly out into the skies of Myst.
Down below, the city ground to a halt. Thousands of eyes looked up at the colossal, midnight-black Sky Ray—a creature none of them had ever seen.
The sight was overwhelmingly intense for the mermaids. Their bodies suddenly trembled, falling to their knees as they witnessed me holding both the legendary, otherworldly trident and their beautiful queen wrapped in my arms, standing tall upon the crown of a magnificent monster.
What I didn't realize at that moment was the hidden mechanism of the artifact. When Neptune’s Trident fully bonded with my soul, it tapped into a massive, dormant reservoir. The divine pool of faith, collected over thousands of years as the myth of the Sea God spread from generation to generation, flooded into my system. Suddenly, I was hit with a heavy dose of a Ruler’s Pride. It forced me to stand taller, flaunting my rightful possession over everything beneath the waves. Without consciously registering the shift, I had just absorbed a distinct portion of a Sea God’s portfolio, embedding it directly into my overall growing Fertility and Drink godhood.
The Sky King, acting like an excited child on its very first maiden voyage after slumbering for millennia inside the trident, took three full, sweeping laps around Atlantis. It put on a spectacular show before finally lowering itself toward the city center to let us disembark.
Queen Blue, still cradled tightly against my chest, looked up. She saw me smiling and waving to the vast sea of beautiful women, but her hand caught the sudden tremor in my forearm. My lip was twitching in sheer anguish.
"My Sea King," she whispered, her brow furrowing with worry. "What is wrong?"
"Damnit," I hissed back under my breath, gritting my teeth. "Too many prayers are flooding me as King Neptune all at once. I can't think straight."
Fucking fantastic. It wasn't enough that I already had to parse and receive the prayers, wishes, and thoughts directed at both Loki Sky and Hao Hun.
Now, as King Neptune, the mental noise was deafening. My brain felt like it was splitting open. Unless I was the literal reincarnation of the original Neptune and just didn't know it, I had completely stripped the previous deity of his godly domain—at least the specific domain tying him to the Mermaid race.
Standing beside me, Sara grew spooked. I was in so much obvious pain that a slip of my raw divinity leaked into the air. Terrified and awed, she immediately closed her eyes and began to pray fervently to her new King Neptune. It added yet another loud, echoing voice inside my skull that I had to manually parse...
Two weeks later, inside the cracking, dying Heaven Secret Realm...
"Ahh~! Make it stop!"
Up in the pastel, ethereal clouds, thousands of floating islands spread across the magnificent, air-element plane. The sound of a human screaming in agony on the grass was no longer a surprise to the three women gently patting his back.
A few feet away, Fenrir took one look at the thrashing Owen, rolled his glowing yellow eyes, and laid his massive head back down by the warmth of the campfire.
Princess Nut, the beautiful, petite Dwarven woman, sat closest to him. She had been rescued by King Owen right before a vicious Cloud Beast could tear her apart. In the aftermath, consumed by guilt, she had confessed everything to him—her betrayal, her kingdom's plans, all of it. But Owen, understanding the impossible position she had been put in, never blamed her. Instead, he had only held her tighter.
Naturally, that display of pure chivalry made Princess Nut fall drastically deeper in love with the man she had technically wronged. She had promised to stay by his side forever, completely abandoning her underground kingdom to wander the realms with him. What neither Princess Nut nor Owen knew was her true origin: this fierce Dwarf woman was the literal reincarnation of Ratatoskr, the mythological squirrel who once ran up and down the trunk of the world tree, Yggdrasil.
But Owen’s current nightmare hadn't been caused by beasts or betrayals. It had started two weeks ago, the exact moment he got his first taste of a growing Divinity and a small, fanatical following of worshipers.
"Is it... is it still the same voices?" Princess Nut asked softly, using a damp cloth to gently wipe the cold sweat from Owen's forehead.
Owen grit his teeth, his expression a chaotic mix of futility, rage, and a bizarre sense of appreciation for his own mental suffering. "I hate it! Countless mermaids... thousands of them... are begging me to get them pregnant! They keep crying out, asking me to accept their love! This is all Loki Sky's fault, damn it! I even heard a pair of twins I used to have a crush on back on land, begging to be next in line!" He slammed a fist into the dirt. "This means Loki found a structural loophole around that damn curse. He’s drowning in my dreams, using my goddamn identity!"
Had Owen known that he was only receiving a mere quarter of the annoying prayers Loki was currently enduring, he would have laughed at the sky in pure joy. Because all the prayers specifically invoking King Owen’s name and physical likeness routed directly to his brain. Meanwhile, any prayer directed broadly to King Neptune completely overwhelmed the lucky bastard down in the ocean instead.
Skogul looked around at the unstable horizon of the Heaven Secret Realm, her eyes filled with deep worry as she looked at her husband. "Owen... but don't you need the raw power from those prayers right now? This Secret Realm is going to completely collapse into the void soon. If we don't find a way out, we will die."
Owen, suddenly catching a second wind of pure, unadulterated main-character energy, pushed himself up. He stood like a textbook chuuni, glaring defiantly at the literal space cracks spiderwebbing across the sky.
"A king forgotten? A god erased?!" Owen yelled, pointing dramatically at the void. "This is the ultimate protagonist setup! Let the void collapse! The All-Father answers to no apocalypse!"
Gondul leaned over, whispering quietly to Princess Nut, "It’s your night to soothe his broken heart."
The brown-haired dwarf woman blushed furiously, nodding her cute head as she looked up at her shouting king.
Back in Atlantis City, after major structural changes took place around the new Neptune Kingdom of Myst...
Slap! Slap! Slap!
It had been nearly a dozen straight, agonizingly blissful days of non-stop mermaid insemination. I had officially collapsed mentally. My mind was a blur of never-ending mermaid wombs, the constant absorption of unique Mermaid Curses, and a rapid, daily influx of military-style reports confirming thousands of successful pregnancies during my exceptionally short reign.
Slap! Slap!
I looked up, my eyes glazed over as mermaid number 3,172 enthusiastically rode my dick, desperate to secure her share of my baby-making mermaid batter and formally mark my soul with her lineage's curse. I was entirely stunned. I hadn't slept a single wink in two weeks. I had completely exhausted my entire stockpile of those bright pink stamina pills, all while May West stood by the bedside, continuously casting high-tier restoration spells to heal my physical body back to full energy just so I could fulfill my mandatory conjugal duties as the Sea King.
As my hands instinctively gripped her slender, trembling waist, I forced a tired but genuine smile. "My new wife... I'm cumming. Thank you, Era, for your hard work."
The purple-haired woman let out a sharp, violent cry as her climax hit, her internal walls clamping down hard around my shaft as my hot seed flooded her deep womb. In that exact moment of release, I could practically visualize a cosmic game achievement flashing across my vision: [No More Fish In The Sea: King Neptune status unlocked with over 3,172 Mermaid wives!]
As her trembling climax finally faded, I leaned up to gently kiss her slick lips, gesturing for the waiting royal maids to step forward and help her down so she could get cleaned up.
May West, my absolute angel of mercy, stepped up to the bed. With a sympathetic smile, she cast her final Full Healing magic on me. A soothing, warm light washed over my skin as I stood up from the bed I had affectionately taken to calling 'Hell'—a very specific, beautiful hell that I secretly loved.
It was finally time to leave for the Balder Kingdom's Summer Council Meeting. Queen Blue had made sure to extract every single ounce of labor from me before allowing me to depart. Over the course of the marathon, I had successfully inseminated nearly half of the entire current mermaid population.
I was already slated to hit the remaining half the next time I visited, alongside re-inseminating the unfortunate few who didn't manage to lock down a pregnancy during these two weeks. Currently, the medical cores confirmed that over 2,000 mermaids were officially pregnant with my children via Life Magic detection.
Opal Blue, my six-month pregnant wife, was currently helping me dress. She watched my absolute desperation to flee the undersea paradise with an intensely amused look on her face—a paradise that every human man on dry land was actively trying to break into.
Princess July Blue, the first woman I had taken from the Slap Feast and the third grandchild of Sara, was practically crying with dramatic regret nearby. "King Owen... Opal and Ariel won't let me come with you... But you better make sure to come back and see our little mermaid, hehe."
She rubbed her still-flat belly with immense pride. I felt hella awkward. Not only had I gotten Queen Blue pregnant, but all three mothers of the three royal princesses were also carrying my seed. Opal had actually pouted for two straight days after discovering I had gotten her own mother knocked up, which was still kind of hilarious in hindsight.
Out of the legendary Seven Sea Songs, the only one not currently carrying my child was Ariel. She was currently sitting in the corner, pouting and mad at me for an entirely different, much heavier reason.
Right before she had tried to mount me during the massive sexathon, I had forced myself to step back. I stopped her completely and confessed the absolute truth: that I was actually Loki Sky, not Owen. She had been left completely stunned and deeply hurt. I had treated her incredibly well, had personally named her baby, and had now become the legendary King Neptune. Her heart and her body were tangled up in all kinds of complicated knots. But in the end, I had successfully managed to keep my dick out of Owen's primary wife. For now, at least.
Queen Blue had originally commanded every single mermaid in the city to become my wife, but I had stood firm on one boundary: any mermaid who was already happily married to another could freely decline coupling with me. A very small handful actually took that option. But poor, oblivious Owen was still going to be absolutely cursed and hunted down on the surface. He was about to single-handedly destroy the dreams of countless land-loving human men who would realize they lost their mermaid lovers in the single largest Green Hat cuckold sorting session in the history of Myst. I had stolen the largest harem of wives in recorded history—another completely shameful achievement that I would only fully realize the gravity of much later.
May West wrapped her arms around my neck, giving me a deep, passionate goodbye kiss. She had to head back to West Palm Island to govern her territory, but she explicitly reminded me to stop by and visit her often.
After the rest of The Seven Sea Songs stepped forward to see me off, it was finally Queen Atlantis Blue’s turn.
"The official word of our Kingdom's name changing from Atlantis to the Neptune Kingdom has already spread," she said, a sharp, knowing smirk gracing her lips. "Plus, the surface world is getting the news that King Balder is technically becoming our King. Good luck dealing with the political fallout of that for now, haha. Come back soon to visit, husband. I will make sure Opal is fully prepared to take over the position of Queen whenever she feels she is ready."
Yeah, after knocking up Opal's mom, I had Sara deliver the news that her personal wishes had been met, after which the future queen completely pampered and forgave me.
I nodded, pulling the strict, older woman into a deep, passionate goodbye kiss. Over the last two weeks, I had truly fallen for her hard. It was exhausting, but I genuinely tried my best to love all of my women—even the wild, chaotic, or bad ones.
With my absurd, exhausting misadventures in the City of Atlantis firmly behind us, my long trip back home finally began, riding high on the back of Bubbles.