Chapter 168: A Girl’s Love Must Be Protected By Herself (Part 3)
Imperial Capital, Black Lily District, Jin Gui Street No. 32.
The gentle afternoon sun cast its rays down, clothing the villa, which had been covered in dust from being uninhabited for nearly half a year, in a layer of light golden splendor.
Shaya looked up at the familiar yet somewhat strange residence before him and couldn’t help but stretch.
“It really has been a long time.”
“Indeed, it has been a long time. Not just for our home.”
Beside him, the blonde-haired girl wore a wide sun hat and a plain white long dress.
Her crystal high heels clicked rhythmically on the ground, carrying a hint of annoyance and dejection.
Not long ago, Shaya had used the Giant King’s skull, which served as the relic of ashes, as an anchor. Through the passage opened by the summoning ritual, he had directly descended in person from Eden in the Remnants of the Imaginary Belt into the real world.
After Shaya arrived in the Real Timeline, he was then able to use himself as an anchor again to provide coordinates and guidance for Aerora’s Holy Spear to traverse the river of history.
The time difference was about a few hours.
Originally, Shaya and Aerora had spent ten years in Eden, so a few hours wouldn’t have made much difference.
However, when Aerora, riding the Holy Spear, traversed the river of history and returned to the real world—
The scene she witnessed caused a tremor in Aerora’s Spiritual Ocean, which had just completely taken shape after being freed from the Holy Spear’s constraints.
Beneath the dawn light, amidst the ruined remnants.
A black-haired youth and a silver-haired empress reaching out to each other.
What kind of lunar painting was this?
And the most crucial point was—
She was clearly the one who arrived first!
Meeting Shaya, intertwining pinkies, even falling in love.
And yet, after just a few hours apart, she had instantly become a third wheel?
Thinking this, Aerora slightly lowered the brim of her wide sun hat and quietly moved to Shaya’s side, picking up the collar of his clothes and sniffing.
“Her Royal Highness is one thing.”
“Miss Sylvia, it seems there’s also the scent of President Diris.”
“What have you been up to in the few hours I was gone?”
How had she never noticed Shaya’s potential to be a master of time management before?
“Little Ai, your temper, which flares up like a lit vinegar jar, really hasn’t changed at all.”
“But I like it.”
Shaya toyed with a few strands of Aerora’s hanging hair and smiled.
Time could change many things.
But some things were immutable by time.
Ten years of living together had not caused their originally fiery love to gradually cool down, as depicted in many stories, nor had it eventually soured and faded due to trivial matters, or experienced entanglement like the seven-year itch.
Quite the opposite, in fact. These ten years, along with the complete unsealing of the Holy Spear and the growth of their strength—
Had only made Aerora’s possessiveness towards Shaya even stronger.
This could be seen from the fact that in the last few weeks before they left Eden, Shaya had been drinking wolfberry water and making grilled kidneys daily.
One could only say that this girl was becoming increasingly adept at ‘overthrowing the superior’.
The two walked into the mansion at Jin Gui Street No. 32 in the Black Lily District.
Shaya looked at the living room and study covered in dust and took out a bucket and cleaning tools from his Spatial Pocket.
He summoned his familiars, who were sound asleep in his Soul Pact Space, “Time to work.”
“Yip yip yip (Master, this kind of thing can be done by Yui alone, and those micro-nano robots can finish it in an instant.)”
The little mink’s eyes fluttered open on Shaya’s shoulder, and it let out a yiping sound.
Since being promoted to Legend Species and becoming the Legend Species “Boundary Breaker. Snow Mink,” Yin’s tendency to sleep had only worsened.
Of the 24 hours in a day, at least 18 were spent sleeping in the Soul Pact Space. The remaining time was either spent seeking pets in Shaya’s arms or basking in the sun on Shaya’s head.
Its main focus was laziness.
“There’s an old saying in my hometown: ‘Dwelling in high places for too long makes it easy to lose one’s original heart.'”
“This is a lesson I learned from the incomplete memories of that Giant King’s skull… The deities once had kin, had bonds they cared for, and were once living beings.”
“However, as their strength grew and they resided in high places, looking down upon all beings, their original humanity and emotions would slowly fade, leaving only cold divinity.”
“Of course, from the perspective of becoming stronger, removing emotions and leaving only aloof divinity is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just a difference in choices.”
Shaya rubbed Yin, Shan Shan, and Chi Hong’s heads.
“It’s just that I don’t want us, who have fought so hard all along, resisting deities, resisting fate, acting for that sliver of insignificant human persistence…”
“To end up like the boy who hunted dragons eventually becoming one, and after several hundred years, we become the new aloof gods looking down upon all beings.”
If that were not the case, he would have accepted the Crimson Rose Family’s goodwill and marriage proposal at the Borgia Family’s dinner party back then.
Instead of choosing to fire that world-breaking shot at the condemned prisoner.
“Yip yip~ (Master, stop lecturing, I know.)”
The little mink helplessly shook its fluffy snow-white tail and leaped from Shaya’s shoulder.
Then, it picked up a broom from the cleaning tools on the floor and walked towards the inner room with short legs.
It had been adopted and contracted by Shaya when it was very, very young, before it could even remember.
All along, it had been well protected and nurtured by Shaya. Therefore, even though it had now been promoted to the Legend rank, Yin’s disposition remained relatively simple, and naturally, it could not understand the deeper meaning of Shaya’s rambling words.
Anyway, the point was to work, right? It wasn’t the first time it had been a tool mink; it was long accustomed to it.
Meanwhile, Aerora did not speak but silently handed the water-filled bucket to Shaya.
Compared to Shaya’s worry about whether he would lose his humanity in the future, she had never wavered in the slightest.
For her, as long as she could stay by Shaya’s side—
Whether it was sitting side-by-side on a lonely divine throne, slowly forgetting humanity,
Or falling together into the abyss and becoming evil gods, Aerora didn’t care.
She would follow him, from life to death.
Beyond that, Aerora didn’t care and didn’t want to care.
…
“Done.”
Two hours later, Shaya lay down on the sofa in the living room.
On the sofa beside him, Yin and Shan Shan also lay down, utterly dispirited.
Only Yui, in the form of a metallic fairy, hovered in mid-air, flapping her wings made of solidified undead metal. She looked displeasedly at the little mink and the little golden monkey below.
“Sister Yin, you slacked off for fifteen minutes. Shan Shan, you slacked off for nineteen minutes.”
However, facing Yui’s accusation, Yin and Shan Shan didn’t even have the strength to retort.
As high-level familiars, their physical abilities were sufficient to shatter mountains and split rocks… Cleaning a mansion should have been child’s play for them and not so strenuous.
But their Beast Tamer was simply inhuman.
Under the guise of “recalling past hardships,” he had completely banned all their familiar skills using Soul Pact. He had also used the skill “King’s Domain,” derived from “Heart of the Conqueror,” to create a gravity field hundreds of times stronger.
This made every movement of theirs arduous, let alone cleaning the entire mansion.
Moreover, the gravity field was individually customized. For example, Yin, who had now been promoted to the Legend rank, had to endure several times more gravity from the “King’s” Domain than Shan Shan.
The main objective was to stimulate the familiars’ potential to the extreme, without being human.
If Shaya hadn’t set an example by participating in the “King’s Domain” training himself, the familiars would have likely roared “The late afternoon sun, the nascent eastern dawn!” and rebelled.
Only the little Silver Spirit, Chi Hong, blinked its eyes innocently beside them, in good condition.
Before being contracted by Shaya, it was a pure training fanatic, having rigorously trained its “Cutting Slash” to the “Transcendence” proficiency with only Tier 1 strength.
This amount of training was like a drizzle to Chi Hong. It couldn’t understand why Yin and Shan Shan, who had been pampered since childhood, had such poor resilience.
Shaya didn’t pay much attention to his familiars’ bickering.
After resting for a while, he approached Aerora.
His childhood friend, like Chi Hong, was a training fanatic and had voluntarily joined the “King’s Domain” training, yet she hadn’t even shed a single drop of sweat.
At this moment, Aerora was using a piece of paper to wipe an old silver-white photo frame on the bookshelf.
It was a magical projection taken when Shaya and Aerora first arrived in the Imperial Capital. In the picture, a young boy and girl with immature faces looked at the camera.
The boy had a premature seriousness beyond his years, with his hands in his pockets, while the little girl held his arm, smiling brightly at the camera.
Aerora wiped the silver-white photo frame for a long time before finally placing it on the bedside table in the bedroom.
“Back then, we probably never imagined that in a few more years, we would achieve what we have now.”
Shaya also saw the photo frame and sighed, placing his hand on the blonde girl’s long legs clad in white stockings.
“But the past is in the past. People have to look forward. We can create many
