I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 322: An Illusion Of Heaven

I revealed more and more items to her, drawing from her lips more and more shocked expressions. This was the best I’d felt in a while.

After I finished introducing my items, Lady Hue confirmed they had passed.

According to her, these items didn’t have a fixed price on the market, and that was because of how rare they were to come by, especially those I’d gotten from Primal tier beasts. They were items very difficult to harvest from a corpse, and more often than not, even a skilled Scavenger usually messed them up.

I could sense during our conversation that she was trying to probe for who my Scavenger was. But I knew how to dodge questions like that. Running away from things was my specialty, after all.

We moved on to what actually mattered: the percentage split between the Auction House and me.

This was, in my estimation, the more important soul of the whole process. And I couldn’t help but feel like Lady Hue was being generous with me. She’d opened at 30:70 in her favor, which I’d pushed all the way down to 10:90.

Then I thought about it and realized it probably wasn’t that I had pushed anything down so much as she had let me. After all, plenty of buyers out there didn’t understand the value of these things and treated them as scraps. It was always the top brass that revealed the gold buried in the dirt. Strong summoners knew. I wasn’t surprised.

Lady Hue seemed eager to do business with me. Eager, but guarded.

That part was easy to guess even if she didn’t make it clear.

We still had to find out if the items performed as well as they looked. That depended on audience response at the auction, and rare didn’t automatically mean people would pour fortunes into something.

So, at the end of the day, I still had to wait.

For that part, Lady Hue said she’d handle it herself, adding value to my product so people would be bidding on the perceived value and not the item.

I had no idea how she planned to do that, but I followed her to the Auction regardless.

We boarded a flaming chariot waiting for us at the center of the city, just in front of the Mayor’s building. As we settled in, six-legged horses with flaming manes and flaming wings shot into the air, hurling the chariot with them.

They wheeled up into the clouds and, for a moment, there was nothing I could see but a flat expanse of fog.

I turned to Lady Hue, who was sitting beside me with the composure of someone who made this commute every day.

“Is this your illusion too?”

She shook her head with a small, polite smile.

“No… I do not have the power nor the essence to pull something of this level. We were helped by one of the Sovereigns that exist here.”

I nodded and turned back to the fog. Nothing about it gave itself away as illusion. No seams, no flicker at the edges. I had taken a guess that it was one, and that guess led me to a bigger one.

My head shifted back to Lady Hue, a small scowl of surprise climbing my face.

“Wait, don’t tell me… is this entire place an illusion?”

Lady Hue smiled calmly.

“Crafted by one single person? Or is it his summon?”

Lady Hue, still smiling, shook her head.

“If you were a regular summoner, or a Mortal Spirit Summoner, I would have revealed such information to you. But you’re a Sovereign.”

The excitement in me went out almost immediately.

I had asked out of innocent astonishment. But the way Lady Hue drew that line so cleanly brought me back to reality and made my innocent question look layered with things I hadn’t intended. Apparently, being a Sovereign meant people stopped answering the easy ones.

I exhaled, folded my arms, and sat back.

Then we flew out of the clouds.

It was heaven, or at least what heaven probably looked like. Not that I’d ever been, and I doubted I was ever going to end up in that treacherous place anyway.

’It’s a good thing this one’s an illusion.’

An Illusion of heaven.

It sat above the clouds themselves, with pillars of gold stretching into the sky until they vanished into whatever was above. I wasn’t sure if there was another ceiling up there, but all I could see was an endless white, the same color as the clouds beneath us.

The horses galloped out across the clouds and through dozens of those gold pillars arranged like a hallway, and then a structure drifted out of the horizon: a massive pagoda rising so high into the sky it could have been a skyscraper back on earth.

Craning my neck to look at it actually hurt.

’How does something like this even exist as an illusion? I always thought the whole point was that illusions weren’t real.’

I respected whoever had built this. Genuinely. That kind of power didn’t announce itself. It just stood there and waited for you to figure it out.

’I wonder if they’re here today.’

Of course they’d be. How else would they maintain something like this.

The horses stopped in front of the Pagoda. At the entrance stood two guards, one male, one female, both wearing silver and cerulean armor, like heavenly soldiers.

Each of them gave off enough spirit pressure to match Tristan in a fight, maybe surpass him. And we all know Tristan was strong. Fairly.

They scowled at me. Then their gazes moved to Lady Hue, and just like that, their demeanors brightened like she’d personally come to make their day.

’Shitheads.’

They opened the wide double doors, and Lady Hue and I stepped inside.

***

[A/N]

Pacing might have drifted too slow but exercise patience, this is not a filler. Been a while since I spoke here, I don’t think I was missed.

But anyways, I’m thinking of creating a discord server, anyone interested in helping out can message me on discord: hat3_the_author_

PS: You kinda have to help cause I don’t know how to do that sh**