Chapter 355: Overtime (GT Bonus - )

The first thing Mark had to do upon returning was to be seen.

Seven months was too long for a ruler to vanish without explanation, and during his absence rumors had spread across the entire south.

That he had died on the plains.

That the Demon Lord had kidnapped him.

That the kingdom was about to fall to pieces and his wives were only pretending to have everything under control.

And no matter how hard his wives had tried to stamp out the rumors, Mark knew words alone wouldn’t convince anyone.

People needed to see him with their own eyes.

So he stepped out onto the palace’s great balcony and planted himself before the assembled crowd.

Elves, beastmen, half-humans of countless species, and even dwarves who had come down from the mountain range just to see their savior again.

When Mark appeared on the balcony, thousands of voices erupted at once.

No speech was needed, no grand words. His presence alone was enough to put an end to months of rumors, doubts, and speculation.

With Mark back, the kingdom finally had its ruler again.

During the seven months of his absence, Emilia and Luna had taken up the burden as queens and had managed to keep everything in order.

But that situation couldn’t go on much longer.

Both were little more than a month from giving birth, and the pregnancy was starting to take its toll even on the simplest tasks.

So the moment Mark took his place again, the full weight of government naturally returned to his shoulders.

What he hadn’t expected was to find a kingdom running far better than the one he had left.

During his first week back, Mark practically disappeared into the meeting room, buried under mountains of reports.

And what he found there surprised him.

The south was at peace.

Not a perfect peace, but something that would have seemed impossible just a few years earlier.

Elves, beastmen, and half-humans had spent generations killing each other over borders, resources, and inherited grudges.

But now they all answered to the same throne, so many of those disputes had simply lost their reason to exist.

People still distrusted their old enemies, but they could no longer declare war every time a conflict came up.

The new kingdom operated through four semi-autonomous regions.

Luna governed the beastmen, Emilia the elves, and Bayle kept the half-humans in line, which was fairly easy when most of the tribes preferred not to find out what happened if they disobeyed him.

The dwarves were a different case. Their population was much smaller, and from the start everyone had agreed that the best thing was to let them organize themselves.

It turned out to be an excellent decision.

After centuries of living in hiding, concerned only with surviving one more day, they could finally lower their guard.

They no longer needed to hide beneath the mountain, count every food ration, or keep sentries watching around the clock.

The kingdom provided them with food, protection, and access to resources, and the dwarves responded by doing what they did best.

Inventing.

And, more importantly still, mass-producing.

Their inventions revolved around the mana stones of the Great Eastern Mountain Range, whose extraction had increased enormously since crews of half-humans began helping with the heavy labor in the mines.

What made those stones special was their versatility.

Carved and combined the right way, they could turn a small amount of magic into light, cold, heat, wind, or practically any similar effect.

All it took was infusing them with a bit of magical power, something anyone with even minimal affinity could do, and they ran on their own for about a month before needing a new charge.

Thanks to the mana stones, dwarven inventions were starting to appear everywhere.

Glowing crystals had replaced many of the candles in the palace and the capital, bathing the streets in a white light that could last for weeks.

Cold chambers made it possible to preserve food for much longer, while fire boxes could heat it in minutes without firewood or stoves.

Little by little, those inventions stopped looking like exotic wonders and began to become part of daily life.

Mark couldn’t help finding it funny. To him they were light bulbs, refrigerators, and microwaves, only with magic. To everyone else, they were genuine miracles.

And miracles had consequences.

Homes were no longer plunged into total darkness at night.

Food could be kept for weeks, and kitchens stopped depending so much on open flame.

Even keeping a home warm in winter became much easier.

At the same time, merchants began moving between regions to buy and sell those devices.

Dwarves haggled with elves, beastmen traded goods with half-humans, and the border markets began filling with people who, just a few years earlier, would have preferred to kill each other rather than share a table.

Commerce had done what centuries of treaties never managed.

It forced them to coexist.

Mark could see it in every market.

A beastman bought dwarven tools, a dwarf carried off sacks of grain grown by elves, and a half-human merchant hauled both goods between regions.

It was hard to keep an ancestral hatred alive when your dinner, your light, and the warmth of your home depended on the very people you were supposed to despise.

And the more stable the coexistence between the four regions became, the less Mark needed to intervene.

Each territory had its own administration and resolved most of its problems internally.

He only showed up when disputes arose between regions, usually involving taxes, trade, infrastructure, or administrative jurisdiction.

His other major responsibility was keeping the trade relationship with the Eldian Empire open.

Emperor Joseph had never felt much sympathy for the non-human races, but he had discovered that he did feel it for their products.

The dwarven inventions and the south’s raw materials were too valuable to ignore.

And in return, Mark’s kingdom received high-quality fabrics, meats, spices, vegetables impossible to grow there, and far better materials for making tools.

It wasn’t an alliance born of friendship.

It was better.

It was an alliance born of convenience.

So, as far as governing was concerned, Mark could afford to breathe.

As far as his wives were concerned, not so much.

There, the workload overwhelmed him.

Seven months away had left all of them deeply frustrated and unsatisfied. Not just some of them, but every single one.

Which, in practice, meant that since the day he returned, Mark had barely had a moment’s rest.

The ones who weren’t pregnant, Ely, Yuki, Aria, Alice, and Zilu, wanted to be. And they wanted it as soon as possible.

His disappearance had planted a fear in them that wouldn’t go away: that someday he would leave again, and this time not come back, leaving them without ever having had the chance to give him a child.

And the ones who already were pregnant, Rose, Emilia, Cali, and Luna, weren’t giving him a break either.

Far from calming them down, pregnancy had thrown their hormones completely out of whack, and their sexual appetite had skyrocketed in every way.

Emilia, who could barely climb a staircase without panting, always found the energy to ride his cock nonstop.

Cali, who had had so many complications during the first months of her pregnancy, seemed to have no trouble at all taking his cock.

Rose, lying like a queen on her pillows, never stopped demanding his blood and every last drop of his cum.

Luna, surprisingly, was the one who put the least pressure on the matter.

Whenever any of the others was having sex with Mark, she would simply sneak in to watch and masturbate off to one side of the bed. Though more than once it ended with her joining in too.

After spending entire days in the dream world fighting summons one after another, Mark had thought few things could exhaust him more.

How wrong he was...

"You look adorable, my love,"Emilia whispered, tenderly stroking his head while Mark sucked on her big tits. "But don’t be greedy... Leave a little milk for our child."