Novel Full Chapter 1470 Denied
Chapter 1470 Denied
He looked across their faces.
“Do you agree?”
The maids stared at him, uncertain. The words were kind, but they couldn’t see where he was leading them, and the confusion was plain in their expressions.
Quinlan smiled and nodded to Aurora.
She opened the pouch, revealing a row of deep crimson pills nestled in soft cloth. One for each of them.
“If you want this decision to be made by your will and not by the cruel passage of time, eat those. One each.”
There was no hesitation.
Not a single one of them asked what the pills were. Not a single one examined them or held them up to the light or inquired about side effects. Their master told them to eat, and they ate. Emily placed hers on her tongue and swallowed without breaking eye contact. Clarisse took hers with the practiced grace of a woman who had spent decades following instructions she trusted. Cecile popped hers like candy.
The effect was not dramatic.
There was no flash of light, no surge of visible power, no transformation that onlookers could point to and marvel at.
It was quieter than that.
One by one, each woman went still as their status windows updated with information only they could see. Eyes widened. Hands rose to cover mouths. Breaths caught and held.
Clarisse was the first to speak.
“Aging… halted…” she whispered, her voice barely holding together. Her weathered hands — hands she had been watching grow stiffer with each passing month — trembled as she held them up before her face. “For twelve hours…”
“Twelve hours per pill,” Quinlan confirmed. “And we can make more. As long as you take one every twelve hours, your body will not age. Your hands won’t shake. Your joints won’t stiffen. Your strength will remain as it is now.”
Clarisse’s composure broke.
The woman who had maintained perfect poise through every hardship of her life, who had stood firm when her former employer demanded she corrupt children, who had rebuilt herself from nothing in a stranger’s household through sheer force of dignity, pressed both hands to her face and wept.
The sound undid the rest of them.
Emily’s tears fell silently, streaming down her cheeks as she stood perfectly still, as if moving might shatter whatever dream this was. Dorothy grabbed Ilde’s arm and squeezed, both women shaking. Cecile stared at her status window with her mouth open, reading the same lines over and over as if the words might change.
Anna, Beatrice, and Eira, all three of them teenagers, thus not quite as worried about the passage of time as the older of them were, walked up to Clarisse to hold her tenderly.
“Master…” Emily managed at last, her voice cracking on the word. “This is… We can’t possibly accept something this valuable. Not even kings and queens can attain a treasure like this… This should go to your soldiers, your allies, people who-”
“It goes to whoever I decide it goes to,” Quinlan decreed, and his tone left no room for argument.
I take care of what’s mine.
The words were unsaid but understood by all.
The courtyard fell into a silence broken only by the sound of women trying and failing to compose themselves. His girls watched from behind him, and not a single one of them looked anything but proud.
Clarisse lowered her hands from her face. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were wet, but her spine was straight, and when she stepped forward, she moved with the grace of a woman who had just been told her craft would not be taken from her by time.
She bowed, deeper than she ever had before.
“I will serve this house,” she announced with utmost conviction, voice steady despite the tears still falling, “with everything I have. For as long as you’ll have me.”
The others followed her lead. Eight women, bowing as one.
Quinlan looked at them and felt the familiar warmth settle in his chest.
This was why the pill mattered. Not because it was a tactical advantage or a strategic resource, though it was both. It mattered because it meant he would never have to watch good people wither and fade.
His Blessed Seed was meant to bless.
And for the first time, it could do so without asking for something Quinlan didn’t feel comfortable paying.
Just then, a presence at the edge of the group shifted.
Black Fang hadn’t moved throughout the entire exchange. She’d stood apart from the others as she always did, arms folded, posture deceptively relaxed, her dark serpentine tattoos coiling along her exposed skin like living things resting between kills. Her expression had remained unreadable from the moment Quinlan began his speech to the moment Clarisse wept.
But her eyes had not left the pouch in Aurora’s hands.
Not once.
“Stopped aging…” she repeated.
The words came out quiet, almost conversational, but something beneath them vibrated with a frequency that made several of his girls glance her way.
Black Fang was a woman who had spent four centuries building herself into one of the deadliest beings on the continent. Four hundred years of refining her craft, of accumulating power and technique that put her at the peak of mortal capability. Her body was her weapon, honed through centuries of violence that most people couldn’t survive a single day of.
And time was stealing it from her.
Not quickly. Not yet. But inevitably. Every year that passed was a year closer to the day her reflexes would dull, her joints would protest a movement they’d executed flawlessly ten thousand times before, and the body she’d spent centuries perfecting would begin its quiet, irreversible decline.
She hated even the concept of it.
It was why she’d nearly jumped Quinlan when she first learned what his Blessed Seed could do. The deal they’d struck was the compromise. One year for Quinlan to seduce her properly. If he succeeded, she’d accept his seed willingly, as his woman. If he failed, he’d still give it to her, but on her terms entirely, in whatever manner she dictated, bound and gagged and deafened if that’s what it took for her to stomach the act.
That deal had been made before the pill existed.
Now she was staring at a pouch of crimson tablets that rendered the entire arrangement irrelevant.
Those mesmerizing purple eyes, the same eyes that had watched hundreds of targets draw their final breaths, swirled with mania.
Quinlan smiled.
“Hm?” He tilted his head, casual and unhurried, as if he hadn’t noticed the way her pupils had contracted or the way her fingers had uncurled from their folded position for the first time since he’d started talking. “Something on your mind, Miss Terror?”
Her jaw tightened.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she took a single step forward. The motion was controlled, measured, the kind of step an apex predator took when it had identified something it wanted and was calculating the shortest path to acquisition.
Quinlan reached into the pouch at Aurora’s side and plucked a pill from the cloth, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger. The crimson core caught the light, pulsing faintly.
“This?” he asked.
Black Fang’s eyes locked onto the pill with an intensity that could have cut glass.
“Wait…” Quinlan continued, feigning the slow dawning of realization with an expression so deliberately oblivious it bordered on theatrical. “Could it be? Black Fang, do you… want one?”
One did not have to look further than her gorgeously swirling eyes to know the answer.
Yes, she wanted it.
Yes, she craved it.
This was what she’d been looking for for centuries.
She stepped forward again. Closer now. Close enough that the faint killing intent she perpetually carried brushed against his skin like static.
Her hand rose, and Quinlan watched its approach.
Then he closed his fist around the pill and tucked it back into the pouch, which then found its place tossed inside his soul realm.
“Nope~”
Black Fang moved.
Her body crossed the distance between them faster than most humans could process, centuries of assassin reflexes compressing into a single explosive burst. Had she reacted even half a moment earlier, before the shock of the pill’s existence had frozen her instincts, the pouch would’ve been in her hands before Quinlan’s fingers ever reached his soul realm.
But that half second was all he needed.
The pouch vanished into his soul realm just as her weight slammed into him.
Quinlan’s back hit the ground hard enough to outright evaporate a lesser man. Black Fang landed on top of him with one hand planted beside his head and the other gripping the collar of his shirt. Her dark hair spilled forward, framing a face that was inches from his own.
Those otherworldly beautiful, manic purple eyes of hers filled his entire vision.
Up close, they were devastating. Swirling, volatile, carrying the weight of four hundred years of violence and lunacy, and right now, every ounce of that intensity was aimed squarely at the man beneath her.
Her breath came out slow and measured despite the speed of her lunge. She leaned in closer. Her lips stopped a breath away from his.
“What do you mean, ‘nope’?”
Quinlan looked up at the legendary assassin sitting on his chest, her killing intent pressing against his skin, her eyes promising consequences he probably couldn’t survive if she meant them, her body pinning him to the dirt in front of every single one of his lovers and all eight of his maids.
But despite all that…
He grinned.
…
Author: Hey all, I saw your dissatisfaction with the pill and I wanted to address your concerns. If you’re one of the people who didn’t like the development, please read the note below. The author note can only be 500 words so I put the first point here. Read the last in the proper note.
1.
The existence of the pills will allow characters to remain relevant to the story without their extreme growth being a borderline/total plot hole. Why is Lyra still relevant as a fighter right now? She’s been introduced when Ayame was less than level 20. Ayame now enjoys a 3x buff and has been for many months. So why is Lyra not significantly weaker? Is Ayame that bad at leveling? Is Lyra some secret OP character who never sleeps and keeps preying on monsters when she’s off screen? Where does she find the monsters to begin with? What will this discrepancy in XP gain look like many years from now?