Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1527  Genius Babes

<They keep cracking or coming out cloudy.>

<Quin, didn’t you grow up in a world with actual glass? Mass-produced? In factories?> Playfulness was evident in his plump alchemist lover’s voice, making it clear she was enjoying this talk greatly.

<Knowing glass exists and knowing how to make it from river quartz with magic are different skill sets.> A second presence joined the link. Softer, gentler, with the quiet focus of a woman who spent her days shaping metal with precision.

<I’m here.> Kaelira’s mental voice was warm. <What kind of quartz are you working with?>

<I have no idea.>

<…Right. Of course you don’t.> A pause came, and he could feel Kaelira thinking, organizing the problem with the methodical care of a master smith. <Can you show me the sample?>

He pulled a soul soldier aside and gave him the errand. Within a minute, his dutiful elf’s voice sounded in his head again.

<I’m pretty sure you’re heating it unevenly,> Kaelira said. <The milky appearance is trapped air and unmelted impurities. Bring the entire mass to temperature at the same time and hold it there long enough for impurities to separate before you press. At least ten seconds at full melt. And press slowly, or you trap the bubbles.>

<I’m no artificer, but…> Aurora spoke up with uncertainty before Quinlan interjected.

<I called you for a reason.>

Aurora’s delight flooded the link like sunlight through an open door.

<The cracking is thermal shock, I think. You’re cooling too fast. Some minerals contract when they cool, and if the edges go rigid while the center’s still hot, the pull between them cracks the whole panel. Bring the temperature down gradually.>

<Heat evenly, hold the melt, press slowly, cool gradually.>

<Yes,> both women said at the same time.

He tried it.

The quartz melted uniformly. He held the melt for a ten-count, watching through his earth sense as trapped air bubbles rose and popped. The impurities separated and sank. He skimmed them off and pressed the remaining molten quartz into a flat panel, slowly, letting it thin without trapping air.

He held it up to the fading afternoon light.

Translucent. A warm amber-white, like frosted glass, diffusing the light into a soft glow. He could see shapes through it, the dark silhouettes of trees, the pale sky, but no detail.

<Better,> Kaelira said after receiving the new sample. <The amber tint is iron contamination. Rust, essentially. You’ll find reddish flecks through the melt. They’re denser than the quartz, so you should be able to feel the difference and pull them out the same way you separated the crystals from clay.>

He reached into the next batch and found the iron-rich flecks scattered through the quartz like rust in sand. He pulled them out by density.

The next panel came out cleaner. Pale, with a slight warmth to the light. Still frosted, still diffusing rather than clarifying, but the glow was steady and natural.

<That’s good,> Aurora said. <The frosted quality gives you privacy while still lighting the interior. Better than clear glass for residential use.>

<See? This is why I need my harem of genius babes. If I knew everything, why would I need my smart and amazing lovers?>

A beat of silence on the link.

<Uh, because you love us?> Aurora and Kaelira said at the same time.

Quinlan’s mental presence went very quiet.

<Moving on,> he said.

<He’s deflecting,> Aurora noted.

<He always deflects,> Kaelira agreed softly. <I think it’s really cute.>

<I’m not cute.>

<Yeah, very badass, very macho…> Aurora giggled.

<…Thanks for the help. See you tonight.>

Quinlan cut the banter by throwing himself into production. The technique was locked in now, and repetition turned it into speed. Extract, separate, melt, hold, press, cool, set. Each window took seconds once the process was automated, and he rolled through the settlement punching window frames into walls and filling them with translucent quartz panels that caught the fading afternoon light and turned dark earth interiors into rooms that glowed.

On the third floor of a building in the eastern block, the craftsman’s wife stood at the south-facing wall and watched a quartz panel appear in it. Through the frosted surface, the canopy of the two oaks outside their building filtered in as a soft, warm shape, and the late afternoon light filled the room with an amber glow that made the compressed earth walls look almost golden.

“Oh!” she gasped in sheer joy.

She pressed her palm against the warm quartz and stood there for a long moment, her mind already turning to what kind of flowers she’d put on the windowsill come spring.

Something with color. Something that would catch the light through the frosted panel and look pretty from the road below.

Across the settlement in the workshop district, the craftsman was walking with the resigned posture of a man who had lost an argument he’d been certain he would win and was now calculating how many commissions it would take to keep his wife in the lifestyle she had decided they were living.

“Ground floor,” he muttered to himself. “I said ground floor.”

The nobles and wealthy merchants were less pleased than the happy wife.

A silk trader who had owned a three-story townhouse in Whisperfield’s merchant quarter stood in the doorway of her new third-floor unit and looked at the compressed earth walls, the smooth but undecorated floor, the frosted quartz window that let in light but offered no view.

“This is a peasant’s home,” she said to her husband.

“This is a warm peasant’s home,” her husband replied, because he had been standing outside in the cold for three hours and his priorities had rearranged themselves.

“Where am I supposed to put the silverware cabinet? The reading room furniture? The imported rugs?”

“On the floor. Which is heated. By magic. For free. For now.”

She glared at him. He wisely found somewhere else to be.

Similar complaints rippled through the wealthier evacuees.

Men and women who had dined on porcelain and slept on feather mattresses discovered that compressed earth did not distinguish between a merchant prince and a blacksmith’s apprentice. The homes were identical.

The Primordial Villain, it turned out, was an egalitarian when it came to housing, which was the kind of policy that made common folk grin and wealthy folk write letters.

Count Aldren arrived through the gate late, the last of Whisperfield to cross. He’d stayed behind to coordinate the final hours and ensure every family was through before he stepped in himself, and by the time he crossed the threshold, his torn cloak had acquired a second layer of dust and his face carried the hollow focus of a man who had been running on duty alone for the past six hours.

He stepped through the pale energy and stopped.

Streets. Buildings. Three-story structures of compressed earth lining wide roads, with external staircases and frosted windows glowing amber in the late afternoon light. A four-story tower dominating the central square. Steam rising from ventilation channels. Trees standing between buildings as if they’d always been there. Children running barefoot on heated roads in the middle of winter.

A city.

“He had this prepared? In advance?” Aldren started, then stopped. His eyes moved across the skyline, counting buildings, measuring roads, processing the sheer scale of what he was looking at.

The soldier escorting him shook his head. “He built it, my lord. Started when he stepped through the gate.”

Aldren stared at him. “That was a few hours ago.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The Count’s knees buckled. It was a small thing, a half-step that turned into a stumble, one hand catching the soldier’s arm before he righted himself. He stood there for a moment with his hand braced against the militia man, breathing, staring at the settlement that stretched in every direction.

He’d known what Quinlan was. Everyone knew. The Primordial Villain.

The elemental destructive summoner warrior mage tank with mana regeneration who shattered barriers with a touch and commanded armies of the dead. A force of destruction that the continent measured in threat levels and casualty projections.

But this was different.

Aldren’s gaze rose and found Quinlan high above the city, standing on the roof of the four-story market hall with his arms folded and his dark armor catching the last of the daylight. From that height, the settlement spread beneath him like a map he’d drawn from memory, every road and building and green space exactly where he’d decided it should be.

The man hadn’t just conquered Whisperfield this morning. He’d relocated its entire population, and in the time it took Aldren to organize an evacuation, he’d raised a city from frozen dirt. Heated floors. Running water. A market hall. Bathhouses. Barracks for Aldren’s own soldiers, designed with drill yards and armories as if Quinlan had reached into a military commander’s mind and pulled out the floor plan.

Sewage, Aldren realized as his gaze caught the subtle slope of the roads. The roads were graded for drainage. There was a sewage system. The bastard had thought of sewage.

This was a man who didn’t just destroy. He built. He planned.

He looked at a hundred thousand displaced people standing on frozen ground and saw a city that didn’t exist yet, and then he made it exist before sundown.

The destruction was terrifying. But the construction, the sheer scope of a mind that could hold an entire city in its head and execute it in an afternoon, stone by stone, road by road, floor by heated floor…

That was the real monster.

Aldren watched the dark silhouette on the rooftop and felt, for the first time since the siege began, a fear that had nothing to do with violence.

High above the settlement, Quinlan looked down at what he’d made. The sun was touching the treeline. His mana reserves were screaming and the gate drain had graduated from a boulder on his chest to an anvil, but the city was built and his people were warm and the craftsman’s wife was planning flowers for a windowsill that didn’t exist a couple hours ago.

‘Good enough for day one.’

Then, his voice hit the air and carried across every street at once, reverberating off compressed earth walls and rolling through the settlement with the weight of a man whose aura made the words physical.

“My people.”

A hundred thousand heads snapped upward.