Chapter 693: Beast Eggs? [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 693: Beast Eggs? [II / Bonus Chapter]

The blue-haired woman paused, her hand hovering over the catalog and beside Kara, Rika blinked with her head tilting in complete surprise.

Both women stared at the black-haired sovereign, their expressions filled with confusion.

"Eggs...?" the receptionist repeated, raising an eyebrow. "Lady Kara, with all due respect, hatching a beast from an egg takes immense time, specialized incubator arrays, and massive quantities of elemental nourishment... Buying a mature battle-ready beast saves a Lord months of cultivation."

"Can you procure high-tier, unhatched eggs or not?" Kara countered.

Rika stood beside her, her small brow furrowing as she pondered Kara’s words.

’Why eggs...?’ Rika wondered.

Then, like a bolt of golden lightning cutting through the fog, the brilliant truth of her Master’s strategy detonated in her mind.

’Ah...!’

Rika’s breath caught in her throat.

’The soul imprint...!’

Her hands flew to her cheeks, her vivid green eyes widening into giant, shimmering pools of pure awe as she looked up at Kara’s beautiful composed profile.

’Master... he’s thinking of my soul!’

Subduing and contracting a mature battle-hardened Tier 4 beast was an agonizing and brutally dangerous process.

The creature’s ego was already fully developed, its predatory instincts hardened, and its spiritual pathways resistant to foreign authority.

With her Beast Contract Weaving still sealed, forcing an adult chimera or manticore into submission would place immense grinding strain upon her recovering meridians though she would still be able to do it.

...But an egg?

When a beast hatched, the very first soul-signature it perceived became its eternal parent.

The contract wouldn’t be a violent subjugation at all... it would be a natural effortless soul-imprinting... It created practically zero stress on her pathways, allowing the creature’s growth to synchronize flawlessly with her own divine vitality from day one!

’Aww...’

A tidal wave of warm, melting adoration flooded Rika’s heart, making her chest feel so tight she could barely breathe.

Thump...!

’He was worried about my recovery...’ she squealed silently, her toes curling inside her slippers as literal stars practically sparkled in her emerald eyes. ’He didn’t want me to suffer the mental strain of breaking a violent adult beast... so he insisted on eggs, just to keep me safe and comfortable!’

She stepped forward, puffing her small chest out with fierce, proud solidarity as her voice rang out with devotion.

"Yeah! Exactly what my Master said! We want eggs!"

Chirp!

The fledgling phoenix poked its little golden head out from her cloak, letting out a sharp decisive squeak of agreement.

Meanwhile, standing inside the tailored shell of Kara White... Silas Graves was having a different smug internal celebration.

’I am a genius,’ Silas cackled internally, patting himself on the back with boundless satisfaction.

’If I buy a fully grown adult beast, the system’s upgrade algorithms treat it as an established high-tier entity... Elevating an adult manticore or chimera to the pinnacle divine rank would cost an astronomical fortune in Upgrade Points but an unhatched egg... An egg is classified by the system as an unranked item. The base cost to upgrade an egg to its peak bloodline is practically pennies compared to an adult monster!’

Why in the world would he waste tens of thousands of hard-earned Upgrade Points buying pre-packaged second-rate adult beasts when he could buy cheap unhatched eggs and leverage his system to manufacture apex beasts for a fraction of the price?!

’So what if I’m sitting on nearly a hundred thousand UP from the slaughter in North Khemet, all of it earned by me and the girls?’ Silas thought, an arrogant delighted grin hidden behind Kara’s polished exterior. ’Do I look like an idiot who throws points out the window? Efficiency is the mark of a true Lord! Silas Graves, you magnificent bastard, you really are a genius!’

Selvane blinked slowly with the pink sphere of bubblegum resting forgotten against the roof of her mouth as her dull heavily shadowed gray eyes settled downward onto the massive ledger propped against the corner of the dragon-bone desk.

She turned a wide vellum page with a sharp practiced flick of her thumb.

The sound of dry paper scraping against lacquered bone echoed hollowly in the vast reception rotunda, cutting through the distant muted murmur of the concourses beyond the heavy doors.

"Well now," Selvane mused, leaning her chin into a pale palm while two fingers idly twirled a loose lock of electric-blue hair around the shell of her ear. "If it’s unhatched stock you’re hunting for... you have rather peculiar timing, Lady White... The consortium’s central auction house is hosting a grand beast-egg gala tonight in the Grand Pavilion... Hundreds of high-tier bloodlines, dormant elemental drakes, chimeric strains hauled out of the outer rifts by our void-caravans. Normally, every single shell on the manifest is sealed beneath third-tier custody until the bidding starts at dusk."

She leaned forward across the desk, her gray eyes narrowing with the sharp edge of a merchant.

"However... seeing as you personally met my ridiculous father beneath five miles of granite, and seeing as you’ve kindly agreed to deliver a rather sensitive letter to his dusty desk, I can bend the protocols by an inch or two... I can lead you down into the reserve vaults right now. You can browse the reserve stock before the public sees it. Pick a few promising clutches here and there."

Her gaze flicked upward, sweeping over Kara White’s immaculate three-piece suit with cold appraisal.

"Naturally, you’ll be footing the bill in full... Pre-auction private acquisitions carry an administrative handling premium. Cash or certified credit notes. We don’t take barter, and we don’t take excuses."

Kara smiled, it was a cool impeccable expression that Selvane had seen on very rich people.

"An acceptable arrangement," Kara replied, her melodious feminine voice smooth as oiled silk, not a single trace of hesitation showing in her posture. "Lead the way, Madame Selvane..."

"Give me two seconds," Selvane said, turning her head toward the curtained archway behind the counter.

She cupped her hands around her mouth and let out an ear-piercing whistle that made the glass fixtures in the nearby chandeliers vibrate.

"Oren! Get your lazy backside out here! Now!"

The velvet drapes parted with a soft rustle, and a young man hurried into the rotunda, nearly tripping over the edge of his own tunic.

He looked to be in his late twenties, possessing the same sharp pale facial structure as Selvane, though his hair was a messy dark ash-brown.

He was already fumbling with the strings of a heavy leather clerk’s apron, tossing it over his head and tying the waist straps in an ungraceful flurry as he scurried toward the desk.

"I’m here, Mother, I’m here!" the young man gasped, hastily pushing up a pair of brass spectacles that had slipped down his sweat-slicked nose. "I was just finalizing the manifests for the southern void-freighters, the freight handlers were arguing about the tax stamps—"

"Save the ledger talk for the auditors," Selvane waved him off, already rounding the dragon-bone counter with brisk strides. "Watch the desk. If anyone from the Second Magistrate’s office comes in whining about the carriage tariffs, tell them I’m inspecting the outer wards and won’t be back until sundown... If they don’t like it, tell them to file the complaint in triplicate."

"Understood, Mother," Oren nodded obediently, sliding behind the bone counter and immediately taking up the exact same slouch Selvane had abandoned moments prior.

Kara watched the young man take his seat, her left eyebrow giving a faint, twitching spasm.

’Good grief...’ Silas thought from within the feminine illusion of Kara White, watching Oren adjust the inkwells with that identical carelessness. ’The posture... The way he rolls his shoulders... The slight, unconscious ninety-degree tilt of his neck when he glances toward the side door... every single one of them moves like Musvi.’

It was uncanny... It felt like watching a bizarre multi-generational mime troupe perform beneath different names across centuries.

’Haah...’

It was mildly infuriating, like catching a glimpse of that painted wooden theater mask out of the corner of your eye everywhere you turned, reminding you of dust and the lack of tickets.

Silas would have asked for some tickets but he could always come back... He already had enough now.

’At least none of the kids talk like him,’ Silas comforted himself with a dry, internal sigh. ’No bows, no waving midnight-silk sleeves in the dirt, no endless rambling about stuff and certainly none of his power...’

Then he remembered Selvane letting out that ear-piercing dramatic "Aiya!" only minutes ago while laughing about her nineteen children and twelve failed romances.

’...Well, mostly,’ Silas corrected himself, deadpanning into the void. ’The bloodline is clearly cursed by theatrical absurdity.’

"This way, Lord White," Selvane called out, gesturing toward a heavily reinforced bronze door set into the western alcove of the rotunda.

"The storage vaults lie beneath the main foundation. Mind your step... the stairs were chiseled from volcanic basalt back when the first trade guilds still used blood-contracts to seal their grain quotas."

Kara and Rika fell into step behind her, the fledgling phoenix nestled snugly against the hollow of Rika’s neck beneath her green cloak.

The tiny bird chirped softly, its starlit eyes blinking at the glowing runic sconces lining the descent as they stepped through the threshold.

As they stepped onto the winding spiral staircase, the temperature dropped steadily, replaced by the cool dry air of underground vaults.

Selvane led the way down into the depths with her boots clicking in a steady tune against the basalt steps and her gray eyes occasionally flicking back over her shoulder toward the black-haired Lord.

’Kara White... she really isn’t half as terrible as they claimed,’ Selvane thought, keeping her pace light and unhurried.

In truth, while the High Directorate was mostly empty of World Council leadership at the moment, the administrative network was never blind.

"No active members" was the line the front desk gave everyone, and "active" did a lot of work in that sentence.

Number Five was stationed in the Sovereign Realm, but the diminutive foul-tempered Council Head was presently overseeing an emergency dispute on the eastern frontier which was hundreds of leagues from Central City and nowhere near the building.

Selvane remembered receiving a secure encrypted communication crystal from Number Five barely a week ago.

The tiny Council Head had spent forty straight minutes pacing across the scrying projection, her high-pitched voice practically shrieking with fury as she described Kara White.

’She certainly is a talkative woman...’

She had painted the Lord of Blessed Land as an unprincipled parasite, a ruthless scheming smooth-talking terror who preyed on vulnerable people, extorted treasuries without blinking, and took perverse pleasure in bullying honorable people out of their stuff.

She had sounded like a traumatized child recounting an encounter with a legendary bog-demon that had stolen her lunch money.

Yet here Kara was being immaculate, soft-spoken, composed and very polite.

’More importantly...’ Selvane mused, a wry smirk curling her lips, ’...she didn’t look at me like I was a leper.’

Across three centuries, most high-ranking Lords and pious matriarchs who crossed her desk looked at her with undisguised contempt the second her family ledger came up.

They sneered at her nineteen children, turned their noses up at her twelve failed romances, and whispered behind their silk fans about her loose morals and commercial vulgarity.

But Kara was different... Sure, the Lord had looked momentarily horrified, which was only natural when someone dropped twelve baby daddies on you without warning, but there was no righteous moralizing.

There were no condescending sermons about virtue or any of that bullshit... Kara had simply nodded, accepted the reality, and treated her like a peer.

’Number Five was definitely exaggerating,’ Selvane decided, silently shaking her head in amusement. ’The little gremlin probably lost a bet or got outmaneuvered in a trade dispute and threw a childish tantrum... Kara seems completely reasonable.’

They reached the foot of the spiral staircase.

Before them stood a towering vault-grade door forged from solid starmetal, etched from top to bottom with complex interlocking defensive wards that hummed with a vibration.

Selvane walked up to the central control panel, pressing her right palm flat against the cold metal plate.

BZZZZ-CHIRP!

A web of azure scanning lines flared across her skin, parsing her biometric signature and soul-resonance.

With a series of deep thuds, seven massive locking pins retracted from the stone frame, and the heavy door glided open with a pressurized hiss of cool vapor.

The air that billowed out from the vault was humid and also filled with pulsating elemental mana.

’We’re finally here... At the vaults where the eggs are kept.’ Rika thought.