The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine! - Chapter 352. My Own Magic Creation Seems to Make The Druid Feel Suspicious At Me

Chapter 352: 352. My Own Magic Creation Seems to Make The Druid Feel Suspicious At Me

She broke a branch in the same quick way that Rex had done, and for a moment she looked briefly surprised at herself before her expression settled back to its usual register.

Rex said, “You pick things up.”

“I watch,” said Nerith.

“Well, in my opinion, that’s not the same as learning,” Rex said. “For me… watching is just being there for it.”

“Learning is what happens after, when you take what you saw and run it through until it becomes yours.”

“You do both, which is why what you’re picking up actually sticks.”

She was quiet for a moment, and the leaves in her hair shifted color slightly at the edges.

She went back to her gathering and said, “I’m still feeling all curious about the compound element working… on the road this morning.”

“Well… I’m the type of student who always repeats some new stuff until I fully understand it.”

“Go on, you can ask about it again, but the answer won’t change at all,” Rex said.

“My channel registered the ambient-mimicry layer at the base as background,” she said. “I could feel the frequency, but… it didn’t seem to be actively working.”

“Well, yeah, that was the whole point,” Rex said.

“But the thermal-displacement layer underneath it,” she said, and her voice had the particular focus it got when she was describing something she had been turning over since it happened. “That read like nothing I’ve encountered before…”

“Not in any taxonomy nor in any training record, written or practical.”

“Because it isn’t like I said before,” Rex said. “I made it purely with my knowledge and struggle.”

Nerith held the branches she had gathered and looked at him with the look that the amber leaves had been waiting for since the morning.

“You made a new elemental frequency,” she said.

“Yes,” Rex said.

“From nothing.”

“With a working understanding of how frequencies interact,” he said. “It’s less about creating something from nothing and more about finding the space between things that already exist and building in it.”

Nerith looked at the branch in her hands and then back at him. “That’s not how elemental magic works.”

“That’s not how elemental magic has worked,” Rex said. “Up until now.”

The leaves at the ends of her hair turned amber and stayed that color. When she was thinking about something that her current model didn’t have a category for, she didn’t look away from him or say anything right away.

This was the version of Nerith that showed up.

Then, quietly, she said, “Show it to me… again…”

Rex looked at her.

Rex focused not on the amber leaves or the branches in her arms, but solely on her, with a specific quality of attention that made her feel like the only relevant thing in the immediate environment.

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said. “It takes up a whole lot of energy in me.”

She held his gaze for a moment. “I see…”

“Don’t force yourself then, and I do hope I can see it again tomorrow,” she agreed and turned back toward the clearing with the particular walk of someone who had gotten more than they had asked for and was working out what to do with the difference.

For a long time, she was quiet.

“I’ve been studying elemental taxonomy for eight years.” She said, “I know every documented frequency band in the natural catalog…”

“I know the compound forms, the interaction patterns, and the edge cases.”

Rex said, “I know.”

“And you just made one that doesn’t exist in any of that,” she said.

Rex looked straight at her.

“The catalog is a list of things that have already been done,” he said. “It’s not a limit on what can be done.”

She didn’t try to control how the leaves in her hair changed from green to amber all at once.

She said, “You’re very annoying,” but her tone conveyed a different meaning than the literal words; it reflected the specific context of the situation.

“I know,” Rex said.

[NERITH SYLVARUNE — DESIRE LEVEL: 58 → 68/100]

They walked back to the camp with the firewood, and the forest gave them the specific light of evening coming on, which was warm and amber and didn’t need any explanation.

…

The dinner that Talyra and Aisella made with the expedition rations and the fresh food that Apollo and Mireya had brought back was as satisfying as any other field meal made by people who knew what they were doing.

The group ate around the fire with the ease of people who had spent the day together and were mostly done with the social work of getting to know each other.

Apollo talked about the geological history of the canyon system with the excitement of someone who had read everything there was to read on the subject and was delighted to have an audience that didn’t already know everything.

Elizabeth and Alexander added to the conversation by giving specific details every now and then. Their contributions were like those of people who had read different sources and were making a picture out of the overlap.

Iris didn’t say anything about geology, but she was there, which was her way of participating.

Mireya made a quiet remark about how quickly ice forms at depth that stopped the geological discussion for a moment. This statement was true in a way that required either extensive study or significant field experience to understand, and Mireya possessed both.

Nerith ate with the focus of someone who was doing many things at once: eating, keeping her druid connection going, and not looking at Rex more than she had to.

Rex took note of all of this, as he typically did during meals.

The talk went from what happened during the day, like the morning’s encounter with the bandits and Elizabeth’s two jobs at once, to the expedition itself, to what the canyon would look like and what it would take to find Aurelia’s group.

“The network of ventilation shafts,” Iris said. “We talked about it in the briefing, but the most important thing in practice is the sound quality.”

She stared at the group.

“The shafts change the way sound travels in ways that don’t make sense,” she said. “If Aurelia’s group has been sending signals, we’ll hear them before we see them.”

“But we’ll hear them from the wrong direction.”

“We triangulate from a lot of places,” Apollo said.

“Yes,” Iris said. “That means the group has to be ready to break up. Not too far, but far enough to get two or three different positions for the acoustic read.”

Rex turned to Iris.

“You’ve already thought about this.” Rex said, “The pattern of retrieval.”

Iris looked him in the eye.

“A hundred times,” she said, her tone carrying the weight of every one of those repetitions, each reflecting the scenario where someone you had depended on for eight months had been trapped in a cave for two days.

Rex didn’t say anything because there was nothing else to say.

When everyone gathered around the fire, they felt at ease in the quiet; the flames danced as they often do. The night enveloped the camp like the outdoor evenings east of Aethelgard, filled with a variety of sounds and greater intervals between them compared to the nights in the city.

The camp slowly fell asleep, like a group that was saving energy instead of staying up later.

Rex was somewhere between the line between sleep and the Foresight’s passive monitoring when he saw something move at the edge of the natural channel.

No threat. Something quieter, like how the plant material moved when a druid was connected to it.

He registered it and let it move where it was going.

After waiting for nearly half an hour, Rex approaches Aisella’s tent to wake her up and ask her to follow him away, as he needs something from her.

Yes… sex at night…

…

Nerith woke up because the roots told her to.

That was the only way she could describe it afterward, in the private part of her mind where she kept descriptions of things she didn’t plan to say out loud.

The natural channel had shifted its register while she slept, as it often did when something in the surrounding environment needed attention, and this shift had awakened her before she was fully ready.

She lay still for a moment, reading the channel.

It wasn’t a threat. The channel’s tone when there was a threat was different, tighter and more directional, pointing at the thing that had caused it.

The feeling was something else, more like the sensation of a door left open in a room where doors were usually closed.

’What’s going on…?’

’This is the first time for me to wake up in the middle of the night… and it’s right in a place where I could call home…’

She pulled on her outer layer and moved out of the tent.

The camp was quiet. The fire had gone down to coals, and the night around it had settled into the specific stillness of deep hours, the kind where sound carried further than it did during the day.

Nerith moved toward the forest’s edge, following the shift in the channel, and the undergrowth was easy under her feet because she had been reading the root patterns since they made camp and knew where the ground was stable.

She found the source about forty meters in.

It was a heart moss cluster growing at the base of a large ash tree, the same species she had noticed on the way into the clearing. The cluster had doubled in density since the afternoon, which was not the natural growth rate of heartmoss under standard conditions.

It grew where the natural energy was steady and calm, and something had been feeding the energy in this specific spot for the last several hours.

“Huh…?”

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