Chapter 137: Chapter 137

As for what might be on Abella’s notebook, Yvette had plenty of expectations: it could be runology notes, or magitech engineering; maybe her studies were already in the later stages, though it was also possible she was still early on. There might even be idle-time doodles, like she herself sometimes did when studying.

What she absolutely didn’t expect, the moment it came into view, was a smutty story—and starring her, no less!

Does this make sense?

My dear maid-san, aren’t you an aberrant? How can you be this flamboyantly repressed?

Or is this the special present you prepared for me after I slept for a hundred years? Updates are released by novel~fire~net

After several minutes of silence, Yvette set the notebook down with a blank face. She glanced at the surrounding mountains of notes and draft paper, and a dreadful thought rose unbidden in her heart.

Don’t tell me this is what all of these are?

No way, absolutely no way. This many notebooks—if they’re not proper books but notebooks and manuscripts—would add up to millions upon millions of words. Who would be so idle as to write this much for their own… amusement?

Then, just like before, after a few seconds she was sure: this one was the same kind of thing.

Then the second. The third—

Very soon, wind magic flared; a gale swept through the room. Notebooks by the dozen, sheets of draft paper by the stack,

as if sucked into an invisible vortex, circled her and unfurled—brazenly flaunting the indecent scenes contained within. It was like gathering the darkest, sickest, most wicked corners of the human soul into one, evolving into a storm of the mind—glance once and your memory banks would be corrupted on the spot.

And Yvette, a novice smut inspector, felt like a lone skiff in a storm-tossed night, battling waves made of filthy knowledge. One misstep and she’d be swallowed by a tide of pornographic sludge, plunge into the abyss, and never return.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the cozy, warm room, Abella—who had been enjoying a sweet dream a moment ago—had lost the smile on her face without knowing when.

Her long eyelashes trembled again and again, as if she were about to open her eyes; yet each time, some instinct sensed danger right before she did, and her lids timidly slid shut.

And so the room fell utterly silent, all sounds extinguished— even the crackle of burning logs vanished. Only the frantic riffling of pages before the wind remained, like a death knell urging a soul to depart.

Dozens of minutes later.

Firelight wavered in the hearth, casting a warm glow across the living room floor layered with thick rugs. Abella was kneeling beside the sofa in a perfectly textbook dogeza, trembling; her forehead nearly touched the carpet pile. Her ink-black hair spilled in disarray, veiling most of a beautiful face gone paper-white.

On the other side, Yvette leaned against the sofa, expressionless, looking at her in silence, cold as glaciers adrift upon the abyssal North Sea.

This went on for over ten minutes. At last, when Abella’s nerves were about to snap, she cautiously lifted her head. A flattering smile bloomed on her beautiful face as she said, “Um—Master—congratulations on your awakening—”

“You don’t intend to explain?” Yvette asked lightly.

In truth, she wasn’t angry—just speechless. If the protagonist of those smutty stories hadn’t been her, she would’ve even felt a sort of respect for Abella—being able to entertain herself enough to write that much. That isn’t your garden-variety performative repression; that’s a lewd star descended to earth, the sort who could single-handedly push an entire industry forward.

But she had to look very angry. That was part of the art of handling subordinates—like an elementary or middle school homeroom teacher who has to put on a fierce face to keep the class in line. Show them a good face, and they’ll be stepping all over you.

“Um—Master—Master, I—I just got carried away for a moment. I know I was wrong. I won’t scribble like that ever again—”

“Mnn—” Abella let out a whimper like a wounded puppy. She sounded on the verge of tears, though her eyes stubbornly produced none. Penitently, she pleaded, “Master, I was wrong. For the sake of me keeping watch for you for a hundred years, please don’t destroy them, okay? I’ll do anything—”

Yvette was silent for a while. Seeing Abella so strung up she was about to snap, she finally said, deadpan, “Put that stuff away. Don’t let me see you writing that kind of—” She paused, reconsidered, and sighed. “At the very least, don’t write me into it.”

“Wah! Master, I love you!!” Abella exhaled in relief, chirped, and even felt a little moved.

Master is just too kind—she isn’t going to toss out all that hard work, and she’s even allowing her to continue pursuing this… career!

Only a Master is worthy of her loyalty!

Ignoring the almost stringy intensity of Abella’s heartfelt gaze, Yvette quickly asked, “Did you really keep watch for me for a hundred years?”

This was what she cared about more—mainly because such behavior really didn’t fit the Abella she had in mind.

This one had no such thing as loyalty to her—lust, maybe. But that alone shouldn’t be enough to keep this little spider-lady stationed here for a hundred years without leaving.

“Really—” Abella protested at once, aggrieved. But after a beat, meeting her Master’s eyes, she became honest and added, “I wanted to go back to the island to visit you, but I ran into a fight, and the vehicle got damaged—I couldn’t help it—”

I see—forced to be stranded on the island. That makes sense. My read on people wasn’t wrong after all—

Satisfied, Yvette told her to hurry and tidy up the place, then turned and stepped outside.

The manor’s potion fields were as they had been. All the environmental-mode devices ticked along in perfect order. Now and then, a skeleton would pass by, checking that the temperature, humidity, and other settings were correct.

She looked around and confirmed the alchemical materials here were quite mature. She didn’t harvest them all at once; she let those long-cycle plants keep growing and only selected a small portion, then used her Ashen Touch to devour and deconstruct them, recording them into the database.

This way, if all else failed in the future, she could use Mimicry to reproduce fully formed specimens directly.

The cost was just a bit steep—mostly in the thousands, some even in the tens of thousands. She had a little over two hundred thousand aberrant mana in total; after devouring these herbs, she barely had a hundred-some thousand left. Unless it was absolutely necessary, she would never use it.

After making a round of the manor, Yvette picked a portion of mature herbs and put them into the manor’s cold storage.

Next, she went to check on the AI Skeletons in the central district.

With Abella holding down the fort, the Tier-3 elite aberrants on Ish Island didn’t dare approach Ish City. So the thousand-plus skeleton troops in the central district never encountered any particularly threatening aberrant attacks. After a hundred years,

the attrition wasn’t heavy—only a few dozen skeleton troops had gone missing.

As for the rest, aside from a bit of weathering and osteoporosis from wind and rain, and some Runic Weapon failures, there weren’t any major issues—

they still looked spry as ever.

By the way, all of Yvette’s Magitech Rings had failed. But since she had transferred the important data to the Soul Brain in advance, she was neither surprised nor worried.

The downside was that the Soul Brain couldn’t provide enough mental amplification for her to cast high-spec spellwork. So from now on, her magic would have to follow the approach she’d once written in her grimoire: multi-ring nesting and linked combinations.

She didn’t mind. A spammy small-scale spell route could still pack a serious punch; the only thing was the atrocious mana efficiency—bad enough to make mages of the Origin Civilization faint at a glance.

But she now had over 7,000 mana, terrifyingly high mana pressure, and plenty of combat experience. Even with a pile of small-form spellwork, she was confident she could duel the late Soulfire High Priest again—and this time, win.

Only two days after shedding the white cocoon and resting up, Yvette was already thinking of setting out for the Jadeite Continent.

She remembered: a hundred years ago, before she slept, she had told Ice Rain to wait for her over there. Great—now it had been a century without seeing her, like standing someone up. She didn’t know if Ice Rain, being of the machine race, could handle that.

What agitated her even more was that in a hundred years, Rosalyn hadn’t returned to the island. That was truly bizarre.

She planned to scour the Jadeite Continent and the Silvermirror Continent at the fastest possible speed, searching for tracks of her eldest disciple.

With that decided, she began smelting materials, preparing to handcraft a new travel vehicle.

But on the third night after she began this prep work, the tranquil manor, the top-floor room—Yvette, drafting her designs, suddenly heard Abella shout from downstairs: “Master, Master, look outside!”

Yvette set down her pen and pushed the window open in puzzlement—and at once saw a brilliant aurora stretched along the distant edge of the sea horizon. Its glow was fading fast, as if about to vanish any second.