Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1528 Long Live
Chapter 1528 Long Live
“My people.”
A hundred thousand heads snapped upward.
Quinlan stood on the roof of the market hall with his helmet no longer hiding his face. His magic carried his voice across every street, every building. Every warm floor and frosted window heard him as clearly as if he were standing in the room.
“The move is done and the gate is closing.”
He raised one hand toward the Warp Gate and let it go.
The gate collapsed inward, its edges folding like paper caught in a flame.
The drain vanished with it.
The relief hit him like a physical blow. The anvil that had been crushing his chest for the entire afternoon simply ceased to exist, and mana flooded back into his channels so fast his knees nearly buckled. His vision swam. The world tilted, steadied, and the air in his lungs tasted different, lighter, as if he’d been breathing through cloth for hours and someone had finally ripped it away.
He locked his legs, kept his posture, and let the crowd see nothing.
Below, the silence had a different quality. People stared at the empty space where the gate had been, and the absence of its hum left the square feeling hollowed out. A child whimpered. A woman pulled her shawl tighter. The last visible thread connecting them to Whisperfield was gone, and the crowd felt it.
Then the warmth beneath their feet reminded them why they were here, and the moment passed.
Quinlan kept talking.
“Winter is here and you’ve had a hell of a day. So here’s what I need from you tonight. Go home. Secure your belongings. Get your families settled. The floors are warm, the water runs, and the ovens are hot. Use them.”
His gaze swept the upturned faces below. Soldiers standing alongside civilians. Families clustered in doorways. Children sitting on heated roads with their shoes off, watching the man on the roof with the wide eyes of people too young to understand politics but old enough to remember magic.
“Miri Town is a twenty-minute walk north through the forest. It’s the only other settlement for a long stretch in any direction, which means you don’t need to worry about Elvardian patrols or undead raids tonight. Or any night soon. You’re deep in my territory, and nothing gets through these forests without my knowing.”
He let that sit for a moment.
“Rules and changes are coming. New laws, new expectations. I won’t pretend this transition will be painless, and I won’t insult you by pretending you chose it. I took your city, I killed your loved ones, and I moved you here. Some of you will hate me for that for the rest of your lives.”
Silence across the square.
“But you’re alive and life must move on.”
A ripple went through the crowd. A few heads turned. A few mouths opened and closed.
“So for the time being…”
Quinlan raised his hand again, and the air beside him split open.
A smaller gate, barely two meters tall, flared to life on the rooftop. Through it stepped a woman with auburn hair tied in a practical knot, wearing a tailored coat that managed to look administrative and beautiful at the same time. Her eyes found Quinlan immediately, and the smile that broke across her face made telepathic communication feel redundant.
Jasmine Argentis walked through the gate and straight into his arm.
Quinlan pulled her against his side with one arm around her waist, and before she could say a word, he called on wind manipulation. The two of them rose from the rooftop.
They climbed twenty meters above the market hall and hung there, suspended in the cold evening air, Jasmine’s coat fluttering and her hair catching the wind as the settlement spread beneath them in every direction, roads and rooftops and trees standing between rows of homes, frosted windows glowing amber in the fading light.
A hundred thousand people watched the Primordial Villain hold a woman in the sky.
Jasmine looked down at the city, then up at Quinlan, and her face said everything her mouth hadn’t figured out how to yet.
She kissed him.
A small thing. Quick and warm, lips barely touching his cheeks, the peck of a woman who was proud and grateful and couldn’t help herself. She pulled back with a grin that suggested she hadn’t planned it and didn’t regret it.
Quinlan looked at her for a beat.
Then he cupped the back of her head with one gauntleted hand and kissed her properly.
Not a peck. Not a quick thing. He kissed her the way a man kissed a woman he loved when a hundred thousand people were watching and he couldn’t be bothered to care. <Quin… This is becoming a tradition at this point!> Jasmine whined telepathically while their tongues twirled. <You kissed me in Miri Town too!>
<A tradition I have nothing against. Do you?>
Her eyes sparkled as she shouted, <None!>
Her arms went around his neck, and the wind held them steady. The kiss lasted long enough for the entire central square to process what they were seeing.
The gasp that rolled through the crowd was audible from twenty meters up.
A merchant’s wife seized her husband’s arm. “Did he just…”
“Yes.”
“In front of everyone?”
“Yes.”
“In the middle of a speech?”
Her husband looked at the two figures floating above the market hall, wrapped around each other in the evening sky, and wisely said nothing further.
A cluster of young soldiers near the barracks road stared upward with their mouths open. One of them managed, “Shameless.”
“Completely shameless,” his companion agreed, and the admiration in his voice was not subtle.
Among the women, the reaction was quieter and considerably more dangerous. Wives glanced at their husbands with a particular expression that men throughout history had learned to fear. It was the look that said, ‘Why don’t you ever do that? Do you not love me? Are you embarrassed of me?’ It was the look that preceded arguments about romance that husbands would lose before the first word left their mouths. It was the look that the Primordial Villain had just inflicted on every married man in the settlement, and he hadn’t even noticed.
A girl of maybe sixteen pressed both hands to her cheeks and whispered to her friend, “He’s so romantic! King Alexios would never do such a thing…”
“He conquered us this morning,” her friend reminded her.
“He did it in a romantic manner.”
“That’s not how that word works.”
The girl wasn’t going to be swayed, however. “My worries for the future have lessened like, a lot.”
“Because our tyrant kissed a woman?”
“Because of how he kissed a woman and how she reacted. It put my heart at ease.”
“You’re weird.”
The girl just shrugged as her eyes never once left the display of immense affection in the skies.
Quinlan released Jasmine with the easy confidence of a man who had just kissed a woman in front of a city and considered it a reasonable use of his time. Jasmine’s cheeks were flushed, her hair was windswept, and the grin on her face could have lit the settlement without the magma system.
No duke or count in the Vraven Kingdom’s long history had ever done anything like that.
Their rulers had been formal men in formal coats who addressed crowds from behind podiums and kissed their wives in private, if at all, and governed with the stiff propriety of people who believed dignity and warmth were mutually exclusive.
The Primordial Villain kissed his woman in the sky because he wanted to, and that was the end of it.
Watching their new ruler make out with his lover twenty meters above the city square wasn’t what most of them had pictured when they heard the words “new start.” But it sold the idea better than any speech could have.
Quinlan’s voice carried down to the crowd below, projected by aura while he kept Jasmine against his side.
“This woman is Jasmine Argentis, my lover, representative, and the governor of my lands. She’ll oversee the settlement process and work with your leaders to make this city into something worth being proud of.”
He looked down at a hundred thousand faces staring up at two figures floating in the evening sky.
“That’s it from me. Get some rest. You’ve earned it.”
The silence held for three heartbeats.
Then a woman near the gate square, one of the early arrivals who had watched the first building rise from frozen dirt, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted.
“Long live the Sovereign!”
It carried across the square. A few heads turned toward her. A few people shuffled uncomfortably, because the man floating above them was the Primordial Villain. Cheering for the man who had conquered your city felt like a strange thing to do on the same day he’d done the conquering.
But then a soldier, one of the group who had been sitting on the heated road laughing like idiots an hour ago, rose to his feet and echoed it.
“Long live the Sovereign!”
