Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1289  A New Emotion

The crystal receiver thrummed once before a strained voice came through.

”What is it?” Morgana asked. There was no greeting offered whatsoever, paired with absolutely zero patience. Instead, it was irritation bleeding through every syllable.

Alexios leaned back in his chair and let out a low, humorless chuckle.

”Itʼs good to hear from you, too, wife. We havenʼt spoken in months. How have you been?”

”Didnʼt you banish me from the capital?”

”You know why I had to,” he said. ”Your fixation on Devil dragged a terror incident into my city. Innocent civilians died because of you.”

”Sure. Whatever. I donʼt care. Do you have news on him or not?”

Alexios closed his eyes for a moment.

Four centuries of duty pressed against his ribs.

He had married her for the sake of the kingdom. It was a calculated arrangement forged when Tharion Ravenshade was still the wildfire who thought about gaining independence every single day, being similar to Alastair Greenvale before Alexios made his move at the feast, forcing the man to fight for his own home.

By pairing himself with Morgana, he had softened Ravenshadeʼs stance enough to turn from desiring nothing but full independence to ʼmaybe the current state of affairs isnʼt so bad.ʼ At the time, it was the best move he could have made. He still had no regrets. If Tharion were acting as Alastair was, then the current chaotic situation, centered around the little anomalous existence, could devolve into full civil war. He made the best choice; perhaps future historians would even applaud him for it.

Furthermore, when he made the decision, Alexios thought it could lead to the Vraven Kingdomʼs golden age. Morgana was brilliant, stunning, and unmatched in her age group. A true prodigy with limitless arcane potential.

He had assumed time would temper the rest. He didnʼt hope to receive love from a woman much younger than him, but he couldnʼt help but imagine a future where, after a few decades or even centuries, they would find a rhythm.

He would lead the nation and the armies.

She would handle mage regiments, research, and arcane strategy.

Their pairing couldʼve, and shouldʼve, been that of a real power couple.

Instead, she was a rotten woman who was incapable of being tasked with such things.

She was a greedy AoE-oriented mage; she would run away from the squads she should be leading so they didnʼt get in her way.

And that was the better option, as she sometimes just blasted both allies and enemies equally when she couldnʼt be bothered.

As for leading arcane research… she was a real talent at that.

At magical research, that is.

Not leading it.

Not dealing with the mundane parts that held a kingdom together.

Give her a laboratory, and she would tear through theory faster than anyone alive.

But give her responsibility, and she redirected everything toward whatever caught her curiosity.

When Alexios asked her to study fertilizer-grade catalysts to ease the famine in a particularly nasty year, she abandoned the assignment within a week and started studying astrology instead, thinking the stars might answer some of her questions about magic. When asked where the catalyst was, she shrugged and said the project was a failure.

When he tasked her with developing a cheaper ward stone to help villages reinforce their borders, she converted the funding into a prototype spell that inverted gravity fields. It was impressive, yes. But utterly useless for common households.

When he needed a breakthrough for a more secure and cheaper long-distance communication channel between garrisons that could, in theory, connect garrisons all over the kingdom without range limit, she returned months later with notes on how to tear a hole through space if enough mana batteries were detonated at the same time.

Brilliant work.

Absolutely disastrous in every practical sense.

He had stopped giving her state tasks after that.

And the marriage had shifted entirely into a political armistice, not a partnership.

Alexiosʼ jaw tightened as another face surfaced in his thoughts.

Black.

Quinlan Elysiar.

The little anomaly who had walked into his birthday banquet pretending to be a noble surrounded by a full entourage of women, each one as breathtaking as Morgana, without any of them carrying that cold interior rot. They behaved carefully, masks on, steps measured, but even then, Alexios could read the truth.

They adored him.

They trusted him.

They moved with him as if they shared one mission, all together.

A real unit.

Something Alexios and Morgana had never achieved despite almost half a millennium of marriage.

And all of Alexiosʼ intelligence reports pointed to one absurd conclusion: the man had met these women less than a year ago.

He found Ayame Fujimori in a slave house in Aldoria, bought her contract for practically nothing because she rejected over a hundred candidates and accepted only him, prompting the seller to just want to free up her cell and stop feeding her, losing money every day. Soon, the golden-haired dogkin joined him. Those were the first sightings of his group during early spring.

Now winter had arrived, and the group had grown into a dozen.

A dozen loving women adoring a single man, and that single man adoring them all back just as much.

Yet here Alexios stood, bound to Morgana for centuries. The two of them were colder than ever. The bitterness between them had not weakened with time. Instead, it even deepened, calcified, spreading like frost across everything that shouldʼve been shared. No trust. No partnership. No sense of standing on the same side.

Just two people locked in a political marriage, drifting farther apart with every decade.

Quinlan built a family from nothing in a single year.

Alexios and Morgana had half a millennium and produced nothing but a growing divide.

A slow realization crept up his spine.

ʼAh. Envy.ʼ

He almost laughed.

The strongest man in the realm, the wealthiest, the one with the crown and the armies and the authority to command hundreds of millions of lives, was envying someone else. An upstart, a new beginning, who was rising so rapidly that calling him an upstart might as well have been a grave insult to his accomplishments.

Ridiculous.

Yet here it was.

His gaze slid to the small statue of the Goddess in the corner of the office. The stone face stared back at him with its calm, distant expression.

ʼIs that my fate?ʼ he thought. ʼTo spend my last years surrounded by power yet buried in misery?ʼ

A sharp exhale from the receiver pulled him back.

”I donʼt have the whole day,” Morgana said. ”Speak.”

”Haaah…” Alexios let out another quiet breath, one that carried more weight than sound.

”Iʼll keep it short,” he said.

He gave her the essentials.

Morgana made no comment. Not a hum. Not a sigh. Just silence came from the other end.

Alexios, looking at the stack of letters on his desk, said, ”Morgana. Things canʼt go on like this. We must make a move.”

As the king and queen circled their plans, discussing the best course of action, the man they envied and were obsessed with, respectively, spent the night in his own home, unhurried and in good company.