SMASH or PASS

Chapter 58: Chapter Fifty-Eight: Flowers

Back at the apartment.

Walking through the evening streets. Pixia was dark inside my collar. Fenra was waiting at the gate.

She pressed her nose against my hand. For a long time. Today it wouldn’t be pure sex one, it would be the forest. Moss, trees, elven air.

An unfamiliar scent. But not the scent of a woman.

Her tail wagged. Small. Checking.

"I went outside. Beyond the wall. The forest."

Her ears twitched. Beyond the wall. A place that doesn’t exist on Fenra’s map of the world.

"It was fine. I met an interesting person."

She sniffed my hand again. Thoroughly. Searching for the scent of a woman.

Apparently, she didn’t find one.

Her tail wagged once more. A little bigger this time.

◇◇◇

In a Covenant of Purity Chapter house in Brannock, a woman in white-and-gold robes opened a file. Three weeks old. Enrollment records, academic performance data, seventeen complaint summaries.

She added a note: "Subject demonstrates anomalous behavioral patterns. Social integration rate exceeds statistical norms. Recommend continued observation."

She added a second page. Cross-references. The academy’s performance reports. The guild’s contract history. The Baron’s sponsorship records. The breeding farm’s visitor log from Greenveil.

Everything connected. The commoner ward with no mana and exceptional intelligence. The orphan who appeared from nowhere with skills that didn’t match any educational background on record. The student whose analytical frameworks referenced mathematical principles that no institution in Solvraeth taught.

She picked up a pen. In the margin of the file’s cover page, she wrote a single word.

"Anomaly."

She touched the file deliberately. Possessively. "The academy whore... Heh."

She smiled.

She might gain a new plaything soon.

◇◇◇

Academy, week six.

The routine had settled. Classes in the morning. Encounters in the afternoon and evening (the +50% had not reduced demand; it had multiplied it). Pixia tutoring at night. Sleep. Repeat.

Mirette visits became regular. Every third day, a message arrived at my mailbox in Aldren’s handwriting: "Tea at the warehouse. 4 PM." Mirette didn’t write messages. The maid named Henna wrote them for her.

The second visit was at a tea house in the merchant quarter. Mirette arrived with two servants and a different expensive dress.

"How’s the academy?"

"Women keep giving me things."

"What sort of things?"

"Notes. Flowers. Invitations. One woman gave me a drawing of myself."

"That’s terrifying."

She has changed a little since the first visit. She made eye contact four seconds now instead of three. She fidgeted less. She’d brought her own conversation topics.

"Can I tell you something? After you left last time, I tried to pour my own tea."

"How did it go?"

"Henna was in the next room. Nobody was watching. I picked up the teapot and—" A pause. "I spilled it on the table. On my dress. And on Nimbus, who was sleeping in the chair. He was very upset."

"But you tried."

"I tried." She gave a small smile. "The teapot is heavy. The spout doesn’t go where you point it."

"Most things don’t the first time."

"That’s what Henna said. She said she was proud of me. Which made me cry. Which made Nimbus upset again because wet cats don’t enjoy crying people." She touched her twintails. "I’m going to try again. Without the cat nearby."

"Progress."

"Glacial progress. Henna says glaciers move mountains if you give them enough time." She tilted her head. "I’d like to be a glacier. Moving so slowly nobody notices until the landscape is different."

Huh... That was the most insightful thing she’d said in two meetings.

The spoiled half-elf who couldn’t pour tea was growing.

"Do you know what happened when I spilled the tea?" she asked.

"You told me. The dress. The table. The cat."

"No, I mean what happened AFTER. After Henna cleaned up and Nimbus dried off and I changed my dress. I sat in the drawing room and I looked at the teapot. Just looked at it. For an hour."

"An hour?"

"I was thinking. I was thinking about why pouring tea is hard. The teapot has a handle. The cup has an opening. The distance between them is twelve inches. The motion is simple: lift, tilt, pour. Every component is straightforward. The result should be straightforward. But it wasn’t, because I’d never practiced the motion. My hands didn’t know the weight distribution. My wrist didn’t know the tilt angle. My brain understood the concept but my body hadn’t been trained to execute it."

She was analyzing tea-pouring as a skill acquisition problem. Without knowing the terminology, she was describing motor learning theory.

Underneath the servants and the schedule and the golden raisins, there was a brain. It worked. It just hadn’t been asked to work before.

"So I practiced. Without the tea. Just the teapot and an empty cup. Lift, tilt, pour. Twenty times. My wrist learned the angle. My hand learned the weight. By the twentieth repetition, the motion was smooth." She smiled. "Then I added water. Not tea. Water. Because if I spilled water, Henna wouldn’t know."

"Did you spill the water?"

"Twice. Out of ten attempts." She held up two fingers. "An 80% success rate. Henna says that’s above average for a first-day student in the guild’s alchemy apprenticeship program." She paused. "Henna compares everything to guild standards. I think she secretly wanted to be an adventurer."

"Did she?"

"She’s never said. But she owns a sword. It’s in her room. She thinks I don’t know about it."

I was starting to understand Mirette. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t incapable. She was untrained. Every skill that normal people developed through daily life, cooking, cleaning, pouring, choosing, deciding, she’d outsourced to servants since birth. The capability existed. The practice didn’t.

Given practice, she’d learn.

◇◇◇

That morning, someone had left flowers on my desk. Moonbloom lilies. Five stems.

I usually throw this type of stuff straight in the trash. I don’t really have much uses of flowers.

But those ones were apparently very important.

Pixia evaluated them at 2.5 gold.

"Keep them. Put them in water. Say nothing. The sender is anonymous. Anonymous gifts from noble women are opening bids. She’s waiting to see if you keep them."

"What if I give them to someone else?"

"War between two noble families."

"Throw them away?"

"2.5 gold wasted. ’Ungrateful’ added to your profile." She kicked her legs. "Silence is your best response. The sender interprets silence however benefits her ego."

I kept the flowers.

◇◇◇

Also this week, I got an offer from a noble lady.

Lady Voss’s dinner invite. Two gold for an evening with her shy daughter at the Voss estate.

The daughter was nineteen. Dark-haired. Quiet. She sat across from me at a table set for two and spent ten minutes looking at her plate.

"You can talk. I don’t bite." Most of the times.

"Mama said you might." She looked up. Blushed. "She rehearsed the whole evening with me. She told me what you’d say and what I should say. I have a LIST."

"What are the categories?"

"’His interests,’ ’Compliments that sound natural,’ ’Topics to avoid,’ and ’Emergency exit strategies.’" She pulled the list out. Two pages. "She spent three days on this."

"Does ’topics to avoid’ include the list?"

"...Number four on the avoid list is ’Do not mention the list.’" She stared at the paper. "I just broke rule four."

"..."

"Pffft." I couldn’t help but chuckle.

She relaxed after that. Talked about her studies (she wanted alchemy; her mother wanted marriage). About her cat Buttons (who’d eaten her mother’s shoes). About the forty-seven conversation scenarios her mother had rehearsed.

"You’re not what she said you’d be."

"What did she say?"

"Scary. Calculating. She said commoner men only care about themselves."

"Well, that’s not untrue."

"So you don’t deny it?" She laughed. Actually laughed.

"Can I tell you something? Since we already broke rule four." She said.

"Go ahead."

"I don’t want to get married. Mama wants me married. Papa wants me married. My aunts want me married. Everyone wants me married except me." She stirred her soup. "I want to study alchemy. I want to make potions and compounds and figure out why moonroot reacts differently at altitude. I want to be in a laboratory, not in a drawing room arranging dinners for a husband I didn’t choose."

"Have you told your mother?"

"I’ve tried. She says alchemy is a ’phase.’ She says I’ll grow out of it when I meet the right man." She looked at me. "She thinks you might be the right man. That’s why she paid 2 gold for this dinner."

"Am I the right man?"

"You’re eating soup and listening to me talk about alchemy. That’s more than anyone else has done." She picked up her spoon. "You’re not the right man. But you’re the first person who asked."

We ate the rest of dinner in comfortable silence. She didn’t follow her mother’s forty-seven scenarios. She talked about reagent crystallization and the specific temperature at which silverleaf extract becomes unstable. I asked questions. She answered them. By the end, she’d forgotten about the list entirely.

At the door, she said: "Thank you for not being scary."

"Thank you for the soup."

She smiled. The smile was real. Not rehearsed. Not from the list. The genuine article from a nineteen-year-old who’d spent an evening being herself instead of her mother’s investment.

I smiled and waved at her as she left.

"Tsk. So fucking naive."

In the ’invite’ the desperate lady Voss asked me directly to get her daughter drunk and ’Put a baby in her.’ Apparently their house inheritance war was getting worse and needed my help.

Of course, I would never do this, but I accepted the money under the promise of ’I’ll try my best, but if didn’t get a chance to...’

I didn’t get a chance. Since I stopped her from drinking anything with alcohol five times this night.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!