The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 369 - Ancient Patience Is No Match For Youthful Desires, Or Is It?

Four days later...

Elua er Goltbred sat cross-legged with her obsidian mirror floating over her lap. Her latest letter to her deeply missed spouse was crumpled up in her fist, for the second time. The words had *started* normally enough again.

Updates on the wagon project’s success - it took longer to pretend she was working than to work. Mentions of the fort’s preparations for moving inward toward the nearest superfort. And of course, careful inquiries about the strike force’s current activities.

Then they’d devolved into unconcealed desperation.

/ Have you encountered any situations that really tested your new formation? Are you eating properly? Sleeping fine even without me? That Empath on your team... does she maintain all the appropriate boundaries or do I have to- /

Each question revealed more of her spiraling anxiety than the last. She’d torn up and set on fire another previous attempt that had been even worse.

"This is pathetic."

Her manipulations of her Element hung near the ceiling - her training exercises had multiplied and grew in complexity as her need for distraction grew. Temperatures and pressures, rotations and merging flows of complex patterns, and tunnels that spiraled like miniature tornados.

The elementalist displays would have impressed anyone who witnessed them - and they barely registered as background activity now. Just another way to keep a fraction of her mind occupied manipulating essence while the rest churned through increasingly problematic scenarios.

"Based on the missives I’ve read in the commander’s office and the progression of map updates, there are approximately seventy-three more days until the earliest possible reunion."

She spoke the vague math she’d done aloud, as if hearing it might make the timeline feel less insurmountable. It didn’t. Her Qat was supposed to be back in only 6 months of Guild training and ended up staying out of her reach for a year!

Commander Huri had personally thanked her in one private meeting for the innovation - and the supply coordinator had started referring to her as the ’sassy serpent’ when she came by to visit and lend an eye over documents. It was rare for her to continue getting along with another spiritualist that saw just a little bit through her.

’He has to know I was using it just to gather more information on everything...’

It should have felt *some* kind of satisfying. Recognition of her ability and contribution to the war effort. The small boost to society at large after the war and further establishment of her value. Opinion of her spreading, independent of her family and Qat - but that reflected well on both of them.

Everything she’d claimed to want when ’justifying’ her decision to remain at this same fort that her precious gem had departed from. Except the majority of what she’d done was pure distraction, ideas that couldn’t be used for years or more, letters and instructions for disciples and other personnel that may never be used.

"None of it brings her back here. None of it extends her spiritual presence around me. None of it is a set of strong arms wrapped tight as I think of nothing else."

She stood abruptly, causing most of her Gaseous manipulations to destabilize momentarily before she reasserted control. Elua paced the small confines of their quarters - a room extended to her despite her technical position of not being ’assigned’ to be there. She’d read the letters between fort commanders and found the old one’s persistence in getting her sent back slightly amusing.

’He owed favors to Anper. He also needs a better lock for his secret compartment.’ ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com

As she took steps from one wall to another, she felt the ever more familiar sensation of her Ogre Physique responding to the emotional stress. Hormonal changes threatening to surge beyond her careful restraints.

The bedroll bore a new tear from two nights ago when she’d gripped it too tightly while attempting to sleep through a short nightmare. The desk showed faint indentations from her fingers when she’d pinched down on it during a particularly vivid fantasy of what might happen if Qat walked through the door. Then she had burst beanbags she worked hard on, gripping them while thinking about creating false emergencies that would recall the strike force.

"I’m losing control. The very thing I was afraid of."

Eventually she left the room, an aimless walk in a more open corridor brought her to the small window overlooking one of the fort’s courtyards to watch the dawn exercises that had begun. Soldiers running drills, cultivators practicing private forms, and the usual other mundane activities of a military installation prepped for war.

All of it felt irrelevant. Like watching ants arrange themselves in patterns below while standing atop a mountain. Their business was only a small part of the entire world, after all. And they crawled over and around her life while not even recognizing the directions of a Queen when they saw one.

"Viewing everyone else as pieces to be moved as I willed rather than people to be protected without question. I know I am not Qat, which is why I love her. But when she is not here..."

’I start to question their individual worthiness and desire to expose them and their inadequacies for her to see.’

The thought sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with the morning air. Because each one would shake her beloved like it had with Kefa. Lead her to have more casual disregard for the consequences to others, like she almost had with Dima.

She’d convinced herself that Qatrand’s influence had changed her fundamentally already. That ’love like this’ had somehow rewritten the core patterns of her ancient soul. And even being subjective, she could tell it was *true*... that it was excavating and reassessing ingrained parts of her.

And that it wasn’t just her doing everything her spouse would want her to. That some of these things were about what she wanted, together with Qat. But even as she thought this, her mind was already spinning through possibilities that weren’t *quite* what she wanted.

Ways to engineer situations that would ’require’ Qatrand er Yecine’s return from the frontline. Political pressures she could apply by leveraging things she had learned while snooping through every important person in this fort. None of it was beneath her capabilities.

Most would even serve legitimate purposes - strengthening defenses, exposing corruption, eliminating domestic threats to the region. She could craft justifications that would satisfy any observer. Justifications that would satisfy Qat, who was always so easy to accept almost anything the heiress did - except the things that put herself down.

And the rationalization she could do to combine physical needs with spiritual manipulations scared her more than she liked. For a long time, maybe even since the day they met, the brunette knew she would do anything for her ’fortress’. But she was slowly, surely sliding towards doing anything ’for herself’.

"No. I won’t become like that."

The obsidian mirror’s dark surface floated in front and reflected her face. The weight of millennia stared back through dulled mint green eyes that had seen too much and glowed with flickers that wanted too much.

"But perhaps busy work is not the best distraction. Something that demands the real me might be in order."

Her fingers traced the mirror’s warped gilt edge, considering options that made her current wagon modifications look like children’s games. There were threats to this region that went far beyond cyclical Voidling incursions.

Political machinations from foreigners and the Saltfire Storm Alliance could destabilize the entire continent in the post-war period. Early secondary breaches like she’d taken care of suggested ancient powers stirring that the current generation of cultivators couldn’t even comprehend.

She could involve herself in dealing with any of them and apply her true capabilities to challenges that should occupy her completely until Qatrand’s return. Leave this place and stop drowning in loneliness she didn’t deserve and that her beloved would never wish on her.

The question was whether she could get involved without losing her ideal self in the process. Without becoming the kind of ancient cultivator who viewed mortals and ’young’ cultivators as expendable resources in pursuit of larger goals. Because as a schemer, she knew she was not a real master.

She was merely fairly good at manipulating others’ reactions and making it seem that way. Through hard work and effort, not genius and improbable foresight. But occasionally, cleverness was not needed to make an assessment of a pattern.

"So she showed up after all. I bet Qat she would not, after she told me of meeting her. I probably should not tell my love that I wanted to owe her that favor. But I will have to remind her she is owed it until she uses it~"

Elua’s spiritual sense had focused on the presence approaching her quarters. A female cultivator, carrying something that resonated with quite a bit of dimensional instability. But more importantly - someone whose spiritual signature felt familiar as the illusionist locked a cage around the dangerous feeling artifact.

After days of hollow distractions and mounting desperation, something worthy of her attention had finally arrived... and it happened to be a dusty cloaked woman with a *lot* of inadequacies.

This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢