The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 542 - He Who Watches The World (Atomize)

Chapter 542: Chapter 542 - He Who Watches The World (Atomize)

Madrigil’s studio occupied a spot in the forest - the wooden kind, not the stone formations near the main estate. A hollow that was a good distance away from the spire that visitors operated around. It made travel for him and others a bit out of the way, so Elua had provided him one construct whose only purpose was to ferry people there and back.

One which she sat on while her mint eyes looked toward one of the smaller caverns that Sevra had mapped during her Walk explorations years ago. The exiled noble had ’claimed’ it after the wedding of her disciples, having seemed to have developed some need to obtain all of his art medium material on his own. Plenty of Metal could be found all throughout the Exclave, and El found no reason to prevent him from harvesting as he wanted.

The cave was also where she had assisted him in rebuilding a safe space for himself, a while after her Breacher breakthrough mishap had ruined his first self-made gallery of... *things*.

’That is really all I can call them. There is no real motif. Though I like these. I’ll add placing them around the base of the gardens to his duties.’

After landing, her fingers ran along the edge of a beautiful copper lattice that climbed the cavern wall, like a kind of ivy that she’d read existed in his homeland. Each ’leaf’ was painstakingly formed from tiny hexagonal plates joined with intentional geometric angles. Yet, the overall pattern of ’growth’ and spread followed something surprisingly organic and showed he really was paying intense attention to everything he looked at.

The rest of the space held a similar contradiction. A ’care to detail’ within each item... all out of an individual who usually preferred not to engage with the people who might genuinely appreciate these things he made. In a way, she respected the sort of artistic heart he had and the way it distracted him while practicing his essence control, but loathed the *lack* of an artisan’s soul in the foreign noble. None of it seemed made expressly for trade or as work that could intentionally affect others.

In short, he was the sort of selfish whimsical cultivator that would never be an altruist and therefore only worth so much of her interest. Mostly in the sort of way that kept potential enemies within her line of sight. Not that she felt he was directly malicious, but she recognized him as someone who would be opportunistic the moment he felt he could get away with it.

A series of small spheres sat on a workbench, each one a different alloy material she had not *provided* him so much as ignored that he was willing to take it from her ingot stores and mention it later. Their surfaces were carved with geodesic, stereographic, and some spiraling grooves on one rack of them... and the other rack seemed to be made of chaotic looking Voronoi tessellations that attempted to mimic cell structures. She knew that giving him access to a high powered microscope would intrigue the scholar, but not how much it would affect his hobby.

Wall-mounted pieces mimicking all sorts of flowers sat right alongside some representing organs of Exclave creatures. She had a feeling that if Madrigil ever did desire to return to their world, he would be a terror of a naturalist... willing to capture and dissect everything to learn everything with his Parallel Astralism. He’d already done just that to some of her early constructs - which seemed perfectly fine at the time because they weren’t *living*.

’Maybe he was on a slipperier slope than I knew!’

A half-finished form that she suspected was meant to be a bird... though it currently looked more like an ’argument’ to the heiress. Between leaving it as skeletal structure pulled together out of iron strands or finishing the outside to look realistic. At least, that was her assessment with how one well crafted wing sat detached beside it and one set of wing bones were properly fused to the overall statue.

"Why did you specifically show Nohre around in here?"

She didn’t really want to ask the man sitting at that workbench this question initially, but couldn’t help herself as her calculations were adjusted by the entire room. It had already been more than a week since friends left perfectly well and *not* dissected, but if she had to levy a direct warning to not do that to him... she would break any suspect behavior with the full force of her spirit as a warm up to her return to the continent.

"She seemed interested after I told her you were having me braid the last of her wedding headdress into-"

"You told her ahead of time I was giving her a gift."

"I was not told to keep it a secret."

The brunette frowned and wondered which of the items there would hurt him most for her to Grip into junk.

"As a member of a well off family, I would expect you were taught the importance of reading between the lines. When someone hides away to do something, it is usually because they do not want the other person to know, yes?"

"If you say so. She would have been the same amount of happy, regardless."

The man’s fingers traced the edge of one of his unfinished spheres while looking towards a stone on his desk. An uncut emerald, the only gem of any kind sat up on his desk. For a moment, his spirit flickered with something the ancient cultivator *recognized*. Though she wasn’t sure whether it was something she had to worry about crushing.

Madrigil had found reason to be sociable and present when the green-eyed cultivator was around. At least after she was married - and the event with the Silver Divinity had passed. It stood out because the behavior was precisely so unlike him. And El knew of only one possible connection between it all.

"Your wife had the same color eyes, is it?"

"Yes."

She wasn’t surprised that he didn’t try to evade it. The man may have been very private in some respects, but he did seem to answer truthfully about his past any time the reincarnator guessed correctly. She just didn’t do it often because it always opened up more details than she often wanted to hear.

"Nothing else about her matches - hair color, height, chest size, hip width, - and Hamma’s lips were not exactly that shade of pink, but it was a close enough detail that I... suppose I was hoping she would appreciate things my wife might have."

"That’s just the tiniest bit pathetic. And I totally, ruefully understand."

As Uvraneht, she had been almost callous in her ability to cut off the feelings about a person who she stopped loving because they firmly, irrefutably betrayed the history and ideal of themselves in her heart. But when that was not the case, when she lost them while still loving them? Longer and longer it seemed as she aged, would she stew in obsession about the smallest of details.

"I thought I had put that away. Buried it with everything else from before."

"Attachment doesn’t bury well. It tends to push back up through whatever you pile on top of it. It has to be severed... or sometimes just accepted as a part of us."

"Speaking from experience again?"

"Yes. I’ve stressed before that keeping the totality of your mistakes as something to meditate on is valuable. That’s because it’s hard, not because it’s easy."

She turned away from a little bronze bauble that she eventually realized was an attempt to copy the shape of the Realmshard he’d seen for a short while before their teleportation. Finding that amusing, considering what she was about to say.

"You could go back, eventually. From what you told me, your exile wasn’t a death sentence. Political winds shift. Even scholars forget why they were angry when enough time passes and they’ve chosen to oppress new radicals."

"I could."

His answer carried no particular weight in either direction. Which was fine by Elua. She hadn’t come to kick him out in the first place. She’d came to settle something that had to do with the opposite, in face.

"I’ll be leaving myself, soon."

"I assumed as much. Even before your disciple shared that with me. You’ve been finishing things off rather than starting any new large projects for a while now. And you’ve been standing up on top of your balcony and staring at the Gateway for an hour every night."

"Very observant. Also, please stop observing me that closely at midnight."

She pointed toward the telescope sitting against one wall that he must have been using. Really, she was regretting allowing him to just raid nearly everything that wasn’t an especially dangerous substance. All he did was do more things that annoyed or concerned her with what he took!

"My apologies, it was a bit like bird watching. And I’ve run out of new ones to find on my walks."

"Yes, well, a real shame that. But if you are intending to stay here despite the lack of new stimuli-"

"There is a whole world of bacteria at my fingertips now."

’One thing. I swear I will destroy at least one thing of his here, before I leave.’

"If you shut up for a moment, I am trying to assign you officially as the steward to my beloved’s mansion. Nothing really changes. You are still barred from every area you were before."

"As expected. What about food?"

"The majority of the constructs will be shut down, other than the ones necessary to help you maintain an appropriate amount of energy storage. And of course, the ones that only activate in emergencies. If I am somehow unable to return in the next few years with my beloved, you should evacuate."

"I can probably manage by myself without your automatons. Even decades, with what you’ve taught me."

"...That’s not why I’m saying you should leave. Just trust me."

Explaining that she had rigged a mechanism that would vaporize all the structures meant for Qat, if the woman herself was not able to enter and take control, to the person meant to be living and cultivating in the area was probably unwise. He was already too interested in the destructive properties of many things. And Starlances, Breacher breakthroughs, and essence powerplants potentially blowing up would be tiny.

Next to the doomsday device placed near the Spirit of the Realm.