My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 141

Chapter: 281

The silence stretched, comfortable for her, slightly awkward for him. He felt the familiar, almost compulsive urge to fill it, to poke the sleeping dragon, to see if he could elicit another one of those rare, almost invisible, flickers of human emotion. His mind, weary from a day of alchemical theory and logistical planning, reached for a conversation starter. And, as was becoming increasingly common, the one it found was probably not the wisest, most socially adept, choice.

He was thinking about his new product lines. The ‘babies’ of his burgeoning empire. The different formulations, the new scents, the potential for a whole family of Aura products. And the word, unfortunately, stuck.

He cleared his throat. Rosa didn't look up, but he saw the faintest tightening of her shoulders, a silent acknowledgment of his presence, a subtle tensing in preparation for whatever inanity he was about to unleash.

“So,” Lloyd began, his voice casual, almost conversational, as he ambled over towards the sofa, his designated patch of domestic territory. “Been thinking.”

Silence. The soft rustle of a turning page was her only reply.

He pressed on, blissfully, suicidally, unaware of the conversational cliff he was about to gleefully leap from. “About the future, you know. Of the house. The lineage. All that important, noble stuff.” He sank onto the sofa, feigning a thoughtful expression. “And it got me wondering…”

He paused for dramatic effect. Rosa still did not look up.

“So, how many babies do you want?”

The silence that followed was not merely the absence of sound. It was a solid thing. A physical entity. A block of pure, unadulterated, super-chilled, mortified silence that descended upon the room and seemed to suck all the warmth, all the air, all the very life, from it.

The page-turning stopped. The air stopped moving. The dust motes, which had been dancing so cheerfully in the lamplight, seemed to freeze mid-air, terrified.

Slowly, with a deliberation that was infinitely more terrifying than any sudden movement, Rosa Siddik lowered her book. She placed it, with preternatural, chilling calm, on the small table beside her chair. Then, her head turned, a slow, inexorable pivot, like a statue coming to life, a very angry, very powerful, very much not-amused statue.

Her obsidian eyes, visible above the delicate silver lace of her veil, were no longer calm, no longer analytical. They were wide. Not with shock, in the conventional sense. But with a kind of profound, almost cosmic, bewilderment. As if he had just asked her to explain the mating habits of interdimensional dust mites. In fluent, sung-through opera.

Then, the bewilderment was consumed, instantly, violently, by something else. A wave of color, a stunning, furious, beautiful crimson, surged up her elegant neck, flooding her pale cheeks, a blush so intense it was visible even in the dim, flickering lamplight. It was the blush of a deeply private, deeply reserved individual who had just had their most personal, most sacrosanct boundaries violated by a conversational sledgehammer wielded by a complete and utter moron.

And her eyes… her obsidian eyes, which had been merely wide, now narrowed into dangerous, glittering slits. The air around her didn't just feel cold anymore; it crackled. A faint, almost invisible, shimmering aura of pure, unadulterated, Spirit-Power-infused rage began to emanate from her, making the hairs on Lloyd’s arms stand on end.

He had not just poked the dragon. He had apparently tap-danced on its snout while wearing novelty clown shoes and singing a jaunty sea shanty about its questionable parentage.

“What,” Rosa said, her voice a low, terrifying whisper, each word a perfectly formed icicle of pure, concentrated fury, “did you just say to me?”

Lloyd’s blood ran cold. The playful, anachronistic humor that had seemed so clever in his head moments before now revealed itself for what it was: a monumentally, catastrophically, suicidally stupid idea. The look in her eyes was not one of mere annoyance. It was the look of a woman who was actively, seriously, considering how to turn his internal organs into a tastefully arranged, if slightly messy, centerpiece for the dining hall.

“Uh…” Lloyd stammered, his brain frantically, desperately, trying to backpedal, to defuse the situation, to find the emergency eject button on this conversational train wreck. “I… that is… I meant…”

Too late. She was rising from her chair, a fluid, terrifying movement of silk and suppressed rage. The Spirit Pressure, the familiar, crushing weight of her immense power, began to descend, making the very air in the room feel thick, heavy, like trying to breathe underwater.

Chapter: 282

He was going to die. Here. In his own suite. Not at the hands of a reborn terrorist or a giant snake, but at the hands of his own furiously blushing, incredibly powerful, deeply offended wife. All because of a monumentally ill-advised joke. This, his internal monologue wailed, is going to be a very embarrassing obituary. ‘Heir to Ferrum Duchy, survived Galla Forest, defeated cousin in tournament, was later found mysteriously flattened into a thin, vaguely Lloyd-shaped paste. Foul play, and a really stupid question, are suspected.’

“Wait!” he yelped, a squeak of pure, unadulterated panic. His hand, acting on pure survival instinct, shot into the inner pocket of his tunic, fumbling for the object he had brought back from the manufactory earlier that day, the very object that had sparked his disastrous train of thought. His last, desperate, probably entirely useless, hope.

He pulled it out, holding it up like a holy relic warding off a demon. “This! This is what I meant! The babies! I meant these!”

He held in his trembling hand a small, exquisitely crafted, prototype dispenser bottle. It was a miniature version of the large oak-and-steel model, no larger than his palm, designed for travel or perhaps a lady’s personal vanity. It was a 'baby' version of their main product line.

Rosa froze mid-rise, her killing intent momentarily checked, her furious, narrowed eyes fixing on the small, elegant object in his hand. The crushing Spirit Pressure faltered, a flicker of profound, utter confusion warring with the incandescent rage on her face.

“Babies?” she repeated, the word a strangled, bewildered hiss.

“Yes! Babies!” Lloyd confirmed frantically, brandishing the miniature dispenser like a shield. “Our new product line’s ‘babies’! Smaller versions! Travel sizes! For… for convenience! I was just… thinking about them! The product line! Expanding the family! The AURA family! Of soap! Soap babies!” He was babbling, he knew, a torrent of panicked, nonsensical, soap-related gibberish.

He scrambled to his feet, holding the small bottle out to her like a peace offering. “See? A baby. It’s… it’s a prototype. For a new, more personal, line. I… I wanted your opinion on the size. The feel. The… the general baby-ness of it.” He offered a weak, terrified, hopeful smile.

Rosa stared at the small bottle. She stared at his panicked, desperate face. She looked at the word ‘babies’ still echoing in the tense, rosemary-scented air.

Her expression, which had been a mask of pure, homicidal fury, began to… crumble. The rage faltered. The intense crimson blush remained, but it was now overlaid with something else. Something utterly, completely, bewildering. The corners of her lips, which had been pressed into a thin, white line of fury, twitched. Once. Twice.

Then she just snorted.

---

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Next morning.

He was in the middle of a meeting with Mei Jing and Tisha, discussing the next phase of their marketing strategy—a plan to subtly introduce the more affordable hard soap bars to the upper echelons of the Guild merchants—when a triumphant, almost unhinged, shout echoed from the laboratory wing of the old mill.

“EUREKA! BY THE BEARD OF GRIMALDI, I’VE DONE IT! IT’S SILK! IT’S ACTUAL, BLOODY, LIQUID SILK!”

The voice was unmistakably Borin’s, laced with the manic, joyous energy of a man who had either just made a revolutionary scientific breakthrough or accidentally turned himself into a newt and found the experience surprisingly pleasant.

Lloyd, Mei Jing, and Tisha exchanged surprised, intrigued glances. “Excuse me, ladies,” Lloyd said, a grin already forming on his face. “It seems our head of experimental R&D has had a breakthrough. Let’s go see what he’s managed to create this time. And someone,” he added, glancing towards the door, “might want to have a fire extinguisher bucket handy. Just in case.”

They hurried towards the lab, a small, stone-walled chamber that was now Alaric’s pristine sanctuary of precision and Borin’s chaotic playground of ‘what if’. They found the two alchemists, and Lyra, gathered around a small, cooling vat of what looked like… soap. But it was different.

The batch of hard soap they had been working on, the one meant to be the next-generation ‘Noble’s Choice’, looked… luminous. Its color was no longer the creamy, pale beige of the tallow-based bars, but a pure, almost translucent, pearlescent white. It seemed to possess a faint, internal glow, a soft, silken sheen that was utterly captivating.