My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 148

Chapter: 295

Lloyd stared, his breath catching in his throat. He had seen the effect in his own reflection, felt it behind his own eyes. But to see it on someone else, on his own mother, wielded with such calm, deliberate, absolute control… it was different. It was terrifying. The eye was no longer the warm, intelligent eye of Milody Austin. It was an abyss. A gateway to a cold, dark, powerful place.

“This,” his mother stated, her voice seeming to echo slightly, imbued with the strange, resonant power of her transformed eye, “is the gate. The focus. The lens through which our will reshapes the world.”

Before Lloyd could fully process the sight, before he could ask a single one of the thousand questions now screaming through his mind, his mother did not speak again. She did not gesture.

She simply… looked at him.

And his world tilted.

It wasn't a push. It wasn't a blow. It was a sudden, absolute, and utterly irresistible sensation of force. He was lifted, effortlessly, from the stone floor, his feet dangling several inches in the air. A powerful, constricting ring of pure, tangible, bluish-white energy, a perfect, shimmering manifestation of the ring in his mother’s eye, had wrapped itself around his waist, holding him suspended, helpless, in mid-air.

He gasped, the air forced from his lungs not by the pressure of the ring itself—it was tight, yes, but not crushing—but by the sheer, shocking, disorienting sensation of being so utterly, completely, controlled. He struggled instinctively, but it was like struggling against the very concept of gravity. The ring held him fast, a band of pure, inescapable will.

He looked at his mother, at her single, glowing black-and-white eye, and he felt a jolt of profound, almost fearful, understanding. The simple binding ring he had managed to project, the one that had snapped a willow branch… it was a child’s toy. A clumsy, flickering candle flame compared to the focused, unwavering, industrial-grade searchlight of power his mother now wielded. The ring she had created, projected by her gaze alone, felt… solid. Real. Unbreakable. Its force was immense, yet controlled with a precision that was breathtaking.

Across the hall, the whisper of steel abruptly ceased.

Rosa, who had been pointedly ignoring them, had faltered in her sword practice. Her head was turned, her obsidian eyes, no longer coolly detached, now wide with a flicker of genuine, undiluted shock. She was staring, not at Lloyd dangling humiliatingly in mid-air, but at Milody. At the Duchess’s transformed eye. At the palpable, overwhelming aura of ancient, terrifying power that now filled the room.

Rosa was a prodigy of Spirit Power. She understood power, could sense its nuances, its strength. And what she was sensing now from her mother-in-law, the quiet, elegant Duchess she had likely dismissed as a mere political figurehead, was a form of Void power so potent, so controlled, so utterly alien to the brute-force energies she was used to, that it clearly, visibly, shook her.

The Ice Princess, for the second time in as many weeks, looked genuinely, comprehensively, stunned. Lloyd, still dangling, still struggling to breathe, made a mental note: never, ever, get into an argument with Mother. Especially when she’s using her ‘scary eye’. This family, he was beginning to realize, was composed entirely of terrifying, overpowered individuals who were all remarkably good at hiding it. Except for him, apparently. He was still working on the ‘hiding it’ part.

—

---

Lloyd hung suspended in the air, a puppet on an invisible, unbreakable string, the world a slightly nauseating, tilted perspective. The constricting ring of bluish-white energy around his waist was a band of pure, unyielding will, a physical manifestation of his mother’s power that was as humbling as it was terrifying. He could feel the sheer, condensed force within it, a sleeping giant of potential that she was holding in check with casual, almost contemptuous, ease.

His own attempts at projecting such a ring had been… clumsy. Instinctive. Like a toddler learning to throw a ball. His mother, however, wielded it like a master surgeon wielding a scalpel. The precision, the stability, the sheer, quiet authority of the power… it was a different league entirely.

Chapter: 296

Across the hall, Rosa remained frozen, her practice rapier held loosely in her hand, her usual icy composure completely shattered. Her obsidian eyes, wide with a rare, unguarded shock, were still fixed on Milody. She was witnessing a form of Void power she had likely never encountered before, a power that wasn't about flashy explosions or overwhelming spirit pressure, but about a subtle, absolute, terrifying control over the very fabric of reality. The quiet, elegant Duchess had just revealed herself to be a hidden master, a wielder of a legendary, almost mythical, power. The political and social landscape of the Ferrum household had just been seismically, irrevocably, redrawn in Rosa’s mind.

Lloyd, meanwhile, was mostly focused on not throwing up from the disorienting sensation of being held aloft by his mother’s vaguely demonic eyeball.

“This, Lloyd,” Milody’s voice was calm, didactic, the voice of a master instructing a particularly slow, and currently dangling, apprentice, “is the most basic, most rudimentary, application of the Austin power. Binding. Constriction. The imposition of a physical seal upon an object or a being.” She gestured with her free hand, a small, graceful movement. “It is useful for restraint, for defense. A simple but effective tool. It is the power of the right eye, the eye of negation, of control. The same power you instinctively used to place the Seal of Severed Perception on your cousin.”

She acknowledged his feat in the tournament with a cool, clinical nod. “A surprisingly sophisticated application for a novice. You sealed his senses, not just his body. You demonstrated an innate, if uncontrolled, understanding of the power’s true nature. It does not just bind flesh; it binds concepts.”

She paused, then, with a flick of her will, the constricting ring around Lloyd’s waist simply… dissolved. Not with a pop, not with a flash, but it just ceased to be. Gravity reasserted itself with a vengeance, and Lloyd dropped the last few inches to the stone floor with a jarring thud that sent a fresh wave of agony through his still-healing legs. He grunted, stumbling, catching himself before he could collapse completely.

“However,” Milody continued, utterly unconcerned by his less-than-graceful landing, “binding is merely the preface. The introduction. It is a child’s first word in a language of infinite, cosmic poetry.” Her expression became even more intense, her single, glowing Black Ring Eye seeming to burn with a new, creative fire. “You used the true power of the right eye, the eye of the Seal. But you have not yet begun to comprehend the true strength of the left eye.”

She looked away from him, her gaze sweeping across the empty training hall, as if searching for a suitable canvas for her next lesson. Her Black Ring Eye fixed upon the far wall, a solid expanse of thick, ancient stone.

“The right eye seals. It negates. It controls what is,” she explained, her voice a low, resonant hum. “But the left eye, Lloyd… the left eye creates. It generates. It gives form to that which is not. It is the eye of manifestation, of creation, of pure, generative force.”

As she spoke, she raised her hand again. The air before her, near the far wall, began to shimmer, to coalesce. The same bluish-white energy of the binding ring flowed from her gaze, but this time, it did not form a simple circle. It flowed, twisted, gathered, solidifying with impossible speed into a new shape.

A war hammer.

It was immense, a colossal, two-handed maul that seemed to be sculpted from pure, solidified moonlight and captured starlight. Its head was a massive, brutal block of shimmering energy, its handle long and thick, its form perfect, detailed, radiating a palpable, overwhelming weight and power. It was not an illusion; it felt real, solid, a weapon of myth and legend conjured from nothing but a look and a thought.

Lloyd stared, his jaw slack, the lingering pain in his legs forgotten. Rosa, across the hall, let out a soft, almost inaudible gasp, her hand instinctively going to her own rapier, as if in the presence of a superior, almost divine, weapon.

Milody didn't wield the hammer with her hands. She controlled it with her will, with her gaze. It hovered in the air for a moment, a testament to her creative power, humming with a low, dangerous energy.

Then, with a sharp, almost contemptuous, glance, she sent it crashing down.

The massive, shimmering war hammer of pure Void energy slammed into the stone floor of the training hall.