My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-166

Chapter : 331

He leaned back, his proposal laid bare. He was asking her to lend her name, her reputation, her very real talent, to his bizarre commercial enterprise. He was asking her to paint soap.

Faria was silent for a long, long moment. She looked at him, at the fire in his eyes, the absolute conviction in his voice. She thought of the life he had saved, the hope he had given her family. And she thought of the sheer, insane, wonderful audacity of the idea itself. To blend high art with common commerce, to create a masterpiece with a purpose so nakedly persuasive… it was a challenge that was both terrifying and utterly, completely, irresistible to her competitive, artistic soul.

A slow, brilliant smile spread across her face, chasing away the last of the shadows from her eyes. “Lord Ferrum,” she said, her voice filled with a new, vibrant energy, a shared spark of audacious creation. “Even if I did not owe you a debt that could never be repaid, even if you hadn't saved my life and the hope of my family… I would do this. By the ancestors, I would do this purely for the magnificent, unprecedented, wonderfully vulgar, artistic challenge of it all.” She stood up, her weariness forgotten, her eyes blazing with a familiar, creative fire. “Where do we begin? And what is our color palette? I’m thinking… a lot of luminous, pearlescent white.”

The artist had been enlisted. The revolutionary advertisement was about to be born.

—

The very next morning, a secluded garden pavilion on the eastern edge of the Ferrum Estate, a place usually reserved for the Duchess’s quiet embroidery sessions or the occasional, discreet romantic tryst between visiting nobles, was requisitioned and transformed. The delicate silk cushions and low tea tables were whisked away, replaced by sturdy wooden easels, stacks of large, pristine canvases, and a chaotic, colorful array of artists’ materials. The air, usually fragrant with jasmine and polite conversation, was now thick with the sharp, earthy scents of linseed oil, turpentine, and freshly ground pigments. It had become a studio, a laboratory of art, a war room for their audacious new campaign.

The dynamic that formed between Lloyd and Faria was a fascinating, almost alchemical, fusion of their two disparate worlds. It was not the tentative dance of courtship, nor the stiff formality of two high-born nobles. It was the focused, energetic, and occasionally argumentative, rapport of two professionals, two creators, utterly absorbed in a shared, groundbreaking project.

Faria was in her element. She moved through the makeshift studio with a fluid, confident grace, her practical traveling leathers replaced by a simple, paint-smeared linen smock thrown over her tunic. The fiery, competitive noblewoman of the tournament, the haunted sister from Galla Forest—both were gone, replaced by the Artist. Her amethyst eyes shone with a focused, almost obsessive, intensity as she directed the servants Ken had discreetly provided, instructing them on the precise grinding of pigments—lapis lazuli for the deepest blues, malachite for vibrant greens, cinnabar for the richest reds.

She was a master of the classical tradition, her knowledge encyclopedic. “The underpainting must be done in earth tones, Lloyd,” she would declare, her hands a blur as she mixed a perfect shade of raw umber. “It provides depth, a foundation for the light. It is the method of the great masters of the Southern Realist school. It gives the final work a weight, a verisimilitude, that cannot be achieved by simply applying color to a white ground.”

Lloyd, whose own artistic training consisted of teenage sketching and decades of drafting mechanical blueprints, listened, absorbed, fascinated. He was out of his depth in this world of color theory and classical technique, but he was a quick study, his engineer’s mind instantly grasping the logic, the physics, behind her artistic principles.

“Of course,” he would reply, peering at her palette. “The earth-tone underpainting creates a mid-tone value from which to build both the highlights and the shadows. It establishes a more efficient value range. A logical starting point.”

Faria would blink at his strangely technical, almost clinical, assessment of a centuries-old artistic tradition, then laugh, a bright, genuine sound that echoed in the sun-dappled pavilion. “A ‘more efficient value range’,” she would repeat, shaking her head in amusement. “You speak of beauty as if it were a problem in logistics, Ferrum. But… you are not wrong.”

Their collaboration was a constant, stimulating dialogue between art and science, between emotion and engineering. Faria brought the soul, the tradition, the mastery of the brush. Lloyd brought the perspective, the innovation, the deep, almost subconscious, understanding of how to guide a viewer’s eye, how to construct a narrative, how to sell an idea.

Chapter : 332

He would watch her sketch the initial composition—a woman at her bath, as he had envisioned. Faria’s initial rendering was beautiful, allegorical, filled with soft light and classical grace. The woman looked like a goddess, the act of bathing a sacred ritual.

“It’s beautiful, Faria,” Lloyd would concede, studying the charcoal sketch. “Truly. But it is not… persuasive.” He would then take his own piece of graphite—a tool she initially scoffed at as being too hard, too precise, for true artistry—and begin to adjust the composition, his movements sharp, clean, economical.

“The light source,” he would explain, his voice taking on the patient tone of a professor explaining a complex principle. “It should not be diffuse, ethereal. It should be specific. Coming from here,” he would sketch a sharp, angled light source, “to create a high contrast. We need to clearly define the two halves of the image. The ‘before’ and the ‘after’.”

He would adjust the woman’s posture. “She should not be serene in the ‘before’ section. She should look… uncomfortable. Her shoulders slightly hunched. A subtle frown. We need to visually communicate the unpleasantness, the harshness, of her current reality.”

He would then focus on the ‘after’ side. “And here, where she is using the Aura elixir, her posture should be open. Relaxed. A subtle, almost unconscious, smile of pure, sensory pleasure. The light should catch the water droplets on her skin, making them glisten like diamonds. The lather should not be just a vague whiteness; it needs texture, volume. It should look… decadent.”

Faria, initially resistant to his stark, almost brutally direct, storytelling, found herself increasingly swayed by the undeniable logic of his approach. He was thinking not like an artist, but like a storyteller, a propagandist, using the visual language of art to implant a single, powerful idea into the viewer’s mind.

Their days fell into a comfortable, productive rhythm. They would work for hours in the sunny pavilion, their debates over composition and color palettes lively, passionate, yet always underpinned by a growing, mutual respect. They would break for a simple lunch, brought by a discreet servant, and find themselves talking not just of art, but of other things. Faria, her reserve slowly melting in the face of Lloyd’s easy, often self-deprecating, humor and his surprisingly vast, if eccentric, knowledge of the world, would speak of her home in the Southern Reaches, of her frustration with the stifling confines of courtly life, of her deep, abiding love for her ailing brother.

Lloyd, in turn, found himself opening up in ways he hadn't with anyone else in this new life. He couldn't speak of Earth, of course, or of the System, or of the ghosts that haunted him. But he could speak of his own feelings of being an outsider, of his fascination with how things worked, of his vision for building something new, something better. He spoke of the Elixir Manufactory not as a business, but as a grand experiment, a place of innovation and camaraderie.

Faria listened, her amethyst eyes thoughtful, her perception of him shifting with every conversation. The ‘drab duckling’, the awkward heir, the lucky tournament winner… that image was fading, replaced by a portrait of a man of profound intelligence, of hidden depths, of a strange, unconventional, but undeniably brilliant, mind.

“You are a paradox, Lloyd Ferrum,” she said one afternoon, as they cleaned their brushes, her hands stained with a rainbow of pigments. “You possess the power of a warrior, the mind of an engineer, and,” she offered a small, wry smile, “the soul of a rather ruthless soap merchant. It is… a most perplexing combination.”

“I contain multitudes, Lady Faria,” Lloyd replied with a grin. “And most of them are currently worried about achieving the correct level of pearlescent sheen on a lather bubble.”

Their easy rapport, their shared laughter, the quiet, intellectual intimacy of their collaboration, did not go unnoticed. The garden pavilion, while secluded, was not invisible. And from a high window in the main wing of the estate, a pair of cold, obsidian eyes watched.

And waited. And analyzed.

From the tall, arched window of her silent, sun-drenched suite, Rosa Siddik observed the scene in the garden pavilion below. Her vantage point was perfect, offering a clear, unobstructed, and entirely discreet view of the makeshift studio. She stood partially concealed by the heavy velvet drapes, a silent, motionless figure, the thick, ancient tome she had been reading resting, forgotten, on a nearby table. Her veiled face betrayed no emotion, but her obsidian eyes, sharp and analytical, missed nothing.

She saw him. Her husband. Lloyd.