My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-173

Chapter : 345

She stood before a single, magnificent rose bush, its blooms a deep, velvety crimson, the color of spilled wine. She was not training, not reading, not engaged in any discernible activity. She was simply… standing. Her back was to him, her veiled form a still, sapphire silhouette against the vibrant green of the garden. She was lost in thought, her head tilted slightly, as if contemplating the perfect, silent beauty of a single, flawless rose.

His first instinct was to retreat. To melt back into the shadows of the path, to leave her to her private, inscrutable thoughts. Their interactions, even the recent, less frosty ones, were still fraught with a kind of delicate, high-stakes tension. He had no desire to shatter the fragile peace of the afternoon with another clumsy, ill-advised attempt at conversation.

He began to turn, but then, she spoke. Her voice was a low, quiet murmur, almost a part of the garden’s own gentle sounds, yet it carried to him with a startling clarity.

"The painting," she said, without turning, without acknowledging that she had even known he was there. "I saw it. In the city square. I was returning from… from visiting my mother."

Lloyd froze, his retreat aborted. He turned back, his gaze fixed on her still, elegant form. She had seen it. The ‘AURA girl’. Their masterpiece of persuasive art. He wondered what she thought, what her cold, analytical mind made of their blatant, emotional storytelling. Had she seen it as a work of art? Or as a crude piece of commercial manipulation? Her judgment, he found, mattered to him more than he was comfortable admitting.

He waited, but she said nothing more. The silence stretched, filled only by the buzzing of a bee among the roses and the soft sigh of the wind.

“And…?” he prompted finally, his voice quiet, hesitant, strangely reluctant to break the strange, peaceful intimacy of the moment. “What did you… think?”

She remained silent for another long moment, her back still to him. He could see the faint rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed. He wondered what she was thinking, what calculations were running behind those unreadable obsidian eyes. Was she analyzing its commercial effectiveness? Critiquing its artistic merit? Dismissing it as a crude, vulgar piece of public manipulation?

When she finally spoke again, her voice was still a low, quiet murmur, a statement of fact delivered with her usual cool, almost clinical, precision.

"It is… effective."

The two words, so simple, so understated, landed with the force of a physical blow. Not a blow of anger or pain, but of profound, startling, unexpected validation.

Effective.

Coming from Rosa Siddik, the queen of icy indifference, the master of the non-committal glare, the woman whose emotional range seemed to extend from ‘mild disdain’ to ‘profound disapproval’… the word was a symphony of praise. It was an acknowledgment. A concession. A quiet, almost reluctant, admission that his vision, his strange, unconventional, soap-fueled strategy, had worked. That the story he and Faria had so passionately, so painstakingly, crafted on that canvas, was a powerful one.

It wasn't a compliment on the artistry. It wasn't an expression of personal feeling. It was a verdict. A cold, logical, undeniable verdict, from the most ruthless, most analytical critic he knew. And it meant more to him, in that quiet, sun-drenched moment, than all of Master Elmsworth’s fervent praise, all of Mei Jing’s triumphant profit projections, even the King’s royal endorsement.

Because she understood. She had looked at the painting not just as an image, but as a tool, a weapon in a different kind of war. And she had, in her own, quiet, analytical way, approved.

A slow, genuine smile, free of irony, free of swagger, touched Lloyd’s lips. He didn’t say anything more. There was nothing more to say. He simply stood there, a few paces behind her, sharing the quiet space, the warm afternoon sun, the scent of roses.

He thought about her own secret burdens. The mother she had mentioned, her long, mysterious illness. The visit to her bedside. He thought of her veiled face, the secrets it hid, the emotions it so ruthlessly suppressed.

And he realized, with a sudden, startling clarity, that the silent, icy fortress she had built around herself might not be a castle of arrogance or disdain. Perhaps… perhaps it was just a shield. A defense. Against a world that had, perhaps, been as cruel and unkind to her as it had been to him.

For the first time, he felt not just a grudging respect, not just a perplexed curiosity, but a flicker of something else. Something warmer. A quiet, tentative, and deeply, profoundly, unexpected, empathy.

He stood there for another long moment, watching the woman who was his wife, the stranger who shared his name, his home, his life. The distance between them was still vast, a chasm of secrets and silence. But in that shared, quiet moment in the rose garden, with the unspoken verdict of the painting hanging in the air between them, it felt, for the first time, not quite so empty. A single, fragile, almost invisible thread of understanding had been woven. And it was, he thought, a start. His daily System Coin conversion had been steadily accumulating in the background, pushing his total to a respectable 1770 SC. The slow, patient grind, fueled by his commercial success, was paying dividends, building a war chest for the battles, both seen and unseen, that he knew were yet to come.

Chapter : 346

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Lloyd Ferrum stood in the quiet solitude of his manufactory’s office, the scent of rosemary and almond a comforting, tangible reality against the swirling, formless dread that had taken root in his soul. The AURA brand was a roaring success, a self-perpetuating engine of commerce and desire that was steadily filling his coffers with gold and his System account with the precious, life-altering coins he so desperately needed. He had achieved the goal he set for himself. He had built a foundation.

But the foundation felt fragile, built on a fault line he hadn't known existed. Ben Ferrum’s revelation—that the ghosts of his past life on Earth were not just memories but active, powerful, and vengeful presences in this new world—had changed everything. The game wasn’t about outsmarting his uncle or dazzling a disguised king with innovative soap. It was about survival. A race for power against enemies who had been running for decades while he had been standing still.

He closed his eyes, accessing the cool, clinical interface of the System, his gaze drawn to the glowing balance.

[Current System Coins: 1770 SC]

The number was a testament to his success, a small mountain of potential. Just weeks ago, a sum like this would have felt like an impossible dream, a treasure hoard capable of solving all his problems. Now, it felt like a soldier’s meager rations before a long and brutal war.

The choice before him was stark, a fork in the road of his own power progression, and he knew, with the cold certainty of a strategist weighing the lives of divisions, that this decision could determine his very survival.

Two paths. Two philosophies. Two futures.

On one side was the path of sustainability, of long-term growth. The promise of the ‘Farming’ function, a reward he had earned through the very success that now felt so hollow.

[System Function: Farming]

[Description: Allows the User to establish and manage passive or active generation systems for System Coins and other valuable resources.]

[Access Cost: 1000 System Coins to unlock the Farming Interface.]

One thousand coins. The price was steep, a huge portion of his current capital. But the potential reward… it was the dream of every general, every emperor, every CEO. A self-sustaining resource engine. A way to generate the currency of power without constant risk, without the endless, dangerous grind of quests and bounties. It was a promise of infinite growth, of a future where his power would no longer be limited by his ability to scrounge for gold. It was the smart move. The pragmatic move. The one the eighty-year-old engineer, the man who had built empires of technology, would have made without hesitation. Long-term stability always trumped short-term gains.

But then, there was the other path. The path of immediate, overwhelming, desperate power. The path dictated not by the cool logic of an engineer, but by the raw, survivalist instinct of a soldier who has just been told the enemy is already at the gates.

[Spirit: Fang Fairy (Lightning Affinity)]

[Current Stage: Ascension (Peak)]

[Upgrade to Transcend Stage? Cost: 1000 System Coins]

Transcendence. The final, almost mythical, stage of Spirit Power. The stage where spirit and master became one, a merged entity of devastating potential. He remembered the feeling of Fang Fairy’s Ascension—the explosive power, the transformation into a being of lightning and grace. Transcendence, the System promised, was a leap of another order of magnitude. It would grant Fang Fairy a new, humanoid form, true sentience, the ability to speak. It would grant them access to shared abilities, a synergy of power that was almost incomprehensible. It would make them a force to be reckoned with, not in the future, but now. Right now.

The warnings of Ben Ferrum, his crippled, steel-limbed nemesis, echoed in his mind, cold and sharp as a shard of glass. They are here. They remember you. They are stronger than you. What good was a long-term plan for a sustainable System Coin farm if he was killed next week by a reborn terrorist with a Transcended spirit and a generations-old grudge? What good was an empire of soap against an enemy who could erase him from existence before he could even summon a single Steel Wire?

The eighty-year-old pragmatist screamed for the Farming function, for the slow, steady, inexorable path to ultimate power. It was the right choice. The logical choice. The winning choice, in any war of attrition.