Chapter 361: The Search for Privacy

Three days into their honeymoon on Darkmist Island, Kai had begun to accept that they weren’t going to get privacy like he had hoped. The mansion was filled with magical items that would let them live alone easily, but many were damaged, requiring more ongoing repair work. So in addition to no master bedroom, they had elves all around them continuing construction.

That meant their supposed honeymoon wasn’t quite as idyllic as they’d hoped. There was plenty of time for training, cultivation, and experimentation, it was just difficult to find time together. Instead of just relaxing in bed, it felt like they had to steal what moments they could.

One day while enjoying the baths after training, Kai was interrupted by Omilaena wearing nothing at all. Another day Zae Zin Nim shyly invited him to the cavern and they practiced formal dual cultivation. Eventually Omilaena got frustrated and started ordering elves out of the room so they could fuck. For her part, Zae Zin Nim just became more withdrawn and spent time off on her own. The two women were definitely spending time together in one hidden corner or other.

Kai was satisfied enough physically, he just missed sleeping together in the literal sense. They hadn’t been together long, but he’d grown used to having all of them in the same bed. He longed to wake up and find Zae Zin Nim curled beside him or Omilaena sprawled across his chest.

To fight the frustration, Kai split his time between training and helping the elves get off the island faster. He couldn’t do much with the carpentry required for the master bedroom, but the abandoned island had a lot of problems that needed strength, offensive power, or even ingenuity. Over the passing days he moved some boulders, cleared hot springs, and ate some aggressive sacred beasts.

That cycle was becoming familiar enough when one day an elf approached him with a more concerned expression.

"There’s something you should see, my lord. This one was a surprise to all of us."

Kai followed with only a shadow of his old concern. Whatever the difficulties, the elves had been good for their promises so far. The two of them walked to one of the corners of the house he hadn’t explored well - he thought it had cellars and some other sub-levels much shallower than the Immortal's Cave. Yet when they descended the stairs, he felt an odd chill from below.

"We were clearing out old supplies and we ran into this." The elf led him to the end of the cellar, where Kai immediately understood.

All of the cellar’s walls were smooth packed earth lined with shelves... except for one, which had a massive hole torn in it. Someone had cleaned up the shelves that had been damaged in the process, but they couldn’t hide the gaping maw leading into the depths. Kai approached and stepped one foot inside, but the tunnel twisted down and left, so he couldn’t see very far.

"How deep does this go?" he asked.

"We can’t say, my lord. We ventured in for a short time before we discovered signs of monsters and decided to get you right away."

"You made the right choice. Let me take a look."

Kai pushed inside with an eagerness that surprised him - maybe he needed to work off some frustration, maybe he was just in the mood to hunt monsters after so long. He had to crouch to move in the tunnel, but he wasn’t particularly concerned: if monsters tried to attack him this way, they’d be utterly vulnerable to Baleful Breath.

Unless they could tunnel through the stone much faster than anticipated. As he crouched deeper, Kai tried to stay fully alert and anticipate an attack from any other direction - behind himself too, for that matter. The walls of the tunnel were very smooth, but he couldn’t be sure what exactly had produced them. He suspected it had probably been bored slowly over time, he just couldn’t rule out some sort of magical process that could send a monster swimming through stone like water.

The tunnel’s width remained constant until it abruptly widened. Kai generated a little qi in one hand to assist his night vision and realized that he’d come out in a cavern. These must be naturally-occurring, because they had certainly never been touched by elven craft. After passing through a narrower section, Kai entered a large chamber.

This one was filled with a salty scent and had several piles of carapace-like debris, so it was presumably as far as the elves had gone - they’d been right to come get him. Underneath the obvious, he caught a scent of something else he couldn’t quite pick out. His monstrous hunger was also quite active, though it might just be anticipating conflict.

The complication at this point was that the larger cavern split into several directions. Kai picked one at random to explore, but it seemed to head steadily downward, so he backtracked. Didn’t want to let anything get around him and attack the mansion.

Kai picked a second tunnel and confirmed it headed upward before returning, under the same logic, and scouted out a third. Then again, were any monsters likely to attack here if they hadn’t attacked the mansion while it was abandoned? In his experience monsters tended to destroy when they didn’t find people to attack, but best not to make assumptions.

His third tunnel finally produced a definitive result: the path got narrower and narrower until it seemed to end in deep crags. Kai emitted a little more qi to try to peer around all the rock spires and confirm this was really a dead end, which cast strange shadows across the walls.

Something moved in them. Kai whirled just in time to catch a massive claw descending toward his back.

A monstrous crab covered in black carapace had moved up behind him, completely silently. He’d grabbed its claw instinctively and only then realized that the thing was practically the size of his torso. The main body wasn’t as large as he expected, because one claw was much larger than the other. It had glowing green eyes and a fang-filled mouth.

<

Monster: Dire Crab

Threat: IV (Delta)

>

Now the monster broke its silence: it let out a screech and exerted its full strength, trying to close its razor sharp claw around him. Kai actually felt a bit of strain in his muscles as he kept the sides of the claw apart.

"Finally!" He let out a laugh and jerked the monstrous crab upwards to smash into one of the stalactites.

To his surprise, he impaled the monster in the first movement. The stalactite was dull and it broke apart, but he had moved the monster upward with so much force that the stone still pierced its carapace.

Though the monster crab struggled, it clearly didn’t have much life left. Kai sighed and finished the thing off with an Isulfr’s Bite to the head. The thing was a dangerous predator, just not for a fighter of his level. He supposed it would have been too much to hope that Darkmist Island had a perfect monster for him to draw new essence from, on top of everything else.

Still, he was happy to get to work. Over the next several days Kai mapped out the tunnels. Most of the passages that arced down eventually went underwater, which was likely where the monsters were coming from. He took a while to build a barrier back in the first cavern, which the elves enhanced with some of their warding magic, so nothing would wander into the mansion.

Still, he told them to leave the tunnel open so that he could explore, and one day he found that the entrance had been expanded so it was easier for him to enter. These were his private hunting grounds now, he supposed. There was still a larger cave system to explore and he enjoyed eating the occasional Dire Crab, so he wouldn’t complain. Omilaena came down with him as an excuse to fuck; Zae Zin Nim visited once, but clearly found it too dank and dreary.

Before Kai could get anywhere close to exploring all the caves, the elves finished their work: the mansion was completely repaired. The master bedroom in particular looked amazing: not that it was anything special, it just had a large bed that looked unbelievably comfortable.

"The essential work is complete," the head elven steward said, "but we really should stay longer, to make sure everything is in proper order."

Kai shook his head. "You’ve done more than enough. What we want now is privacy."

"We understand that, but there are so many details... it would be shameful to leave guests with so much work undone. These caverns are a problem, the orchard requires serious cultivation, and we haven’t broken the seals around the maze of mist..."

"If the three of us can’t handle any of those problems, what are you going to do?"

"I suppose you have a good point." The steward bowed in the elven fashion and gave him a thin smile. "It’s been a pleasure to serve. Some cannot see your finer qualities through the lack of Soul Cultivation, but we’re all grateful for your help."

It was nice that he was getting through to them, Kai supposed, but at the moment he really just wanted to be left alone with his wives. As the elf left, he saw Omilaena leaning against a nearby wall. When she met his gaze, she wiggled her eyebrows.

"My, my, someone’s eager for privacy for some reason."

"Won’t even deny it." Kai stepped in and grabbed her ass to press her against him in a fierce kiss. "I want to put that bed to work."

"Easy there." Omilaena put a hand on his chest... but it wasn’t pushing him away, it was basically groping him. "Even I can wait until the elves leave."

They had a small ceremony, nothing much by the standards of any of their continents. Just a last meal with the elves present and discussion of a few details, plus meeting up with the sailors below and confirming that the ship was prepared for the journey back. Eventually they all said goodbye and waited together by the stairs descending into the island.

The last of the elves finally disappeared down the stairs. No sooner had they vanished than Omilaena’s arms slid around their waists. "Finally! There have been so many things I’ve been wanting to try that we couldn’t do on the ship or with so many of them fumbling about."

"We’ve been waiting a long time," Zae Zin Nim said sternly. "We should do something normal for our first night."

"And what is normal?" Omilaena asked with a smirk.

As it turned out, Zae Zin Nim had strong ideas. They tangled together on the new bed in positions involving a lot of kissing and embracing, but it also involved all three of them being thoroughly satisfied. Even Omilaena seemed content with the cuddly sex, and it left Zae Zin Nim softened and affectionate.

When Kai fell back onto the bed with his wives, he felt physically satisfied, but it was the next morning when he woke up with them beside him that he felt truly whole. The wait had been worth it.

Zae Zin Nim lay against her chest, her features slack - it might not be the most composed expression, but she looked relaxed in a way he rarely saw. It made him want to pull her close, but he restrained himself to let her sleep longer.

Meanwhile, Omilaena sprawled against his leg, as she was always the most restless sleeper. The position pressed her against him, but there was nothing calculated about it, just the connection of warm skin on skin. He enjoyed watching her face so relaxed, without any posing or ruses.

His gaze eventually seemed to wake her and Omilaena blinked at him sleepily a few times before she reengaged. Her relaxed position against his leg became very calculated indeed as she pushed her breasts against him and wrapped a hand around his thigh. He’d already had a morning erection, stiff but not particularly insistent, and she wasn’t helping.

"Want me to help you with this?" she purred. "I’m willing to bet that if you can stay still, I can suck you off without even waking up Zin Nim."

"Wrong." Their wife shifted against Kai’s chest to frown down at her. "We’ve barely woken up, how are you in the mood already?"

"You’re blaming me?" Omilaena aped a shocked expression, then traced a fingernail up his length. "When Kai is the one showing off his monster?"

"That is apparently an unavoidable reaction for men. You making such suggestions is entirely your choice."

"And a good choice, I think." Omilaena wrapped herself around his leg and pretended to pout. "Oh husband, our wife is being so frigid... can’t you convince her?"

Kai sighed and sat up, pulling away from both of them. "How about this: I’ll find us something for breakfast while you two relax, then we can talk about what we’re doing now that the island is really ours."

He loped to the kitchen completely naked, feeling strange the entire time despite the fact that there was no one else to see. The elves had left plenty of food and he grabbed some of the chakra fruit as well, eventually putting together a platter for them. No meat - and his hunger would have been happy to eat raw meat first thing in the morning - but it should be a breakfast they’d all enjoy.

On the way back he did pull on some pants, in case Zae Zin Nim was feeling formal, but it seemed like it was unnecessary. When he got back to the bedroom, Omilaena was holding her gently and combing through her hair. The pose was surprisingly intimate, especially as they both smiled welcomingly at him.

"Boo!" Omilaena called. "Take the pants back off!"

"I did not realize how hungry I was until now." Zae Zin Nim pulled a sheet around her shoulders as she sat up. "We should eat first."

Kai set down the platter and took up a position on the other side so they could all eat. Throughout breakfast they discussed completely normal topics, like training and what they planned to do with the island. What was going to happen next lay unsaid between them, but Kai found himself reacting to the mere idea. It wasn’t their bodies, amazing as they were, but the casual intimacy between them.

Then at last they finished the food and it was time to sate other hungers.