Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 298. Everything Was Right, and That Was the Problem
Rick almost didn’t see the first sign because it was so small.
He was walking down the main hallway of the mansion, moving from the Council chamber toward the east wing, when he noticed the light was off for a moment. It wasn’t darker or brighter; it just felt wrong, like when you focus on something directly while your peripheral vision catches an illusion.
He paused to examine the wall. It appeared to be just a wall, and the light resembled typical afternoon brightness. He shrugged it off, convincing himself that he was simply worn out.
He kept on walking.
The second sign was Carmilla.
Carmilla was standing at the end of the hallway, and she turned to him before he made any noise. This was normal for her, and Rick had long since accepted that it was a part of who she was.
He hadn’t noticed before that she always turned at that exact moment in this hallway.
She said, "Welcome back," just like she had at the gate, and then she turned back toward the east wing.
Rick came to a stop.
She had said, "Welcome back."
He had been gone for about forty seconds, making a brief walk between two rooms.
He thought about it for a moment before shifting his focus to something else. He noticed that the shadows in the hallway fell at the exact angle he expected, as the light source was in its usual place; after all, this was a room he had been in before.
He was aware of the shape of this hallway and knew where the shadows lay.
He continued walking.
Heinz was the third sign.
Heinz stood in the doorway of the east wing, doing what he usually did in doorways: occupying the space without considering his position. He had Sophia at his side.
He saw Rick approaching down the hall and remarked, "She was looking for the cold again," the same thing he had said the last time Rick passed through.
Rick stopped once more.
The words were not wrong, but it was the wrong time. He hadn’t told Heinz that he was coming.
He hadn’t made any noise in the hall. Heinz had looked up at the right time and said the right thing.
The thing he said was something he had already said once that day, the first time Rick had come through.
Rick said, "Heinz." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
Heinz said, "Yes?" and his face was open and simple, as it always was.
"What did I just say to you?"
Heinz stared at him. "You haven’t said anything yet."
This was true; Rick had merely uttered his name.
Rick struggled to articulate the sensation stirring in the back of his mind, but there was something in the pause before Heinz responded—something subtle, like a performance where someone was choosing the right words instead of genuinely replying.
He put it away and went to the east wing.
The light coming in through the windows at the same angle that afternoon made everything look right. Sophia was on the floor with her stones.
It felt like a room he had been in before, and he told himself that was the reason and kept going.
He sat at the study desk that night with the Sael document, the verification report, and the Thessara notation page. He worked through the logic of the succession mechanism and thought about what would happen next.
At some point, he looked up and saw that the candle on the desk was still burning at the same height as when he sat down.
He stared at it for a while.
He knew that candles burned. He had seen candles burn for most of his life and for months in this world.
They burned unevenly, and the drafts made them gutter. The wax pooled in ways that were different for each candle and each draft pattern in each room.
This candle had been lit for at least an hour.
It was the same height, though.
Rick sat back in the chair and stared at the candle for about thirty seconds without moving.
Then he looked at his hands.
"Something feels odd here..."
"I’ve been feeling this since I entered the Golden Temple, and I know it is somehow different from what I remember."
He then looked around the room.
The room was right. Everything was right.
The shelves were in the right places, the papers were stacked in the right order, and the window showed the same night sky with the same star positions that it had for the past hour.
The stars are in the same places.
He got up slowly, walked to the window, and stared at the sky for a long time. The stars stayed still.
In Zorathia, much like the world he had come from, stars moved. Although the stars did not move quickly, their positions shifted enough over the course of an hour to be noticeable if one was paying attention and knew what to look for.
These stars, however, remained in the same place.
Rick pressed his hand flat against the cold window glass, feeling its solidity. It was real, tangible, and right.
He reassured himself that perhaps he had miscounted the time, that he hadn’t been sitting there as long as he thought.
There had to be a logical explanation for this.
He recalled Heinz saying something similar at just the right moment.
He remembered Carmilla saying, "Welcome back."
He thought about the candle.
With that in mind, he walked away from the window, stood in the center of the room, and called out, "Sebastian."
Silence answered.
"Sebastian."
"Yes?" There was a pause that felt a bit too long, much like the pause Heinz had taken earlier.
The voice was unmistakably Sebastian’s, but it came from a direction he typically didn’t approach from.
Rick asked, "What are we doing tomorrow?"
"Following up on Natasha’s verification and starting to find Sael’s other connections within the Shadow Covenant network," Sebastian replied.
That was the truth. It was precisely what Sebastian would have said.
However, there was none of the usual Sebastian quality—information delivered sideways and slightly ahead of the question, paired with the dry efficiency of someone who had already anticipated what you were going to ask and moved on.
"Right." Rick said, "Thanks."
"Of course," Sebastian responded.
Yet, Sebastian did not typically say "of course." He preferred phrases like "yes" and "noted" and occasionally used responses that resembled a verbal shrug. But he didn’t say that, naturally.
Rick sat on the floor of the study, an unusual position for him. He placed his hands on his knees, breathed slowly, and scanned the room.
Everything in the room felt perfectly right. Every detail was meticulously arranged, every corner precisely placed, and every shadow cast at the correct angle.
He realized that this perfection was the problem: it was right in the way that something built to be right could be, devoid of any life or spontaneity.
The rooms he inhabited were not like this. They were more akin to the candle on the desk: imperfect, always shifting, and vibrant in subtle ways.
This room was still.
He touched the floor, feeling the cold stone and its texture beneath his fingers. He thought about the entity’s domain, which had felt alive in a troubling manner, humming and shifting in response to him. This room, in contrast, was lifeless. It was merely a representation of a room.
He mused, "Something is keeping me here."
Then, unexpectedly, the socket activated for the first time since the Severance Rite.
It wasn’t the familiar warmth of the grief construct, which had remained quiet and motionless since that ritual. No, this was something different, something deeper—the socket responding to whatever it was designed to react to, indicating the presence of corruption where it didn’t belong.
The warmth was unsettling. It wasn’t the familiar amber, but it was something colder.
