Void Lord: My Revenge Is My Harem-Chapter 220 : Opening Shop and Increasing Harem Members III

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"Was that torture," Kobb asked quietly, not quite looking at her.

"That was imagination maintenance," Edda said. "Torture is loud. What I did was tidy."

"And if they had not listened," Myr asked.

Edda tucked the gray-wrapped tools away and stood. "Then we would have done something no one at the next campfire could bear to describe. And we would still have slept. Because we have work."

She did not say she hated the cruel parts of her job less than she hated leaving cruel men available to practice. She did not say she would prefer to fold blankets and not knives at the end of a day. She simply checked the road, felt the tether purr like a cat who had decided not to scratch today, and set them marching.

They crossed two rivers — the first on a ferry run by a woman whose arms could have wrestled a mule into philosophy, the second on stones that had learned to live with being wet. They slept one night in an inn where the bread was so stale Edda paid extra to apologize to her teeth. The innkeeper flirted with Kobb in a way that was mostly a tip jar; Kobb blushed, Myr smirked, Edda stole a towel just to feel young.

The last day rose with a wind that had been sharpened on high stone and came down to tell stories about it. The land had changed its mind again; hills surged up the way they do when the ground remembers it used to be taller. No farms here. No careful rows. Just heather and rock and, at last, what Edda had been walking toward.

The mist lay in a bowl like a sleeping animal — a deep, soft thing poured between three low ridges. It was not a fog that wandered. It clung, it curled, it held itself. The road ended two hundred paces before it would have reached the pale wall, as if roads respected mysteries now.

Myr stopped and forgot his breath for a count. "That’s... not weather," he said, reverently.

"No," Edda said, equally reverent. "That’s the intention."

The bowl’s rim had been staked with thin poles holding iron chimes that did not move in the wind. A sign —plain plank, plain script— had been fixed to a post: Pause. Consider. Proceed only with purpose.

Kobb squinted. "Do we have purpose?"

Edda tapped her chest where the folded letter lived. "We carry it," she said. She did not touch the mist. Not yet. Mist felt like something you asked to dance, not something you put your hands on without being introduced.

The world went quieter at the edge, the way rooms do when important people stop just outside the door. Edda slipped John’s letter out and looked at the seal the way one looks at an honest coin — testing weight, truth. The wax held his mark: a neat J not much interested in flourishes.

"Left boot," she said softly, "this is where you stop thinking like a boy with a pack and start thinking like a front door."

Myr straightened. "Stand. Wait. Smile without teeth."

"Good," she said. "Right boot, if something comes out of that mist wearing a question, do not answer with a knife first."

Kobb nodded, serious. "What if it is a knife?"

"Then answer with a better sentence," Edda said, and tucked the letter under her thumb so it could be seen without being surrendered.

They walked the last twenty paces that separate travelers from thresholds. Edda’s braid tugged once at her back like a friend catching up. The iron chimes didn’t ring; the wind was minding its manners. The mist shifted one degree, not forward, not back — just a shrug that admitted they existed.

"Greetings," Edda said to the air, to fog, to whoever. "Edda of the Bell, carrying a letter from John. We come to speak to his smiths. We come with work and work’s cousins."

The mist did nothing dramatic. It was simple. Edda had seen kings perform, priests perform, thieves perform. It was always the quiet doors that changed the day.

A shape approached inside the white —two shapes, no, four— glint of metal, low voices. Edda lifted the letter higher. The tug under her breastbone hummed a clean, steady note: loyalty set to "not optional."

Myr shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Kobb pulled his hood back so his face would carry its honesty in front of him like a lantern. Edda licked her lips and tasted road dust, pepper, and the kind of future that makes your fingers itch.

Someone on the other side spoke, calm as a polished hammer. "Names."

"Edda," she said. "Myr. Kobb. With a letter."

"Wait," came the reply, not unkind.

"We are very good at that," Edda murmured, and for once, she did not hurry anyone. She let the road fold itself up behind her. She let the week sit in her bones. She let the mist look back, patient as a gate deciding whether a knock was music.

The chimes moved a fraction. The mist breathed. Edda smiled without teeth and did not step in. The part of her that loved knives told her to rush. The part of her that loved better outcomes told her to be excellent at pausing.

She held the letter out where the white could see the wax and the world could see the gesture, and stood on the edge of the mist with her two boots and her two boys and a week of travel arranged neatly behind her like proof she meant what she had done.

The fog stirred, and shadows resolved into men with aprons and arms, and a voice said, "John’s people," with the respect reserved for work that had been promised and had arrived.

Edda inclined her head, just enough to be polite without being shy. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"Proceed only with purpose," the post had said.

She had brought purpose on paper and in chest.

She did not step yet.

She waited for the mist to invite her, because she was learning to enjoy manners.

And there, at the very lip where the road becomes threshold and ordinary air learns a new habit, she smiled her private, sharp smile and let the scene hold — letter in hand, boots stilled, village in the mist breathing like a live thing just beyond her reach.