Kang Jiesu picked up the paper that I had scribbled on, but obviously he couldn’t read a single word. He’d have to find someone to interpret it for him, but that was his problem now — not mine.

  It was getting fairly te at night, so I could imagine that Kang Jiesu was starting to get tired.

  “I have no idea where we are,” he confessed.

  The implication here was that I would need to take him back to his room.

  The Emerald Room had been destroyed during the fire st night along with at least half of the VIP guest suites, so many of my cssmates had been reassigned to a different location. The remaining guest rooms were lower quality — smaller spaces intended for merchants and minor nobles — so it was quite likely that they’d notice a big difference. I could even imagine that some of my cssmates would compin about their new rooms.

  Nobody liked it when their hotel status was downgraded.

  + + +

  Predictably, it took a small amount of effort to extricate myself away from Kang Jiesu.

  After I brought him to his new room, there was this complicated process of dancing around the fact that — no, I was not going to sleep in the same room as him.

  I couldn’t tell if he was secretly hoping for some type of lucky accident that would force me to share a bed with him; I found it extraordinarily difficult to figure out when boys were subconsciously thinking with their dicks. For that matter, I caught his gaze drifting towards other parts of my body, quietly checking out my proportions whenever he thought I wasn’t looking, but I wasn’t sure if that could be considered natural horniness that was normal behavior with an eighteen year old teenage boy who had just been informed that he now owned a girl as personal property.

  The physical attraction was certainly there.

  He surely knew that he could order to me to suck his dick.

  He could direct me to spread my legs and penetrate me right on the spot.

  With the Obedience Crest, there was no way for me resist.

  He had the power to raise a finger and instantly pursue any of those X-rated things that might have briefly fshed across his mind, and no one would ever be able to stop him. No one would question it and nobody would know about the acts that happened in the privacy of his room. The w was on his side, and the social currents of broader Galuterican society keenly encouraged these types of sexual antics. I didn’t know if Kang Jiesu was aware that Sha Guadi had taken sex sves, but even his own cssmates were indulging ‘as Romans do when in Rome’.

  He just needed to say a single phrase to take things in a different direction.

  + + +

  Ultimately, Kang Jiesu said:

  ‘If you need any help, please come back here right away.’

  And we bid goodnight.

  Afterwards, I made my way back to the sve quarters assigned to the Otherworlders, which was only a few hundred steps down the next hallway. All things said, it was quite close to this cluster of guest rooms, but the entrance was hidden away inside of a nondescript supply closet so that nobody would accidentally open a door and find themselves face-to-face with a bunch of unhappy sves.

  Sves were like house elves — everyone wanted them kept out of sight and out of mind.

  When I stepped back inside, I was surprised to find that Yuko was gone.

  The kuma (bearkin) was nowhere to be seen, which must have meant that someone had come to fetch him. He didn’t seem like the type of sve who would randomly wander around on his own at night, especially since sves were supposed to be avaible 24/7 on-demand. If his owner couldn’t find him at the time that he was suddenly needed, it would definitely transte into a severe punishment. Nobody would risk that kind of adventurous behavior on their first night with a new master that they had only just met.

  The bedrolls from Sha Guadi’s three sves were untouched as before.

  At this point I was starting to wonder if he would ever let them leave his bedroom.

  + + +

  There was a long undry list of things that I wanted to do, but given the time of night, I wouldn’t be able to pursue most of the items on my checklist until tomorrow.

  For now, I knelt on the floor and started to draft a letter to my younger sister. Originally, I intended to write this yesterday after I overheard a certain conversation between the King and the Prime Minister, but I had been unconscious for half a day and missed the opportunity to send any mail.

  Somehow, a lot of things had happened in the past 48 hours, and I wasn’t even sure exactly how to begin.

  ‘Dear sister, I was suddenly ensved. Also a dragon attacked a town close to where you live and I’ve attached 1000 gold coins to this letter so be careful of the pgue that is spreading nearby.’

  —This hypothetical example was just in jest, but I seriously couldn’t figure out how to word things short of sounding completely illogical and ridiculous. To completely fair, my experience had genuinely been quite absurd, and I struggled with how to summarize the sequence of events in a manner that would actually made sense to someone who wasn’t familiar with the full story. In the worst case scenario, she might even think that I was pulling a prank.

  I decided to omit a lot of information.

  Thinking pragmatically, it wouldn’t help my family at all to know that I was (technically) ensved by the Otherworlder who used to be my childhood friend, so I decided to cut all of those details out of my letter.

  I mainly wanted my family to prepare for a disaster that was very likely to strike the Western half to the Kingdom, so I revised my writing to focus on actionable items that would actually help my younger sister if things started to get rough. Specifically, I tried my best to keep the structure of my letter concisely in the form of: ‘if X, do Y, because Z’.

  It was hyper-rational, and I was quite proud about it.

  I hadn’t been a science and mathematics major in high school all for nothing.

  + + +

  I was midway through my letter when a random burst of stimution suddenly assaulted me in between my legs.

  It seriously came out of nowhere.

  I wasn’t doing anything remotely erotic or indecent, but it felt like an invisible vibrator had been pressed against my genitals completely without warning. It was rubbing me quite vigorously, much more forcefully than I ordinarily preferred to masturbate. The abrupt stimution caused my hand to suddenly jerk, sending a long erratic spray of bck ink all across my carefully prepared sheet of parchment.

  Dishearteningly, the letter to my sister was ruined.

  I cmped my thighs tightly together and curled over, my body shaking quietly.

  —What the fuck?!

  The rubbing was relentless, as if it was trying to bring me to climax.

  However, there wasn’t anything in between my legs. I wasn’t touching myself, and I had no clue what was responsible for this phantom stimution. I could only assume that it was magic, but I genuinely hadn’t heard of anyone experiencing anything remotely simir to this before. To be fair, I definitely wasn’t an expert on Galuterican sex sves and I had never really bothered to interview them about their experiences in the past (I hadn’t been interested…), but I never imagined that the Obedience Crest was capable of producing an effect like this.

  The pressure and warmth was rapidly spreading in between my loins. I bit my lips, trying my best to prevent any strange sounds from escaping my mouth.

  It felt like human fingers, stroking, rubbing, and pumping all along my clitoris.

  Was this the type of up-and-down motion that men used when they masturbated?

  My breathing grew haggard and irregur as I trembled and twitched helplessly on the floor.

  The stimution was climbing. It was rising and rising. Even though this entire episode had barely gone on for more than three minutes, I could feel that an orgasm was definitely coming. I was going to climax any second now, and I was sure that everything would explode in brilliant white lights.

  However, just at the moment that I thought I would fly off the cliff—

  It stopped.

  I was left hanging.

  I felt like I was teetering just on the very edge, but somehow I had been left behind. There was this strange fuzzy tingle and afterglow that I felt in my pelvis — much like the residual warmth and increased blood flow that some people had after they orgasmed — but I definitely had not even experienced the main event. It was almost like I had skipped right over it, leaving me denied and frustrated like a big swollen balloon that hadn’t popped.

  However, the other party had already shot their load.

  + + +

  For rather obvious reasons, I went to straight my bedroll and buried my face in my pillow.

  I tried to finish the deed manually.

  I needed to cum so badly.

  As a matter of fact, I went at it quite vigorously. I went straight to the spots that I liked, masturbating in the exact same way that I did hundreds if not thousands of times before.

  In the past, I never had any difficulty reaching orgasm. I didn’t need any toys and it usually came to me very easily. While I certainly wasn’t anything like a nymphomaniac or a sex addict, I didn’t shy away from masturbation and I had my own things on my Internet browser history that I would prefer that nobody else knew about.

  However, the relief that I sought was terribly elusive.

  If anything, the more that I rubbed myself, the worse that it got. The distended balloon of arousal inside of me continued to infte and grow beyond its limits, up until the point that I literally felt like I was swollen and shaking in agony from an unbearable amount of pressure inside my body that had no avenue of escape.

  I didn’t understand.

  I didn’t get it.

  Why couldn’t I orgasm?

  ?