Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 986

Chapter 986: Chapter 986 - Taming Bargains - 2

Luna held her breath when she heard that negotiating for the crystal was genuinely on the table.

She had hoped the crystal was somewhere in the possible outcomes of this session since Orion always liked to "negotiate" it with her...

But knowing something is possible in the future and hearing Orion actually confirm it now that she had stuff to offer were two different things, and the confirmation landed somewhere deeper than the strategic part of her mind.

Julius didn’t change his expression. Yet something in him went still, the specific stillness of a person who has heard something unexpected and is recalibrating before they show any of it.

"Truly, not joking... But that alone isn’t enough for me." Orion looked at Luna directly. Not the way he’d been looking at her during arguments, scanning for weak points in the position. The way he looked at something he’d already decided was his and was simply determining the terms of collection.

"I want you married to Seiya, the attractive young man son of one of my finest allied families. And subordinate to my management for at least ten years."

And then he showed a smile that had nothing warm in it.

"The white crystal will be yours to carry the rest of your life. I won’t force you to use it beyond what’s absolutely needed... But you’ll follow my instructions and open every door I need opened without protest."

He turned toward the hall. The gesture of someone who wanted what he was saying to reach everyone, not just the persons in front of him.

"If this is what you all want... I won’t back down the way you think I will."

He took out the white crystal for the room to see.

It pulsed in his hand pushing a light that was visible to everyone in the room now, those with mana vision and those without. Not quite a threat, since it had the shape of a barrier. The kind of display that communicated something without having to name it, that asked the room to do the work of understanding what it meant to see this object in this person’s hand in this context.

"I don’t need this to handle anyone who comes at me here," he said. "But if you want me to accept your terms of ditching my defense, I want everything we’re negotiating put in writing and sealed."

His gaze returned to Luna.

"Including the allegiance from the most "meek" yet ambitious young Starweaver in the room."

Luna didn’t react to the insult. She moved forward instead, offering more, not from desperation but to make clear the covetousness he was trying to attribute to her had no footing. That she was dropping everything just because she saw that kind of clarity that comes when you’ve already decided what actually matters and everything else is just noise.

"I’ll give you my crystals budget as well." The voice was flat, without the temperature Orion had been searching for throughout the session. "And I’ll renounce the name... I have no interest in being a Starweaver. No interest in recovering the lineage or carrying what it requires. Give me the crystal, and I will dissolve my side of the faction and the name completely. I leave the road clear for you to lead the entire family without contest."

The hall processed that differently from everything before it.

Several of those present looked at Orion, waiting to see whether the ground they believed was firm beneath his proposal had been firm and not just sand. Was he really going to let go of his barrier?

Everyone held their breath.

Orion shook his head slowly, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should already understand it.

"The ’small’ crystals in the bag of a young lady don’t interest me. I’ll have more than enough from the third vault." No hardness in it, just a fact, delivered simply the way you might note the weather.

"But I want you with our name... I want you carrying it high."

His eyes settled on her with a quality that had nothing to do with negotiation. The quality of someone looking at something that belongs to them for reasons that exist entirely outside the opinion of the person in question.

"Destiny chose her, and the family with her. The genetic key she carries doesn’t separate from the lineage that bears it. A lineage isn’t abandoned because a girl decides she’s no longer interested!"

He addressed the people and raised his hand.

"If she wants the crystal, the conditions I offered are the conditions she needs to fulfil."

Luna didn’t respond.

The offer turned over and over in her mind, in the silence, three seconds, four, the weight of it pressing in from every angle at once.

Not any argument.

Not any political maneuver.

At that moment, swirling in his mind for those few tense seconds, was the most difficult thing she had ever had to look at without being able to touch during the entire session.

The one thing that had to do with whom she had the least armor against.

Her mother.

The crystal was right there. In Orion’s hand, pulsing with a light she had been looking for her entire life. It was an object and an important person simultaneously, and it was the last living thread back to the years when the world had been simple and safe and full of a voice that loved with an intensity that was almost unreasonable in how it felt to receive.

Every time Orion used that crystal in combat, in demonstrations, in moments exactly like this one, a little more of that light spent itself and didn’t come back.

She could end that.

’Ren!’

’I can’t choose between them.’

’I love them both too much and I can’t...’

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify