"Kiana, turn that off first." Theresa reached out and flipped Sirin's phone face-down on the sofa. "Type in a URL for me..."
She lowered her voice and rattled off a garbled string of letters and numbers.
Sirin gave her a strange look—the kind of look one gives a raving lunatic.
But considering this was an "exchange of high-end technology," she obediently picked up the phone, opened the browser, and typed in that garbled string of letters and numbers.
The loading bar spun once.
The webpage popped up.
What greeted her eyes was a vast expanse of pale, unblemished flesh, without a shred of holy light to cover it.
All manner of cover images that challenged the very limits of human imagination densely blanketed the screen. The sidebar even had every sort of category tag, the crude and blunt text sending a tremendous shock through even Sirin's nonexistent heart of common sense.
Sirin's eyes slowly widened.
This little white-haired runt possessed such astonishing mastery?!
With study materials this abundant, this comprehensive, the channels that her foolish servant Su Yu had provided her were, by comparison, nothing but child's play!—like kids playing house!
For the first time, the gaze Sirin turned toward Theresa carried a few genuine traces of solemnity and approval.
She nodded in understanding.
No wonder this little shrimp could so righteously declare that she'd "help with anything."
It seemed her standing within this organization was absolutely no simple matter of being a mere motion-capture actress.
This spirit of holding nothing back and sharing freely even made Sirin feel that taking her on as her Number Two servant here on Earth was an extremely worthwhile bargain.
Facing "Kiana's" gaze—that mixture of shock and admiration—Theresa felt her entire back breaking out in a cold sweat.
She coughed sharply twice and spoke in a tone as though exchanging a secret password at a covert rendezvous:
"Listen up! These... ahem, these study materials, you can only look at them yourself! Absolutely, absolutely do not breathe a word of this to anyone! If people find out, my forever-adorable idol image would be utterly ruined, understand?!"
Sirin nodded gravely.
She understood.
Truly top-secret arts were never meant to be passed on to outsiders.
That this little melon-headed midget was willing to share them with her was already an enormous show of loyalty.
"You know what's good for you!"
Watching "Kiana" nod so meekly and well-behaved, the heart Theresa had lodged in her throat finally sank back down—at least halfway.
It seemed the child had merely been fumbling around blindly. Thank goodness she'd reined it in at the edge of the cliff and steered her toward some "proper" channels before any real disaster could be brewed.
She picked up the water glass from the coffee table and took a huge gulp, trying to press down the heat in her face.
"But, Kiana." Theresa's mood had calmed a bit, and she resumed her elder's dignified airs. "When you study these things—is it out of pure curiosity, or..."
This was a crucial question.
If it was just curiosity, then fine. But if some ill-intentioned little brat had deceived her, then she, Theresa, would absolutely rip the security door off its hinges and smash that bastard's dog head to pieces.
Sirin's gaze was still lingering over the site's category bar.
Hearing this question, she didn't even lift her head, answering crisply, decisively, and with total righteousness. "Because I want to use it on Su Yu."
"Pfffft—"
The water in Theresa's mouth traced a tragic arc through the lingering glow of the setting sun, precisely giving the snacks on the coffee table a thorough bath.
"Huh???"
Violent coughing erupted through the lounge.
Tears spilled uncontrollably from the corners of her eyes, and she didn't even bother to wipe them. Her azure-blue eyes stared fixedly at the white-haired girl who still sat prim and proper before her.
"You..." Theresa's voice cracked. "You want to... use it on THIS?"
This "niece" before her—who had always been so taciturn, carrying a hint of wariness and an air of keep-your-distance—had just now, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable, uttered the most shocking, world-shattering words.
Use it on Su Yu?
That producer who always looked so lazy and indolent, yet at the critical moment proved more reliable than anyone—just what beastly, subhuman thing had he done to this poor child in some corner she hadn't seen?!
A nameless fury shot up from her lower belly straight to the crown of her head. Theresa's fists clenched in an instant.
Right now there was only one thought in her mind—to charge through that door, storm into the office, and without asking a single question, first smash that bastard named Su Yu into a heap of scattered data fragments.
But she'd only half-risen when her body froze again.
Scenes of their time together at the studio recently flowed through her mind like water.
Over these past days, Su Yu's care for Kiana could only be described as meticulous and attentive to every detail. No matter how she looked at it, he didn't seem like the kind of pervert who would deceive an ignorant girl.
This was the intuition of Theresa's people-reading eye, honed as the former helmswoman of St. Freya.
She forcibly swallowed that surge of anger back down her throat.
Theresa drew in a deep breath, grabbed a few tissues, and wiped away the water stains on the coffee table haphazardly before settling back onto the sofa.
She stared into Sirin's pair of golden eyes, utterly without ripple, and forced her voice to sound like a patient, coaxing elder.
"Kiana... first, tell Auntie." She swallowed her saliva, her throat still aching from being choked earlier. "Why do you... want to use this... this kind of technique on him?"
Sirin lowered her eyelids, her gaze still resting on the unspeakable images on the phone screen.
She was carefully studying the load-bearing points of one particular movement, using it to deduce how this posture could maximally restrict a prey's resistance.
Hearing Theresa's inquiry, Sirin furrowed her brow slightly.
She felt this Number Two servant talked a bit too much, but in order to master this domination art, she patiently opened her mouth.
"Because that guy still doesn't belong to me."
Her voice was muffled.
It even carried a trace of irritation that Sirin herself hadn't noticed.
Theresa was stunned. "Huh?"
"Lately there are always these annoying women showing up around him." In Sirin's mind surfaced the image of Eden's foot pressing down on Su Yu's thigh, and her tone grew even colder and harder. "Those women keep coming up with new ways to trample him underfoot, to make him submit. It makes me very uncomfortable."
She raised her head and stared at Theresa, as though stating a self-evident law of nature: "They can all do this sort of thing—why can't I?"
The lounge's air conditioner hummed softly as it blew.
This declaration, brimming with intense possessiveness, fell into Theresa's maidenly heart—a heart full of pink bubbles—and was instantly translated into an entirely different meaning.
Trample underfoot? Submit?
Theresa's brain automatically translated these words into "all those girls are circling around Su Yu" and "they're all fawning over Su Yu."
"So... what you mean is," Theresa asked tentatively, "there are lots of girls surrounding Su Yu, and he's very sought-after. And when you see him together with other girls, you feel unhappy?"
Sirin thought back for a moment.
When she'd seen that man panting beneath Eden's foot, she really had felt quite displeased.
That feeling was like a prey that should have belonged to her being snatched away by someone else who'd gotten there first.
The moment she thought about how this cunning human had very likely already completed that "submission ritual" with some other woman in a corner she didn't know about, that nameless fury simply couldn't be suppressed.
"That's more or less the gist of it." Sirin nodded. "Seeing him together with other women, I feel jealous. Miserable."
Theresa was suddenly enlightened. She slapped her thigh, and all the tangled worries in her heart vanished in an instant.
Case cracked!
The case was completely cracked!
So that was it! This poor, ill-fated niece of hers—tossed into the mountains as a child, utterly worldly-innocent, unable even to tell the difference between the sexes—had simply fallen head over heels in love!
But that bastard Siegfried had never taught her how to love a person, and that blockhead Su Yu was probably no less dense when it came to matters of the heart.
So this child could only bumble about like a headless fly, clumsily searching for answers in the filthy, seedy corners of the internet.
She'd treated this kind of behavior as the sole means of expressing "possessiveness" and "affection"!
When faced with a rival, she could only clumsily and secretly watch that kind of video all by herself, fumbling for techniques to "win a man's heart back"...
What a sin, truly!
The gaze Theresa cast toward Sirin was now thoroughly filled with dense heartache and an elder's sense of responsibility.
This child didn't even know she'd fallen for Su Yu, yet she was using this laugh-through-tears method to try to "keep" him.
How utterly heartbreaking! She hadn't even realized she'd fallen in love with Su Yu!
A powerful maternal radiance burst forth from Theresa.
Now that she'd stumbled upon it, as the Auntie, she absolutely could not stand by and watch her niece stray further and further down the wrong path!
First and foremost, she had to throw away her old dignity and correct all that garbled nonsense in the girl's mouth about "trampling" and "submission rituals."
She had to make this child understand what a healthy relationship truly was!
"Kiana, listen to me."
Theresa straightened her back, shedding her earlier fluster, her expression turning incomparably serious.
"That kind of behavior in the videos is called sex—it's the act of love between a man and a woman—and it is absolutely not some godforsaken submission ritual!"
She herself had no idea how she'd managed to spit out those two mortifying words while her cheeks burned so hot.
Sirin rolled these two unfamiliar words around on the tip of her tongue.
So this domination art even had such an elegant academic name.
As expected, humans always loved to use grandiose, high-sounding words to disguise their craving for power and conquest.
She turned her head and looked at Theresa, whose embarrassment was so severe that even her ears were nearly dripping blood, and nodded thoughtfully.
It seemed that although this Number Two servant had mastered the core technique, she still harbored some sort of dread about imparting it.
"Go on." Sirin struck the pose of an eager pupil.
Watching this obedient, attentively-listening manner of her "niece," the last shred of shame in Theresa's heart was forcibly pressed down by her sense of responsibility.
She gritted her teeth, her gaze falling on the tabletop she'd sprayed with water.
"This kind of thing... is something only two people who like each other can do."
Theresa's speech sped up, as if reciting from a textbook.
"It represents the most intimate connection between humans. It involves... reproduction. Yes, reproduction."
She raised her head and looked at Sirin.
"Kiana, do you know where babies come from?"
Sirin frowned.
In the Babylon Laboratory, test subjects were all manufactured through cultivation pods and cloning technology.
This fell under the most basic, elementary common sense of bioengineering.
"Cloning? Or gene editing followed by placement into a cultivation pod?"
Sirin gave the most reasonable answer within her understanding.
Theresa's jaw nearly hit the floor.
It was over. This child had already been thoroughly brainwashed by those mad scientists.
Her common sense wasn't just zero—it was negative!
"No, no, not those cold machines!"
Theresa panicked, grabbing Sirin's arm, practically pressing her whole body against her.
"It's humans! It requires two people to unite! Those images you were just looking at—that's... that's the first step!"
Theresa had completely lost track of what she was even saying.
She pointed at the phone in Sirin's hand, then pointed at Sirin's belly, then gestured wildly in the air with both hands, her face flushed as red as a fully ripened tomato.
"Reproduction... is, well, it needs two people... to get very close. And then, to engage in some... deeper, physical, bodily contact!"
Sirin tilted her head, gazing at this short woman before her whose eyes kept darting away.
She understood the words, but she couldn't map them onto any actual images.
Deeper contact? That fool named Su Yu had indeed touched her many times.
He'd combed her hair, pressed down on her shoulders on the sofa in this very room, and when riding the little electric scooter, he'd even been wrapped around the waist and held tightly by her.
At this thought, Sirin lowered her eyelids and looked at the back of the hand resting on her knee.
If it were that man... if it were that kind of contact carrying a hint of warmth—she discovered that, surprisingly, she felt no urge to reject it.
And even, when she recalled the scent of him as he drew near, an emotion that even she herself couldn't comprehend spread through her chest.
"I still don't understand." Sirin lifted her head, her gaze locking straight onto Theresa. "Why does performing this so-called ritual result in a child?"
Theresa's breathing suddenly turned rapid.
Watching Sirin's frank, thirsting-for-knowledge expression, a fine layer of beads of sweat seeped from her forehead.
How was she supposed to explain this?! How was she supposed to explain reproductive isolation and the formation of a fertilized egg to a foolish child who treated this kind of thing as "tyrannical domination"?!
Though she, Theresa, had lived for... well, a very long time, she was also a pure-love warrior who could somehow play through a dating sim and end up with the single ending!
"Because... um... I..."
Theresa's mouth opened and closed, her tongue seemingly tied into a dead knot, unable to squeeze out a single word.
Her face was already too red to look at, her gaze flitting frantically between the coffee table, the floor, and the ceiling of the lounge—anywhere but Sirin.
"Uhh..." She let out a near-dying wail, trying to cover that face of hers—nearly on fire—with both hands.
Watching Theresa's tongue-tied, wishing-to-vaporize-on-the-spot state, a flicker of impatience flashed in Sirin's eyes.
She'd originally assumed that this Number Two servant, capable of providing such a vast trove of "top-secret materials," was a hidden master concealing her true depths.
Now it seemed she was nothing more than an armchair theorist, a dabbler who could only talk on paper.
"Forget it."
Sirin tossed the phone back onto the sofa, that muffled thud especially clear in the lounge.
She leaned her body forward, closing the distance, those heterochromatic eyes reflecting a cold light bearing straight down on Theresa's evasive gaze. Her tone was cold, hard, and crisp, like issuing a command that brooked no rebuttal:
"It seems you only half-understand this yourself."
Sirin stared at that face flushed the color of liver and posed the question that, within her twisted logic, followed most naturally of all.
"Just tell me directly—when that human, Su Yu, performs this 'reproduction' with you, what does it feel like?"
The hands Theresa had covering her face froze in an instant.
The world fell silent.
The last sliver of the setting sun beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows also sank away.
The cold air from the air conditioner vent blew against Theresa's neck, yet it was utterly incapable of cooling the soul that had, at this moment, completely detonated.
"Huh??"
Theresa sat dumbly on the broad sofa.
It was as if something in her mind was emitting a sharp, shrill screech, slicing all her reason and logic to pieces.
Just what on earth had this child misunderstood?
What did she mean, that she and Su Yu had that kind of relationship? She and Su Yu were pure and innocent! Never mind doing that kind of thing—the two of them had never even shared a private meal alone together!
That producer who always looked so lazy and indolent, yet at the critical moment proved more reliable than anyone—in her eyes he was simply a very good work partner, nothing more.
How was it that, in her dear niece's version of things, the innocence she'd taken such pride in, guarded for decades, had been so inexplicably ruined by that man?!
Theresa could even feel steam rising from the top of her head.
Both hands gripped the skirt over her knees for dear life, wringing the fabric into a tangled mess.
Under the gaze of Sirin's golden eyes—utterly without ripple, staring at her purely in the pursuit of knowledge—Theresa's lips trembled for a long while before she finally squeezed a few words out through her teeth.
"I... I didn't..."
Her voice was faint as a mosquito's whine, carrying a shame that nearly brought her to tears.
"Didn't what?" Sirin arched one eyebrow slightly, pressing her body forward again.
Theresa clenched her teeth, and like a criminal caught red-handed, she gave up entirely and shut her eyes.
"I, I've never done that kind of thing with him! So, I... I don't know either!"
The lounge was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
After a brief silence.
Sirin let out a long sigh from the very depths of her soul.
She leaned her body back against the sofa. The fervent thirst for knowledge from before had faded, replaced by a condescending gaze, one that even carried a few traces of pity.
So the little midget capable of providing such a vast trove of "top-secret materials" was, after all, nothing more than a theorist who could only talk on paper.
Sirin looked at that face, flushed crimson and not daring to open its eyes at all.
In this human society, those who grasped even the tiniest bit of power would desperately conceal their own ignorance, putting on an air of unfathomable profundity.
But this little white-haired runt was different. She couldn't even speak coherently, yet she still admitted she had no practical experience.
This kind of honesty was far more pleasing to the eye than those hypocritical lies.
Sirin nodded to herself inwardly.
Very good. Loyal, and doesn't show off her learning.
This Number Two servant—she accepted her.
"In that case." Sirin's voice returned to that cold, hard tone befitting one of superior standing. "Then there's a thing I want you to help me do."
Hearing this sentence, Theresa's eyes snapped open.
This had practically triggered some instinctive reaction in her as an elder.
How could she show herself to be so utterly vulnerable before her niece? She was the former helmswoman of St. Freya, the forever-adorable number one idol in the world!
As long as it was something proper, as long as it could pull this child out of those filthy, seedy chicken-scratch websites, there was nothing she couldn't do!
"Wh-what thing?" Theresa straightened her back, forcing her voice to sound full of an elder's dignity and dependability. "Rest assured! As long as it's within Auntie's power, I'll do it well for you!"
Watching this chest-thumping display of assurance, Sirin was thoroughly satisfied.
For this kind of servant—full of drive, eager to prove her loyalty—one ought to grant ample trust and an important mission, using it to test her ability.
Sirin picked up the phone with its screen still lit and swiped a few quick strokes in the memo app.
That was a set of "domination movement guidelines" she considered the most efficient—distilled, by virtue of a Herrscher's superhuman memory and analytical logic, from those complex diagrams she'd just seen.
Though it was only a theoretical summary, she believed that as long as it was executed properly, it could absolutely make that man completely lose his ability to resist.
She held the phone up before Theresa, the screen nearly touching Theresa's nose.
"These are the various techniques I've summarized over these past days."
Sirin's tone was as grave as if issuing a battle order, every single word landing with weight.
"But I don't know how effective they'll actually be."
"So I need you to go practice on Su Yu first, and see which art can make him submit the fastest. Then, report back to me."
Time froze utterly in this moment.
Theresa stared at the words on the screen—those unspeakable descriptions, itemized point by point, rewritten by Sirin in cold, academic language...
Third time today.
Theresa's brain crashed completely.
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