The Gamer Chapter 1518 – Terms (Patreon)

Somehow, someway, the ensuing orgy also was limited to just teasing Lulu’s mouth. During the second round of cleaning, she made clear why that was. “I want to keep this sort of reasonable.”

Scarlett was the first to respond, “I really don’t think you can say what he did to you the past two hours ‘reasonable’.”

“No, not really,” Lulu gave in immediately with a giggle. “Scaled up to his unreasonably powerful people though…”

“I do see the point,” John acknowledged. The last vestiges of eroticism had, by now, left the room, and everyone was capable of concentrating on their own things. “It gets a little easier to call this off, if it doesn’t work, if you haven’t invested too much yet.”

Lulu nodded a couple of times. “Also, I have to keep stringing you along until you love me too much to care about my evident insanity.” She pulled her jade fan out of the typical nowhere, hiding her sharp grin. “We would not want you to wizen up to our tricks too quickly. It would be unbecoming of our reputation as a schemer.”

“Like insanity ever stopped me. I mean, have you seen this woman?” John pointed at Lee.

“Me?!” the gamer girl cried out and gestured at various women all around her. Claire, Nathalia, Eliana, and Aclysia received the brunt of the pointing. “You have all of these crazies and you pick me?!”

“Your reactions are the most entertaining,” John told her flat-out.

Lee puffed up her cheeks and Lulu laughed loudly. She closed her fan again, letting it disperse out of existence, like a swarm of dying green fireflies. “For the most part, it is that I don’t want to go all in,” she continued in a serious tone. “You decided not to accept the marriage scheme outright. Even if you did, it would have been unwise of me to give you more than I already have.” She brushed over her sultry lips. “It’s probably unwise to have done as much as we have already… but eh, I needed that.”

“Finally,” Momo groaned. “A degree of reason.”

“I concur,” Lydia nodded.

“Oh, shut it, ya two.” Rave walked over and plopped down between the two voices of reason, putting her arms around them in the process. “Ya were right up in there with the rest of us.”

“I can enjoy the absurdities of this harem while attempting to rein in the excesses,” Lydia retorted.

The friendly bickering continued, while John turned to Lulu. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“I think you have earned that privilege,” the empress of the Mandate of Heaven responded with a sly smile. “What would you wish to know?”

“You were born in 2000, yes?”

“In the very first minute of the year of the dragon, the fifth of February, year 2000,” Lulu responded in a proud tone. There was a cultural significance here that the Gamer did not quite understand. He could follow it on a factual level, but he simply was not raised in the tradition that she was appealing to at that moment. “It was a very fated moment,” she explained, sensing his lack of understanding. “To claim the Mandate of Heaven, you either need to fulfil a long list of traditions or you need to conquer the land.”

“I suppose you didn’t do the latter,” John joked.

“Sometimes I wish I got to try,” Lulu hummed and directed her eyes at the sky. “Start from nothing, armed only with my talents and my will, drive my enemies before me, hear the adoration of the people that I free from their burdensome governors, burn down the houses of a few dozen bureaucrats.” Her lips pulled back, revealing a full mouth of sharp, carnivorous teeth. “It could have been great.”

Suddenly, her smile relaxed. She blinked a few times, until the slit pupils reverted to the normal human shape. The hint of scales that crept up the sides of her porcelain face retreated as quickly as they had come, seeping back under her skin like a liquid. What returned was a human smile.

“I suppose I will live with being chosen for the job for the traditional reasons,” Lulu answered.

“And what are those?” John asked. It was a sidetrack from where he had originally wanted to go, but he was nothing if not skilled at taking the conversation as it went. “Observe tells me you need to be from one of the imperial houses and you need to have an Innate Ability related to jade.”

“That’s a way to summarize it.” Lulu tilted her head and sorted her thoughts. “Tianlong, why don’t you explain?”

The dragon that had been resting on her shoulder came back to life at those words. Its colour shifted from muted green to the vibrant green that he otherwise associated with her colour. First stretching on, then rising from her skin, the god of tradition separated from its host and slithered through the air.

Even separated, Tianlong maintained a small form, barely two metres long and not much thicker than a python. Stylized clouds surrounded it, one of which swiftly came to be used as the cushion for its upper body. Short arms crossed atop the puffy white cloud. Tianlong’s regal presence would have been awe inspiring to a different room.

In this one, Nathalia mocked the god of tradition, “Mightiest of the dragons, reduced to a young woman’s battery.”

“I have no mockery for you, Nathalia,” the god of tradition retorted. “I approve that you have ended your whoring ways and finally entered a proper relationship.”

“”Proper?”” Rave, Lee, Lydia, Nia, Hailey and Lorelei all said simultaneously. The tone varied from doubt to surprise.

Hailey picked up where everyone else left off, “Now hol’ on just a sec’. You’re the god of all traditions and such, yeah?”

“That is correct, young one,” Tianlong responded in its even tone.

“And you call what we have ‘ere prop’r?” The country gal tilted her head. “Ain’t nothin’ traditional about this, is there?”

“You are westerners,” the god of tradition retorted. “You have your recent traditions and they too live within me. I am god of all traditions, and though the love of this group for its constituents is unusual, understand that powerful men taking large harems is far more common than not. Especially when these men, whatever their title, are absolute rulers. Empress, consorts, concubines, such is the ranking of an imperial harem.” The dragon looked around. “In my humble opinion, that traditional divergence is a surrender to the demands of politics. A body of love will not need it.”

“Jokes on you, I am consort and concubine!” Sylph declared. “Oh, but what am I first… Oh, what was I first? Was I… hmmmm… what do I want to be first? Concubine is so much cooler of a word.”

While the airhead did her babbling, the rest of the harem digested the input swiftly. Much of that aligned with their personal beliefs and, as a matter of fact, history. The amount of realms in which the current ruler was someone that actually just kept to the woman they were officially married to was limited to the immensely pious or those that hid it well enough no one ever had written down even a rumour that they had it going with the chambermaids.

Traditionally, powerful men had harems. That was a matter of fact. The west was an outlier in this and had made the majority of the world follow in its model because western countries conquered the majority of the Earth and held it for anywhere between 10 and 500 years. Still, there were many countries that either directly or indirectly allowed the practice. Even in the west, it was far from unusual for the upper crust of men to have more than one partner. Tabloids just pretended it was a scandal because it apparently sold well.

Looking at it from the lens of the entirety of human history, Tianlong describing their relationship as proper was therefore entirely logical. Especially if John acknowledged the ‘absolutist ruler’ description. Few men ever had more partners than great conquerors. Although, it had to be said, the standard historical harem was rarely entirely willing, and to find one that had more than one or two members in it that genuinely loved the man was even rarer.

There was also the stereotype that great leaders made terrible fathers.

John really wanted to avoid that one.

“You beautiful dummies really think my own god would allow me a plan that involves breaking our own traditions?” Lulu asked with just the right amount of bite and joviality in her voice.

“I wish for your relationship to be fruitful,” Tianlong continued. “I hope you have the matters of lineage well ordered already? I understand that mixing such powerful lines could lead to some issues… May I suggest the creation of new houses, as to not upset-“

“Tianlong,” Lulu interrupted her patron god, “you’re waffling on about all matters of things again!”

“I was attempting to set the lineage factors straight to create an aesthetic foundation for the understanding of the Mandate of Heaven’s system of imperial houses,” Tianlong responded evenly, then it sighed. “But be that as it may. I shall attempt to lay it down in simple structural terms. The Forbidden City is populated by retainers, the chief administrators, the imperial court, the imperial harem, and the imperial houses. Twenty-four years before I decide the time of a sovereign has come… yes?”

John had raised his hand. “Do I understand the implication of that correctly? You withdraw your blessing from the current emperor and they… die?”

“Such is the nature of things,” Tianlong answered uncaringly. “Emperors must come and go, for the Middle Empire to retain its flexibility. Traditions must retain plasticity to survive.”

John could not entirely disagree. Abyssal Europe had gone through a long period of stagnation because Romulus had been away from the wheel for several hundred years. Killing the current emperor seemed a little drastic. Then again, how long would they have lived without Tianlong’s blessing? “And sometimes you give your blessing to foreign conquerors?”

“If they show promise and obey the Mandate,” Tianlong continued in its even tone.

‘I wonder if I can train up Lulu while Tianlong still remains bonded to her?’ the Gamer asked himself. The last thing he wanted was to get attached to the imperial tomboy, have her for a thousand years, and then have her waste away in front of his eyes because the god decided her time had come. “Can I ask what drove your decision to let the previous emperor die?”

“The Generation of Monsters dawned.” The jade dragon let those words hang in the air for a little while. “And his mind, brilliant as it had once been, had been splintered by the horrors of the war against the Sunrise Land. He was haunted by the images of the red beaches and confessed often the deep seated wish to repay them in kind. His death was a mutually agreed affair.”

‘The expected reasons then.’ John gestured for Tianlong to continue.

“Upon the announcement of a sovereign’s approaching death, the imperial houses begin training their contestants for the role. Each imperial house is the creation of a previous emperor, mixed over the years with those that prove themselves the most capable administrators. Each contestant must carry the blessed Innate Ability: the control over jade. They must be born in the year of the dragon. They must be raised within the Forbidden City and instilled with the culture, the duties, and the capacity to rule. Their fate must be divined thrice and be declared great thrice. They must be capable of going through the eighteen trials and hold the seven speeches. They-”

“They get the idea,” Lulu interrupted.

‘Seems like the kind of burdensome yet practical system I would expect for the most powerful imperial apparatus in a fantasy setting,’ the Gamer thought. “And you were the only contestant for this?”

“Psh, hardly.” Lulu waved off. “I was one of twenty-two contestants for the imperial throne. The width of the imperial houses, over three-thousand years into the Mandate’s history, cannot be understated. The Forbidden City is nearly as large as Rome.”

The revelation boggled even John’s mind. An entire city dedicated solely to bureaucracy and heir selection, ten kilometres across, buzzing with messengers, servants, and teachers. Its own microcosm of human activity, more akin to a beehive attempting to raise a new queen than anything else in human behaviour. They were feeding all of these imperial descendants the royal jelly, hoping one of them would show the necessary will to power and merit.

And apparently it worked.

Magic made all manners of systems John would have regarded as unworkable in the mundane world into possibilities.

“The long and short of it is that I am a super prodigy that cleared everything rapidly,” Lulu boasted.

“Wouldn’t it be smartest to find out if somebody is a Latebloomer before making a selection? Especially in the Generation of Monsters?” John asked.

To that, Tianlong and Lulu smiled and spoke in unison, “”We are tradition. We are knowledge greater than reason, proven through generation upon generation of iteration. Tried, tested, wise, and true. We have our methods, more esoteric than any magic you can weave, and to tell you would fail to engage your enlightened mind. Trust only that we have our ways, through the eighteen trials, the seven speeches, the pendulum and the manifold labyrinths, to find who is most proper to be sovereign.””

John scratched the back of his head and sighed. He could only agree that simply saying ‘tradition covers this’ was not enough for his rational mind. Whether that was the fault of his rational mind or the tradition… well, John was of the belief that it was the latter. Things he couldn’t logically trace dissatisfied him. Equally, he could not dismiss the value of shared cultural beliefs though.

Especially not if they appeared to work.

“Alright, so you were crowned empress when you were…?”

“Eighteen,” Lulu responded. “That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Before empress, I was blessed princess, a title I got upon finishing the last of the trials at the age of ten. Before that, from three to ten, I was the imperial candidate of house Zhi.”

“Observe did tell me you entered the political life of the Forbidden City when you were three years old…” John mumbled.

“Again, it’s not quite that simple.”

“That does bring me back to the question I originally wanted to ask,” the Gamer said and inspected first Lulu, then Lee intently. More than Lee as she currently appeared, he recalled how Lee looked when he first met her. He did the same for Lydia. Both of them were about his age and, just like him, they had lost quite a bit of their youthfulness since aging away from eighteen. They replaced it with a dignified maturity (especially Lydia). Still, the changes to their faces from then to now were undeniable. Then he turned to Lulu who, despite advertised as 19, had little of that. “You grew up in time dilation, didn’t you?”

The Heavenly Jade Empress nodded in a regal manner. “The Forbidden City administers a large population over an even larger area. The Mandate of Heaven is the most centralized of all Abyssal powers, for better and for worse. My predecessor decreed that the heart of bureaucracy should therefore be put under permanent time dilation. Things move about a quarter faster in there.”

“Right, so your actual age is more like 23 to 24,” John gathered. That made more sense to him, although he would like it if Observe was permanently consistent on whether it displayed years since birthday or real age. “Great, that was just confusing me… so, if I understand all of this correctly, should you and I marry…”

“When you and I marry,” Lulu corrected jokingly.

“When,” John gave with just as much of a chuckle. “Our descendants will be the foundation of a new imperial house?”

“Yep… I wonder what would be a good name…?” Lulu tapped her chin repeatedly. “What do we usually do in these situations?”

“For empresses, there is no clear traditional outline,” Tianlong responded. “You can choose patrilineal, matrilineal, or simply create a new name altogether. The last would be my recommendation.”

“That does not make it easier!” Lulu complained and splashed some water at the jade dragon. The scattering drops seemed to grant her inspiration. “Oh, maybe the Hai house!”

“Ocean,” John translated. “Would be fitting considering the width of our joined realm.”

“Alright, now that the two of you have caught up on your future plans,” Momo interjected, “we should be leaving soon.”

“And I suppose I have to leave first.” Lulu let out a deep sigh. Tianlong turned its serpentine body towards her and soon sank back into the paper white surface of her skin. It came to rest over her naked side, the slender body underlining the soft rise of her left breast with jade scales and golden ridges. At that moment, their time together ended. Lulu was replaced with Lu Zhi and the empress spoke in a subtly different tone. Friendly and energetic still, whether she was his imperial tomboy or not did not change who she was, but with a certain sense of distance. “It has been a very stimulating discussion, Mister President. I hope to continue it soon, but I also hope that neither of us have reason to linger in the coming days.”

“You will hear from me regardless of what happens,” John vowed.