Shades of the New World

Chapter 219: Offer

Ignoring the weird looks he was receiving, Evin made sure to let the two girls keep the money and prepared to leave.

'Though, odd how the Earl didn't try to have me and Bella engaged again,' Evin thought with some surprise. As he dined, he noticed that the girl would steal a glance towards him every now and then, but he had decidedly chose to ignore her. 

The Earl decided to have a maid escort him out and Lana stood up to follow behind him as well. Oddly, the woman was walking behind him with an awkward smile, seemingly choosing the proper words for she was about to say.

The trio walked to the mansion's front door, and Lana finally said something after having the maid leave before her.

"Uhh, Evin, do consider joining our little company someday."

"Were you instructed to invite me?" Evin replied with a smile.

"Perhaps? But I wouldn't really mind having you in the team too, you know?" Lana added.

'I really don't feel like Tsaena is someone who would order something he knows pointless. Or maybe there's a bigger boss behind this group Well, who knows?'

"Terribly sorry to dash your hopes, but for the time being, I don't have any plans to work for a group of any kind," Evin explained simply.

"I told him it's not going to work, but he still insists that I ask you Ugh, I feel like I just confessed to someone with full knowledge that I'll be rejected," Lana mumbled.

"He-he, maybe one day you'll be sitting on top of your boss, giving him unreasonable orders," Evin said casually and started floating.

"Sure, I guess we all can dream" Lana said in a wistful, very out of character manner.

"But couldn't you train Bella a bit, so that she can join you guys later on?" Evin asked.

"We actually are alongside a bunch of other young mages, but it hasn't yet been decided if she's going to work with us or not," Lana said with a smile.

"I thought you weren't allowed to teach without being a noble?" 

"Oh, you definitely can, after buying the rights to teach from the country. But for this case, we're just borrowing the Earl's Authority,"

"Ooh, that's pretty interesting. But I don't understand why you would want to teach young mages? Is it just because one of them might join you later on?"

"He-he, no. We're being paid by the Earl. Apparently, the man was hoarding quite an amount of good materials in his stash, perhaps hoping to use them for a mage of his own blood or maybe just a random one he found from his county," Lana smiled.

"Huh? But the last time I saw her, Bella was still a beginner mage, though" Evin asked with some confusion.

The Earl should have collected a number of Core Shards under his possession, so normally, Bella should've been much stronger than she was at the time. 

"Who knows? We've been employed here for almost three months now, and during that time, Bella's absorbed three batches of Core Shards under our guidance, which turned her into a half-core just a few days ago," Lana shrugged.

'To each their own, I guess,' Evin was a bit confused, but thought no more of it and said his goodbyes.

"Alright, well, hope we'll see you in the future."

"Yeah, goodbye," Lana said and waved Evin off, watching as the boy in question disappeared behind a veil of illusions. 

A few minutes later, Evin entered his house, satisfied with finishing one of the tasks he set out to do.

'Now I just have the paper money to worry about and then Sasha' 

Rith was sleeping on a pile of pillows, a slight crease on her forehead, while Riz and Raz were playing around her.

The two kittens looked at Evin, ran over excitedly and started rubbing their fur against Evin's feet teasingly, like they weren't acting all thrilled a second ago.

'Ah, these two obsessed with me, just like their mother,' Evin thought jokingly and played a bit with the kittens, waiting for Rith to wake up. 

Theor and Lora came to ask him about what happened to him, to which Evin answered how the Earl wanted him to become a noble. Theor seemed very slightly interested in the endeavor, while Lora seemed a bit wary.

Evin expressed that he didn't mind if his parents wanted to try at becoming nobility, but reminded them that he wouldn't be involved in the process at all. He also wanted to tell them that the kingdom might try to get to him through them, but his parents reassured him that they weren't going to dabble in nobility, so he chose not to.

Eventually, Rith woke up and Evin dragged the Cosmic into his room and asked her to summon her brother.

"Ugh, can't we do this tomorrow?" Rith groaned, clearly not in the mood for work.

"Just fix yourself with the World of Life, why are you so stubborn about this anyway?" Evin sighed.

"No, but you can't It's just that you You don't understand," Rith grunted.

"Sigh, it's not that I want to ruin whatever unsung law you guys have to follow, but it's just painful to watch you suffer like this, you know? I'm genuinely distressed to see you like this," Evin said, wondering if a change of approach will work.

"Ugh, shut up," Rith replied, dashing Evin's hopes.

"Alright, we'll wait for tomorrow. Though have Abe ready a Contract or something," Evin reminded with a sigh.

Just as Evin was about to leave, Rith suddenly lurched and hastily created a portal in front of herself, into which she tried to puke out her innards. Obviously, the half-assed portal fizzled out of existence and the Cosmic's vomit gushed onto the floor.

"Empress' tits! Just fix yourself! What is wrong with you?" Evin cursed and went to find something to use as a wiper, cold sweat running through his back, because of the liquid nature of the mess.

When he came back, he saw Rith staring blankly at the floor, a dejected look on her much more healthy-looking face.

"Did you fix yourself?" Evin asked, a satisfied glint in his eyes.

"No Uh, but I'm feeling better because I puked," Rith explained.

'She definitely did Thank the Empress.' 

"How much did you drink anyway?" Evin asked, looking at the massive amount of liquid on the ground.

"Probably enough to get a human drunk as shit I don't remember that well," Rith said, making Evin wonder how much alcohol would a cat be able to drink before it died from poisoning.

"Alright whatever. Go and sleep some more," Evin said, and bent over to clean the floor.

But a thin portal appearing right in front of him stopped him from doing so. The portal perfectly swept over the floor, skillfully wiping all of the nasty liquid away. Evin expected part of the floor to be scraped off by it, but the floor's paint wasn't changed in any way.

"Huh," Evin said and looked between the gaps between the wooden boards and found that they too were swept clean by the awfully precise portal.