I bounced toward the cave entrance, positioning myself on a rock near the path.
Sii followed, standing behind me, her staff raised.
The bushes rustled.
Small shapes emerged — green-skinned, wiry, three feet tall, with pointed ears and sharp teeth and crude weapons.
Goblins.
A dozen of them, maybe more, their eyes wide as they entered the clearing and found not an empty cave but a human woman and a glowing blue slime.
They froze.
We froze.
A moment of mutual, bewildered assessment.
Then the lead goblin barked something — a command in the guttural goblin tongue — and three of them charged, raising their crude stone axes.
I released my aura.
Not fully.
Not even a fraction of fully.
Just a taste — a thin, controlled leak of the magical pressure that I had been holding contained within my body, the ambient energy that had been accumulating since my transmigration, fed by Veldora’s proximity and my own evolution.
It washed outward from my body like a wave, a pressure front that hit the charging goblins like a wall of wind.
They stopped.
Not gradually — instantly, their legs locking, their bodies going rigid, their eyes going wide with a terror so profound that it transcended the cognitive.
They did not understand what they were feeling.
They only knew, on the deepest, most primal level of their monster instincts, that the small blue creature in front of them was a predator so far above them on the food chain that resistance was not merely futile — it was unthinkable.
The lead goblin dropped his axe.
His knees buckled.
He fell forward, prostrating himself on the ground, his forehead pressing into the dirt.
Behind him, one by one, the others followed — dropping their weapons, falling to their knees, pressing their faces to the earth.
“Lord…” the lead goblin whispered, and the word was in the common tongue, broken and accented but unmistakable.
“Lord…
Dragon…”
I bounced down from the rock.
The goblins flinched but held their prostration, their bodies trembling.
‘Good’, I thought.
‘This is the beginning.
The same beginning as the original story — goblins, a village, names.
The path is the same.
The destination is different.’
I remembered the original story.
The goblin village, the dire wolves, the naming, the evolution into hobgoblins.
The protagonist had stumbled into it by accident, guided by chance and circumstance.
I was going to walk into it on purpose, because I knew — from the reader’s knowledge I carried — that this was where power began.
But I also remembered the dangers.
The Demon Lords.
Milim — the pink-haired dragon demon lord whose power could level mountains, whose whims could destroy nations, whose childish exterior housed a being of apocalyptic force.
I trembled — internally, in the privacy of my own consciousness — at the thought of encountering her.
At the thought of encountering any of them.
I was weak.
Far weaker than the original protagonist had been at this stage, because I had diverged, because my evolution had taken a different path, because the system had shaped me into something that was powerful in intimate contexts but still fragile in combat.
I needed the goblins.
I needed the wolves.
I needed every advantage the original story had offered, because the world did not care that I was a reader, and the Demon Lords did not care that I knew their secrets, and if I made a mistake — one mistake — I would die.
「Notice: Subject ‘Sii’ — magical level increase detected.
Current rating: between three-star and four-star mage.
Cause: Repeated magical energy exchange through bio-absorption contact.」
I looked at Sii.
She did not know.
She could not feel it — the increase in her magical capacity, the subtle expansion of her mana reserves that had occurred as a result of our repeated contact.
Each time I had been inside her, each time the bio-absorption link had connected us, the magical energies in our bodies had interacted, had balanced, had equalized — and in the process, her capacity had grown.
It was like dual cultivation.
A concept from the xianxia novels I had read in my previous life — two cultivators exchanging energy, each benefiting from the interaction.
My power was so much greater than hers that the exchange increased her capacity significantly while only minimally reducing mine.
A fraction of a fraction, transferred each time, accumulating over repeated encounters.
Not profitable for me.
Not directly.
But a three-star mage becoming a four-star mage without training, without effort, without knowledge — that was useful.
That was leverage.
That was a tool I could use.
I looked at Sii again.
Considered eating her.
The thought was brief, clinical, and immediately dismissed.
She was useful.
She was devoted.
She was a conduit for magical exchange and a source of intelligence about the cult and the seal and the political landscape of the Western Nations.
And she was a woman I had fucked.
Eating a woman I had fucked was — even by the standards of a transmigrated author turned pleasure slime — a line I was not willing to cross.
I smirked.
Internally.
“Lead me to your village,” I told the goblins.
The goblin village was exactly as I remembered it from the source material.
A collection of crude huts built from mud and branches, clustered around a central clearing, surrounded by a palisade of sharpened sticks that would not have stopped a determined squirrel.
The goblins who lived here were small, malnourished, their green skin stretched tight over thin frames, their eyes dull with the exhaustion of creatures who spent every moment of their lives struggling to survive.
The village head — an old goblin, grey-skinned and stooped — knelt before me in the central clearing.
Behind him, the entire village knelt.
Men, women, children, all of them prostrate, their foreheads pressed to the mud.
“Lord Dragon,” the old goblin said, his voice quavering.
“We are honored.
We are unworthy.
We are—”
“Rise,” I said.
“All of you.”
They rose.
I looked at them — at the assembled goblins, the frightened, hopeful, desperate faces of a community on the edge of extinction.
And I looked at the women.
They were small.
Malnourished.
Their bodies were thin, their features gaunt, their clothing — scraps of leather and woven grass — barely covering them.
By human standards, they were not attractive.
But I could see beneath the malnourishment.
I could see the bone structure, the body types, the potential that was hidden beneath layers of deprivation and hardship.
After evolution — after naming — these women would become hobgoblins.
Taller, stronger, more developed.
Their bodies would fill out, their features would sharpen, their skin would take on the healthy glow of well-fed, magically enhanced beings.
They would be — I assessed with the cold, analytical part of my mind that was still a fanfiction writer — fuckable.
The thought was clinical, evaluative, and entirely shameless.
I was a slime.
Slimes did not have shame.
“Bring the women forward,” I said.
“Line them up.”