Chapter 41. Adventures in Vespera

“Welcome to Vespera!”

Looking around after Ken opened his eyes, he saw a beautiful woman who resembled Alice greatly but slightly shorter and more mature looking. Beautiful red eyes and silvery hair, Ken smiled warmly at the beautiful vampire who just greeted him.

“Ken! She is a married woman. Sure, her husband is a scum who’s not in the picture but don’t even think about it! I am not going to fall victim like the drama queen did!”

“Alice, it’s too late for me to even want to waste my breath defending myself. Thank you for having me Ava! Can you show me where I am staying so I can take a shower and get some sleep.”

“Obviously you are staying with me. Goodnight Ava!” Alice said happily while pulling Ken to her room so the two could be alone.

“How am i supposed to control myself if you are going to take a shower with me but we can’t make love?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I am not leaving your sight for the next ten days we are together so you can’t run off and sleep with my sister or one of the servants.”

Offering a helping hand, the two eventually got ready for bed and snuggled together until they both fell soundly asleep.

Waking up to an unfamiliar voice calling, when Ken opened his eyes, he was staring straight into the bright red eyes of Alice, glistening with a ray of sunlight.

“Did you sleep well Ken?”

“How do you keep the room this warm? I know it was cold outside last night.”

“Come on Ken, this is the castle of a noble, obviously we have artifacts all around that heats the castle up with fire magic during the winter and ice magic to cool down during the summer.”

“Wow! How come I have never thought of that! I definitely need to buy a few for my family and Lovetta definitely needs them for the freaking winters they have.”

“I will ask a servant to go get you some of the highest quality ones to bring home. But you are with me now! Stop thinking about other girls!”

“You know what I just realized. You all don’t eat any food right? Am I going to starve to death over the next ten days?”

“Ken, I am going to starve you for a comment that stupid. We got plenty of human servants and obviously food for humans and other races that work here in the city. I told my sister to get the best ingredients for your arrival and you are out here acting like I’m about to starve you.”

“I am just joking with you to change the subject! Where is your sense of humor Alice?”

As the two bantered and got ready, a servant girl greeted the pair when Ken opened the door as the pair headed for the dining hall for some breakfast.

A table full of lavish dishes awaited Ken when they arrived at the dining table and Ken was not sure how he should proceed.

“Alice, are you having a party here or what?”

“No silly, it’s all for you!”

“Alice, I know I have a big appetite, but even if Lovetta and Seraphina were here, we couldn’t eat all this food. You shouldn’t waste food like this. Better get all the human servants and whoever else to come and share this food while it’s still fresh.”

While Ava watched Alice getting scolded, she was shocked that her sister, who’s normally so headstrong and won’t even back down from their father or the king, is listening to this commoner human young man and acting so docile while following his request so obediently.

“How are you able to get my sister to be so obedient?”

“Alice? Obedient? She is the biggest troublemaker I know! Can’t get her to behave at all! But she will always listen to reason and apologize when she is wrong, one of my favorite things about her for sure.”

“Praise me more Ken!”

While Alice clinged onto Ken like she always does, confused servants and staff walked into the dining room not sure why they were being called.

“Hi everyone! Ken here wants to share the breakfast I made for him with everyone so enjoy the food!”

Looking at the table full of high end luxury ingredients they could never dream of affording, the staff was reluctant and none would touch the food.

Looking at the nervous staff, Ken started to take food and offer it to the various servants while trying to break the ice.

“Come on everyone! Alice decided to make this feast to welcome me and there is no way I could eat all this myself so let’s not let all this go to waste! This rich girl definitely went overboard but just because she is loaded doesn’t mean we should waste food right?”

Chatting happily with the staff and starting piling on food onto his plate, Ken acted nothing like a high class with how he was stuffing the food down and the nervousness eventually became temptation of wanting to try food of such high quality and soon, everyone was eating and chatting happily while getting to know the young man.

After enjoying the breakfast and getting to know quite a few servants at Alice’s castle, Ken with Alice holding him tightly walked outside of the castle along with Ava, ready to explore the city.

The kingdom of Vespera, located on the continent of Yuwoa, is just a mountain range from the capital city of Darrumburgh in the heart of the Darrumburgh kingdom.

Provided with an area landlocked between a few mountain ranges, the city’s size was limited by its natural boundaries set by the Darrumburgh King a millennium ago.

Stepping outside of the castle for the first time in daylight, Ken was able to see just how grand of a place he is staying at. white marble blocks stacked as high as one can see, the castle towered into the sky on the flats on top of the mountain, having one of the best views of the entire city.

Only the castle a short distance beside it had an even better view and looked more grand and it took no deduction skills for Ken to know that the castle next door belonged to the king.

While both castles looked magnificent, Ken quickly noticed that instead of having the massive land area like the castle at Yelwraek or even their academy. As impressively tall as the two castles are, they lacked the landmass and the reason was obvious.

From the castle highground, Ken had a great view of the city and as the areas got further from the castle, more and more buildings got crammed together tighter and tighter due to the lack of landmass that prevented the kingdom from expanding like a normal kingdom.

“Ava, why are you tagging along on my date with Ken?”

“What else am I supposed to do? I am alone at home all day all the time. Every time Dad sees me, he complains about how I am always at home and not with my husband. I’m not going to miss this chance to go out and explore around.”

“You can go and explore whenever! Why do it on my date with Ken!”

“Alice! I had to listen to you talk about him all day every day whenever you are home! The least you can do is let me join you two so I can see why you are so in love and why my marriage failed so badly when both happened to be womanizers!”

“Hey! I take offense to being called a womanizer. I am very serious about my relationships and while I might have interests in multiple girls, I don’t take any of my relationships lightly.”

“Oh yea Ava. When he was in Yelwraek, on Clare’s birthday, he went and slept with her sister and Clare got so mad, she hadn't talked to him all semester. Good for me since she’s my biggest rival but yea, he and your husband are definitely the same type!”

“Does the whole entire world need to know that?”

“Why are you still with him! Get out while you still can, Alice! Do you want to end up like me?”

“I am with him because I am not stupid like that drama queen. I won’t let the two of you be alone for one second so don’t even think about making a move on Ken.”

“You think I would sleep with your boyfriend?” Ava shouted shockingly, as the trio took a carriage down the mountain into the town.

“Ava, you have been married for over two years but how long has it been since you slept with your husband? I know you have urges too and Ken is a master at seducing girls!

He met the daughter of the fourth ranked hero Sylvester once! And somehow she is in love with him now. It happened with Clare’s sister too! She saw him twice at the banquet and the next time they met, they were sleeping together! I am not letting him put his spell on you!”

Trying his best to focus on the sightseeing instead of getting devolved into the conversation between Alice and Ava, Ken watched as the carriage got down the mountain and onto the paved stone road into the city.

With its surrendering covered with mountains and nothing else, the most abundant material happened to be the white stone rocks that’s mined from the mountain ranges and the city was impressively beautiful with most of its buildings constructed from the white stones.

Getting off the carriage at the town square, the girls guided Ken as the three went around checking out the different views and buildings as they explained the history of the town and Ken listened attentively.

“You guys don’t have restaurants here do you?”

“Not here in the main districts since us vampires can’t eat anything, but we do have blood bars everywhere serving different quality of blood. We also have a few settlements of humans mostly here for work and they do have restaurants in those districts.”

As the three walked through the main district amongst the busy crowd, Alice tried to buy Ken everything they saw at every shop along the way while getting upset when he refused to let her buy him anything and told her to stop causing a scene.

The day passed fast as the trio explored the beautiful streets paved in the same pure white stone as the buildings and settled in the central district garden to relax and for Ken to have some food while Alice enjoyed her meal as well.

“Were you able to find your soulmate Ava?”

“Nope. I think Alice is the first vampire in who knows how long to actually have a soulmate. Even I didn’t believe her at first and thought she was just being stubborn and didn’t want to marry Dimitri but after almost two years and you are still alive and well, I can confidently say that you are the one and only for her so don’t go too crazy with your womanizing and make her feel how I do.”

“I told you I am not like that! Anyways, what sort of jobs do you all even have here? Unlike Yelwraek, I don’t see that many job opportunities but obviously the city is prosperous for a reason.”

“The mining for the white stone is our major source of income as an export. We have people who work the mine, people that work in refineries to turn the stone into different sized blocks, merchants that export large qualities of it to other nations.

Since only the wealthy could afford human blood, we do have quite a large number of ranchers amongst the mountain range raise animals for everyday people’s blood need and obviously, the meat are sold to either the human settlements in the city or to Darrumburgh, their capital city is only a day’s travel away over the mountains.

Obviously we have those in the service industry that provide people with their everyday needs but with our lack of diet variety, the lack of restaurants is a major constraint on how many service jobs are available.

Our city is for sure on the decline too with no more room for new constructions and there is only a limited amount of repair work available. A lot of those that live in the wealthy districts are from old money where their families got rich from generations ago from deals with Darrumburgh and most of their descendants probably never worked a day in their lives.

The rest however, are fighting over the limited living space that keeps getting more expensive as the population grows with limited job opportunities and those that live on the outskirts of the city are pretty much living in large slum communities without basic necessities and not much opportunities.”

“Wow, I guess unless the city could expand, you are limited on what you could accomplish. I am impressed, Ava! I didn’t think a noble would be so knowledgeable on the day to day happenings.”

“Ken! Don’t get interested in my sister, she is a married woman! She is right on one thing though, because of our limited size, for the past hundred or so years, the morale of the cities has definitely been declining with more and more of the general public not happy with my uncle since he took over the throne and the lack of resolutions for the growing numbers of slums and people in poverty even though the wealth are richer than ever.”

“If you are so rich Alice, why don’t you go share some of your wealth with those in the slums?”

“Ken. No matter how much money my family has, there is not enough to spread between all of the poor. The more we try to help some, the more others would expect the same and unless we can resolve the underlying issue of not having enough jobs or room to expand, we are at a standstill.”

Chatting with the sisters about their country, while walking along the beautiful streets and buildings, not far away, people are struggling to even get fed. Ken wondered what and if there was anything he could do to help and eventually, the trio returned to the castle for the night where Alice had the servants prepare another huge feast.

“Hello everyone! If you weren’t here to join us during breakfast. This is Ken! You might have seen him from the tournament, he will be my husband eventually! Since he is a human, I have prepared this feast for everyone to enjoy and welcome him!”

Before Ken could scold Alice for wasting this much money on food again, she was well prepared and invited all the servants who aren’t vampires and with how happy everyone looked, Ken couldn’t even get upset at Alice and enjoyed the meal while having fun chatting with everyone at the table.

“I just realized. Where are your parents?”

“They went on vacation as soon as the tournament ended. I knew they would be gone for two weeks. That’s how I was able to get Ava to get you teleport access!”

“So, basically I’m not even welcomed here.”

“Did you meet Clare’s father when you were in Yelwraek?”

“Nope.”

“Exactly! You need to at least win the tournament Ken. Once you beat that Darrumburgh brat and the drama queen. I will tell my dad to let us get married!”

“Jee, so much unwanted pressure.”

“You told Lucia you would win by next year!”

“I did not! She was just making up a narrative to fit her story!”

“Doesn’t matter. You will do it anyway!”

Ignoring Ken’s protest, the two continued having a great time chatting with Ava and the servants and eventually with all of the food completely finished, the servants thanked the two sisters and Ken and cleaned up the empty dishes while Ken and Alice returned to her room to call it for the night.

“You really are going to follow me everywhere no matter what for the next ten days aren’t you.”

“I am a girl that keeps my word!”

Shaking his head as he got undressed and got in the shower, having a beautiful girl like Alice right there in front of him made things difficult.

“I will give you a helping hand again.”

“I won’t need your helping hand if you weren't here in the first place!”

“Stop complaining! Think about us girls! We don’t even have a way to relieve ourselves because of the stupid spell. I guess I could offer something other than just a hand but don’t want to go there and open the floodgate.”

“What? Your butt?”

“KEN! Obviously the spell also prevents that but where did you learn to get so naughty!”

“I was just curious about those men at the academy that also like men so I asked Genesis how they make love and she told me that’s what they do.”

“Think about it Ken, if that was possible, that Genesis would have already done it with you. She is as crazy about you as me.”

Eventually, the pair got out of the shower and went to sleep exhausted from a day of exploring and excited for what adventures awaited.