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"Debt workers with no surviving loyalties are useful if they are not stupid. Women with business discipline. Women who know storage and loading but not enough to form resistance inside my walls. Women aren’t addicted to talking. No one, pretty enough to think beauty is leverage. No one, who asks too quickly about sealed rooms."

Mira almost smiled.

"All right."

"And Mira."

"Yes."

"If you buy, do not buy soft. Pick the strong one."

That answer needed no explanation.

She understood perfectly.

People bought from contract markets came in different shapes of broken. Some bent toward obedience. Some toward resentment. Some toward collapse. Soft ones made noise when pressure came. Better to buy those who had already learned hardness and simply needed direction.

Mira nodded. "I know how to select."

"Yes," he said. "That is why I am telling you to do it."

Trust without softness. Good.

The room settled after that, quieter now that the center had been spoken aloud.

Mira did not thank him immediately. Also good. She isn’t trying to butter him up.

Cheap gratitude would have insulted the weight of the conversation. Instead she gave him one long look, the kind that said she had heard the yes inside the not yet and intended to remember both parts equally.

Then she said, "I will bring you results as soon as I can."

Sekhmet nodded once.

"Good."

That was enough for now.

A few hours later...

.

.

.

.

The Void Land at evening looked like a thought the world had forgotten to finish.

The sky above was dark, but not with the softness of natural dusk. It held that familiar, impossible depth the hidden domain always wore, as if darkness there had been poured instead of born. Farther off, the little spread of green around the spirit leaf had grown into something even more offensive to the barren land than before. What had once been only a small rebellious patch of grass now looked like a stubborn promise beginning to test the edges of the impossible. Auri sat not far from Lily’s blood-red sphere, still keeping watch exactly as ordered, her posture steady, her eyes alert, her expression calm in the way only people who had already made peace with strange things could become calm around stranger ones.

Vera and Vela remained at the outer watch lines.

Sofia and Natasha remained sealed.

Bat Bat had long since been removed from the Void Land and from immediate disaster range after her morning catastrophe in human form.

And Lily still floated at the center of it all.

The crimson womb pulsed gently in the dim dark, its surface smoother now than before, less like raw blood and more like something halfway between crystal, flesh, and living spellwork. The silhouette inside had changed over the long hours. She was no longer curled so tightly inward. The shape had loosened. Limbs had shifted. The whole womb now looked less like a child before birth and more like a cocoon trying to remember that it had once held a woman and would soon have to return one.

Auri had seen all the changes.

She had said nothing because there had been no one to say them to and because panic had never helped a living thing finish changing.

Hours later, inside Dawn House, Sekhmet had been in one of the side rooms reviewing auction notes, Mira’s first worker recommendations, and the beginnings of Raka’s new lower feeding routes when the system finally rang.

[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: Target Lily’s transformation is nearing completion.]

Another notification came.

[Ding! SYSTEM Notification-

Estimated emergence window: a few minutes.]

That had been enough.

He had stood at once, said nothing aloud, and left before anyone in the room could ask the wrong question. Mira had only lifted her eyes and read the urgency in his face. Elena had seen him crossing the hall and chosen not to stop him. Good. That saved time. He moved through Dawn House, shut himself into his chamber, and opened the Void Land without wasting another breath.

Now he stood inside again, the evening-dark hidden world closing around him like a second skin.

Auri looked up immediately.

"Master."

Sekhmet’s gaze went first to Lily’s sphere.

It was different.

The red shell trembled.

Not violently. Not in danger. In pressure. Hairline threads of brighter crimson moved across its surface in lines so fine they looked at first like reflections. Then they shifted again, and he understood.

Cracks started to come. Very small ones at first.

Auri rose slowly to her feet. "It changed not long ago."

"How."

"She moved more." Auri’s voice remained controlled. "The shell tightened first. Then the light inside got stronger. Then these appeared."

Sekhmet stepped closer.

The blood womb hung at chest height now, not motionless anymore, but pulsing in shorter, stronger rhythms. The cracks glowed. The pressure inside it had become visible enough that even the Void Land air felt tighter around the thing, as if emergence was no longer only probable but actively happening.

Vera and Vela had already noticed his arrival and approached from the edge of their post. Neither abandoned their awareness of Sofia and Natasha completely, but both knew this mattered more at the center. Sofia and Natasha, from farther off, also watched with the sharp stillness of predators who recognized a rare blood event when they saw one.

"Is it time," Vera asked quietly. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"Yes," Sekhmet said.

Vela’s eyes remained fixed on the womb. "It feels stronger."

It did.

Stronger than before. Clearer too. Whatever had been hidden and internal for the last long stretch of transformation was no longer fully contained. The blood around Lily was now carrying identity. Not only change. Presence.

Auri moved half a pace to Sekhmet’s side. "Will it hurt her when she comes out?"

Sekhmet looked at the sphere, then answered honestly. "Probably."

That was enough truth for the moment.

The cracks spread.

One line became three.

Three became many.

They moved over the blood shell in branching patterns like crimson lightning trapped under glass.