Morning came with Selena’s voice from downstairs calling everyone for breakfast.

She’d been awake since before sunrise, working in the farmhouse kitchen with three other elves and whatever ingredients Rosa had stocked. The smell of cooking eggs and some herb that grew in the garden behind the house drifted through the whole first floor.

Eren woke up with Emily’s arm across his chest, Lyra’s back pressed against his left side and Selena’s spot on the bed already empty because she was the one cooking. The other four concubines were in the room too, spread across two mattresses that the craftsmen had pushed together against the far wall.

Emily was showing it now. Five and a half months into an eleven-month elf pregnancy and her belly had a visible curve that pressed against his hip when she slept. She looked comfortable though. Her face was soft and her breathing was slow and her hair was a blonde mess across the pillow.

He looked at Lyra. She had her eyes closed but her hand was on her own stomach and she was smiling in her sleep. First month of pregnancy. All four of the other concubines were the same. The timing was actually wild when he thought about it. Five women all carrying his children within a few months of each other.

If someone told me that in my 25, I’d have seven babies on the way with seven elven women who will all sleep in the same room, I would’ve called a hospital and asked them to check for brain damage.

He carefully extracted himself from the tangle of arms and blankets without waking anyone except Emily who opened one eye, confirmed it was just him getting up and closed it again.

Rosa was already at the kitchen table when he came downstairs. She was eating toast with one hand and writing in a notebook with the other. Her dark brown hair was in that ponytail and she had bags under her eyes that she was pretending weren’t there.

"Morning."

She looked up. "Kalina called last night while you were playing campfire leader on the porch. She has a report ready and she wants to talk today."

"About what?"

"Everything." Rosa turned a page in her notebook. "Budget, permits, renovation timeline, the identity situation." She paused and took a bite of toast. "She sounded stressed."

"Kalina always sounds stressed."

"Kalina sounds stressed because she’s the only person doing actual work on the legal side of hiding two hundred illegal aliens."

Fair point.

Eren grabbed a piece of bread from the counter and Selena slapped his hand without looking up from the pan. "Sit down and wait. It’s almost ready."

"Yes chef."

She turned and gave him a look that was half-annoyed and half-amused and entirely Selena. Her body moved differently these days. First month of pregnancy was barely visible on her but she carried herself with a new weight, something protective and warm that he could feel every time she got close.

He sat at the table across from Rosa and chewed the bread he’d stolen anyway.

Mel appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing an oversized Earth hoodie over her elf clothes with her hair still messy from sleep. She looked at Eren and her cheeks went pink almost immediately.

"Morning." Her voice was a little too careful.

"Morning Mel. Want some coffee?"

She walked to the counter and Eren noticed she took the long way around the table to avoid passing too close to him. That had been her habit for weeks now. Close enough to be in the room but far enough that his passive Charisma didn’t turn her brain into soup.

They’d never talked about it directly. Not since that moment in the dungeon when he grabbed her and she practically melted in his arms from the contact. But the way she moved around him, the glances she thought he didn’t catch, the way she’d started showing up wherever he was without having a reason..

Something is definitely happening there and I have zero idea what to do about it.

Mel poured coffee and leaned against the counter with both hands wrapped around the mug. Her eyes drifted to the window.

"I heard Kalina is coming today." Her Turkish was almost perfect now. The Advanced Language Learning skill had done its work on the elves who spent time with humans.

"Not coming here. I’m going to her." Eren finished the bread. "Portal trip."

Eren finished his small breakfast and his inner cat almost rebelled about how little he ate. His body and especially hands on the table shook but he managed to stop it.

His bloodlines were becoming scary.

..

Kalina’s house was in Zekeriyakoy, the same neighborhood where Eren’s family home was. A suburban street with high garden walls and old trees lining the sidewalks. It was a thirty-minute drive from central Istanbul but it felt like a different city entirely.

Eren focused on the spot behind her house where the garden met the back gate. He’d been there twice before and the memory was clear enough for Door Master to lock onto.

The portal snapped open in the farmhouse hallway and on the other side he could see Kalina’s backyard. Morning sunlight on cut grass, a wooden fence covered in ivy and the back wall of her family’s two-story house.

"Clock starts now." He checked his mana. 770 total. One per second within the same universe. That gave him roughly twelve minutes and forty-five seconds before the portal collapsed.

He stepped through.

The temperature difference hit him first. The farm was warm with sea air. Istanbul in autumn was cooler with that particular dampness that came off the Bosphorus and crawled through every neighborhood within twenty kilometers. He’d grown up with that air. His lungs knew it even if his body had changed into something that barely matched his old self.

Kalina was waiting at the back door. She had a folder under her arm and a pen behind her ear and she was wearing a dark blazer over jeans which meant she had work after this.

"You’re late." She looked past him at the portal. The doorway-shaped shimmer showed the farmhouse hallway on the other side with Selena walking past in the background carrying plates. "That’s still the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen."

"Twelve minutes. Talk fast."

She opened the folder while they walked toward the garden bench behind the privacy hedge. The folder had tabs. Color-coded tabs. Kalina didn’t do anything without color-coded tabs.

"Electrical first." She flipped to a blue section on the bench. "I got quotes from three companies. Factory-grade solar panel installation with battery storage for the whole property. The cheapest came back at seventy-eight thousand dollars but that’s only enough for basic lighting and a few outlets per building. If you want actual heating, hot water and enough power for the dormitory and the farmhouse, you’re looking at about ninety-five to a hundred."

Eren leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "And water?"

"Well drilling plus a filtration system for clean drinking water." She turned to a green tab. "The property is close enough to the coast that groundwater is accessible at about forty meters. Drilling, pump installation, a basic purification unit and piping to both main buildings. Twenty to twenty-five thousand."

Ninety-five plus twenty-five. That’s a hundred and twenty thousand just for the basics.

Kalina saw his face change and kept going. "I know what you’re thinking. You spent 250k on the land. This puts you at 370k total. You’d have about 130 thousand left."

"A hundred and thirty." He said it out loud because hearing it made it feel more real. "For two hundred people."

"For two hundred people who need food, building materials, farming supplies and legal documentation." She flipped to a red tab. "Which brings me to the big one."

She paused and pulled her blazer sleeve up to check her watch. Then she looked at him. "Identity documents. For every elf."

"How bad is it?"

Her eyes went back to the folder. "You need to register them as legal residents. You can’t keep two hundred people on a property without anyone having identification. The power company alone needs a registered address and a name on the account. Farming permits require a registered agricultural entity. Even buying bulk food supplies in the quantities you need will raise questions if nobody on the books exists as a legal person."

Kalina tapped the pen against the page. "If we go the legitimate route, the story is they’re Ukrainian refugees from the war. That’s the easiest cover because there’s already infrastructure for processing displaced people. But legitimate refugee registration takes months and involves government interviews and medical checks and all of that is impossible when your refugees have pointed ears and no birth records on any database on Earth."

"So the not-legitimate route."

She looked at him for a second before answering. "Fake IDs, forged documentation, purchased identities. Per person minimum cost is about 200 thousand lira. Some will be cheaper if we can find bulk deals through the right people. Some will be more expensive for the ones who need full work permits."

Eren did the math and immediately wished he hadn’t. Two hundred people at 200 thousand lira each. That was 40 million lira. At the current exchange rate..

"Eight hundred thousand dollars! Are you joking..?" He said it flat.

"Give or take thats the amount for the job. It’s real issue is the money." Kalina closed the folder. "And that’s with discounts with my family connections by the way. And assuming I can negotiate bulk rates and find the right contacts and that nobody along the chain tries to blackmail us because they figured out something weird is going on with the two hundred identical-looking people who don’t speak any known language and have no digital footprint."

"They know Turkish and English actually. And I bet we can figure out a different language for proof. Maybe like Russian or Ukrainian? And say they are war refugees sheltering in our country?"

Kalina considered about it but the problem was still the money.

Eren leaned back on the bench and stared at the sky through the hedge leaves. Eight hundred thousand dollars. He had 130 thousand left after the renovation costs.

I’ve never even seen eight hundred thousand dollars in one place. The most money I ever had before all of this was maybe nine hundred TL in my bank account after a good month at work just for a day.

"Is there another way?" He already knew the answer should be no.

Kalina tilted her head. "A few actually."

She had a dangerous but excited look on her face.