SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 627: The Masterpiece

"I remember everything."

The man beside Selara did not relax, but he had already lost the right to delay her. The guard pressed his palm to the ward plate, and a slow pulse rolled through the black glass frame, touching each symbol in sequence before the lock opened with a soft internal click. The sound was small, almost polite, and that alone tightened Selara's jaw. Places hiding decent work rarely required this much ceremony before a door.

The door swung inward, and the chamber beyond struck her first through its elegance. That was the first insult. Selara had expected guilt to leave some mark on the room - a careless stain, a sourness in the air, an ugly tool abandoned where someone should have hidden it. Instead, the chamber gleamed with expensive restraint. Black glass curved along the walls, divided by pale metal ribs and thin channels of mana flowing beneath the surface. The floor carried a wide containment circle carved with enough precision that even her anger had to acknowledge the hand behind it. Transparent tubes ran from the walls into the floor, ferrying diluted silver fluid in slow pulses. Wards breathed from every corner, filtering temperature, pressure, scent, and sound until the place felt untouched by the work it held.

A perfect room for people who wanted cruelty to arrive without odor.

At the center stood the creation, and the first word her mind offered was child. Selara crushed it before it reached her face. The official word was homunculus.

It carried the shape of an elven girl, perhaps ten years old by appearance, though that number held no honest meaning here. Small frame, narrow shoulders, pale skin with a faint translucent cast under the chamber light. Its ears were unmistakably elven, slim and tapered, shaped with a care that felt almost personal. Fine white hair fell to the middle of its back in smooth strands, orderly in a way living hair rarely managed, as though someone had designed beauty and forgotten inconvenience.

It wore a single gray garment, a plain one-piece cloth that covered the body without offering warmth, comfort, or identity. Not clothing in any meaningful sense - a covering laid over a tool, because even men proud of their work knew bare imitation made a room uneasy.

The homunculus stood barefoot inside the containment circle, and its face held nothing. That emptiness reached Selara more deeply than panic would have. Panic could be answered. Pain could be named. This was absence shaped into obedience. The small chest rose and fell with measured regularity, each breath steady, each pause identical. Its hands hung at its sides. Its head inclined slightly forward, waiting for instruction with the patience of something trained before it had ever been allowed to choose.

A living vessel taught to resemble compliance before it had become anyone.

The official watched her carefully, weighing her expression as though her reaction were one more test Aurevane hoped to pass. She gave him exactly what he needed - professional attention, no accusation, no raised hand, no spell curling at her fingers, no drift toward the containment boundary. Beneath the glove, her nails dug into her palm.

"This is the work?" Selara asked.

The official released a breath through his nose, comforted by the steadiness of her tone. Fool.

"Yes. A stable homunculus vessel created through advanced alchemical synthesis, bloodline mimicry, and guided biological formation. The structure is coherent, the mana channels are functional, and the body has shown no rejection signs despite the complexity of the vessel."

Selara began to circle the containment line, keeping the distance they had forced on her. The homunculus did not track her movement, and that was intentional. Controlled stimulus response. Limited autonomy. Reduced developmental interference. The words arranged themselves in her mind with sickening ease because she knew their ancestors. She had heard them many decades ago in another room, spoken by another mouth, wrapped in the same scholarly calm that made sins sound like procedure. Her master had loved language like that - words that made violence sit upright and call itself research. "What base did the creator use?" she asked.

"The creator has not disclosed every stage of the process," the official said. "The visible vessel uses elven morphology. The explanation given was mana efficiency, longevity potential, and superior channel refinement."

Elven morphology. Mana efficiency. Superior channel refinement.

Selara forced her fingers loose. Of course he had chosen an elf. A dwarf would have offered dense vitality. A human vessel could have been argued for adaptability. A beastkin frame would have given physical instinct. Yet here stood an elven body - mana-sensitive, long-lived, elegant enough for patrons to admire and close enough to her own blood to twist the entire thing into a private insult. If this was his work, and her bones already knew it was, the choice had been anything but accidental. No one else would manage cruelty with such impeccable taste.

"Does it respond?" she asked.

"To basic commands, yes. Movement, posture, mana intake, focus redirection. Speech has not been demonstrated publicly."

"Publicly?"

"The creator requested that certain functions remain undisclosed until the main day."

"And pain response?"

The question changed the official's breathing. "The creator considers pain response unnecessary for its primary function."

She moved to the side of the circle where the mana channels were easiest to read. Direct probing was forbidden, and the wards would report it the instant she tried. She didn't need to. The work exposed itself to anyone with enough knowledge to recognize the shape of the crime. The artificial heart structure had been stabilized through layered circulation, each loop folding into the next with a slight asymmetry most alchemists would have corrected. Only one man would defend that flaw as essential. The growth arrest near the bones was elegant, brutal, efficient, preventing distortion without freezing the vessel completely. The bloodline mimicry had been left incomplete by design, leaving space for external command and later adaptation.

The craft was extraordinary. That was the second insult. A masterpiece of obscene imagination. Many deranged researchers could dream of building a homunculus; only one man would render it this graceful, this functional, this unforgivable.

The memory came uninvited: chalk dust, glass vials, an old voice cutting through her calculations before she understood the mistake, knuckles rapping the edge of her notebook because "almost correct" was a lazy disease. The rare approval that had once warmed her chest. The rarer pride that had come from him like a blade offered handle-first.

Selara kept breathing. The chamber held its perfect temperature, and her skin chilled anyway.

"The vessel is stable," she said at last.

The official brightened. "You see it, then."

"I see the craft."

"And?"

Selara turned toward the homunculus again. The small elven face remained untouched by the praise being prepared around it. "The craft is exceptional."

Relief spread across the official's face. He heard approval because he needed approval, and failed to register everything she had refused to say.

Selara stepped closer to the boundary without crossing it. The homunculus's lashes flickered once, a tiny motion, small enough to be dismissed by anyone eager to dismiss it. The silver fluid in the tubes pulsed. Somewhere behind the walls, a ward adjusted pressure with a soft hydraulic sigh. For the first time, the homunculus moved its head. Only slightly. Its face angled toward Selara, and there was nothing in it.

Selara's stomach twisted so violently that the urge to smile almost surfaced, absurd and ugly, the body's worst attempt to bury revulsion under etiquette.

The official spoke behind her, quiet with reverence. "The creator called it the first successful vessel of its line. Living proof that artificial formation can surpass the limits of crude flesh."

Selara did not turn. "What did he call her?"

The official paused. "Her?"

"The vessel." Each word arrived calm enough to pass inspection. "What did the creator call the vessel?"

"I believe the designation is E-7." The number entered the room and found no resistance, because the homunculus had not been given enough self to hate it. Selara's hand closed once inside the glove. It opened again. E-7. A designation. A sequence. A result. No name. Of course.

She drew one careful breath, restored her face to professional order, and turned away from the containment circle before the official could misread anything left in it.

A voice cut from the far side of the chamber. "Selara?"

Matteo di Ravelle stood near a side table stacked with sealed documents, cane gripped in one hand, his face stripped of every polished excuse he had worn in the hall. For once, the old man sounded genuinely unprepared.

"What in seven hells are you doing here?"