The Grandmaster Strategist - Volume 1, Chapter 7: The Floating Fragrance Pleasure Boat

James, a brilliant mechanical engineer and passionate history enthusiast, loses his life in a tragic house fire—only to find himself in a mysterious world as the ruler of an island nation. Armed with his modern knowledge and unwavering ambition, James embarks on a bold mission to industrialize his kingdom and build an empire on which the sun never sets.

Kai is refused help from the president and thrown back into ground zero, where he meets a man whom he shows kindness to. As an act of repayment Kai is taken to the under tunnel of the city where he discovers a secret office belonging to his father. The stranger seemed to know what he was looking for after some time he handed over a box to Kai. A melodic robo voice came from the box -|DNA ACTIVATION VERIFIED|- -|ASTRAL NODE IS ONLINE|- -|SYSTEM HAS BEGUN ACTIVATING|- -|AWAITING MANUAL OVERRIDE TO TURN ON SYSTEM|- Kai is gifted a rare astral node and resolves to join the academy to save his dying sister from the F-X7 disease and also escape the life of poverty they were stuck in. -|PASSWORD CORRECT|- -|MANUAL OVERRIDE SUCCESSFUL|- -|SYSTEM IS UPDATING, PLEASE BE PATIENT|- -|SYSTEM UPDATE IS COMPLETE|- -|SYSTEM IS ONLINE|- Joining the academy does no guarantee his success since he has no powers. But he must survive since that has been his goal after being sold to slavery. -|USER: KAI HALSTEN|- -|RACE: HUMAN|- -|GENDER: MALE|- -|LEVEL: ONE|- -|EXP: 0/100|- -|HP: 10/10|- -|BEGINNING BONDING|-

It's simple. A vengeful wildfire of a woman. A tyrant who begs to be burned.When Aria crashes into Kael’s empire, hellbent on making him pay for taking her job away, she’s met not with defiance—but a dare. “You want revenge?” he taunts, voice dripping with dark invitation.“Then ruin me. Take your pound of flesh exactly where it hurts.” His proposition is a trap laced with sin: As expected he calls the shots in his bed, her contempt is his twisted aphrodisiac.“Hate me until your hands shake,” he growls. “But do it on top of me, where I can watch you savor every cut.”Their arrangement is a collision of dominance and delirium. Aria wields her fury like a blade, determined to break him. Kael? He thrives under her wrath, goading her darker, deeper, hungrier.But vengeance turns slippery when every command she hisses ignites his obedience, and every cold glare melts into bruising kisses. Soon, the bed becomes a battleground—her nails carving victory into his skin, his whispers a serpent’s promise: “Chain me with your rage, darling. I’ll still come back for more.”The rules are simple: No mercy. No surrender. But as their games spiral into something ravenous, who’s destroying whom? And when hatred burns this hot, what’s left when the ashes cool?

Monsters lurk in the night, but what if something else hunted them? An incident in his childhood left Velik an outcast with a racial subtype that thrives at night and unique class called [The Black Fang], which focuses on just one thing: killing monsters. He’s good at finding them, and he’s good at slaying them. For ten years, he’s been gaining levels and sharpening his skills on the thousands of monsters infesting the wild lands of the frontier. For ten years, he’s kept a lonely stretch of towns safe. Despite his efforts, this year has seen an explosion in the monster population, so much that he’s no longer capable of protecting everyone by himself. This draws the interest of another monster hunter, one that’s professionally licensed, but he seems more interested in investigating Velik than anything else. At least with him there, Velik is free to finally explore the mysteries of the deep wood, where he believes the source of all monsters resides. Every answer he finds leads to new questions, and not even Velik himself knows the truth of what happened on that fateful day. One thing’s for sure: not even the monsters are safe in the dark.