I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 202: Eight Months

Back on the farm, it was the eighth month and the reality of the situation was getting impossible to ignore.

Emily’s belly had gone from barely rounding to genuinely huge over the spring. It was happening way faster than any normal human pregnancy he had ever read about online, and she had finally stopped pretending it wasn’t slowing her down. She could still move like an elite hunter when she really wanted to, but mostly she moved like a tired woman carrying a heavy watermelon. She kept one hand pressed firmly to her lower back and walked with flat, deliberate steps where she used to just flow across the room.

The mornings were the roughest part for her. Some days Eren would hear her throwing up in the bathroom before the sun even came up. He would bring her a glass of water and rub her back while she gripped the sink edges and swore violently in Elvish. Then, twenty minutes later, she would walk downstairs demanding fresh cherry juice and acting like absolutely nothing had happened.

He found her sitting at the kitchen table when he walked through the back door with his hands full of jars. She had both elbows resting on the wood, glaring down at a bowl of plain white rice like it had personally insulted her entire family lineage.

"You smell like the old orchard," she muttered without looking up.

Her nose was totally unfair sometimes.

"I brought you a surprise," he said, setting the largest glass jar of little apple-pears right in front of her bowl.

Emily looked at the glass. Then she looked up at his face. Then she immediately went after the jar with both hands, twisting the lid off and biting into the first piece of fruit before it was even fully open. The happy little noise she made was so genuine that Eren completely forgot about the constant stress of feeding two hundred refugees for a solid ten seconds.

"Where did you get these?" she asked around a mouthful of food, letting a drop of juice run down her chin. "These don’t grow on Earth soil."

"From the old village orchard," he explained while pulling out a chair. "Three of the trees actually survived the fire."

Her chewing slowed down completely. "That orchard is right near the World Tree trunk. It’s near the dragon."

"It’s far enough."

"Eren." She put the half-eaten fruit down on the table and grabbed his wrist. Her grip was still strong enough to actually hurt his enhanced durability. "You went near that dragon. Just for some fruit?"

"You wanted them, silly," he shot back, using her favorite pet name on purpose. He watched her try and fail to hide a small smile. "And honestly, you stop being completely terrifying when you eat them, so it’s basically a self-defense strategy for me."

She slapped his arm hard and then grabbed him by the collar, pulling his face down to kiss him. She still tasted like the sweet apple-pear, and her free hand automatically found his palm, pressing it flat against the large curve of her belly. It was a habit she did constantly now.

"Push harder," she ordered against his lips. "You never push hard enough."

"There’s nothing to feel yet, I can’t just make it kick on command."

"She’ll kick if you-" Emily stopped dead in her tracks. Her green eyes flicked nervously to the side of the room. "The baby will kick if you do it right," she finished, her voice perfectly smooth as she reached out and stole another piece of fruit from the jar.

Eren didn’t say a single word about the pronoun slip. He had learned the hard way not to push that button.

Rosa walked into the kitchen ten minutes later while he was washing the dirt off the empty jars in the sink. She already had her thick notebook open in one hand and a black pen tucked securely behind her ear.

"How many today?" she asked.

She didn’t say good morning. Rosa never wasted a basic greeting on a workday, and that specific part of her personality hadn’t changed at all since the day they got engaged in that tiny Istanbul apartment what felt like a lifetime ago.

"Seven," Eren answered over the sound of the running water. "Two repeats and five completely new ones."

"Show me." She pulled a wooden chair around to the counter, leaned over the small glass jars, and immediately started copying his scratched labels into her notebook.

Her handwriting was a hundred times neater than his. She had built an entire system for this over the last few weeks. There was a column for the plant name, a column for the soil mixture, a column tracking how it was surviving on the Earth windowsill, and all of it was carefully cross-referenced to the digital photos on the cheap tablet Kalina had bought for the farm operation.

It was a really weird thing to look at. Rosa was standing in a Turkish farmhouse kitchen, actively cataloguing alien plants from another dimension. Exactly one year ago, she had wanted to get engaged while Eren had been drowning so deep in daily life struggles and unpaid bills that they couldn’t even sit in the same room for a single hour without starting a massive argument. Now, she handed him a perfectly corrected inventory list every evening, bumped his shoulder casually when she walked past, and shared a bed with him and three elf women without making a big deal out of it. The whole situation between them had settled into something much warmer than before, but at the same time, it was stranger than any word he knew how to use. He had stopped trying to define their relationship, and as far as he could tell, she had stopped trying too.

"This one’s completely mislabeled," she said, tapping her pen against the fourth jar in the row. "You wrote down the blue tea herb, but this is clearly the bean vine. You did this last week too."

"They look exactly the same in the dirt."

"They don’t look anything alike, Eren." She crossed out his label with three sharp lines and wrote over it without asking for permission. "If we ever actually sell these seedlings, I am absolutely not letting you anywhere near the inventory logs."

"You really think we could sell them on Earth?"

Rosa actually paused her pen at that question. For someone like Rosa, stopping a work task to think was basically a standing ovation.

"The tea herb? Maybe," she muttered, staring at the green leaves. "If it’s actually safe for humans and does what Selena claims it does. People pay stupid amounts of money for organic wellness tea right now." She made another quick note in the margin. "But we are not doing anything until I’ve watched it grow through a full biological cycle. We are not accidentally poisoning anyone in Istanbul. I have a legitimate teaching license to protect, and you have nothing to lose, so the responsibility lands entirely on me."

"You don’t even teach anymore."

"I will again one day," she shot back.

She closed the heavy notebook, tucked the pen smoothly back over her ear, and bumped his shoulder with hers on her way toward the hallway. It was the exact movement he knew she would make.

"Eat something," she called over her shoulder. "You look like you haven’t had a meal since yesterday afternoon."

..

Kalina called later that afternoon. That always meant they were going to talk about money, because Kalina only ever called him to discuss money or logistical nightmares.

He put her on speakerphone on the kitchen counter while he stood at the sink, peeling a thick Evon root vegetable with a small knife. Her voice had that crisp, fast-paced clip it always got when she was reading financial numbers off a computer screen. Behind her voice, he could hear the loud echo of her warehouse, the beep of reversing forklifts, and somebody shouting angrily about a misplaced wooden pallet.

"The second spice shipment cleared customs an hour ago," she announced. "My main buyer in Gaziantep wants to triple the order if the quality holds up to the first batch. Triple the volume, Eren. He thinks it’s grown in some lost, untouched village high in the mountains, and I am absolutely not going to correct his imagination."

"That’s a good thing, right?" he asked, tossing a peeled root into the boiling pot.

"It’s very good. It’s not enough to cover our costs yet, but it’s a good start."

There was a short pause on the line, and the loud warehouse noise suddenly dropped out, like she had stepped into a soundproof office and closed a heavy glass door.

"How’s she doing?" Kalina asked, her tone dropping slightly. "The pregnant one."

That was Kalina’s standard way of asking about Emily. She had met the elf hunter exactly four times so far and clearly found her completely terrifying.

"Big and grumpy," Eren answered honestly. "She’s constantly craving things that literally do not exist in this dimension."

"The hospital appointment is officially confirmed." Her voice shifted instantly into the careful, highly organized register she always used for problems she had personally fixed. He could easily picture her leaning her weight on her good leg while looking at a calendar, the way she always did when she’d been standing in heels for too long.

"It’s a private maternity wing in Istanbul," Kalina continued. "Very discreet. I paid the entire fee up front in cash, so there will be absolutely no questions asked about her missing insurance or lack of state paperwork. I told the clinic director she’s a high-profile foreign client who needs absolute privacy. They’ve done this kind of off-the-books work for wealthy families before. You need to be there Friday morning. The appointment is booked under a name that definitely isn’t hers."

"Kalina, that’s- thank you," Eren said, stopping his knife. "Really."

"Don’t get sentimental on me, it’s terrible for negotiating habits."

But her corporate tone had definitely gone soft at the edges. It was something he had started noticing over the last few weeks, ever since that crazy night on Aradne when she had stared up at the impossible sky over the dead dungeon and completely forgotten to be a businesswoman for about sixty seconds. Something new was growing between them. It was slower than the others, not officially named yet, and neither of them wanted to poke at it too hard.

"Just bring her in on Friday," Kalina ordered. "And Eren. Take the rest of the family up there while you’re in the city. Your grandmother has been asking your mother about you for months. Your mother told me."

Eren frowned at the phone speaker. "You’ve been talking to my mother behind my back?"

"Someone has to," she fired back instantly. "You’re terrible at it."

She hung up the phone before he could even form a response, which was honestly the most Kalina thing she could possibly have done.

He brought the whole hospital plan up that night in bed. Emily was wedged tightly against his side, and his right arm had already gone completely numb under the heavy weight of her.

"After the hospital appointment on Friday, I really want to bring everyone down here for a bit," he said quietly into the dark room. "Mom, Dad, Grandma Sofie. Just bring them to the farm to stay."

Emily traced a lazy, warm line down his chest with one finger. "Your human family."

"Yeah. And I want Grandma to see the other side of the door."

Her hand stopped moving instantly. "Evon?"

"She’s getting old, Emily. She doesn’t like to admit it, but she’s really old and she’s slow now. She gets completely winded just trying to go up the wooden stairs at the Zekeriyaköy house." He stared up at the wooden ceiling beams. "I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Once the experience energy thing is fixed, once normal people can level up again... everyone hunts. Not just us. The villagers, my parents, Grandma. Even just gaining a few levels."

Emily pushed herself up on one elbow and gave him her serious hunter look.

"You do know that’s exactly why we live so long, right?" she asked softly. "Don’t you?"

"I figured it was just basic elf genetics."

"It’s definitely not just blood." She pressed her palm flat over his heart. It was a slow, deliberate movement, exactly the way she acted when she was explaining something she actually cared deeply about. "Genes are only part of it. But every single system level makes the body fundamentally better. It improves endurance, the way you heal from wounds, the way your immune system fights off getting sick. An elf who never leaves the safe zone of the village and never fights anything stays physically weak and gets old just like a human does. It just happens a little slower. The strong ones, the hunters, the ones who push their stats in combat... they’re the ones who reach three centuries and still climb giant trees."

Her hand spread out wider over his chest. "Oldir’s parents are way over two hundred years old, and they walk like they’re sixty because they hunted beasts their whole lives. Your grandmother is sick because her human body is running on absolutely nothing. Just a few system levels would do more for her health than every human doctor combined."

Eren lay there and let that massive piece of information settle into his brain.

So basically... fighting monsters is literally the fountain of youth? That’s how this works?

A few levels could give his grandmother years of life back. Real years. The kind of years where she could climb the stairs without clutching her chest. All he actually had to do was fix a leveling system that was broken because an ancient alien mind, older than every elf who’d ever lived, had eaten the World Tree that ran the system and was currently digesting a massive dragon just to build itself a new body.

Easy. Just gotta beat a god first. No pressure right..

"What’s wrong?" Emily asked, watching his face closely. She always caught his micro-expressions. "You don’t look okay."

"Nothing." he muttered.

He pulled her back down against him and kissed the top of her blonde hair. Then he mentally pushed the thought away. He pushed the entire heavy weight of the god-level threat away, the exact same way he had been pushing it away for a solid month.

"Just thinking about Friday." he lied smoothly. "It’s a long drive."

She let it go. But he felt her stay awake in his arms a little longer than she normally did. His precious Emily kept her hand resting protectively on her belly, and they spent the next hour both pretending they weren’t thinking about the future.