While Aki felt rather conflicted about the situation, there he stood, his thoughts trying very, very hard not to veer into wondering about what his family would think of the situation. At the very least his mother would be filled with tears, face red from screaming reprimands at him over how barbaric all of this was.

Yet there he stood, out-smoking and out-drinking five old ladies and one very scantily clad buxom like he’d been practicing for this moment his whole life.

Did the tent smell like ten different types of burning shit? Yes. Did everything taste like piss and sand? Also yes. Did he have a very awkward boner? Unfortunately, yes. The drugs did somehow have an effect on his over two hundred strong (effective) constitution thanks to the ritual tipe skill equaling the participant’s base resistance to foreign substances to whichever was the lower denominator.

Still, he wasn’t the one embarrassingly rubbing their genitals against the drug glass thing with a name he did not remember. To be fair, it was very distracting for him, meaning he was ingesting a lot less substances that should most definitely not be on a human’s body.

By that point, it was a close shave, but he went through several overdose symptoms far better than his opponent and… By fuck did he want to choke on the fat, red....

[You have won the duel! As stated by the rules, the representative body of the Krazit now answer to your rule as well, becoming unable to report anything disadvantageous to your reign over to the Khan or the great council.]

Oh right, this was a duel for that… He totally remembered that. He was most certainly not thinking about how great the dry air felt against his sweating skin or how much he hated his pants or how much he could have drunk through his ass instead or how he wanted a menage with Septima right now or how dust formed such a beautiful rainbow when burning all around them or how this was the perfect moment to sing Derulo or how this was probably why teenagers went to parties or how could have his ears fucked so they’d….

Drugs are bad, very bad. Insanely evil really. The fact that he'd just spent twenty fours doing unspeakable thing to his new subordinate was most definitely because of them.

Denial aside, Aki had just performed almost half of the Nexus' version of the Kamasutra, which he'd bought and memorised even before going into the dungeon all that time ago. For the first few hour or so they'd even had an audience, though those had quickly ran back to their own tents and spouses.

The thought of how many times he'd almost killed his partner only to heal her, restrain her and fuck her even more was honestly scary however.

If the sticky form of the grinning hyena woman next to him was any indication, there would still be many people who would pay him to be on the receiving end of such treatment.

This was probably what surviving having sex with a succubus felt like. Deadly and humiliating, but on such a level of pleasure that even one time would get you addicted, possibly disregarding more mundane pleasures.

That comparison was also because of the obvious sounds of what seemed to be an orgy derived from the sheer stink of lust and drugs related to his own incident. Really, he couldn't even smell the drugs anymore, the fumes were long gone.

Aki's first thought on this after calming down was that he needed to take responsibility. Not because of any random kids that might pop out, those outside had nothing to do with him and his pure savagery had completely destroyed any fertile cell inside his partner's womb, nevermind that he triple checked since normal sex had not originally been part of his plan at all, so no gnoll-human hybrid would be spawning directly because of him.

To begin with, he needed to make sure this tribe was safe as it's guards were clearly distracted at the moment. Before leaving the fur and pillow clad tent though, he did make sure to write a message to his sleeping 'lover'.

There had been some monster nests that looked about to burst deeper in the depths of the canion, but he didn't exactly know if they were important for something, so he just inscribed some quick barriers to make sure the monsters wouldn't leave while the people were 'incapacitated'.

Later he roamed the dry savanna a bit, and to his surprise there was indeed a band of bandits thinking of attacking the village. It only took a bit of pacifying to understand that they were there because of some political bullshit rather than the fact that Chief Kira refused to become a certain warlord's seventeenth concubine, so he just looted everything they had instead of worrying he was doing something stupid.

By the time he got back to the tribe he was honestly starting to doubt how these gnolls had even survived such a dangerous place. Their average levels were higher than those at earth and Kira even had a budding image, but so did most everything around as far as he could see, with the exception perhaps of that band of bandits.

Would it really be as easy as to simply go to the biggest bad, challenge them to a duel and bring everyone to his side of the portal?

Obviously it would take more statecrafting prowess and time to go through the changes since he didn't want to simply throw away any semblance of a balance in his population, but he couldn't really see the appeal of remaining in an arid land where everyone had to practice blood magic to extract scraps of aether from the monsters around.

Sure it was fun to battle, but reaching the point where your culture considered it strange if your name did not have anything to do with blood was clearly not so good.

Going back, he noted that the woman who he'd laid with was still completely unconscious and covered in many different substances. Knowing himself, he took the chance and cleaned her with some magic. If he were to try and do the same the normal way then they'd begin fucking again, and then it’d be anyone’s guess how long he’d go for it while doing it more gently.

Honestly, he wanted to figure that one out, a lot, but it really didn’t feel like the time and place. The partner wouldn’t really be a problem though, as it was a sure way to get to know each other since…. He should probably not be thinking that kind of stuff while in the middle of what was a business trip, especially considering the person in question was naked right in front of him.

He should probably also put some silk sheet on her, even if it was a bit late. Without much else to do, Aki decided to sit down and cook something.

While he wasn't the most enthusiastic about it, he was most certainly good at it, what with a an almost eidetic memory capable of telling each ingredient's properties, a good base on chemistry and a ridiculous amount of control over the properties that were able to manifest themselves in the final product, meaning that despite any magical bullshit, he was able to make the most of what his ingredients had to offer.

It apparently had something to do with the amount of condensed atoms standing on the same place so as to allow for the formation of all these magical minerals, herbs, flesh and so on. His own blood was not filled with hemoglobins anymore for example, but a version of it with a ton more materials occupying the same amount of space, logic by which he now weighed almost half a ton.

Really, it sounded ridiculous, but even he could even force the process to force more than one atom to be stable while occupying the same space as another or the same tipe, so there wasn’t much to do besides learn how the actual fuck that worked through experimentation and robing the people who already knew but refused to share.

Thirty minutes later, he had a very happy spotted murder cat drolling over a whole five drunk rabits which he’d roated inside of a pig, which was used as an alchemical caldron for him to control the effects of the spices floating around together with the rabits. Crude, but it worked thanks to magic, so he could do quite well with it.

Honestly, her tear filled face was quite cute. Slobber and all. Seeing someone eat his cooking with such gusto also left quite the warm feeling in his chest though, so he waited until she finished and laid with her stomach to the sky, chest heaving, to go and actually talk to her.

“Now, Kira, we have finished the duel and much more.” He grinned while poking her belly, receiving a more restrained smile from her part despite both their species showing teeth as a form of mirth. “There are some things we should discuss now. The tribe’s future, this so-called Khan, you…” As he whispered to her face, Aki couldn’t help but notice her trembling. Now if only he could tell if it was because of fear or being horny… According to his very professional opinion as a healer and magical scanning technique, the answer was both. “What do you want to do?”

His question seemed to surprise the woman, who finally took the time to take her waist long black hair out of her face after the silence started to become awkward.

“I want what’s best for my tribe, but I also want to lay with you again.” She finally explained, her rather raspy voice badly hiding her anxiety. “You have already gained all I could offer by winning against me in my own game however, and I honestly can’t even tell how it is possible that being under your rule could grant so much more than being part of a government that has existed for millenia.” Gulping, the gnoll squinted her eyes and looked forward with determination. “If I can only choose one thing before preparations begin, then I ask that you take care of them.”

For a moment, Aki just puzzledly stared at her with a small smile, then his brain caught up with what she said and his mouth opened in surprise before he suppressed a chuckle.

“Kira, look at me.” She did. “I want you to keep in mind that I am not a gnoll, nor from this plane while I say this, ok?” With a reluctant nod and a confused look in her eyes, the young man continued the conversation as they both sat straight on their respective pillows. “Ok. So, I don't even know what you are actually referring to. I could probably design a ritual that would completely strip a soul of their aether, I don't need to, because I have more of it than I know how to use. Even outside this plane, which is actually on the brink of becoming a barren rock of stagnation because the system doesn’t want to sustain it anymore, I am considered so rich that I could kill people with pure aether overdoses instead of normal attacks and not suffer a dent on my riches. That being the case, I have no need to take it from someone else, nevermind someone that’s starved of it.”

His explanation took a bit to process, and he was pretty sure that the woman in front of him was internally producing the sound of an old computer dying as she tried to absorb the concepts presented to her. Which she likely wouldn’t even consider if he wasn’t touching her leg and infusing it with Aether.

Much like he’d explained to Lin Huang, having a deficiency would stunt your growth. This sexy exemplar of a woman with a hourglass figure was one such case, as the moment he started to infuse the well’s pure aether into her, her skills and class greedily drank it all in, a couple even starting to fuse as she stared at him wide eyed, tons of skill levels she’d missed out on because of the environment flooding her. Her full expertise was still not completely reflected in the numbers, but it would make a great difference.

Before she could drown in it, he receded the flood to a tickle, taking his fingers from her calf to her chin, closing her mouth and giving her little snout a peck.

“I was actually asking you what you wished to do from now on, because as someone working for me, I'm not letting you just up and die. No, that duel was for you to recognise my rule and agree to amicable relations, nothing more. As for your request however, I would be more than happy to get to know you better.” He giggled much like a schoolgirl.