Eren sat overlooking the water. Just as he took a sip of his coffee, a flicker of dizziness washed over him. His head spun for a heartbeat which was very strange for someone who hadn’t been sick in a long time and had been living between two universes for almost five months now.

He was at one of those nice open-air spots with outdoor heaters that let people sit outside even in winter. A trendy place in Üsküdar overlooking the Bosphorus where the waterfront strip had party venues and winter garden themed restaurants on both sides.

But Eren could afford places like this now because the Evon-grown products they’d been bringing to Earth, mostly food and fruit that had been touched by elven hands and elven soil, had made him genuinely wealthy.

His family’s house was far enough from the city center that the neighborhood was quiet enough for elves to live without being noticed. Two months ago he’d created a clone and sent it into the forest while he started the project of slowly bringing the village elves to Earth and helping them adapt.

Within a week or two the oldest elves went first and then almost everyone else picked up Turkish as their primary language and English for business and internet purposes.

The way it worked was pretty standard for anyone with the Evon System. You got exposed to enough of a new language and the system popped up with something like "you have been exposed to a non-Evon language extensively, language learning skill acquired."

Once the elves had that basic skill that boosted language acquisition by a percentage they just sat down and watched Turkish soap operas on TV and leveled the skill three or four times a day.

Most of them were speaking Turkish like native speakers within five days. The accents were so good that even Eren wouldn’t have recognized them as non-Turkish if he’d bumped into them on the street. Maybe slightly accented but nothing you’d look twice at.

But back in the elf village, the one that still didn’t have a proper name and that Eren only knew by its system designation of Starter Village 31, things weren’t going well at all.

The dragon attack about a week ago had shown everyone exactly how weak the Totem Tree had become and how vulnerable they were to outside threats.

Eren had been there that day. He’d watched everything outside a certain ring around the village center get destroyed. The fruit orchards, the farmland, the bigger of the two ranches that was on the outer edge, dozens of houses, storage buildings and resource sites. All of it gone because one stupid dragon with a twenty-five to thirty meter body had flown over the village a few times and then spent hours spraying fire in every direction.

The fires couldn’t pass through some kind of barrier that the Totem’s protection ring created around the village center. But the heat from the flames covering the entire sky above them was bad enough to nearly suffocate and cook everyone inside the ring alive.

Even Eren with his fire resistance skill and the highest passive stats in the village had been struggling to breathe.

That day every elf had to cross over to Earth whether they wanted to or not. Eren used his Door Master skill which he could now hold open for about thirty seconds and moved all hundred and twenty elves in the village to Earth in two trips. Sixty per trip through the portal to his family’s house with the garden.

Emily and Rosa were handling things on the Earth side. Their job was to pull people away from the portal exit and keep moving them out of the house and into the backyard or the surrounding property because more were always coming.

The last ones left in the village were Eren himself and Fury and Rury. The two wolves had grown so much that they looked like full-sized adult wolves now but according to them they still weren’t fully grown. Fury kept bringing it up and saying he wanted to be at least as big as their mother someday.

Eren had wondered in that moment just how big the Alpha wolf they called mother actually was if these two house-sized creatures were still considered cubs.

They’d stood together near the tiny Totem Tree at the center of the village while the dragon’s flames destroyed everything around them outside the protection ring. All the resources, the trees, the orchards that had been funding Eren’s Earth-side business. Gone.

The next evening Eren brought back everyone who’d finished learning the language and didn’t need to stay on Earth anymore. But fewer than a hundred came back. The rest had slept on the floor mattresses Rosa bought, scattered across the house and the garden.

The elves were traumatized and in pain. Watching hundreds maybe thousands of years of carefully maintained gardens and trees and the village they’d built their lives around get burned was devastating.

Eren didn’t force anyone who wanted to stay on Earth. And six days ago he’d made a decision.

He was going to buy land. Real land on Earth where the elves and he could live properly.

But for tonight he was about to convince Kalina for a massive illegal project of buying false ID’s for over two hundred people. Or get any other solutions for the elves from Kalina.

Things were about to become spicy on Earth.

He had half a million dollars of cash here and two hundred skilled and long living elf which he saw them as his people nowadays.

So now he was sitting in the waterfront garden drinking coffee while Kalina sat across from him asking why he suddenly wanted to pause their business arrangement.

"Like I said. The whole production site took massive damage. Something huge happened and it’s not the kind of thing that gets fixed quickly. If you heard what kind of trees I lost you wouldn’t believe it.." His voice was calm and final despite Kalina’s protests. He’d already explained that the orchards where they grew the exotic fruit had burned.

The fruit they’d been shipping to Istanbul and a few Western European countries had gotten so popular so fast that within months the business model had shifted to serving only the wealthiest and most connected buyers.

Three months ago when Eren had sent Emily to Earth and put Rosa in charge of operations he never would’ve believed they’d make this much money. But in exactly three months they’d earned half a million dollars. And because the exchange rate in Turkey was absurdly high that half million dollars meant about twenty million Turkish lira.

Eren was rich!

..

"I want to see this production site you keep saying burned down. I have my own connections and a lot of things you’d call unrecoverable can actually be saved." Kalina shot back with her usual confidence. She wasn’t looking down on him though. She was showing her value and trying to impress this handsome man who used to work under her.

He was used to her style by now and they both knew she had feelings for him so Eren had started acting accordingly. He didn’t stress around his former boss anymore and he’d taken to doing stupid guy things around her just to piss her off.

Kalina looked at his half-smiling face and his empty stare at the sea and she grinned like she wanted to kill him but her expression was pure confidence. "You really need to trust me on this. Most burned land and production sites, especially trees, are more recoverable than you’d think. I’ve been calling farmers and agricultural engineers for the last six days since you told me about the fire. My uncle who works with my father is an expert on this stuff and he said he needs to see the burned area in person. But even photos and video would work."

A few months ago when Eren first stepped onto the planet Aradne in the Evon Universe he never would’ve imagined becoming someone who could talk this confidently about business losses and recovery plans. But Kalina was practically begging him with her eyes and her lips looked annoyingly attractive in that moment and he felt something shift inside his body. His hormones and his hunter instincts were doing something weird.

Before he could figure out what was happening he started seeing colors he’d never seen before. And inside his body something appeared like a horny animal that had suddenly woken up and started pushing him out of control.

His eyebrows furrowed slightly while he sipped his coffee. Kalina was still leaning forward trying to convince him and she wasn’t expecting what happened next. Eren stood up and physically picked her up like she weighed nothing and moved her to the side. Then he gently but firmly guided her to sit down on the grass next to the café terrace.

Kalina’s heart was pounding and she was too shocked to speak when Eren grabbed her waist with one hand and her hip with the other and started kissing her neck aggressively.

Every voice in his head was crashing into every other voice.

The Clone’s skills and levels that Eren had already been receiving passively were one thing but he hadn’t expected THIS to happen when the clone died.

The Cat Bloodline that the Clone had developed through its feline evolution appeared inside the original Eren the moment the clone died and started integrating into his body.

Eren latched onto Kalina’s lips without caring about the people around them staring or the phones coming out to record them. He gave in to the cat inside him feeling the urge to mate for the first time in its existence and kept making out with his former boss on a café terrace in Üsküdar.

Maybe he was about to fulfill the Clone’s final wish or at least the wish of the cat bloodline the Clone had carried right here on this waterfront café by the İstanbul’s epic Bosphorus view!