My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 821: Mystery Vein to Mine

Otherwise — yes. Strong. But still weak. Particularly the Primordial Blood element, which remained a nascent, untrained, barely comprehended instrument of destruction that he wielded with roughly the same proficiency as a child wielding a broadsword.

He could swing it. It would damage things; and whether those things would be exclusively the things he intended to damage was a question that would keep Eira awake at night and keep him humble during the days.

So, they’d felt all of this — the endless dark, the suffocating bloodlust of the Primordial Blood, the void-cold infinity — but hadn’t felt the Bond.

Good.

He didn’t tell them about neither did he tell Melissa his fruitful adventures of the previous night and this afternoon either — the mystery boxes, the Witness Bind, the things the System had handed him like a cosmic patron dispensing increasingly unhinged gifts to a protégé whose capacity for absorbing unhinged gifts was, apparently, bottomless.

What he didn’t know — what nagged at him with the persistent, subcutaneous irritation of a splinter lodged beneath the skin of his certainty — was how much Melissa already knew:

About his powers or about the powers in general, about the vast, buried, interlocking new revelations about progenitors and bloodlines and cosmic-old inheritance that undergirded everything Paradise pretended to be.

He had a burgeoning, discomfiting suspicion that all of them — his entire family, even the seemingly guileless Delilah and Victoria — knew a thing or two more than he did.

Perhaps considerably more than a thing or two. Perhaps entire libraries more, actually an entire geological strata of concealed knowledge that they had been sitting on, patiently, waiting for the day he would be ready to receive it.

As for Sienna — she was no longer on the list of people he suspected knew little.

In fact, if he wanted answers, she was his most promising vein to mine.

Perhaps Sienna knew more than Melissa.

But Phei wasn’t certain, but the instinct felt architecturally sound, although Melissa would never be someone he’ll ever categorize as poorly informed.

In fact — the more he considered it, the more the shape of Melissa’s reactions across the entirety of their relationship reconstituted themselves into a configuration that made his stomach do something uncomfortable.

She had never been surprised.

Not truly. Not at the fundamental, structural level where genuine surprise resided:

From the very first day — the Charm Speech, the earliest abilities, the capabilities no teenager had any legitimate business possessing much less a loser like him back then having such a voice — she had evinced astonishment, yes.

But it had been performative. A surface-level production staged for his benefit, engineered to conceal the fact that beneath the widened eyes and the murmured oh my God, Phei was not astonishment but recognition.

’Not how... but Finally.’

It was as though she had known, all along, that this day would arrive and his awakening was not an anomaly but a rendezvous she had been keeping in her private calendar for years, and the only surprise — the only genuine, unperformed surprise — had been that it took him this long to show up.

Even when he’d Marked her...

...There had been surprise, but she hadn’t lingered in it or even try to interrogate him about it.

Phei had found it suspicious that she had not even asked the kind of probing, forensic questions a woman encountering an unprecedented supernatural phenomenon for the first time would have asked. She had simply... accepted. Moved on. As though a Mark was not a revelation but a confirmation.

And the over-excited-Phei of back then just moved on too.

’Took you long enough to realise, huh?’

He sighed.

It was not, in point of fact, a comfortable sensation — knowing that other people possessed more comprehensive intelligence about you than you did about yourself.

They were his women, yes. Some of them. But that didn’t ameliorate the vertigo of discovering that the people you loved had been watching you stumble toward a truth they’d been holding in their hands for years, waiting — patiently, lovingly, infuriatingly — for you to arrive.

He’d never even let his thoughts wander this far before.

What did Melissa know about him?

He had a crawling, nascent suspicion that she knew he’d awakened a new power even right now.

He could feel it in the way she’d been tonight beyond the love and grief she’d been feeling — the way she’d kissed him, the way she’d made love to him. It hadn’t been their usual incendiary consumption of each other.

There had been something small hidden deeper underneath... something....

’Congratulatory, almost.’

As though her body was telling him what her mouth hadn’t — I’m proud of you. I see what you’ve become. I’ve been waiting:

Atop him, the way she rode him, hips rolling — low, slow, sensuously deliberate, she had been holding his hands against her breasts, pulling him upright to kiss him with a tenderness that transcended the physical and became, for a few breathless seconds, something sacramental.

Yes, she always did these things. But tonight they had carried a certain profundity to them and a depth that hadn’t been there before.

Or had always been there, and he was only now developing the perceptual acuity to detect it?

In the end, Phei left Melissa with Roxanne — she had wished to remain, to be with Roxanne longer, and continue the mending that had commenced on that charcoal couch with a handshake and two words that had traversed a decade’s worth of damage to arrive.

He’d kissed them both — Melissa first, then Roxanne, each kiss carrying its own specific vocabulary — and stepped through his new portal...

...And vanished.

’Ah, how exquisite. How magnificently, gloriously expedient.’

He no longer had to beg Eira every time geography became an inconvenience — no longer had to wait for her to rouse herself from whatever diminutive slumber she’d settled into and weave a portal on his behalf.

As long as he knew the destination, the Void-Ice element would carve the aperture itself, obeying Infinity Control with the instantaneous compliance of a force that did not comprehend the concept of hesitation.

And his portal was superior to Eira’s in terms of beauty.

He was not going to say that to her face.

He valued his continued existence.

But the aesthetic was objectively, inarguably finer — the swirling black-white ribbons of paradox-light lending it an ancient gravitas that Eira’s portals, for all their precision, simply did not possess.

The chill his portals produced carried a sense of kinship to it — not the impersonal cold of a cosmic mechanism, but something warmer. Familial to him. The sensation of being recognized. Of the Void-Ice element greeting its sovereign with the fond, shivering embrace of a child wrapping its arms around its father’s legs upon his return.

’Ah, noice.’

The portal sealed behind him.

The night continued.

And somewhere in the private ledger of his mind, the question of what Melissa Ryujin Tiamat knew — and how long she had known it — settled into the growing column of mysteries he would, one day, need to solve.

But not tonight.