Chapter 1402: Meeting Eleanor WitchBourne

Disbelief washed over Phei first, and then every perception he possessed expanded almost violently. True Void Sense swept through the corridor and peeled the surrounding world open before him. Walls stopped mattering beneath his awareness. He felt the rooms behind them, the tiny currents of conditioned air slipping through hidden vents, Mana threading through defensive formations and the subtle fluctuations produced whenever those formations adjusted around living occupants.

Several floors below, an elevator moved upward. Somewhere behind decorative paneling, a tiny insect crawled through dust.

Farther away, guests slept inside their rooms while other people crossed corridors, turned corners, breathed, shifted and disturbed the world around them in thousands of tiny ways ordinary senses would never notice.

’Everything is just fine with my senses!’

Phei pushed his awareness deeper, tracing the space behind the woman, the direction she should have approached from, the carpet beneath her shoes and the atmosphere her body should have disturbed as she walked.

He found no residual of her movement explaining her arrival, no spiritual ripple, no faint trail of displaced Essence or spatial disturbance collapsing behind her and not even the subtle hollow produced whenever something occupied a place where empty space should have existed.

True Void Sense could notice absences themselves, yet until the instant this woman physically struck his chest, every part of his perception abilities and his own Sky Sovereign prowess senses had insisted the corridor was empty.

’That is impossible!’

His arm remained around her waist while the new instincts forged inside the Primordial Frozen Zone took over beneath his calm exterior. Phei could perceive individual patterns of Essence moving throughout Infinity Chaos. He could sense life, track concealed spaces, distinguish a fly crossing the edge of his perception from drifting dust and notice disturbances left by beings that thought themselves invisible.

World Transcendents had struggled to surprise him in battle!

Yet a woman with no visible cultivation had walked into him without producing so much as a fucking footstep!

Eira felt the change in him through their bond and abandoned her teasing immediately. If the woman breathed wrong, Eira realized with a mixture of concern and reluctant admiration, Phei might actually remove her head before asking whether the breath had been intentional.

In his mind and survival instincts this woman was freakish powerful imposter who bumped into him intentionally! Who knew what her deal was... maybe harm him?!

{You dimwit,} she said sharply inside his mind. {She’s mortal. Completely mortal. Feel properly.}

Phei did, and now that the woman was physically touching him, every one of his senses perceived her perfectly. Her heartbeat was ordinary, her lungs ordinary, her blood ordinary. There was no Core, no hidden cultivation, no Essence circulation in her and no monstrous sealed existence waiting beneath a mortal disguise.

She appeared to be exactly what Eira claimed, a completely powerless human woman who had somehow crossed the awareness of a Sky Sovereign with True Void Sense as though those abilities were decorative.

"That’s more concerning." Phei replied silently.

Eira had no immediate answer because it absolutely fucking was.

Her own senses brushed across the stranger more carefully and reached the same conclusion. Mortal. Completely mortal. Yet Eira had not noticed her approach either, and that finally wiped the last trace of amusement from the fairy’s face.

"Are you all right?" Phei finally asked in concern after she was in his arms dazed fro seconds just looking at him.

The woman blinked several times and seemed to return to herself only after becoming aware of the arm around her waist. "I... yes. Yes, I’m quite all right. Bloody hell, I’m terribly sorry." Her British accent emerged naturally through the embarrassment while she tried straightening herself and discovered Phei was still supporting most of her weight.

"My mind was somewhere completely different, and nobody is usually wandering through this part of the hotel this late, so I’ve apparently developed the dreadful habit of walking as though I’ve purchased every corridor. Thank you for catching me, though. Otherwise I would’ve made a spectacular fool of myself."

Her gaze dropped toward his arm, and for Eleanor the problem stopped being embarrassment almost immediately.

His hand was around her waist.

’Phei’s hand!’

Actually around her waist.

And it was not dream-Phei or some feverishly vivid version of him waiting inside whatever impossible realm that swallowed her every time sleep became dangerous.

The real one was touching her, close enough that she could feel his warmth through her clothes, and reality turned out to be considerably more beautiful, dazzling and dangerously easy to get lost into than the dreams because now her body had to deal with the fact that everything it had learned to associate with him suddenly existed outside sleep.

Her dreams had always been sexual.

Always.

There were conversations inside them, certainly, sometimes hours of them, but those conversations always ended beneath the same overwhelming intimacy; Phei kissing her until thought became useless, his hands tracing places she somehow remembered after waking up and felt the pleasure of those dreams even in the waking world, his body pressed against hers beneath impossibly endless skies as they flew while hours blurred into days and days became stretches of dream-time as they shagged for all that time without tiring and that felt absurdly real each time she woke up.

Sometimes she awakened so wet between her legs and breathless with memories no ordinary dream should have been capable of leaving behind, and after enough nights she had abandoned the comforting lie that her mind was simply inventing him because he was handsome.

Now the man from those dreams was holding her waist.

His scent reached her before she could properly recover, and Eleanor nearly forgot how to breathe.

God.

She knew that scent.

Or believed she did.

In dreams it had always been impossible to preserve after waking, some addictive Dragon warmth her mind could remember emotionally but never reconstruct properly. Here it possessed physical weight. Clean skin, something faintly sweet beneath it and another deeper note that slid into her lungs and sent heat curling through her body before dignity had even been informed there was a problem.

Her thighs tightened almost imperceptibly as memories responded to the scent faster than conscious thought could stop them; Eleanor was turned on wet from his presence!

’Oh, that’s unfair.’

Her gaze moved downward, where Phei’s sleeve had shifted slightly during the catch and exposed part of his wrist and forearm. His skin possessed that faint lustrous quality she remembered from recent dreams, almost gathering the corridor lighting instead of simply reflecting it, while subtle strength shifted beneath it when his fingers adjusted at her waist.

He felt stronger than during their first real meeting.

Stronger than a human should feel.

Closer to the version she knew.

Then Eleanor looked upward and saw the white hair.

Her thoughts stalled.

In the dreams, Phei had been changing.

Sometimes his hair had been dark, but in the more recent ones it had turned white, impossibly beautiful around a face that became less ordinary every time she met him there. His presence had grown heavier too, more overwhelming and more frighteningly ancient, until dream-all-powerful-witch-Eleanor occasionally woke up as a mortal with the physical memory of being held beneath something that felt less like a man and more like a primordial creature wearing the face of the man she loved. ℯℓ.

Now he looked closer to becoming that Dragon in her dreams than ever before.

’He’s becoming HIM.’ The thought sent another shiver through her before she could stop it: ’My Dragon.’

Then she made the disastrous decision to meet his eyes.

Phei watched the usual effect begin to settle over her, although her reaction was subtly different from what he had grown accustomed to. Yes, she stared. Her pupils widened, her cheeks warmed and her focus caught upon him with the familiar dazed quality his appearance caused increasingly often, but beneath that attraction was something that did not belong in the face of a stranger.

Recognition. Comfort. Almost relief.

Most women meeting him for the first time either became uncertain where to look or overcompensated by pretending not to look at all. This woman stared at him as though she had finally found something she had been waiting for.

That bothered him almost as much as the fact he never sensed her arrive.

Eira noticed it too.

{Master.}

Phei heard the change in her mental voice immediately. "What?"

{She’s looking at you strangely.}

"Everyone looks at me strangely."

{Yes, narcissistic Dragon, congratulations on rediscovering your face. I mean familiar.}

Phei’s eyes narrowed slightly while Eira studied Eleanor more carefully.

A powerless mortal had walked through Phei’s senses, she somehow escaped Eira’s as well, collided with him twice across separate encounters and now stared at him with the flushed attraction of a woman seeing a beautiful man mixed with the strange ease of someone looking at a lover she already knew.

Either this was the most unusual mortal Eira had encountered in centuries, or reality had started lying again.

Neither possibility was particularly comforting.

"Are you sure you’re okay?" Phei asked, allowing Healing Touch to erase the final discomfort before slowly releasing Eleanor’s waist.

The loss of his hand was embarrassingly noticeable to her.

"Yes, perfectly," Eleanor replied, smoothing her clothes and attempting to remember how adult women behaved when they had not just received a vivid physical reminder of several hundred indecent dreams: "More embarrassed than injured, its strange really. I promise I don’t ordinarily hurl myself into strangers in corridors."

"Good. I was beginning to think that was a local custom I’d somehow missed."