Chapter 1416: Possessive, Mercy and Cruelty

Phei had never lacked options when it came to what to do to Marcus, or any Original Progenitor unfortunate enough to fall completely into his hands:

Lust Reality alone could have ended the entire matter with almost insulting ease.

One touch would have been enough to tear Marcus’s soul from the ruined Angelic manifestation before him and cast him into a world built from the deepest desires he had spent lifetimes concealing. Phei could have allowed him to drown inside that counterfeit paradise, surrounded him with every fantasy his diseased heart had ever treasured and simply waited while fulfillment itself became the prison from which Marcus no longer wished to escape.

Eventually the bastard would die there, perhaps smiling until the final moment, never realizing that the happiness embracing him had been sharpened into an executioner’s blade.

Phei had rejected the idea almost immediately.

It had nothing to do with some concern that killing Marcus now might allow the Angel Progenitor to return as a Supreme Immortal monstrosity.

That possibility had once mattered enough to deserve careful thought.

It barely moved him anymore.

If Marcus somehow returned stronger one day, then Phei would deal with the stronger Marcus when that day arrived!

Somewhere during the past year, threats that once demanded contingencies, careful planning and ten moves of preparation had begun losing their teeth. Phei had grown into the uncomfortable habit of looking at future calamities and thinking they sounded less like disasters than appointments he could rearrange when they became inconvenient.

The real problem with Lust Reality was far simpler as it was merciful.

Far too merciful for people like Marcus!

Marcus would die painlessly by the standards Phei had in mind, and worse, he would die inside complete fulfillment. His final experience would be receiving everything his twisted soul had ever wanted while reality quietly closed over him, and Phei found the thought so offensive that the ability disappeared from consideration almost before it properly entered the equation.

The Slave Mark had opened too many doors inside Marcus for private desires to remain private anymore.

Phei knew the filth desires buried there now, including one particularly persistent obsession involving princesses, collecting them, possessing them and surrounding himself with women whose beauty made the fantasy sweeter to an ego that treated people like trophies arranged around a throne.

That alone was enough to seal Marcus’s fate!

Some of those women were already Phei’s. Others were women he might one day court, protect or perhaps bring into his life if whatever strange road ahead of him happened to lead there, and the thought of constructing a perfect little world in which Marcus could enjoy even a fantasy-reality-versions of them made something deeply selfish inside Phei bare its teeth.

Phei was possessive and hypocritical enough to keep a philosopher employed for several decades, but Phei had stopped caring whether every ugly corner of himself survived moral inspection.

He loved selfishly, he protected selfishly; he wanted certain people for himself, and after everything he had become, pretending otherwise merely for the sake of sounding noble would have felt more dishonest than admitting it.

Phei had made the same choice before:

Phei had done it with the World Transcendent male Demon.

The moment Lust Reality began digging through the bastard’s deepest desires; the female Demon sat at the center of them, wrapped through the man’s fantasies so thoroughly that constructing his perfect paradise without her would have been like building a kingdom and deliberately leaving out its throne.

Lust Reality could have recreated her perfectly, every feature, every expression, every little detail the bastard wanted, then handed that illusion over to him and let him die believing he had finally possessed the woman he desired most.

Phei had cut that possibility out without hesitation.

Because he wanted her too.

Not as some passing curiosity, not as a woman he might look at once and forget, but as someone he already intended to pursue until one day she stood beside him as his woman the way Cassiopeia was: the female demon was so beautiful.

Phei was possessive enough to refuse another man even a fabricated version of her if he himself had already decided he wanted the real one. He was not going to create her body, her face, her voice and everything that made her her inside another bastard’s paradise, then stand outside and let him drown in satisfaction over a fantasy Phei had personally allowed.

Fuck that.

’Call it selfish. Call it hypocritical. Call it whatever the heavens wants.’

Phei did not give a shit.

He’d never share a woman he knew he’d pursue and court her, with any one even in thought!

The male Demon could die with every other desire in his heart fulfilled if Lust Reality wished, but the female Demon was staying out of it. If Phei intended to make her his one day, then no other bastard was getting even the counterfeit version of that future from him.

So Lust Reality was out for Marcus too.

The second and easier alternative had been even simpler. Phei could have placed the Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark upon Marcus, claimed the Progenitor Soul, taken whatever rewards accompanied the conquest and left everything else intact. Marcus would become his slave, his ancient bloodline would remain buried within him and the matter could have ended there with remarkably little additional effort.

That was merciful too.

Phei had something far worse in mind.

The only reason he had not begun it immediately was necessity:

He needed Marcus’s Soul intact first and the Angel Progenitor bloodline untouched long enough for the Slave Mark to seize it, the connection to World Essence, the ancient power hidden beneath Marcus’s old Soul’s existence and whatever powers might emerge once the Progenitor had become his slave.

Stripping pieces away too early risked mutilating the very treasure Phei had entered this Soul Realm to make his.

That concern no longer existed.

The Mark had completed.

World Essence had answered him.

The Angel Progenitor belonged to him.

Now Marcus Heavenchild could finally begin losing everything else.

Only when the great tempests born of the enslavement had spent their fury did Phei descend toward what remained of the golden sea. World Essence still churned through the far heavens in vast, slow spirals, and torn veils of radiance drifted across a horizon still scarred by the conquest forced upon it.

With every step Phei took through the air, the sky dimmed.

The surviving storms faltered and bowed away from his path, and the broken light of the realm trembled in his presence like a kingdom’s last banners dipping before the warlord who had just burned its throne.

It was no longer Marcus’s heaven.

It knew its new master, and it was afraid.

Marcus lay half-conscious on the shining remnants of the sea, his body sprawled almost lifeless while the aftershocks of the Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark kept shuddering through his soul. His six wings had regained their proper shape, but whatever majesty they once held had been wrung out of them.

Golden-white feathers floated half sunk around their edges, and the great wings lay spread uselessly across the World Essence; the Angel Progenitor understood that the sky was no longer his unless Phei allowed it.

Phei landed beside him and crouched, and the sea itself sank a hand’s width beneath his weight, the World Essence pressing flat and silent as if it dared not ripple near him.

Dragon Dominance coiled around him, so vast and terrible that it was no longer just an ability merely felt:

—it had taken form!

Behind Phei, a colossal shadow rose out of the golden mist, the silhouette of a Cosmic Dragon whose coils wound through the broken heavens and vanished beyond the horizon, its scales glittering with the cold light of dying stars. Its head hung low above the sea, and its amethyst eyes, each as wide as a lake, opened slowly and gazed down at Marcus with the same indifference Phei wore.

The pressure pouring from it alone made the golden World Essence mist part on its own, and one after another the distant storms fell silent, as though the entire realm were holding its breath beneath the gaze of a beast that had devoured worlds before Marcus’s bloodline was ever born.

For several breaths Phei simply studied the man whose whole existence had just become his possession. Marcus’s eyes crept toward him, with just enough awareness left in them to know death when it sat beside him, though his body could no longer obey the instinct to flee.

His breath hitched; a tremor ran down his wings, and the brand burning on his soul answered Phei’s nearness with a throb of pain, so that even Marcus’s terror had to ask permission now.

Phei smiled:

"Do you know the worst punishment I can imagine for someone as you— a Progenitor of an entire race who once stood at the pinnacle of power?"