My Taboo Harem!

A languid, unhurried smile commenced at one corner of his lips and unfurled with the exquisite leisure of a predator savoring the aftertaste of victory — it was not at all the razor-edged, soul-devouring leer of the Soul Realm’s apex predator that had beat Kyle black and blue but something softer, fonder, laced with a wry, almost boyish amusement that would have horrified his enemies.

It was the private grin a clever lad reserves for the one wretched saint in the universe who has been quietly preventing the apocalypse while he napped like a spoiled cat.

Cassiopeia registered the minute flex of his jaw against the crown of her head and uttered a tiny, questioning murmur into the fabric of his shirt. He offered no answer.

He simply let the smile melt back into the shadows of his mouth like he was tucking away a stolen sweet before the grown-ups notice.

He was smiling for Eira…

‘Of course Eira had kept the world spinning. Bless her murderous little heart.’

His mind drifted back into the realm’s lingering afterglow. Because the annoying little pebble that had been lodged in the back of his skull for the last several minutes was not Kyle.

Kyle was thoroughly, eternaly owned.

The progenitor had bowed like a cheap actor in a tragedy he never saw coming.

What remained a delicious question was who, precisely, he had been in there.

Because the Phei who had dismantled Kyle’s in his soul realm had not been, in any straightforward or merciful sense, the same Phei now lounging in this bed with a tearful woman draped across his chest like a living stole.

That Phei had known things.

Had moved with the unhurried precision of a man who had done this before — perhaps a thousand times, in a thousand forgotten lifetimes and had treated an ancient vampire — a fucking vampire progenitor at half-awakened strength and the whole power of his Soul Realm — like a mildly inconvenient piece of antique furniture destined for the skip.

Had unmade Kyle across two days of carnage without once breaking a sweat, without once raising his voice above a simple murmur, without once having to think.

Kyle had been obscenely powerful. Obscenely. The kind of power that could have turned Paradise’s into a seismograph’s wet dream and made Marcus Heavenchild bolt upright halfway across the ocean, his Original Angel inheritance screeching like a betrayed opera diva.

Had Kyle dragged even a tenth of that cataclysm into the waking world the island would not have survived.

It would have been politely excused from existence with a footnote in three countries’ geological records.

That Kyle’s power was enough to erase the island in a single punch!

And the Phei inside that realm had taken him apart as though disassembling a child’s wind-up toy that had dared to bite.

‘Who in the nine hells was that?’

Was it the Cosmic Dragon — the version, the current Phei was still growing into like an awkward teenager waiting for his final growth spurt? A premonition? A sovereign self already complete somewhere in the future, tapping its foot while the waking body caught up?

Or was it merely what he became inside the Soul Realm— a different register, a darker key, accessible only in that particular theatre of cruelty and switched off the instant his consciousness returned to fragile flesh?

He did not know. He shock his head… there was no way of answering any of those questions. Whatever that dude was, it was him and he remembered everything, ever sensation, every single thing that happened was still fresh in his mind and he could feel the residuals of it on his body right now.

The system chimed, fashionably late as always, like a dramatic aunt who waits until the bodies are cold before making her entrance.

Blue text unfolded across his inner vision in stately, unhurried procession — the system had clearly been itching to deliver this for some time and had chosen, at long last, its moment with all the flair of a stage magician revealing the final rabbit.

[Ding! Hidden Mission Completed!]

[MISSION: OMNI-PRIMORDIAL PATH

[FIRST STEP: Enslave at least one of the Original Progenitors.]

[STATUS: COMPLETED]

[ULTIMATE LAST STEP: Enslave ALL the Legacy heirs’ Original Progenitors.]

[Ding! Omni-Primordial Path has been elevated to MAIN MISSION.]

[STATUS: MAIN MISSION 2 — ACTIVE]

Phei’s eyes traced the glowing letters. For a long, luxurious moment, nothing stirred inside him. Not awe, fear nor the crushing solemnity the system had no doubt scripted for maximum narrative gravitas.

The sheer cosmic scale of the words — every Original Progenitor, every last ancient blood-soaked relic, chained beneath him as tribute-givers, owned — was simply too vast to squeeze into the narrow architecture of a seventeen-year-old chest on short notice.

It slid off him like oil on marble.

What remained, when the cosmic implications had finished their dramatic exit, was not sacred reverence.

It was, quite simply, hell yes.

Not in those exact words, of course. But in the general, gleeful shape like he’d just been handed the cheat codes to godhood.

Because underneath the apocalyptic implications, the mission solved things. Immediate, practical, deliciously selfish things. The Destined Day transformed from a looming death sentence into a tidy to-do list.

Every Legacy boy he chained became one fewer future executioner sharpening the axe.

And every progenitor subdued beneath him became a living battery of tribute flowing upward through the Mark rather than a future calamity waiting to unmake him in spectacular fashion.

The Omni-Primordial Path was not merely destiny. It was useful, critical and an elegantly paved highway away from reckoning and straight toward unchallenged sovereignty.

Also — and this was the part that truly did the thing to his mouth — Omni-Primordial Path sounded incredibly cool.

‘It really sounds cool!’

Because he was still, at the end of the long and blood-soaked day, a seventeen-year-old boy who had spent his formative years stealing himself hours devouring manga, comics, webnovels — anything that promised a protagonist who began as gutter trash and ended as an untouchable deity.

He knew a banger of a mission name when he saw one.

‘Omni-Primordial Path…’ he tasted the phrase behind his teeth like fine wine mixed with the faint metallic tang of future enemies’ regret.

And a grin — helpless, unguarded, and entirely unsuitable for the sovereign composure he had been cultivating for the last several hours — bloomed like a villain’s victory laugh at one corner of his mouth and spread.

His lower lip caught faintly over his teeth and the corner of his eye crinkled against Cassiopeia’s hair. His free hand, still threaded gently through the back of her head, tightened a fraction as though he needed something solid to grip while the expression hijacked him, and Cassiopeia — sensing the sudden lift of energy thrumming through his body — raised her tear-streaked face from his chest to stare up at him, utterly bewildered.

He was grinning. Broadly. Brightly. Like he was a child who had just booted up the title screen of the most broken, overpowered game ever coded and realized the final boss was already on his side.

“Omni-Primordial Path,” he murmured, soft enough that she almost missed it, voice warm with dark delight. “What a delightfully pretentious way of telling me I’m about to become absolutely, obscenely, laughably overpowered.”

Cassiopeia blinked up at him, lashes still wet, wondering whether her Master had finally lost the last marble he owned.

He could already picture it. The Phei from the Soul Realm, but ten times that — faster than light, meaner than sin, with better hair.

Moving across oceans without so much as a twitch of effort, punching world-eating beasts into existential footnotes with a single uncaring fist. Standing atop a mountaintop, hair streaming like a banner of inevitable doom, while a ring of chained progenitors knelt in feudal obeisance, looking thoroughly embarrassed about their new career in cosmic footstools.

‘Heck,’ he thought, the grin widening into something positively feral, ‘I might be thinking too small.’

Kyle first. Then the rest of the boys. One by one. As opportunities — or, more accurately, as his rapidly expanding god-complex — politely presented themselves.

Danton — that freshly awakened, currently obscenely stronger, and already hurtling toward him on an inevitable, cataclysmic collision course — would, without question, be a problem.

A rather large, glowering problem with too many teeth and a god-complex almost as inflated as his own.

But if he could drag even fractions, mere teasing echoes of that merciless Soul-Realm-Phei into the waking world — then Danton ceased to be an apocalyptic headache and became, instead, a problem with a very elegant, very final solution.

He chuckled quietly with dark amusement.

Cassiopeia’s brow creased in confusion. She had not moved her face from where she could drink in his expression. Her hand, still tightly gripped in his, began to tremble in an entirely new register — no longer from grief, but from the bewildering, slightly unhinged shift in the man beneath her.

The way Phei was grinning like he’d just been handed the keys to the apocalypse and a complimentary flamethrower was a bit… unsettling and made her shiver.

And now there was something else about the mission he could see it properly.

He’d got a similar mission before that requires the same thing, but the Omni-Primordial Path had become that Main Mission 2 he had got after enslaving his first Legacy.