My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 836: Dome Around the Boy

She set the tablet down and looked at him fully because she had just heard an Immortal sage — a being who had witnessed the rise and collapse of civilisations, who had walked through centuries as a silent chronicler of vast power and the spectacularly stupid ways mortals chose to die — express a desire to place wagers like some bored mortal with a gambling problem and too much time left on the clock.

"Where did the sagacious, venerable, enlightened Immortal King go? Betting? What are you, twenty-six?"¹

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, like he was about to deploy an argument he found genuinely compelling and expected it to be received with the seriousness it deserved — which, in hindsight, was probably the first sign that thousand years living in mortals had not improved his judgment.

"Psychologically speaking — are you familiar with the human studies on individuals who missed a developmental stage? The phenomenon of regression to —"

She watched him, helpless and faintly pained; she was like an ageless woman observing a tens-of-thousands-years-old being attempt to justify degeneracy through developmental psychology, an ancient horror laboriously trying to file its taxes.

She shook her head:

"You are an Immortal being, Ashworth. Not some mortal with and not — whatever this is."

He laughed. Low, warm like he’d once had someone to laugh alongside and no longer did, the sound carrying the faintecho of empty halls where companions used to sit.

"I miss Seiryū so much at times like this. A fellow drinking companion would be agreeable, no? A classic Master stage being who imbibes with his sensei — and that boy could drink, I still give him that."

"’A classic Master stage being who imbibes with his sensei’," she repeated, flatly. Then, relenting by a degree: "Well. You could try your chances with Phei, he’s a son of your late disciple; better cultivate a bond between you sooner rather than later — before the entire Master-Disciple arrangement with him commences in earnest."

He shook his head. "No. I’ll take it slow with the boy."

"Speaking of Phei." Dravenna straightened in her throne. The casual, bickering energy of the conversation shifted — not dramatically neither with the sudden atmospheric drop that heralded her temper, but with the quiet tonal adjustment of Dravenna setting recreation down and lifting business in its place.

The air around her seemed to grow fractionally heavier, as if the room itself remembered who she had been before she started pretending to be merely the Dean.

"How is it progressing with the interview?"

He nodded. Took another sip. "It’s good. I’ll admit — I may be a neophyte at the whole normal human thing — but I’m still an Immortal Lord being, girl. I know how to construct a narrative."

She laughed — short, genuine. "Do you call thousand years of living as a normal human new? Old man, that’s more than twenty lifetimes for most of humans."

"Whatever." He was no longer entirely invested in the beer. His gaze had drifted to the window, to the moonlit campus, to the empty pathways where a thousand children would return in a week and resume the business of being young and oblivious and protected from truths that would shatter them like cheap glass under an ancient boot.

"The interview is prepared. It’s time we extricated the boy from the showbiz spectacle — parading around like some celebrity when he has substantially more pressing matters to attend to."

Dravenna nodded. "Agreed. And Melissa is going to be really mad."

Ashworth paused.

His beer, which had been en route to his mouth, suspended its trajectory mid-air — Ashworth himself going abruptly still, like he’d just remembered that some names carried curses older than the academy itself.

"Dravenna. You better not tell that woman I was involved in this."

Dravenna laughed — rich, unrestrained, faintly predatory, having located a fresh source of entertainment and deciding to savour it slowly, like fine wine laced with someone else’s suffering.

"Don’t fret, old man. I relish being despised by Melissa. And absolutely demolishing whatever meticulous preparations she’s been orchestrating for Phei’s ascent to celebrity status will certainly make her apoplectic."

Her jade eyes glittered. "I’ll shoulder the full weight of her fury. Gladly."

He finished his drink, setting the empty bottle on the table with a soft, final clink that sounded suspiciously like a period at the end of a very old sentence, he stood:

And the temperature of the conversation changed.

"I feel sorry for the boy."

Dravenna looked up.

"He has his entire existence puppeteered." Ashworth’s voice had shed its warmth like a snake shedding skin it no longer needed.

What remained was something older that had been accumulating behind the beer and the banter and the gentle ribbing like sediment behind a dam that was finally ready to break.

"Every movement, decision and every ostensibly free choice he believes he’s making — is choreographed and stage-managed: arranged by hands he can’t see pulling strings he doesn’t know exist."

Dravenna tensed. Her fingers, which had been resting on the armrest of her throne, curled inward.

"Old man. What are you insinuating? Phei—"

"...Doesn’t have a life."

The words landed in the room like a blade dropped point-first into marble — clean, final, and impossible to ignore.

"All any of you see is what he’s supposed to be. What he’s fated to be. The prophesied dragon: The true heir to the Ryujin Tiamat bloodline. The boy who will fulflil whatever itinerary that has been drafted for him by fate itself since before he drew his first breath. But not once — not once — has anyone granted him the liberty to walk his life as he likes it."

He pointed at her but not aggressively, rather, with the steady, unyielding precision of an old judge who had been deliberating this indictment far longer than tonight and had decided that the verdict was due — and that thousands of years of watching civilizations make the same mistake had earned him the right to say it plainly.

"You’ve constructed this colossal dome around him. Where every step he takes is precisely as you all orchestrated. Every relationship is curated, every confrontation is exactly as fate said and anticipated while every triumph the gets after leaving the ten-years hell is pre-approved by a committee of people who love him so ferociously they’ve forgotten to ask what he wants."

"We’re—"

"You’re what?" He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to. The quiet was worse: "Assisting him to walk his destined path? Safeguarding him so he doesn’t get slaughtered like his father? Because that’s all you perceive, isn’t it? A boy born to be something; a child whose father perished to protect. Is that all there is to him, Jade Dragon?"

Her jaw clenched. Something dangerous flickered through those slitted jade eyes — something old... wounded, the name Jade Dragon reaching into the dark interior of her chest and seizing it with both hands, dragging it kicking and screaming into the light.

"Don’t call me that. Only he can!"

He shrugged — Ashworth shrugging like he’d predicted the response down to the syllable and found it precisely as deflective as expected.

"Whatever." He turned toward the door. "If you truly consider Phei your mate — the least you can do is walk beside him while he embarks on his path. Not behind him, arranging the scenery. Not above him, steering from the shadows with his obsessive grandmother. Walk beside him while he decides, for himself, which direction that path goes..."

He paused at the threshold.

"...And not letting his grandmother dictate how he’s supposed to walk it."

The door closed behind him.

Dravenna sat in her throne.

The moonlight held its position — cold, impartial, and entirely unconcerned with the affairs of immortals and the children they claimed to protect.

And the academy — empty, silent, waiting for its children to return — breathed around her like a cathedral that had just heard a sermon it wasn’t certain it agreed with, the way only an old building can breathe when it has stood for centuries and learned that the most dangerous words are the ones that sound like mercy.

Ashworth’s words reverberated in her skull like war drums...

"Walk beside him!’

Like it was that simple!