My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 838: One Above’s Foresight

Beyond reasonable doubt, Phei could not think about the One Above’s gift in any way other than as a thing born of foresight. Of some variety. Of some sort, really — because nothing else accounted for it.

One had to remember the sequence. He’d received this gift, been meant to receive it, in the immediate aftermath of his awakening. In their own words, the One Above had told him they’d left him something before he departed the void — and at that point Phei hadn’t even awakened his Void-Ice powers.

Only his stats, those obscene, ledger-breaking stats.

It was not even an exaggeration to say the One Above’s decision to release him rather than unmake him was the very reason he’d awakened as early as he had.

It had been a reward. Like Eira. A reward for the squalid little achievement of surviving:

That was how diabolical it ran.

’Not that I will ever thank the bastard... I am not grateful at all.’

Things were unspooling faster than his imagination could keep pace — he was accruing power, escalating, ascending the tiers like a man taking stairs two at a time, and every step had been laid down for him by people who had, with great sincerity, been trying to ruin him.

That night had been the first stone of it.

And the thought arrived bearing its own gallows punchline.

If the System truly intended to reward him for every encounter with an enemy — every ambush, every betrayal, every immaculately dressed assassin who strolled into his penthouse with murder in her mind and a parcel under her arm — then he was, on the available evidence, one or two more catastrophes shy of acquiring a genuine appetite for it;

A masochist with a loot table.

He would begin to anticipate attempts on his life the way lesser men anticipated birthdays — Oh, splendid, the cult again; one does wonder what I’ll unlock this time — and the truly damning part was how reasonable that felt.

He’d want to keep an eye on that particular trajectory...

...Right after he kept an eye on the eleven other things currently trying to kill him.

Because what else, in the end, was he meant to conclude? He’d just been handed an entire new ability courtesy of Consort.

So — logically, indecently — was he not now obliged to look forward to her next visit?

’Better yet, to some grander horror entirely, some properly cataclysmic adversary, so that the System might be moved to disgorge something genuinely flamboyant in recompense.’

All he had to do was survive.

And he was, he conceded without an ounce of pride, becoming unconscionably good at that.

The point — and there was one, interred beneath all the funereal arithmetic — was that back then, fresh from his awakening, Phei had never once examined the gift the One Above left behind.

How they had smuggled it into his penthouse and set it down, he genuinely did not know and had elected, with great discipline, not to interrogate into it.

So Phei had done the only sensible thing a man does with an object of unknowable cosmic provenance.

He’d shoved it clean out of sight and pretended, with conviction, that it did not exist.

But now — having opened it, having been strong-armed into opening it — Phei could not help but marvel at what a gift it genuinely was.

And the marvelling dragged a cold tail behind it...

...Because he grasped, with sudden and thoroughly unwelcome clarity, that had he opened this thing on that morning, the Phei of back then would not have merely returned it to its box and entombed it again:

He would have done that regardless, of course.

But the Phei of that morning would not have possessed the faintest inkling of what to do with it.

Not only that Phei: even the Phei of yesterday — the one from the morning before he set foot upon Hell’s Paradise Island — would have apprehended the use of the One Above’s gift.

He’d have turned it over in his hands, found it exquisite, found it baffling, and reinterred it with the indifferent shrug of someone politely declining a problem.

And it was precisely that — that thread, that timing — which sent something glacial crawling the length of his spine.

Either this was coincidence:

Or the One Above possessed, in plain truth, some manner of sight that pierced clean forward through time itself.

And Phei had lately learned a thing or two about the texture of the world he’d been dragged into.

In the company of powers — entities like the One Above, draped in boundless, unaccountable might — it was a special and fatal species of naivety to think anything whatsoever under coincidence.

’The word is a sedative for small men in small rooms.’

It did not survive contact with the upper tiers.

Not for the span of a single heartbeat did he entertain it.

Because the timing was too immaculate, engineered and too obscenely, surgically planned.

If the One Above had cared solely about the gift being opened, why wait until today to force him to open it? They could have orchestrated it weeks ago with dispatching Consort just like today, or some equivalent blade in equivalent silk, at any point across those intervening weeks to stand sentinel in his penthouse and decline to leave until the lid of the gift box came off.

But no, they’d not done that weeks ago. Today. Of every available day in a calendar that stretched in both directions, this one.

No. Out of the question.

He did not buy a coincident syllable of it.

It was as though they had known — known the old Phei would have stared at the gift and comprehended precisely nothing — and had waited, with the unhurried serenity of a being for whom waiting cost less than breathing, until the exact instant he was equipped to seize the real knowledge its purpose.

And only then, weeks after pressing it into his keeping, had they reached down through the architecture of fate and forced the box open.

Which left him with the only questions that carried any weight, ranged before him like a row of patient teeth.

’How had they known?’

But the first question was; What, precisely, was the gift?

And — the most pressing of the three, the splinter he could not work loose from under the nail — why would the Phei of the past and yesterday have failed to grasp its use, when the Phei of this very moment did not fail to understand it?

The answer was not abstract, much less theoretical:

It lay in something he had done with his own two hands — something concrete, recent, and entirely, irrevocably deliberate.

It lay in something he had done after tiring Eira out.

...Claiming the Super Abilities Mystery Box.