My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 840: ...Of Longing

A/N:If at all, you did not understand the One Above’s foresight, I am happy to explain, say the word.

Shrouded in the dimness of his penthouse, Phei’s mind was crystalline clear as the light of stars glittering above, right there beside the eternal moon held in their keeping, indifferent and ancient and watching.

There was nothing in him that resembled thought of the perils ahead. Not the day, weeks, months or years or the hundreds and thousands of years that might follow — because now that he had tasted power, the prospect of an existence stretched across eternity no longer wore the face of lunacy.

A few weeks ago, forever had been a poet’s delusion;

Now it was a scheduling problem.

He had, quite literally, all the time in the world to attend to the exhaustive catalogue of things that wanted him dead, and he intended to attend to them with the unhurried satisfaction as settling overdue accounts at interest.

But that was future Phei’s headache. Future Phei could weep about it.

His mind had nothing like thoughts of his women either — not their warmth, not their wars, or the magnificent ongoing catastrophe of keeping them all happy simultaneously, which on most days qualified as its own form of combat... one he loved so much.

He had none of it...

...For the first time in recent memory, the harem that orbited him like a constellation of beautiful, opinionated, lethally capable women he’d anything for, had been set aside entirely.

For now — a surprise not short of stumbling face-first into a vault of crisp hundreds on an empty pavement, not short of finding the one unlocked door in a fortress full of paranoids — all the present Phei could think about was this single, solitary moment.

’One step at a time.’ He’d say it like a mantra and mean it like a threat.

So he sat down. Properly cross-legged on the carpet of his penthouse — the most expensive penthouse in the world, which meant he was almost certainly the most expensively seated man on the planet right now, a distinction that would have impressed precisely no one who knew him — and closed his amethyst eyes.

Phei let the dimness settle:

When he opened them again, they had shed their stillness for something far more volatile: curiosity and determination braided into a single sharpened gleam.

He reached out and drew toward him a red cloth, wrapped with sepulchral precision — each fold deliberate, each crease placed with the reverence of an offering laid before something old enough to remember what worship tasted like and petty enough to be offended if the wrapping was subpar.

He began to unwind it; fold by patient fold.

And inside sat the One Above’s gift.

A Rune Pen.

Except pen surrendered its meaning the instant his eyes landed on it.

This was not a writing instrument but a civilization’s last argument given physical form and then, for reasons unclear, miniaturized into something a man could hold in one hand.

The shaft was bronze and gold — or had been, eons ago, before time itself had laid hands on the metal and aged it with the possessive patience of a sculptor who refused to stop...

...Spiraling up its length in elaborate, almost indecent filigree were carvings — endless looping designs that folded back into themselves and continued, each spiral feeding the next with the inevitability of a fractal. No origin his eye could find or end his mind could reach.

The metal hummed beneath the surface but not with heat: with memory. The weight of epochs rendered as texture, settled into the grain of the bronze like old grief into old bone.

But the shaft was merely the foundation.

The prologue before the detonation.

The head of the pen bloomed.

There was no other word for it; ornate petals of bronze and gold unfurled from a central nexus in an explosion of architecture — each petal a sculpture in its own right, each curve and filigree-edge a statement of artistry so deliberate it bordered on arrogance.

And set into that blooming crown, embedded with the tenderness of someone pressing relics into a reliquary, were the artifacts-like crystals.

Not crystals. He refused to call them crystals.

These were something else entirely.

Cyan and turquoise and shades between that he had no name for — luminous, each one, with its own internal radiance.

Some larger, anchoring the structure. Others smaller, scattered through the filigree like stars in a very intentional firmament. They did not merely glow. They refused containment.

Light spilled from them in slow, patient pulses — not a heartbeat, something older and more inexorable, the rhythm of a thing that had spent an unspeakable span of time waiting to be held again and had decided, somewhere in the interim, to be gracious about it rather than furious.

The whole thing emanated a presence. Standing-in-a-room-where-something-ancient-just-woke-up-and-is-deciding-whether-you-are-worth-its-attention presence.

The pen was beautiful, terrifying. The pen was, if he was being entirely honest with himself, the single most impressive object he had ever touched, and he had recently touched a lot.

And beneath the marvel — beneath the genuine, throat-tightening wonder of it — the thing felt exhumed.

It did not look like something gifted or bestowed; it was as though it had just been recovered from a burial so old and so thorough that the universe had forgotten the grave existed and had to be reminded.

It sat in his palm with the somber, primordial weight of something that remembered empires the way a man remembers breakfast — vaguely, and with mild contempt for the portions.

The System, in its blunt bureaucratic fashion, had confirmed what the weight had already whispered:

[Ding! You’ve received an item!]

[Item: ...Of Longing]

[Description:The rune pen Of Longing — ?????? — before the enigmatic Immortal gifted it to a Young Cosmic Dragon. This rune pen of Primordial rank has long been forgotten in time.]

[Attributes:Clear Mind (passive), Timeless Weaver, Affinity Bind, Sentient and Bound, ???, ??? (Yet to unlock)]

That was what he had seen blown his amethyst eyes wide — and Consort, standing there with the patient contempt of a woman watching a stray dog discover a steak and wondering if it understood what it was chewing, had not been certain Phei could even grasp the scope of what the One Above had placed in his hands.

Not until she saw his eyes.

Then she knew.

He understood.

He did not know precisely where Primordial rank sat on the item-level hierarchy — Eira had not yet deemed him ready for that particular taxonomy, filed alongside realms and dimensional architecture under the heading of Things That Will Ruin a Perfectly Good Morning.

But even Phei knew, with cold unarguable certainty, that it occupied the uppermost rungs.

The rarefied, oxygen-thin altitudes where items stopped being equipment and became forces of nature — the kind of forces that started wars, ended dynasties, and made the beings who wielded them very, very difficult to kill.

And the description alone — long forgotten in time, gifted by an enigmatic Immortal (which had to be One Above), its own origin hidden behind a string of question marks the System had not seen fit to declassify — told him this was no mere object.

It was when he read deeper. When his gaze travelled down into the Attributes and his mind began turning each one over like stones hiding something alive and irritable beneath them — Clear Mind, Timeless Weaver, Affinity Bind, and then the one that made his breath hitch: Sentient and Bound — that Phei understood, fully and finally, with the kind of bone-deep, marrow-lodged certainty exactly how catastrophically, gloriously, obscenelybroken the thing in his hands actually was.