My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 854: Infinity: Impossible System Mission

A few moments before...

By the time Emily, Lydia, and Catrina came for him in the penthouse, Phei had failed at everything.

Phei had been sitting in the same place for almost an hour; cross-legged on the carpet with the Page of Infinity Runes spread before him and Of Longing in his hands.

He could feel the pins and needles crawling up his calf every time he shifted, a dull electric itch that he kept ignoring because the page was right there and the runes were right there and if he just stared at them for another thirty seconds, another minute, another five, something would click;

’Something has to click.’

Nothing clicked.

He had been trying to comprehend even a single character — one, just one, any one — from the dense calligraphic labyrinth that colonised the parchment.

And he could feel them and yet that had become the most maddening part.

The runes hummed at some frequency just below his ability to hear, vibrating against his awareness the way a word vibrates on the tip of your tongue when you know the shape of it but can’t quite pull it into your mouth.

They were there, real and any of them meant something enormous.

And yet his brain simply could not close the last inch of distance between feeling their weight and actually reading them.

He’d tried copying them after he pulled a blank sheet from the penthouse’s stationery drawer with the buzzing optimism, genuinely believing that muscle memory might succeed where comprehension had failed, he picked up Of Longing, positioned the nib against the paper, and attempted to transcribe a single stroke.

The result looked like a toddler had sneezed on the page.

He stared at it, looked at the original on the Page and then he looked at his version, the original again.

Phei had sighed, crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it over his shoulder with the quiet dignity as if that particular attempt had never happened... he repeated the same process for hundreds of time with the same results.

But the failed copying wasn’t even the worst part;

The worst part was that Of Longing; the resplendent, antiquarian, Primordial-ranked rune pen, sat in his grip and did absolutely nothing.

He’d tried to squeeze it, rotated it and even held it at different angles.

He whispered to it, which he would deny if anyone asked:

The pen remained magnificently, immovably dormant. It didn’t glow, didn’t hum, didn’t warm, didn’t so much as twitch. It just sat there, heavy and beautiful and ancient, with the serene indifference of something that had been waiting for millennia and was fully prepared to wait a few more.

"Come on," he’d muttered at it, somewhere around the forty-minute mark. "I’m right here. I’m holding you. What else do you want?"

Of Longing had wanted, apparently, absolutely nothing he currently possessed.

He’d tried channelling Void-Ice essence into it; pushing the cold crackling force down through his palm, willing the pen to respond, to acknowledge him, to produce even the smallest tremor of recognition.

The energy slid off Of Longing’s surface like rain off lacquered wood and dissipated into the carpet.

The pen didn’t even shiver...

...Phei’s jaw tightened, his fingers ached from gripping it.

He’d exhaled hard through his nose and sat back, rolling his shoulders, feeling the stiffness that had settled into his lower back from hunching over the Page for nearly an hour.

But he wasn’t disheartened.

Not even fractionally. And that surprised him; the absence of frustration where frustration should have been.

By every rational measure he should have been annoyed, disappointed, discouraged;

He had a Primordial-rank pen that wouldn’t activate, a Page of cosmic runes he couldn’t read; instead he felt hungry.

Each failure sharpened the hunger, drove it deeper into his sternum, made the desire burn hotter and more specific.

The pen wouldn’t respond? Good — that meant there was a threshold, and thresholds could be crossed.

The runes wouldn’t resolve? Good — that meant there was a distance, and distances could be closed.

He was grinning. Sitting on a carpet with a dead pen and he was grinning, because the failure itself was proof the path was real.

The System had confirmed it, the words reverberating through his skull when he’d tried to peer deeper into the Page:

[Host has no affinity/talent for Runes and the Original Tongue!]

He’d actually laughed at that. Out loud, alone in his penthouse, the sound bouncing off the marble — but his bark contained zero self-pity but a considerable amount of something that a therapist might have called compulsive defiance.

The celestial equivalent of a closed door and a turned lock. And Phei had looked at it and thought: good. Now I know where the door is.

So yes — while he possessed the Page that would guarantee his eventual ascent into rune mastery, and while Of Longing sat in his grip at Primordial rank with attributes that included Sentient and Bound and two more entombed behind question marks, Phei Ryujin Tiamat had no innate affinity for the path.

The destination was in his hands although the road had not yet been carved beneath his feet.

’Yet.’

After a question and answer session with the system, he’d come to realize that each stroke of even a single rune character is he could comprehend it, would give him all the basics there is about runes.

For example, take letter A for example, each stroke that made up that A, a single dash like that, contained millions of basic information there is about basics of rune mastery, so the whole letter A would teach Phei for example basic, intermediate and advanced lessons about the first step into rune mastery.

That was saying about hundreds of thousands of rune characters in a single character in Page of Infinity Runes!

And there were hundreds of thousands of characters on the Page.

The ones near the centre made his eyes burn — the pain mounting with vicious speed until his retinas felt like they were being peeled back from the inside.

He abandoned those.

The characters from the centre outward to where the scroll ended, he couldn’t even see — his vision refused to resolve them, the symbols blurring and sliding away from his focus no matter how hard he pinned.

He sat with all of this; the hunger gnawing, his leg completely dead now; Of Longing warm and silent in his aching hand.

And then the System spoke again:

[Ding! New Mission!]

[Mission: Research and learn more about the Original Tongue — speech and writing.]

[Reward: Mastery of the first 10 rune characters of the Page of Infinity Runes!]

His stomach dropped.

Not at the mission — though the mission was an erudite odyssey so preposterously vast it demanded he excavate a language that predated civilization and had been extinct longer than most gods had been breathing...

...At the reward.

Ten characters;

’Masteryof ten characters.’

His mouth went dry. His grip tightened on Of Longing until his knuckles whitened.

If each character harbored the depth he’d just learned about — millions of rune information — then ten would contain a volume of arcane erudition so immense his mind physically recoiled from trying to calculate it.

And from the system, he’d learned what made the number of the runes he could learn so terrifying;

Some rune masters — real war-causing realm wars rune masters whose mere existence could ignite territorial conflict between dimensions — had built entire illustrious careers on the knowledge contained in just the first two characters on this Page...

...And the lowest among Rune Masters were squatting at the bottom of that impossibly rare vocation, did not even possess full understand of the first character on the Page.

Just two characters on the page could forge a career... one could crown a master.

The System was offering him ten:

His heart was hammering; he could feel it in his throat, in his temples, in the tips of his numb fingers.

The hunger had gone from a burn to a roar.

Which made him wonder; quietly, reverently while the Page spread before him in its impenetrable calligraphic splendour; what the Page of Infinity Runes actually was.

How much knowledge did it contain; if the most venerated rune masters in existence had only ever grasped the first few characters?

What had the Super Abilities Mystery Box actually bestowed upon him?

He did not get an answer. The System offered nothing further. Of Longing offered nothing further and the Page too kept its own primordial counsel.

And then Emily’s voice cut through the dim reverence like a knife through silk — bright, warm, exasperated in the specific way Emily got exasperated when she had been knocking for thirty seconds and he hadn’t heard her because he was communing with ancient parchment again.

"Phei. Phei. We’re going to be late."