My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 856: Three Ancients of the Island

The very top of Infinity Chaos Hotel stood so high above Hell’s Paradise Island that even a titan would have looked like nothing more than a black speck from the streets below, like a tiny mark against the sky and mistake in the eye...

Up here, the world had no kindness left to pretend with.

The wind screamed across the rooftop in violent sheets, not blowing so much as hunting, each gust sharpened by altitude until it seemed less like weather and more like a punishment the sky had been saving for anyone arrogant enough to climb this high.

A normal human body would not have lasted a minute. Clothes would have gone first, torn loose and whipped into the night like cheap offerings.

Skin would have followed soon after. Flesh, breath, warmth, all of it peeled away and scattered through the air until whatever remained of the poor idiot became confetti for a funeral nobody had agreed to attend.

The cold was worse.

Hell’s Paradise Island was already famous for that ancient chill beneath its luxury, that strange deep cold rising from forest and lake like something old breathing through the land.

But at the summit of Infinity Chaos Hotel, where nothing stood between the rooftop and the open sky, the cold became cruel enough to feel intelligent. It moved with the wind in perfect, appalling harmony, invisible blades sliding through the air, each gust sharp enough to turn a mortal’s lungs into frost on the first inhale.

Yet Yuzuki Hayashi stood there as if the sky had merely become a little dramatic.

The rooftop stretched beneath her boots, dark and broad, the highest crown of the hotel washed in moonlight and city-glow.

Far below, Hell’s Paradise Island glittered like a jewel cut by sinners with excellent taste, its towers, streets, private resorts, and expensive little vanities glowing against the surrounding wilderness.

Humanity had carved a city out of something ancient and hostile, then covered it in marble, glass, money, and marketing, because apparently humans could not encounter a mystery without trying to build premium suites on top of it.

From one side, Hell’s River curved across the island, wide and clear, its surface silvered beneath the distant lights:

Even from this impossible height, its shape was difficult to read fully, but the strange truth of it was known to anyone who had studied the island’s geography for longer than five minutes and had not immediately given up to pursue a simpler career, like assassination or tax law.

Hell’s River began at Hell’s Paradise Lake...

Then it flowed outward, stretching through the island’s interior before threading itself toward the narrow channels near Paradise proper. From there, instead of escaping into the sea like a normal river with basic manners, it curved back across the land and returned, patiently and impossibly, to the very lake that had birthed it.

A river with no true mouth like a circle of water that began and ended in the same place, as if even nature here had looked at ordinary geography and decided it lacked ambition.

The lake itself was worse.

Hell’s Paradise Lake sat deep within the whisper of island’s interior, quiet and vast, with no visible connection to the outer world. No tributary fed it, no outlet drained it or any system of rivers or see explained its existence.

Its edges were known only where humans had dared to stand near them, and its depths remained unmeasured, uncharted, and arrogant enough to stay that way. It had existed before the Legacy families arrived with their names, money, flags, and delusions of ownership.

’It would remain long after their bones had stopped pretending ancestry mattered.’

The lake simply was:

’Ancient.’

Silent and unhelpful in the way truly powerful things tended to be.

On the other side of the island, the Endless Forest pressed forcefully against the habitable land like a living wall. Trees stretched across the forbidden zones in endless ranks, dark canopies folding into one another until distance became meaningless.

No one had ever fully mapped it and no expedition that went too far returned with anything useful, assuming it returned at all.

The forest did not surround the island like decoration. It was the island. The city, the resorts, the private estates, the obscene towers, all of that was merely the strip humanity had managed to claw out before the wilderness stopped allowing negotiation.

’And endless lake on one side... an endless forest on the other.’

Hell’s Paradise Island sat between them like a coin caught between two fingers belonging to something far older than man.

Standing above it all, wrapped in moonlight and lethal air, Yuzuki found herself wondering, not for the first time, whether the forest and lake were truly endless, or whether the two were the island itself that simply went on forever beyond the borders humans had the courage to name.

The thought was absurd. Geography did not work that way. Islands ended. Forests ended. Everything on Earth had a limit eventually, because Earth was a planet and planets, despite what rich men believed, did not usually rearrange themselves around family pride.

And yet Hell’s Paradise Island had always made ordinary certainty feel underdressed.

Yuzuki sighed softly.

The sound vanished into the wind before it could travel far.

’It really is beautiful.’

Not the city, though the city was beautiful too in its vulgar, expensive way.

Hell’s Paradise knew how to glitter. Its towers rose like polished weapons. Its hotels, clubs, private residences, and forbidden estates wore wealth with the careless arrogance of people who had long ago stopped checking prices:

But even all of that, all the marble and glass and golden light humanity had piled onto this strange land, could not compete with the three things holding the island in their ancient hands.

The river.

The lake.

The forest.

Nature remained the final luxury, the only one money could imitate but never truly own. Everything humanity built beside it looked temporary. Charming, perhaps. Ambitious; occasionally impressive, the way a child’s model palace might impress adults forced to praise it at dinner.

’But temporary all the same.’

Unfortunately, Yuzuki could not spend the night admiring mysteries that were not currently part of her assignment.

There was another beauty below demanding her attention; one nature itself had apparently failed to produce before and then overcorrected with insulting enthusiasm.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat.

’My so-called Young Master... The only Prince!’

Yuzuki’s mouth flattened slightly.

’It is genuinely unfair for a man to look like that.’

Not that she was infatuated with him...

’Please... I am a professional.’

She had a sword, a mandate, generations of Hayashi discipline sharpened into her bones, and enough pride to strangle a lesser emotional inconvenience before it became a problem.

But a woman could acknowledge facts without collapsing into poetry like some tragic court maiden who had seen a jawline and lost access to reason.

And the fact was simple.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat was beautiful in a way that felt like poor resource management from the universe.

’He truly is a Dragon he’s destined to be...’

No one person needed that face and no bloodline required that much visual tyranny.

There were starving models in the world, actors whose entire careers depended on cheekbones, heirs raised like decorative weapons, and somehow the universe, actually, the cosmos, had still chosen to concentrate that much dangerous beauty into one young man already carrying the most powerful dragon bloodline, impossible power, and enough women orbiting him to make romance look like a logistical department.

’Excessive, almost.’

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A/N:Pay extra attention to the three; the river, lake and forest, they hold much things related to the plot.