My Taboo Harem!

Like a kitten discovering court politics and immediately choosing violence.

Phei smiled at her.

Amber narrowed her eyes.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"You are smiling."

"You are cute when you investigate me."

"I am not investigating you."

"You have looked between me and your mother sixty times in two minutes."

Amber’s cheeks warmed: "Maybe your face just looks guilty."

"My face looks godly handsome. Guilt is a separate matter."

Victoria made a small sound that might have been a laugh strangled before birth.

Sierra did laugh softly.

Amber glared harder, which only made Phei’s smile worse.

"You are helpless; you just had to go and do that, didn’t you?"

"And yet you keep looking."

"That is because I do not trust you."

Phei leaned slightly closer, voice dropping into something warmer and more shameless. "Careful, Amber. Distrust looks very good on you. If you keep wearing it with that dress, I may start encouraging bad habits, involving whatever you suspect I did and you too."

Her lips parted then closed; a color rose higher on her cheeks.

Sierra covered her smile with her glass.

Victoria looked away as if refusing to witness foolishness, though the faint curve at her mouth betrayed her.

Amber recovered by folding her arms beneath her chest, a move that made the dress pull in ways Phei absolutely noticed and absolutely should not have enjoyed in the middle of a birthday gathering. He noticed anyway and enjoyed how the cross of her hand accentuated her braless breast making her little peaks spear the dress; he did not look away; he was not about to develop manners over a neckline now.

"You are not distracting me," she said.

Phei’s gaze dipped once, then returned to her eyes with criminal innocence. "I would never."

"You just did."

"I admired the structural honesty of your argument."

"That makes no sense. It sounds like nonsense."

"It is nonsense with confidence. Very common among men in power."

Victoria finally laughed.

Amber tried not to.

Failed.

Before Phei could continue being a menace, Hayashi appeared at his side with the silence of a man who had spent decades proving doors were optional.

"Young Master," the elderly manager murmured.

Phei turned slightly. "Hayashi?"

Hayashi leaned close enough to whisper.

The message was short.

Phei’s expression changed and smiled.

"Good," he said quietly. "Bring him in through the main reception. I’ll come."

Hayashi bowed and withdrew.

Phei turned to Emily, who stood a little distance away speaking now with Elena and Patricia.

She looked composed in a fitted dark-blue dress that shaped her slender frame with clean elegance, the fabric narrowing neatly at her waist before falling in graceful lines on her curves.

Phei caught her eye, she understood immediately and excused herself with a polite smile.

Amber looked at him. "Where are you going?"

"To welcome someone."

"Someone suspicious?"

"You ask that as if anyone in this hotel is not suspicious."

Sierra smiled. "Will you be long?"

"Partly."

Amber’s gaze narrowed again. "Why are you being vague?"

"Because mystery makes me more attractive."

"You were already attractive before the mystery."

The words left her mouth before she could stop them.

Phei’s smile turned slow as Amber realized the mistake but Sierra looked delighted.

Victoria looked like she was seconds away from abandoning all of them.

Phei stepped closer to Amber and kissed her forehead gently. Then, because the forehead was mercy and Phei had never been able to resist pressing an advantage, he let his mouth linger half a breath at her temple, close enough that his next words arrived warm against her skin.

"Thank you," he said softly. "We’ll be back."

Amber stared at him, stunned and flustered and furious about all three, her pulse betraying her at the throat where his attention had absolutely, criminally noted it before he straightened. Phei turned before she could recover enough to attack him verbally, and Emily joined him at his side as they left the gathering.

Behind them, Sierra laughed under her breath.

Victoria sighed. "He is going to become unbearable."

Amber touched her forehead with the back of her fingers, still blushing, then touched her temple where the warmth still sat. "Become?"

****

At the entrance reception of the private hall, a tall elderly man stood with his hands set on his hips, looking into the gathering as if he had arrived at the edge of a storm and found the weather amusing.

He was tall in the way old trees were tall; not merely height, but age held upright.

His suit was formal, dark and immaculate, tailored with a refinement that did not beg for wealth because it had outlived the need to impress anyone. Silver hair swept back from a sharp, weathered face, and his eyes, calm and bright beneath heavy lids, moved across the reception with the unhurried precision of someone who could count every threat, every secret and every absurd romance in the room before the music changed.

The corners of his mouth lifted.

So this was what the little boy had become:

He watched Phei approach with Emily beside him, and despite himself, the old man’s smile deepened.

’Little boy.’ That phrase no longer fit not even as memory.

Phei had grown past it with offensive godly thoroughness. He had surpassed his father not only in beauty, but in presence. The face alone was ridiculous enough. Handsome was too small a word like a poor little adjective people used when language had collapsed under pressure.

There was something godly in the structure of him now, something polished by bloodline, sharpened by awakening, and made worse by the effortless confidence with which he moved.

But the face was not the problem:

The presence was.

The old man’s eyes narrowed very slightly; in the span of two seconds, he scrutinized Phei once, twice and a third time until the tenth.

’Absurd.’

No Immortal being of his standing should need that many looks at a boy barely standing at this stage of power. Even the most talented individuals announced themselves in familiar ways. Genius had patterns. Bloodline had taste. Fate left marks. Even monsters had categories; the universe, lazy thing that it was, liked recycling design.

But Phei did not sit neatly inside any of them.

Interesting. Very interesting.

The old man’s smile thinned into something more serious.

Phei was monstrous.

He did not know it yet and that was amusing to the old man.

Or perhaps it was dangerous.

The old man’s gaze remained upon Phei, and the longer he watched, the less the youth resembled anything that should have been permitted to exist within the Mortal Realm.

The room itself had begun to bend around him.

There was no visible distortion in the walls, the change was quieter than that, subtle enough to escape the senses of everyone present and yet so profound that the old Immortal felt the hairs along his arms rise beneath his sleeves.

Existence itself was making room for the boy.

The women gathered around Phei too revealed only the most obvious portion of it. Their bodies inclined toward him without conscious intention, their shoulders turning fraction by fraction, their gazes returning no matter how often pride dragged them elsewhere. Their souls leaned toward his presence.

When his attention settled upon one woman, the others became quietly aware of its absence.

It was not charm.

Phei’s presence spoke directly to the blood, the soul, and those ancient instincts that had existed long before dignity learned to clothe desire in restraint.

These women did not merely admire Phei; their bodily desires had already reached conclusions their pride had not yet been informed of.

Whatever slept within the Young Dragon’s bloodline did not ask them to desire him. It simply entered the oldest chambers of their womanhood and awakened what had already been waiting there, LUST, turning attraction into instinct difficult to resist with every passing breath.

Yet even that was insignificant beside what the surrounding world was doing.

Mana Essence gathered around Phei in waves.

At first, the old Immortal mistook it for ordinary elemental affinity, the natural obedience offered to a prodigy cultivator only seen a thousand years but then he noticed the desperation within Mana Essence’s movement.

The mana was not merely approaching him but trying to enter.

Streams of it rushed toward Phei from every side, flowing from every direction and crowded against him with almost frantic devotion, pressing toward his meridians as though answering a summons he had never consciously issued.

But the moment they touched him, something within Phei refused them.

The mana recoiled and scattered violently from his body, fleeing several paces as if frightened by whatever it had brushed against. For a heartbeat, the space around him would become unnaturally empty then the mana would return.

Again.

And again.

It rushed toward him, failed to enter, recoiled, circled, and came back with the mindless persistence of rivers repeatedly attempting to climb a mountain. The old man had never witnessed such behavior:

Unless Phei’s body was refusing what his deeper existence demanded.

The old Immortal’s pupils narrowed even he could attract that much mana, even his own seemed desperate to rush to Phei.