Chapter 1469: Above the World, Just Us

By the time Melissa realized Phei had never possessed the slightest intention of taking the shortest route to the hospital, the city had already fallen so impossibly far beneath them that complaining about it felt somewhat pointless.

He could have ended the journey before it properly began; the True Void Steps could have carried him across the necessary distance almost instantly, a portal would have made the matter embarrassingly easy, and Phei had accumulated enough increasingly unreasonable ways of insulting distance that transportation had become less a problem and more a question of which law of space he felt like disrespecting that morning.

Instead, after stealing Melissa into the sky and unveiling his Genesis Angel wings purely because she had chosen the car, he had continued upward—

—and upward.

The enormous towers of Hell’s Paradise Island gradually lost their arrogance beneath them... slowly everything diminished beneath Phei’s ascent until its impossible height no longer looked quite so impossible.

Melissa eventually looked down, then immediately decided she had looked down enough for several minutes.

"Phei."

"Hm?"

"How high are you planning to take your pregnant wife before you remember hospitals generally exist closer to the ground?"

Phei glanced downward as though the vast distance beneath them had only just occurred to him. "We’re making excellent progress."

"We are moving away from the hospital."

"Vertical progress is still progress." Phei smiled beautifully.

That was becoming her problem.

The clouds reached them soon afterward, great white banks rolling across the morning in enormous quiet formations. Phei climbed through them without slowing, and for several breaths the world disappeared into pale mist. Moisture jeweled briefly across his white hair before the air around Melissa warmed and cleared beneath his control, leaving only a cool kiss against her cheeks.

Clouds rolled from horizon to horizon like a second continent suspended beneath the morning sky, their peaks gilded by sunlight while deep valleys between them carried faint blue shadows. Above waited nothing except enormous open heaven, a blue so clean and unbroken that Earth itself seemed very far away.

Only Melissa, Phei and the occasional immense sweep of his wings.

He carried her in a princess hold, one arm securely beneath her thighs while the other wrapped around her back and kept her comfortably pressed against his chest. Melissa had expected flight at this height to be colder and considerably less romantic, perhaps involving hair repeatedly entering her mouth while she questioned every decision that had led her into the arms of the Young Dragon with an allergy to normal transportation.

Instead, Phei controlled the air around her with effortless precision.

The sharper wind never reached her. It moved around them, brushed softly across her skin and lifted only a few strands of hair from her shoulders before slipping away. Even the thinning cold of the upper sky seemed to retreat from the space occupied by Melissa, leaving her warm enough that within minutes she stopped thinking about the impossible amount of empty air beneath her feet.

His wings made ignoring everything else very difficult anyway.

The left stretched outward behind him in a magnificent sweep of white and gold, immaculate white nearest his back before the layered feathers gradually deepened into warm celestial gold farther along their span. Blissful morning sunlight rolled over them in long luminous waves; each feather possessed its own living brilliance, and faint currents of light travelled through the plumage whenever Phei altered his direction.

The Life Essence sleeping within that wing remained completely restrained.

His right wing carried another kind of beauty entirely.

Black felt far too ordinary a word for it.

The darkness of those feathers had depth. Light reached them and seemed to lose certainty, brightness thinning around the vast serrated plumage before disappearing into a blackness that suggested something deeper waited beneath ordinary shadow.

The End slept completely beneath Phei’s command, silent and obedient while the immense wing moved with the same smooth grace as its golden twin.

Life and End— only he knew!

One on either side of him.

The two wings opened and folded in perfect harmony, opposite halves belonging so naturally to the same existence that Melissa found herself staring at them again and again.

She had already been stunned when Phei first revealed them:

—seeing them fully spread beneath an empty heaven was something else entirely.

Her arms slowly tightened around his neck. She rested her cheek against his chest and allowed herself to sink deeper into his hold, her violet eyes wandered over the clouds below before returning to his wings whenever sunlight struck them at another impossible angle.

Minutes passed.

The tension gradually left her body.

Phei noticed.

Seeing her like that stirred something warm inside him.

Melissa had spent enough of her life enduring other people’s decisions, this morning he wanted her to simply enjoy something: "I see you’ve forgotten we’re technically supposed to be going somewhere," Phei murmured eventually.

Melissa continued watching the clouds. "I remember."

"You don’t sound particularly concerned about being late."

"I’m pregnant. Hospitals are legally required to forgive me."

Phei laughed. "I don’t think that’s how appointments work."

"It should be."

He adjusted his hold beneath her thighs when she shifted closer. "Interesting argument from the woman who chose the car."

Melissa finally looked up at him. "Because you cheated."

"I offered you a choice."

"You offered me a choice before showing me the enormous Angel wings. You manipulated the vote."

"I improved the proposal."

Melissa’s mouth twitched. "You are impossible."

"And yet here you are."

"Because you kidnapped me into the sky."

"Romantically."

She studied him for a heartbeat and apparently concluded that arguing with Phei while he wore that expression was a misuse of her morning.

So Melissa leaned upward and kissed him.

That worked considerably better.

Phei’s flight slowed almost immediately. His wings opened wider behind them and caught the high currents until their movement became a smooth glide across the sunlit sky. Melissa’s hand settled against the side of his face while their lips remained together, and for a while there was no hospital, no schedule and no reason for either of them to hurry; it was soft and unhurried.

Melissa eventually drew back with a quiet smile and looked around the empty sky. "How high did you actually take us?"

"High enough."

"That’s not a measurement."

"It’s the only measurement relevant to my plan."

Her eyes narrowed. "You have a plan?"

Phei laughed and carried them slightly higher.

The altitude was only part of it.

Long before the clouds disappeared beneath them, Phei had released the Perfect Domain.

The invisible domain expanded through the surrounding space with such smoothness that Melissa felt nothing change.

The privacy it created was absolute enough to satisfy Phei.

Eyes searching from afar would find nothing if he did not permit them to find him. Any kind and form of perception could sweep across the region and continue onward without understanding what had been missed. Anyone who had seen him leave Infinity Chaos with Melissa could reasonably guess where they were eventually going.

What happened between departure and arrival was nobody else’s business. As far as the outside world was concerned, Phei and Melissa had disappeared somewhere along the journey.

Naturally, several beings noticed.

The Monster found the absence first when her perception reached where Phei should have been, touched the place he occupied and discovered nothing there.

She stopped.

Monster was powerful enough to understand when emptiness represented absence and when emptiness had been deliberately placed in front of her.

Phei had left the penthouse carrying Melissa.

Everyone knew they were heading toward their first prenatal appointment.

Monster considered those facts for only a short while before withdrawing her awareness completely. Anahita followed suite and withdrew.

Phei wanted privacy.

More specifically, he wanted privacy around Melissa and the child she carried.

As Anahita withdrew, the Void-Djinn always accompanying her proved somewhat less socially gifted and it was also unable to see anything.

That was apparently the Void-Djinn equivalent of somebody’s mother silently leaving the supermarket aisle after her children had embarrassed themselves.

It hesitated, then followed her after she withdrew and Anahita smiled at that when Lucienne confirmed.

Melissa noticed his amusement.

One finger traced absent circles against the fabric over his chest. "What are you smiling about?"

Phei looked down. "Was I smiling?"

"You’ve been doing it for several seconds."

"Thinking."

"That usually causes trouble."

Phei looked almost offended. "Remarkably disrespectful thing to say while I’m carrying you several kilometres above the planet."

Melissa kissed the edge of his jaw. "You would catch me."

"Obviously."

"Then my statement stands."

He laughed again.

The amusement remained, though the thoughts underneath it gradually darkened.

Anahita’s presence had not surprised Phei.

Among the memories now open to him were enough fragments concerning Anahita and what Marcus expected from her and exactly what purpose she was meant to serve while remaining close to him. By the time Phei left Infinity Chaos Hotel with Melissa, he already knew there was another pair of eyes somewhere upon the island trying to keep track of him.

Knowing that made finding her considerably easier.

Phei’s True Void Sense spread through the surrounding emptiness while his own perception followed, slipping across the island from angles ordinary senses could never approach. He did not search blindly for a hidden cultivator among millions of living presences—

He searched for something far more distinctive:

World Essence.

Anahita had been created entirely from it.

World Essence formed the very substance of what she was, and after everything the World Essence itself had yielded to his control.

At this point, Phei could nearly arrogantly say World Essence belonged to him.

So when Anahita’s presence touched the edge of his awareness, pinpointing her among the vastness of Hell’s Paradise Island was hardly some impossible hunt. Her existence stood apart from everything surrounding her, a concentration of World Essence wrapped in the shape of a woman, and once True Void Sense found that distinction, Phei’s perception settled upon her with little difficulty.