My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 225 - 225: Dragon's Dead-Edge Molting

The bathroom was absurdly spacious—because of course it was; nothing in this penthouse was less than obscenely luxurious—with a walk-in shower big enough for a small orgy, a soaking tub that could comfortably fit four adults (or one dragon mid-molt and his dignity), and enough counter space to land a small aircraft if the pilot was feeling optimistic.

He’d locked the door. Closed the blinds. Turned on the exhaust fan to (hopefully) muffle any involuntary opera of agony.

The scaled card sat on the counter like a black jewel waiting to bite.

Phei took a breath.

Then another.

You’ve survived worse, he told himself.

Have you though? another part of him asked, voice dripping skepticism. Have you really?

Shut up.

He thought about Valentina, unconscious in her bed sixty floors below, satisfied and exhausted and marked in ways she’d feel for days—little bruises shaped like his fingers, teeth marks on her throat, the kind of soreness that made her smile stupidly when she woke up alone.

He thought about Sierra and Maddie, sleeping in his master bedroom two floors up, warm and safe and his—tangled together under silk sheets, breathing in sync, trusting him to keep the world from touching them.

He thought about Melissa, at the Maxton mansion, waiting for his next visit with that mix of hunger and guilt she still hadn’t learned to hide.

He thought about everyone who wanted him dead.

Everyone who underestimated him.

Everyone who thought the charity case from the Maxton household was just a pretty face with a big dick and no real power behind either.

Wrong.

They’re all wrong.

And after tonight, they’d be even more wrong.

“Activate,” he said out loud.

[TRANSFORMATION BEGINS]

The card didn’t dissolve.

It melted.

Black liquid seeped from its surface like blood from a fresh wound, pooling in his palm—hot, viscous, alive. The scaled texture writhed against his skin, each tiny ridge moving independently, searching, hungry.

Then it found his pores.

And it pushed inside.

Phei watched in horror as the liquid darkness sank into his palm, disappearing beneath his skin like ink into blotting paper. He could feel it—not just the heat but the movement, tendrils of molten shadow threading through his veins, spreading up his wrist, his forearm, racing toward his heart with terrible, purposeful speed.

It wasn’t painful.

Not yet.

It was wrong. Alien. Like something ancient and starving had crawled inside him and was now making itself at home in places nothing should ever touch.

The last of the card vanished into his skin.

For one second—one beautiful, merciful second—nothing happened.

Phei stood there, naked in the bathroom, staring at his unmarked palm, wondering if maybe the warnings had been exaggerated, if maybe this wouldn’t be so—

The fire started in his bones.

Not metaphorical fire.

Real fire.

Not the poetic kind.

Actual fire.

Inside his skeleton.

Like someone had cracked open his bones with a chisel, poured molten lava straight into the marrow cavities—thick, glowing, bubbling—and then, because the universe has a sick sense of humor and clearly hates him personally, lit the lava on fire too.

Not ordinary flames.

White-hot plasma—it erased the concept of existence.

Phei’s legs buckled like wet cardboard.

He didn’t fall—he collapsed. Knees slammed into tile with a wet crack that should have shattered bone, but the sound was drowned out by the far louder, far more intimate symphony of his own skeleton detonating from within.

Femurs grinding against themselves.

Tibias splintering like dry wood under a sledgehammer. Hip joints popping and reseating with sickening, wet snaps.

His spine was the worst.

It didn’t melt.

It boiled.

Vertebrae liquefying, then flash-solidifying, then liquefying again in endless, torturous cycles.

Each disc rupturing like overripe fruit, the jelly inside flash-cooking and exploding outward only to be dragged back in by reforming ligaments that felt like razor wire being pulled through raw meat.

Every nerve root along his spinal cord ignited simultaneously—electric agony so bright and sharp it felt like lightning rods had been hammered into every vertebra and then connected to a live power grid.

A sound tore out of him.

Not a scream.

Screams are human. Screams have shape, rhythm, intent.

This was a death-rattle gargle—wet, shredded, animal. It bubbled up through blood and spit.

His hands flew to the tile—fingers splayed, nails gouging deep furrows, snapping backward at unnatural angles as the small bones in his hands began their own private apocalypse.

Phalanges cracking like gunfire. Metacarpals grinding into powder and then reforming denser, heavier, wrong. Blood sprayed in fine arcs with every convulsion, painting abstract red signatures across the white marble.

His back arched—violent, obscene—spine bowing so far he felt ribs pop free from their cartilage moorings, then snap back into place with wet, sucking sounds.

Something in his thoracic cavity tore.

Literally. A ligament, a muscle, maybe his goddamn aorta for all he knew. The pain was so absolute it looped around into numbness for half a second before slamming back twice as hard.

Then it spread.

From bones to muscles.

Every single fiber. Every myofibril. Every sarcomere screaming as it was ripped apart at the molecular level and rebuilt in the same breath.

Achain reaction of microscopic implosions and explosions that made his entire body ripple and seize like something electrocuted and drowning at the same time.

Vision bleached to pure, merciless white.

Not darkness.

White.

The color of overload. Signals that his brain could no longer translate into anything but blinding static.

He couldn’t see the bathroom.

Couldn’t see his own thrashing limbs.

Couldn’t see the blood pooling wider and wider beneath him.

Only white.

Endless, searing, biblical white.

But the feeling—

God, the feeling never stopped.

Muscles weren’t burning—they were disassembling. Fibers unzipping, actin and myosin strands snapping like over-stretched rubber bands, then being force-threaded back together thicker, stronger, crueler. Every contraction was a fresh tearing. Every twitch was evisceration in miniature.

His jaw locked so hard the temporomandibular joints dislocated with twin pops—then relocated with grinding agony as new bone density flooded in.

A molar cracked down the middle; the root splintered; shards drove into his gums like glass needles.

Blood flooded his mouth in thick, syrupy waves—hot, metallic, choking.

Make it stop.

The thought wasn’t coherent anymore.

It was a loop. A prayer. A scream inside a scream.

MakeitstopmakeitstopMAKEITSTOP—

It didn’t.

His skin ignited last.

Every square inch. Every pore. Every free nerve ending.

It wasn’t flaying.

It was unmaking.

Nerves firing so fast and so hard they felt like white-hot wires being dragged through every layer of flesh simultaneously.

It was flaying + burning + acid bath + electrocution + being run over by a truck made of broken glass + having your soul sandpapered off with diamond grit—all at once.

And then the dial got twisted past maximum.

Phei’s body flung itself sideways in a final, catastrophic convulsion.

Skull cracked against the porcelain base of the toilet—sharp, bright impact that should have knocked him out cold.

It didn’t.

The transformation laughed at concussion.

***

Then the transformation caught up and the impact became background noise, barely perceptible beneath the symphony of agony conducting itself through every cell of his being.

How long?

How long had it been?

Minutes? Hours? Days?

Time had lost all meaning. There was only pain. Pain was the universe. Pain was existence. Pain was the floor beneath him and the air in his lungs and the blood in his veins and the thoughts in his skull.

He’d stopped making sounds at some point.

Not because it hurt less.

Because his throat had given out. Because he’d screamed so hard for so long that something had torn and now all that came out was a wet, rasping wheeze that didn’t sound human at all.

I’m dying, he thought. I have to be dying. Nothing can hurt this much and not be death.

But he wasn’t dying.

He was becoming.

And becoming, apparently, required that every part of him be unmade first.

The bathroom floor was cold against his cheek.

He’d ended up face-down at some point—didn’t remember how, didn’t remember the transition, didn’t remember anything except pain pain pain.

His body was still convulsing but weaker now, twitching rather than thrashing, his muscles too exhausted to maintain full rebellion.

Blood pooled beneath his face.

From his nose. From his ears. From his eyes, maybe—he couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know.

Sweat had soaked the tile around him, mixing with the blood into a pinkish puddle that he was currently lying in like the world’s most pathetic crime scene.

This is it, he thought distantly. This is how I die. Naked on a bathroom floor, covered in my own fluids, because a video game system told me to use a dragon card.

Maddie’s going to find me like this.

Sierra’s going to be furious.

Melissa’s going to—

Another wave of agony cut off the thought.

Worse than before.

Worse.

How can it be worse?

But it was—it was—something had started happening to his skull, to his brain, and if the rest of the transformation had been hellfire, then this was the sun itself reaching down and pressing its thumb directly into his grey matter.

Phei’s mouth opened in a silent scream.

His hands twitched against the bloody tile.

His eyes—still open, still white, still seeing nothing—leaked tears that might have been tears or might have been something else entirely.

The dragon was molting.

And molting, as it turned out, was just a pretty word for dying and being born again at the same time.

On the bathroom floor, surrounded by blood and sweat and the aftermath of transformation, Phei’s body continued to tear itself apart.

And rebuild.

And tear.

And rebuild.

Over and over.

Until there was nothing left of the boy who’d walked into this room.

Only whatever emerged when the fire finally stopped.