My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 414: The Silence After Gods
Chapter 414: The Silence After Gods
The academy had never known silence like this.
For the first time in its centuries-long history, the sprawling campus of Paradise Academy stood almost empty of its most sacred bloodlines.
The Main Legacy heirs — those golden children who had ruled the corridors like minor deities with trust funds and daddy’s private armies — were simply gone.
No Aiden striding through the halls with his entourage of lesser legacies trailing like remora on a shark.
No Anderson holding court in the senior lounge like he was auditioning for the role of “arrogant prince in every teen drama ever made.”
No Zack, no Brett, not Sierra, no Delilah, no Victoria.
Even the Immediates like Paige— cousins, younger siblings, the ones who usually clung to the coattails of power like barnacles on a yacht — had appeared for a single tense day, whispered among themselves in the parking lot like conspiracy theorists who’d just realized the conspiracy was real, then vanished again behind the high walls of Main Paradise.
The teachers noticed. The staff noticed.
The ordinary students noticed most of all.
Rumours swirled like smoke through the cafeterias and hallways, each one wilder, stupider, and more deliciously unhinged than the last.
Some said the club incident had finally caught up to them — that the three legacies who’d tried to assault Emily had been hospitalised in critical condition, and every other family had pulled their heirs into lockdown out of fear of retaliation from the Maxton charity case who’d apparently grown fangs and a vendetta overnight.
Others laughed it off — nervously, too loud, the laugh of people trying to convince themselves the sky wasn’t falling.
“What does a club fight have to do with the entire Main Paradise going dark?” they asked, while secretly refreshing their phones every thirty seconds for updates.
Because that was the strangest part: for four straight days, the exclusive roads that wound through the hills of Main Paradise had seen no movement at all.
Not a single luxury car, not a single blacked-out SUV, not even the usual late-night convoy of security vehicles that usually rolled through like they owned the asphalt.
The grand estates sat behind their gates like tombs. Lights burned behind curtains, but the gates remained closed.
The silence was so complete it felt unnatural — as if the entire expanse had been wrapped in cotton, dropped into a void, and told to shut the fuck up.
Whatever had happened in Main Paradise had stayed in Main Paradise.
And then there was the other thing only people in Main Paradise knew but nobody discussed openly — because discussing it out loud would make it real, and some truths were too dangerous to speak aloud but too important to forget.
The women of the Maxton Mansion were gone.
Not missing or kidnapped. Gone.
Melissa Maxton, Delilah Maxton, Victoria Maxton, Sienna Maxton if they could be called that anymore— all four had vanished the same night the sky above the Maxton Estate had turned black and three hundred years of windows had shattered simultaneously like the house itself had screamed.
Harold Maxton was alive — the rumour mill had confirmed that much — but he hadn’t been seen either, and the mansion’s staff had been sent home indefinitely with severance packages fat enough to buy silence.
The women had gone with Phei.
Everyone in Main Paradise knew it.
The way everyone knew the things they weren’t supposed to — through whispers between drivers, through maids who talked to other maids, through the specific, encrypted silence of Legacy families who understood that some truths were too dangerous to speak aloud but too important to forget.
Phei had come for them.
The whole Main Paradise had witnessed how he came — how the air had thickened, how the shadows had twisted, how his voice alone had made grown men cower behind furniture like children hiding from the dark.
And the four women had gone with him. Willingly.
Whatever that meant for the balance of power in Paradise, nobody was ready to calculate.
Not while the math still looked like it might end in blood.
And then there was Phei himself.
His absence at the academy was noted, but no one dared question it openly.
After all, he was still technically a Maxton — even if everyone had spent years calling him the charity case, the adopted stray, the boy who had been given a name but never the blood.
Now that name carried a different weight.
If the four Maxton children were missing the academy, so would Phei.
His popularity too had detonated across the internet like a supernova with a hard-on.
Videos and short clips of him walking through the academy corridors — calm, unhurried, long black coat flaring like the cape of a villain who’d already won — were everywhere.
Secret videos taken by breathless girls showed him turning a corner, the way the light seemed to bend around him, the way the air grew colder in his wake like winter had a crush.
But the real frenzy came from the basketball court footage: Phei rising into the air as though gravity had personally apologised to him, hanging there for impossible seconds, the ball leaving his fingertips in a perfect arc while the entire crowd lost its collective fucking mind.
The air-walk video had been slowed down, zoomed in, analysed frame by frame. Comment sections exploded.
“Is he using wires?”
“No wires you fool. Look at the shadow.”
“How does one use wires in basketball games you wanker.”
“Bro this is CGI.”
“Then why does the ball obey physics when he doesn’t?”
He was the most searched teenager on the planet for three straight days. Fan accounts multiplied overnight.
Edits set to dramatic music.
Theories ranging from “secret Olympic athlete” to “actual angel” to “he sold his soul for vertical and a ten-inch dick.”
The club video — recording that had the club — had lasted exactly two hours and seventeen minutes before it was scrubbed from every platform. No trace. No backups. No explanations.
Most people outside Paradise simply shrugged and filed it under “crazy fans thinking their idol is a god.”
But inside the academy, the silence was heavier.
And in the total, oppressive quiet of Main Paradise, the great families were moving.
They were not panicking.
They were recalculating.
Whitmore Estate sat high on its own hill, lights burning softly behind heavy curtains. Inside one of the upper bedrooms, Maddie Whitmore —the Chaos Demoness — lay face-down on her enormous bed, surrounded by a fortress of pillows and half-eaten snacks she had refused to touch.
She hadn’t left the room in four days.
Her parents had issued the order the moment she came home: stay inside, speak to no one, wait.
At first, she had laughed.
Her family had always been the wild ones — the ones who threw parties that lasted until sunrise, who treated Legacy politics like a game, who had shrugged when their daughter announced she was sharing a man with Sierra and probably a dozen others in the future like she was announcing the weather.
“If he makes you happy, baby, we don’t give a fuck who he is,” her father had said, sipping whiskey.
Her mother had only grinned and asked for details.
So, the lockdown wasn’t about Phei.
It was about what had happened after she left the club.
