My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 416: The Game Board: The Red Door’s Reaction
Chapter 416: The Game Board: The Red Door’s Reaction
The void was not empty.
It was a living absence — an endless, starless expanse where light itself had been judged unworthy and banished like a peasant who’d dared speak out of turn.
No horizon, no up, no down, only the slow, deliberate pulse of something older than creation breathing in a rhythm that predated the concept of rhythm and would outlast it by several eternities.
Less lively since Phei was here.
In the centre of that boundless dark floated a single, colossal structure: a door.
It was red.
This red was deeper, heavier than Phei would remember if he saw it again — the colour of a wound that had never been allowed to heal, that had been kept open deliberately, fed, maintained, because whatever lived behind it wanted the wound.
Wanted the rawness.
Wanted to be reminded of something that had happened so long ago the memory had outlived the universe it was born in and was now just waiting for the next one to fuck up so it could laugh again.
The door stood thirty metres tall, carved from a single slab of material that had no name in any mortal tongue — not because mortals hadn’t tried to name it but because the material refused to be named, rejected language the way a body rejects a transplant from someone it despises.
Its surface was veined with shifting black sigils that moved like living smoke, forming and unforming constellations that had died before the first galaxy was born and were still salty about it.
A faint, rhythmic glow emanated from the hairline cracks along its edges — the only light in all the void — pulsing in perfect time with the slow, amused laughter that rolled out from behind it.
The laughter was the warmest thing in the void.
And the most terrifying.
Consort stood before the Red Door
, one hand resting on the hilt of her katana, the other loose at her side.
Her head was bowed in perfect deference.
She wore the same immaculate black-and-crimson uniform she had worn for centuries — the fabric untouched by space or void-winds, because space and void-winds had learned long ago that touching anything belonging to Consort’s Mistress was an act of suicide with extra steps.
Her posture was flawless. The posture of a weapon resting in its sheath, waiting for the hand that would draw it and paint the stars with blood.
Yet her fingers tightened imperceptibly on the sword’s grip each time the laughter swelled.
Not from fear.
Consort had forgotten what fear felt like sometime during the third millennium of her service — right around the time she’d carved the name of the last lesser god (despite being weaker in level) who’d tried to flirt with her Mistress into the surface of a dying sun.
The tightening was anticipation. Because when the Mistress laughed like this — this long, this richly, this delightedly — it meant the game had shifted in a way that pleased her.
And when the game pleased the Mistress, the pieces on the board tended to get captured by her Main Character in interesting, humiliating, and frequently erotic ways.
One Above was still laughing.
The sound echoed through the void like distant thunder wrapped in silk — rich, ancient, delighted, and utterly merciless.
It had been going on for nearly an hour now, each peal of amusement sending faint ripples through the darkness, making the sigils on the Red Door flare brighter for a moment before fading again like embarrassed stars.
“Ahhh~… I was right,” the voice finally sighed, warm and fond, as though speaking of a particularly clever child who had just solved a puzzle three centuries ahead of schedule and then set the puzzle on fire for fun.
“I was so very right about him. My little dragon
has finally shown his claws.”
Consort did not lift her head. “You predicted he would eventually make the Legacies shiver in fear, Mistress. But even you did not expect it to happen in a single night.”
Another soft chuckle, this one almost affectionate — the way a sculptor might laugh at clay that had shaped itself into something beautiful without being asked, then promptly fucked the sculptor’s wife in the studio.
“No. I truly did not. I thought we would have to wait years — decades, perhaps? — for him to grow bold enough to strike at the heart of their little empire. Instead…” The voice paused, savouring the words the way a connoisseur savours wine that has exceeded expectations and also happens to be made from the blood of her enemies.
“One girl and he castrated a legacy and other two legacies into cripples! One photograph and text of a bruised girl and he tore the sky open over the entire Main Paradise. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.”
The sigils on the Red Door pulsed faster for a moment.
Pleased. The door itself was pleased — which was never a good sign for anyone on the other side of it.
Consort’s voice remained calm, measured — the voice of a blade that had tasted ten thousand years of blood and had developed very strong opinions about the vintage. “In a few days the excess energy of his awakening will burn away. He will return to his baseline power level. When that happens, the Legacies may regroup. When they awaken their own bloodlines, they might—”
The laughter stopped.
A clean severance — as if the sound had been cut with a knife so sharp the air hadn’t noticed the wound yet.
The sudden silence was heavier than any noise the void had ever produced.
It pressed down on everything — on Consort’s shoulders, on the Red Door’s sigils, on the void itself — and even the nothing that filled this endless space seemed to hold its breath.
“You’re reading too much into this again, my dear Consort,” the voice behind the Red Door said, now soft and almost chiding.
The tone a mother uses with a child who has memorised the textbook but missed the lesson. “Always so cautious. Always planning three moves ahead of a game that has already been decided.”
A pause.
