My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 454: The Dragon Heart Scale
Chapter 454: The Dragon Heart Scale
The Maxton Mansion’s grand living room — once a cathedral of marble, crystal chandeliers, and old-money arrogance — was now a tomb of ruin.
Four days after Phei’s rage had torn through it like the wrath of an angry god, the space remained exactly as he had left it: walls cracked in fractal patterns of black ice that refused to melt, floors cratered where bodies had been slammed, furniture reduced to splinters and dust.
Shattered glass still glittered like fallen stars across the marble.
The air itself still tasted of ozone and void-frost, cold enough to make breath plume even in the middle of summer.
Yet tonight the wreckage had been repurposed.
A ritual circle had been erected in the exact centre of the devastation, as though the family had decided to worship at the site of their own desecration.
Twelve hooded figures stood in a perfect ring around the altar.
Each wore heavy black robes stitched with silver thread that caught no light, faces hidden beneath deep cowls.
In their gloved hands they held tall iron staffs topped with living blue flame — not fire, but something older, colder, a spectral azure that burned without heat and whispered in a language that made the mind itch.
The flames pulsed in perfect unison, slow and deliberate, like the heartbeat of something vast and submerged.
At the heart of the circle rose a single pillar of dark, ancient stone — obsidian-black, veined with veins of liquid mercury that moved like blood.
Ancient runes had been carved into its surface in jagged, furious strokes, the handwriting so crude and violent it looked as though the stone itself had been clawed open by desperate fingers.
The runes glowed faintly with the same abyssal indigo as the flames.
Upon that pillar lay Danton Maxton.
The boy was unconscious, athletic frame stripped completely naked, limbs spread wide and bound by thick chains of blackened iron. The same runes from the pillar had been seared into the metal links, glowing faintly each time his chest rose and fell.
His wrists and ankles were pulled taut, muscles still faintly defined even in repose, skin pale and glistening with ritual oils. Between his spread thighs rested a small, rectangular box no larger than a jewellery case.
It was alive.
Its surface consisted of overlapping scales that shifted lazily between shades of ocean azure, deep sapphire, and the crushing indigo of the deepest trenches where light had never reached. The box was half-open, leaking a thin, constant stream of glowing blue light that pooled on the stone like liquid starfire.
The tallest hooded figure stepped forward.
He removed his hood with deliberate slowness.
The face beneath was that of a man in his late forties even though he was older— sharp jaw, silver at the temples, aristocratic bone structure — but the eyes were ancient, tired, and filled with something close to religious fanaticism.
This was not Harold.
This was one of the true old Maxton elders, one who had walked the earth when the current Legacy heirs were still centuries from being born.
He turned to face the circle, voice low and resonant.
“Begin.”
The eleven others moved as one. They stepped closer, placing their free hands firmly on the elder’s shoulders, forming a living chain of flesh and power.
The blue flames on their staffs flared brighter, the light crawling up their arms like liquid.
A second figure — smaller, unmistakably female — stepped from the outer ring and approached the box.
With reverent hands she lifted the lid fully open.
The light that erupted was apocalyptic.
An intense, blinding azure radiance exploded upward like a newborn ocean sun. It was not mere brightness — it was presence.
The light screamed. It clawed at the ceiling, threatening to punch straight through the roof and tear the night sky open the way Phei had done days earlier.
Reality itself pulsed violently around it — walls bowed inward, the ruined marble floor rippled like water, the air warped and stretched until it screamed in protest.
The entire mansion trembled as though the earth itself was trying to reject what was happening inside it.
But they’d been ready.
From the cracked ceiling above, a massive magical circle with glowing runes ignited — a perfect, glowing mandala of interlocking runes in the same crude, furious script.
It flared once, twice, then slammed downward like a cage of light.
The azure radiance slammed into the cage barrier and was contained, trapped, forced to churn and roil within the living room like a bottled hurricane. The pressure was so immense that the stone pillar beneath Danton cracked audibly, yet the boy did not stir.
Through closed eyes, the elder reached into the box.
His hand disappeared into the searing light.
Power surged.
It hit him first — raw, primordial, the concentrated essence of something that had once ruled skies and oceans before humanity learned to crawl.
The elder’s body locked rigid. Veins bulged across his neck and forehead, glowing the same azure. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the energy tried to tear him apart from the inside, to rip his soul into pieces and scatter them across dimensions.
The chain reacted instantly.
The power flooded through every linked hand, through every shoulder, through every body in the circle. Eleven other figures convulsed as one, robes billowing, blue flames roaring upward.
Some screamed. Some bled from the eyes.
The shared burden kept them alive, but barely — the energy was too vast, too ancient, too hungry for any single mortal vessel. It wanted to consume, to expand, to end things.
The female figure moved quickly.
She stepped beside the elder, reached into the blinding light with him, and together their hands closed around something small and impossibly heavy.
They guided it — trembling, straining — toward Danton’s mouth.
The boy’s lips parted subconsciously, even in his drugged sleep, as though some deeper instinct recognized what was coming.
The moment it passed his lips, the light vanished.
The entire room plunged into near-darkness, the only illumination now the faint blue flames on the staffs and the glowing runes on the pillar.
What they had fed him was a single, palm-sized scale.
Azure blue, edged in living sapphire, its surface rippling like ocean water under moonlight. Deep within its core, almost too faint to see, pulsed a single thread of weak, golden light.
The Dragon Heart Scale.
The original. The first. The scale from which every other dragon’s scale on the dragon’s body is born — the heart-scale of the primordial Azure Dragon whose death had left his unawakened Heart-Scale fractured and hungry and in hands of Maxtons!
Danton’s unconscious body gave a single, soft golden glow.
Then the azure light
detonated inside him.
His back arched violently against the chains. Every muscle locked. His veins lit up from within, glowing the same crushing ocean blue.
The pillar beneath him cracked wider.
The magical circle above flared, straining to contain the newborn power now raging through the boy’s veins.
From within the circle, one hooded figure stepped forward and lowered his cowl.
Harold Maxton.
His face was still swollen and bruised from Phei’s fists — one eye bloodshot and half-closed, lips split and scabbed, cheekbones fractured in three places — yet the smile that spread across his ruined mouth was radiant, triumphant, unholy.
It was the smile of a man who had just watched his greatest enemy hand him the keys to eternity.
If Phei had been standing there, he would have understood in an instant why Harold had beaten him bloody every single time the boy had tried to speak his true name.
Why he had forced him to deny it, to call himself “Phei Maxton” instead of the name that had burned in his blood since the moment of his conception.
It had all been preparation.
To make the Dragon Heart Scale forget him as it’s true heir for Nine Prime years.
A chained being — a witch — silver hair spilling from beneath her hood like frozen moonlight, wrists and ankles manacled in rune-etched iron that glowed with the same abyssal indigo — began to chant.
Her voice was clear, ancient, carrying the weight of centuries spent in darkness and the sorrow of a thousand stolen futures.
{“With the forceful awakening of a Ryujin Tiamat Bloodline within the young dragon… without first reclaiming his father’s the Dragon Heart Scale of his father… the Dragon Heart Scale is left with no heir… and goes out to seek its other True Heir compatible with it!”}
Danton’s body flared.
The azure light inside him detonated — not outward, but inward, then outward again, a violent cycle of expansion and contraction that made the obsidian pillar shudder and the runes on the altar screamed in agony.
The light from him tried to tear through the ceiling, through the roof, to the sky itself — a column of pure ocean divinity that threatened to rip the night open and drown the entire world in endless, crushing blue.
Reality bent violently around it: walls bowed inward like paper caught in a vacuum, the floor rippled in slow, liquid waves of black ice that rose and fell like tidal surges, the air itself stretched and tore, screaming in a thousand layered voices that no human ear could fully hear.
The pressure was apocalyptic — the mansion groaned as though the earth itself was trying to reject what was happening inside it, for a moment shorter than an instant the sky above the estate splitting open in jagged black rifts that swallowed stars whole.
