My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 502: Making an Effort
Chapter 502: Making an Effort
When things came easy, people got careless.
That was one of those laws nobody bothered teaching because life usually preferred practical demonstrations.
Phei knew it the way people knew gravity—from repeated personal humiliation.
Once, and you called it luck.
Twice, and you got superstitious.
Three times, and gratitude started packing its bags.
By the fifth, you were already negotiating with reality.
By the tenth, you were strutting around like the universe had finally recognized talent when in fact it had simply made a clerical error.
That was how entitlement grew.
Not loudly or once. It didn’t arrive in a crown and cape announcing itself like a stage villain. It settled into your bones quietly, like mould in expensive walls
It lived in the way you stopped asking questions because you had begun to confuse wanting something with being owed
it. In the way “no” started sounding less like refusal and more like a scheduling inconvenience.
Dating and pursuing a woman, as it turned out, operated on much the same principle.
Women came to Phei now.
That was simply the shape of his life after the system got involved and decided that turning a formerly underfed charity-case disaster into a weaponized hallucination would be funny.
They came in all the usual ways people pretended were accidental. Lobby collisions. Elevator timing.
Lingering eye contact stretched just a fraction too long.
Invented reasons to remain in his orbit as if proximity itself might someday qualify as destiny.
Subtlety varied.
Results did not.
When he made an effort—actual effort, not just standing there and allowing nature, fate, and female poor judgment to do their jobs—the process was almost embarrassingly efficient.
Show up. Dress well. Say the right thing at the right time with the right look in the eyes. Smile like you knew something they wanted to learn firsthand.
The machinery did the rest. Charm slid into place. His passive abilities followed. Outcomes became less a matter of possibility and more a matter of administrative sequencing.
Which was why the first ’no’ hit the way it did.
Not because he’d never been denied before. Life had denied him plenty: food, comfort, dignity, parental affection last ten years, social mobility, and on at least one memorable occasion, basic footwear.
But this was different. This was a romantic no, delivered after they had already crossed the line most people used as the finish line.
That changed the geometry of the wound.
It wasn’t a casual refusal. Not the sort that bruised your ego, inspired a moody playlist, and became somebody
else’s problem by next Thursday.
This was a clean no. A real one and that made a him realize he’d quietly built a cathedral to his own inevitability and was now standing in the rubble because one woman had looked at all that grand architecture and said, very calmly, absolutely not.
And she had said it after sex.
Not during, which would have been rude in a more conventional way.
After.
Phei understood why, which was honestly the most inconvenient part. Her reasons were solid. Irritatingly solid.
Decades of surviving in a world that punished softness and fed on hesitation had taught her to wrap care in steel and call it sense.
She was protecting him—from the politics attached to her name, from the wreckage that trailed behind the Ashford Madam, from the sort of scrutiny that stuck to people like industrial grease and never quite washed off.
It wasn’t cruelty.
It was affection wearing body armor and carrying a knife.
That did not help.
If anything, it made the whole thing worse, because a rejection born from indifference could be written off as I am not her taste.
A rejection born from concern was far more dangerous… it got into your head and started renting space and made arguments.
And Phei, being seventeen and male and therefore professionally vulnerable to spectacularly confident bad decisions, reached the obvious conclusion: She will be my woman!
The Dragon Rod had already done what it did best. That first night, that first claiming, had sealed something deeper than consent forms and dinner dates and whatever else civilized society liked to pretend mattered more than ancient cosmic cock of a dragon.
The bond was there.
Permanent. Irreversible. She would never ever allow another man inside her, not even her husband.
He’d had cheated magnificently, as he tended to do when written by entities with no respect for ethics and an obvious fondness for overpowered nonsense… and his women did not seem to mind.
But Phei did not want to build a relationship on cheat codes.
Useful?Absolutely.
Morally elegant?Not remotely.
The Rod was insurance. A failsafe. The universe’s smug little way of muttering, what’s claimed mine stays mine, and then walking off before anyone could file an appeal. It worked. It worked very well.
Frankly, it worked in ways that would have made philosophers, lawmakers, and at least half the clergy develop stress migraines.
Still, he didn’t want that to be the foundation for any of his women!
What he wanted was a bond. Stronger. Harder. Something the system couldn’t simply generate out of stats and supernatural hardware.
He wanted the boring sacred stuff.
The daily rhythm.
The tiny negotiations.
The habit of presence.
The slow accumulation of trust and the terrifying intimacy of being known in ordinary daylight and not becoming less desirable for it.
He wanted feelings that survived arguments and silence and distance and the unpleasant revelation that the other person was, in fact, a full human being and not just a very elegant hallucination who liked your face.
Only then would the system abilities step in.
Seventeen years old. A harem situation. A supernatural cock that solved the wrong problems far too efficiently.
And almost no experience with the one part that actually mattered, which was sitting in front of someone you wanted and saying, in one way or another, I would like to know who you are when neither of us is pretending.
Still, he was trying.
Which was why, tonight, Phei had made an effort.
A real one.
The Ashford Tower rose against the night sky like a threat written in glass.
