The day was going to be busy, and Phei knew it in that loose, peripheral way one senses an oncoming siege long before the first battering ram kisses the gate — not yet screaming in his face, but squatting heavy at the edge of awareness, ready to announce itself the instant he dared look away.

A long, merciless list of obligations stretched before him: meetings that could not be delegated, appearances that demanded the precise calibration of his devastatingly perfect face, decisions whose weight could topple minor empires if mishandled.

The slow, grinding resumption of ordinary life after a night in which he had casually enslaved an Original Vampire Progenitor and been gifted an entirely new power tier by a system that had been hoarding its tribute like a miserly dragon for decades.

Yet even this busy day, he reflected with the dark amusement like he had already rewritten the rules once and was now bored with the sequel, did not begin to anticipate what the night and the next day would bring. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

He did not know what yet.

Only that something was coming — and a pressure building in the back of his mind like storm clouds.

Luckily — as with most things in his current existence of casual cosmic tyranny — he did not have to carry the weight alone.

His efficient Emily and her quietly terrifying team would handle the bulk of the logistics, because even a Cosmic Dragon on the Omni-Primordial Path required someone to schedule his apotheosis without the calendar exploding.

Thinking of her now, as the hot water of his private shower, after sex, traced slow, luxurious rivers down the sculpted planes of his back, Phei found himself pausing mid-lather with the faint embarrassment of a protagonist realizing he had been neglecting his most competent supporting cast.

Emily... that girl deserved far more than he had, so far deigned to give her.

It was the equivalency of watching a side character in some overwrought webnovel quietly carry the operational spine of the protagonist’s empire — and realizing, with a twinge of narcissistic guilt, that the author had been criminally stingy with her screen time.

She was underrated and undercredited.

She ran half the machinery of his public-facing life with the unflappable competence that could probably organize the apocalypse itself into neat, color-coded folders, and she had done so since the day she had sat next to him offered her services, all while he lounged here, luxuriating in the private implications of his own ever-increasing, obscenely unfair beauty.

He made a mental note to fix that. Soon. Properly. Perhaps with a title, a raise, and a quiet reminder that loyalty to a being like him came with cosmic benefits and zero retirement plan.

Only if he could throw an ability or two to her, he would!

And Melissa — Melissa was going to help him today too, in ways that went far beyond mere logistics.

If Emily was the assistant who managed the otherwise unmanageable scale of his celebrity — the heartthrob problem, the paparazzi swarms, the sudden materialisation of fans mid-breakfast like particularly devoted locusts — then Melissa was the architect of the celebrity itself.

She would handle his public identity at a level above mere scheduling.

She would decide what existed in the world and what did not, curate the Phei that Paradise was permitted to see, polishing him into the untouchable, god-tier seventeen-year-old who made lesser men question their entire bloodlines.

And, not officially but in every functional, delicious sense, she was also the current queen of his harem.

It was not a title anyone had formally conferred; it had simply emerged the way true rank always does in any court worth ruling — the most competent senior wife quietly ascending while the king was off rattling his sword somewhere in the soul realms.

Every other woman in his orbit looked to Melissa for cues.

Maddie, whose universe ordinarily recognised no authority whatsoever, went visibly subdued in her presence. Sierra, whose glare could freeze diamond mid-formation, softened into something almost thoughtful when Melissa entered the room.

Patricia, Valentina treated her with the careful respect like she was some quiet sovereignty.

Even — and this was the part that had truly begun to give Phei delicious pause lately — even Elena Ashford and Madam Ashford herself, even right now when it to their dining space with the group this morning in the Empyrean Dining Hall, she approached Melissa with that small, unmistakable deference that was not entirely explicable by mere social convention.

’What exactly,’ Phei wondered, ’was Melissa’s true influence in Paradise?’

He had underestimated it at the start, assuming the deference was merely a function of her wine business — her vintages wines that commanded absurd prices among the island’s senior collectors, the delicate dance everyone performed to stay on her good side.

But the more he watched, the more the true shape of her reach revealed itself like shadows lengthening at dusk.

’Is it possible’ — he considered — ’that Melissa actually led the Legacy wives’ main circle?’

That the quiet power behind the social architecture of Paradise’s matriarchs had belonged, for some time now, to his own aunt? He did not know. But he trusted her implicitly to handle today, whatever fresh absurdities it decided to hurl at his perfectly proportioned head.

Cassiopeia, who would otherwise have been invaluable help to both Emily and Melissa, had been given a different, far more deliciously treacherous task.

Her family expected her home for a more physical update on him.

The Maxtons were anxious, mostly Harold was anxious.

’Or maybe Danton?’

They wanted to know a detailed plan, precisely what progress she was making, what vulnerabilities she was surfacing, how close she was to the position from which Harold could safely move against the boy who had already enslaved one of their kind.

She would lie to them, of course — craft the precise, beautifully poisonous fiction they needed to hear: that his power had indeed been growing stronger in the last weeks (true), but that the stronger he became, the more vulnerable he grew (a strategic masterpiece of misdirection designed to keep them patient and waiting for a window that would never, ever open).

She would feed the lie with surgical care and they would believe her and they would grant her more time.

Phei’s secrets would remain ironclad.

He had reminded her of the plan after their bath — after Maddie had insisted, with her usual delightful lack of boundaries, on joining them, and after the three of them had spent a considerably longer time in the steaming pool than strictly required by hygiene, and after what had transpired in that pool and then again in the bedroom afterward, all of which had left him humming a low, private hum of satisfaction for the rest of the morning.

She had nodded once, kissed his knuckle with reverent obedience, and gone to dress. She would leave after breakfast.

The Empyrean Dining Hall sat one discreet level above the penthouse residences, accessible only by a private stair that yielded to top-floor keycards like a loyal subject.

It was not a restaurant in any public sense.

It was an extension of private dominion — white marble gleaming under morning light, long windows offering a commanding view across the glittering spine of Hell’s Paradise, a single oval dining table calibrated for twelve, flanked by a standing sideboard of breakfast offerings that rotated daily and were prepared in a small private kitchen by two groups of chefs whose entire professional lives consisted of feeding whichever demigods happened to ascend.

Soft cello drifted from a discreet audio system, while fresh cut flowers — today’s arrangement of peonies and Japanese maples — sat at the centre like a blood offering to the day ahead.

The Hall was, this morning, a full table.

His crew. Their women.

And, quietly arriving at the end of the table where Melissa sat with her cappuccino like a queen on her throne, Madam Ashford and Elena — both dressed with the careful restraint of women who understood this morning was not about statements but presence, and both greeting Melissa with that small, unmistakable deference that Phei had been noticing more and more.