"While you’re up," she said, voice dropping to something that was technically a whisper but carried the acoustic range of a foghorn, "you could also —"

"Sex?" Phei asked, scratching the back of his head.

"No," all five of them said simultaneously.

The synchronicity was instantaneous. Unplanned. Five different women in a one unified wall of absolute refusal delivered with the rehearsed precision of a response they’d been holding in reserve since the moment they saw his cock was hard beneath the sheets.

Phei blinked.

"...was that coordinated?"

"Go cook, honey, no orgy." Patricia said, eyes closed, already burrowing deeper into the sheets.

He shrugged. "It was worth a try."

A man can dream.

He tucked them in. One by one.

Patricia first — pulling the silk sheet up to her shoulders, smoothing it, feeling her settle beneath the warmth like a woman being lowered into a bath.

Sierra next — she let him adjust the blanket without protest, her dark eyes tracking his hands with quiet attention, and when his knuckles brushed her jaw she turned her face into the touch for exactly one second before composing herself again.

Valentina accepted the tucking with the imperial grace of someone receiving a service she’d always deserved, though her hand caught his wrist as he pulled away and she pressed her lips to his palm — brief, warm, devastating — before releasing him without a word.

Delilah. He moved to the foot of the bed where she’d curled back up, her champagne slip twisted around her thighs, her body already sinking toward sleep again with the boneless surrender of someone who felt safe for the first time in a long time.

"You’ll come back?" she whispered.

"I’m making breakfast, Delilah. I’m coming back with food."

"Promise?"

He leaned down and kissed the corner of her mouth:

"Promise."

She released his fingers. One at a time as though each one cost her something before she rolled onto her side, pulled the sheet against her chest, and closed her eyes with an expression that was trying desperately not to be a smile and failing entirely.

Then Maddie.

Maddie, who had already migrated sideways the moment he’d stopped touching her, had flung one leg across Sierra’s hips and wrapped an arm around her waist beneath the sheets with the territorial sprawl of a woman who had never been introduced to the concept of sleeping in her own designated space and had no interest in learning.

Sierra sighed.

"Maddie."

"Mmm."

"Your leg is on me."

"Correct."

"Move it."

"No."

"Maddie —"

"You’re warm and you smell good and my leg is staying. Those are the facts. I don’t make the rules."

Sierra exhaled through her nose, and calculated the energy required to fight this versus the energy required to simply accept that Maddie Whitmore’s thigh was now a permanent fixture across her hips — and closed her eyes.

She didn’t move Maddie’s leg.

The morning sun stretched through the glass walls and caught them — caught the tangle of silk and limbs and bare skin, caught Maddie’s leg draped across Sierra’s hip beneath the sheet, caught the golden curve of Sierra’s shoulder and the dark spill of Maddie’s hair against it, caught the light shifting across their bodies in slow warm strokes that turned skin to amber and silk to liquid gold.

The sun touched everything with the lazy shamelessness of light that had looked down, seen what it was illuminating, and decided to worship.

’Okay, girl,’ he thought, watching Maddie settle against Sierra with the satisfied possessiveness of a cat who’d claimed the best spot on the couch.

He pulled the covers up over both of them...

And just — stood there as he let the sight settle into him.

Then he turned away:

Time to work.

**

He stood in the centre of the penthouse’s main living space, naked, the morning sun pouring through the glass walls and wrapping around his body in long warm strokes. The light felt good. Clean. Not the best sensation available to him — not anymore — but good.

He took a deep breath and relaxed into it.

Phei’s power woke slowly:

From what Eira had called his core — which he was still reasonably certain he didn’t actually have, because if someone had installed one in him, they’d skipped the user manual — a current of pure essence began to rise and spread outward through his body slowly, moving through muscle and bone and blood with the serene patience.

Void-Ice.

The purest expression of what lived inside him; cold and clean and bottomless and his — more intimate than breath and woven so deeply into his very being; separating them would be like trying to remove gravity from a planet.

The essence flowed through him without resistance, without friction, and wherever it passed, his body felt more. More awake, alive and precisely what it was supposed to be.

Phei let his senses expand outward.

The same essence bloomed in the space around him — Void-Ice essence was everywhere; in the air, light, hanging in the atmosphere of the penthouse and concentrating in denser veils outside, high above the building where the island’s upper winds carried it.

It was more potent than yesterday, when he’d first tried reaching for it. Purer.

It was as though the element itself was growing stronger every time he opened himself to it, rewarding the attention with increased presence.

But there was more.

Beneath the Void-Ice — deeper, heavier, buried in the substratum of his being like bedrock beneath a river — a second energy thrummed.

Familiar, yet distant. Part of him in a way that was intimate but not absolute; it felt like something older than breathing that existed before the concept of alive had been given a shape.

Heavy. Ancient; thrumming with a will that pressed against his awareness from the inside, sentient in a way that didn’t use thoughts but understood intention.

He had some control over it; deeper than instinct but less than mastery, it wasn’t the immediate, absolute command he held over the Void-Ice.

This energy followed him the way a vast predatory animal followed a handler it respected but had not yet fully decided to obey.

’Primordial...’

That was the only word that fit; the Primordial Blood element.

He could feel it inside him — rich, dense, pulsating — but the surrounding environment carried almost none of it.

There was no ambient Primordial Blood essence in the air, in the earth, the island’s atmosphere.

It was just him as the source; whatever essence this element drew from, it drew from somewhere else and deeper in him.

And then there was the third...

But this one was lighter than both Void-Ice and Primordial Blood.

’It is everywhere; a pure and boundless essence that fills the space around me so completely it feels less like a presence and more like a medium.’

—The water a fish swam through without noticing.

This third energy caressed his skin with a soothing, multicoloured lightness that gave him the feeling of blue. Of being surrounded by aurora lights — that vast peaceful shimmer of colour moving across an arctic sky, greens and violets and whites shifting against each other in slow celestial waves.

He’d never stood beneath an aurora...

...But this — this felt like what it would be.

The essence pressed against him gently, trying to enter, to flow inward in him the way the Void-Ice essence did, to merge with whatever he was:

And it bounced off.

Every time; Phei had even strained and pushed himself toward it, tried to open whatever gate it was knocking against — and it simply wrapped around him instead, warm and patient, sliding off his skin and settling back into the surrounding air like a tide that kept reaching for a shore it couldn’t quite touch.

’Mana.’

He knew why it couldn’t enter; not today’s problem.

’But is calming, though.’

The attempt and gentle, persistent, colourful pressure of an element that wanted to be inside him and kept trying with the patient optimism of something that didn’t understand rejection.

Phei smiled.

Then he reached for his oldest friend.

The Void-Ice answered immediately — not rising, not building, not arriving.

It was simply there:

Boundless and bottomless and infinite, the element that belonged to him so completely that accessing it was less like calling and more like remembering.

Its essence flooded him, overflowed, poured across his naked body in a surge of black-white cold that wasn’t cold at all — not to him, not anymore — and in the space of a single breath the air around his hips shimmered, condensed, compiled.

He didn’t need the snap but he did it anyway;

’Some things deserved a flourish.’

Snap.

Black fabric materialised around his lower body — fitted trousers that compiled themselves thread by thread in the space between heartbeats, the fabric dense and dark with pale black-white finishings along the seams that caught the morning light and held it.

No imperial robes this time; the grand hanfu of cosmic weight with dragon embroidery that moved when the air shifted.

"Nice," he murmured, glancing down. "But no robes."

He rolled one shoulder and stretched.

"They’re beautiful, but they’d get in the way of everything today. Cooking. Probably some form of interpersonal crisis that requires running."

Phei looked around himself;

The penthouse hallway stretched beyond — long, polished, lit by the same golden morning light that poured through every glass surface in the building.

The suite his grandmother had arranged for them on the island was absurdly large, built across the entirely almost quarter if not more of top floor of Infinity Chaos Hotel, and apart from the master bedroom currently occupied by four sleeping women whose combined beauty could probably be classified as a natural disaster, there were several other bedrooms branching off the main corridor.

One of them held Catrina...

’My next destination.’

Phei walked, barefoot and of course bare-chested.

The black-white trousers were silent against the polished floor, the morning sun was warm on his skin.