Harem Of Eternal Yandere Beasts: My Legendary Wives

Chapter 67: The Boy Who Shouldn’t Exist

The western cultivation district was in absolute chaos.

Students crowded the stone pathways in a panic, instructors struggled to maintain a perimeter, and academy healers moved between fractured groups with increasing urgency. Something significant had just occurred.

Orion felt the shift long before he saw the source. Inside his chest, the Sovereign Core was reacting—a slow, steady, magnetic pull dragging his awareness toward a very specific destination.

"That is definitely not normal," Selene murmured, falling into step beside him. Her expression remained entirely calm, but her voice carried a rare, tense edge.

"You noticed?" Orion asked.

"The Core?" She nodded tightly. "The resonance is getting stronger with every step."

Orion felt it too. Every meter forward intensified the phantom connection, sharpening into absolute certainty. Whoever or whatever was responsible for triggering the academy’s alarms was close. Exceptionally close.

The panicked crowd parted automatically as Instructor Vale approached. Authority had distinct advantages, the primary one being that people moved out of your way quickly.

The senior instructors guarding the entrance to the primary cultivation hall stepped aside immediately, their grim expressions immediately catching Orion’s eye. That was a bad sign; academy instructors rarely looked worried. They spent most of their lives supervising ambitious idiots and managing magical mishaps. Genuine concern required something truly special.

"Report," Vale commanded.

One of the guard instructors stepped forward. "A first-year student collapsed during a standard meditation breakthrough session."

"The cause?"

"We don’t know yet," the instructor admitted, his hesitation palpable. "His internal mana circulation suddenly warped."

Orion’s interest piqued. "Warped how?"

The instructor swallowed hard, glancing at Orion before looking back to Vale. "Into a structural pattern we’ve never seen before in any imperial record."

They entered the cultivation chamber. The wide room was claustrophobically crowded with healers, researchers, and senior faculty gathered around a single medical cot.

The moment Orion crossed the threshold, his Sovereign Core surged violently. The reaction hit him with enough physical force that he nearly faltered in his stride. It wasn’t exactly recognition, but something far stranger—a profound familiarity, like hearing the verses of a song he had forgotten lifetimes ago. The sensation made no logical sense. He had never set foot in this sector, nor had he ever met the boy on the bed. Yet the pull remained unyielding, persistent, and entirely impossible to ignore.

The patient couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He was thin, dark-haired, pale, and dressed in a standard, unremarkable academy uniform.

Then Orion looked closer. The boy’s eyes were wide open, glowing with a brilliant gold. It wasn’t a natural hue; the color shifted and swam beneath the surface in moving, intricate geometric patterns.

The moment Orion’s gaze locked onto those eyes, everything clicked. His Sovereign Core flared aggressively. Simultaneously, the boy gasped, sat bolt upright on the cot, and locked his eyes onto Orion with absolute certainty. Relief, disbelief, and a desperate surge of hope washed over his pale face.

"The Sovereign Heir," the boy whispered.

The room fell dead silent. The academy seemed to be making a habit of doing that lately.

The boy’s breathing was erratic, his slight frame trembling under an immense internal strain, yet his golden gaze never wavered from Orion. "You actually came."

Orion frowned, stepping closer to the cot. "Do I know you?"

The question triggered a wave of genuine confusion across the boy’s features. He stared blankly at Orion, then let out a single, broken laugh filled with equal parts relief and profound despair. "Of course. Of course you don’t."

Vale stepped into the space between them, her presence commanding. "Identify yourself."

The heavy question seemed to drag the boy back to reality. His expression shifted instantly, growing intensely cautious and guarded, as if he had just remembered a dangerous secret. The sudden pivot did not escape Orion’s notice, nor Selene’s.

"My name is Rowan," the boy said slowly, carefully measuring the weight of each syllable. "I arrived at the academy three months ago from the outermost provinces."

Vale nodded once. That timeline tracked perfectly with the enrollment archives. "Why were you calling out for the Sovereign Heirs, Rowan?"

The room waited in breathless suspense. Rowan closed his eyes, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of his sheets.

"Because my grandfather instructed me to," Rowan finally confessed, opening his eyes to find Orion again. "He told me that if the signs ever appeared... it meant the true heirs had finally returned to the capital."

A cold chill ran through the chamber.

Orion’s Core pulsed three times in rapid, distinct successions. The reaction wasn’t a random spike; the Core fundamentally believed the boy’s words. Or, at the very least, it recognized the lineage authority behind them.

"Who was your grandfather, Rowan?" Vale asked quietly.

Rowan hesitated, a flash of ancient, inherited fear crossing his face—the kind of terror passed down through generations rather than learned from personal experience. He swallowed hard before answering.

"My grandfather directly served the Frontier Branch."

The revelation hit the room like a physical blow. Every instructor and healer froze mid-motion. Selene moved to step forward, her boots scraping loudly against the stone floor, but no one commented on the breach of protocol. No one cared.

The Frontier Branch. It was the exact name from the Legacy Archive’s warning. The branch that had supposedly vanished from the face of the empire fifteen years ago had a living descendant sitting right in front of them, hidden inside the academy’s own ranks. It felt impossible, yet the golden resonance bleeding from the boy’s eyes was undeniably real.

Vale moved with terrifying speed. With a sweep of her hand, a dozen advanced defensive formations materialized, casting shimmering golden barriers that completely sealed the cultivation room. Privacy runes flared along the walls, followed immediately by heavy anti-surveillance arrays. The senior instructor was no longer taking any chances, and neither was Orion.

"What happened to the Frontier Branch fifteen years ago?" Vale demanded.

Rowan’s face went entirely translucent. The question clearly opened a wound that wasn’t safe to expose. He looked around nervously at the golden barriers, the tense instructors, and finally toward the high windows, as if expecting a phantom to be waiting outside in the twilight. Nothing was there, yet his terror only grew.

"They are still hunting us," Rowan whispered, his voice barely audible. "They tracked the branch down to our hidden sanctuaries. They destroyed everything. My grandfather was the only one who escaped the slaughter. He told me... he told me nobody else made it out alive."

The temperature in the sealed room plummeted.

"Who?" Vale pressed, her voice maintaining a forced, professional calm. "Who attacked your lineage?"

Rowan opened his mouth, the name sitting on the very tip of his tongue.

Then, the cultivation hall exploded.

The massive outer stone wall vanished into dust. Concrete shattered, glass erupted inward like a storm of shrapnel, and a devastating wave of kinetic force blasted through the chamber. Students screamed as they were thrown off their feet, and healers fell backward into the debris. The instructors activated their personal barriers instantly, but they were a fraction of a second too late. Something had already breached the perimeter.

A heavy black spear slammed violently into the center of the room, embedding itself deep into the stone flooring.

Webs of deep cracks spiraled outward from the impact point as a thick, suffocating dark energy flooded the chamber. The temperature dropped past freezing in an instant, causing the golden defensive formations to tremble and flicker. Every survival instinct Orion possessed screamed a singular word: *Danger.* This wasn’t academy politics, a reckless student challenge, or a controlled training exercise. This was a lethal execution attempt.

Attached to the shaft of the vibrating spear was a single strip of scorched black cloth, ancient symbols burning across its surface with a malicious red light. The moment Orion’s eyes decoded the script, his blood ran cold.

The message contained only four words: WE FOUND YOU FIRST.

Silence reclaimed the ruined room. Then, Orion’s Sovereign Core erupted in a furious, defensive blaze. Somewhere far beyond the protective walls of the academy, a distant, mocking laughter echoed through the spiritual network.