My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 951: Darkness Done Babysitting

The chilly night of Hell’s Paradise Island had once again descended over the world like a monarch reclaiming territory, spreading its cold sovereignty across cliff, mansion, garden, lake and sky until everything beneath it belonged to the same merciless hush.

The moon hung above as both witness and accomplice, pale and watchful in the black sea of heaven, lending its silver light to the tyranny below as though even celestial bodies occasionally enjoyed watching humans suffer prettily beneath good lighting.

On the grounds of the cliff mansion, the wind hurled itself from east to west with enough force to bend the leaves of even the strongest trees upward, their long dark shapes shuddering beneath the assault while the manicured gardens trembled around the stage while cold crawled under expensive coats, slipped through collars, touched wrists, throats and faces with the invasive intimacy of something that had never once respected boundaries in its entire ancient existence.

Yet none of the fragile congregation of humans gathered below seemed eager to retreat into warmth. None of them rose from their seats.

They sat there instead frozen more by what they were witnessing than by the weather itself, their eyes fixed with almost violent intensity on the small elevated stage beyond them.

The interview between Phei and the anchor had become a Q and A, yes, but not the one the man had prepared.

Somewhere between the anchor stuttering beneath Phei’s quiet question of how much he had been paid and the first damning piece of evidence flashing across the stage walls behind them, control had changed hands so completely that calling it a reversal felt generous.

What had begun as a polished broadcast designed to corner a beautiful young heir beneath polite accusations had transformed into something darker, colder and infinitely more interesting.

Phei was no longer the guest being interviewed. He had become the blade, the witness, the judge and the executioner, all while seated beneath studio lights with one leg crossed lazily over the other as though he were discussing weather instead of vivisecting two legacy families live before the world.

It had become apparent to everyone present and everyone watching from their homes exactly what the Heavenchilds had done, and worse, what they had been doing for years beneath the merciful blanket of shadows. Their influence had not merely touched institutions. It had invaded them; Media houses, legal offices, academy boards, luxury companies, charity foundations, security firms, private courts, the soft hidden places where money preferred to breathe without witnesses.

Their tentacles stretched across the world so thoroughly that most people had mistaken their grip for the shape of civilization itself, which was honestly the most impressive scam wealth had ever pulled, and wealth had spent centuries committing crimes while wearing cufflinks.

And now Phei was exposing them.

Not only the Heavenchilds, but the Maxtons too.

He was pulling open the doors of rooms both families had spent fortunes keeping locked. He dragged out names, dates, payments, private meetings, altered reports, buried testimonies, erased footage, missing witnesses and convenient deaths that had been dressed in official language until murder looked like paperwork.

Among the skeletons rising from the stage tonight were deaths connected to both families, but even the dead were not the worst of it but at least had the dignity of finality.

What followed them were things uglier, things that breathed longer, things that wore suits, held titles, signed donations and smiled beside children at public ceremonies while carrying rot under their polished nails.

These were not small skeletons.

They were colossal things, giant-boned and ancient with wealth, secrets meant to remain buried beneath marble foundations where darkness and influence could keep them warm.

The Heavenchilds and Maxtons had trusted shadows for too long.

They had made a mistake to entrust their sins to the night, believing darkness was loyal simply because it was quiet.

But how long could darkness truly carry the weight of secrets that large? How long could shadows remain merciful when forced to shelter bones too vast for graves? Worse still, what happened when a child born into that same lightless dominion reached out and began plucking those secrets free as easily as seaweed from black water?

Phei had always liked to believe himself favored by darkness.

If calling himself its master of darkness felt too arrogant, then favored son had seemed fitting enough.

A child of shadows and a creature who understood the comfort of lightless corners and the private mercy of places where the world stopped looking.

For years, darkness had not frightened him. It had felt familiar. Almost kind. Perhaps because darkness did not pretend the way light did. Light exposed, yes, but it also judged but darkness hid wounds without asking whether they deserved hiding.

But the stronger Phei became, the more that old belief began to feel incomplete.

Because it was not darkness that favored him.

Not truly:

It was the Void.

And the Void did not merely hold darkness.

It held dominion over it.

The anchor stared in mounting horror as the short decorative walls erected on both sides of the stage, structures everyone had assumed were simply elegant set design meant to frame the interview, changed before the eyes of the audience:

Their smooth pale surfaces darkened, crystallized and shimmered with a depth that no normal screen possessed, black-blue veins of cold light spreading across them before they came alive with images.

Everyone believed, quite reasonably and therefore wrongly, that screens had been hidden there all along.

But those were not screens.

They were Void-Ice screens.

Phei had shaped them quietly, almost lazily, while speaking, letting his power obey the rhythm of his voice as though the stage itself had decided to testify. The walls became mirrors of evidence, dark crystalline surfaces reflecting not faces but buried truths.

Every time Phei named a meeting, or orchestrated death, and other rot the two families his an image or video appeared. Every time he spoke of a payment, transaction records bloomed across the ice in precise cold light. Every time he mentioned a death, footage surfaced. Faces. Cars. Private elevators. Documents signed under dates that contradicted public statements. Men entering rooms they later swore they had never visited. Women crying in corners of expensive offices while lawyers negotiated silence like it was a luxury service. I

t was all there, magnified for the audience, captured by the broadcast cameras and delivered into homes across Hell’s Paradise, Paradise and far beyond.

He was not spouting nonsense.

That realization hit the audience slowly, then all at once.

For every accusation, there was proof. For every claim or implication, an image, a video or document appearing with such cruel timing that the anchor could not even interrupt without looking like a man trying to slap reality off the wall.

The evidence did not merely support Phei’s words; it hunted beside them. It arrived like trained hounds, each one dragging another piece of flesh from the two families’ public masks while the audience watched in fascinated horror.

There was no coming out of it.

Worse, Ashford Elite Academy had paid for an entire hour-long broadcast with no breaks.

No commercial pauses, emergency cutaway or convenient advertisement for perfume, insurance or carbonated sugar water to rescue the powerful from public dissection.

One full uninterrupted hour.

Ashworth.

The old man had not arranged an interview.

He had purchased an execution chamber and called it media reform.

Even Phei had to admire the cruelty of it.

’Quietly, of course.’ Respecting an old schemer’s craft did not mean one had to say it aloud and encourage the elderly. ’Just like Chaos, they became dangerous when praised, like cats discovering humans were emotionally weak.’

Above the stage, Eira sat upon the edge of one of the raised side structures swinging her legs with radiant, childish delight.

She had arrived at the call of her master, appearing with the casual wrongness of something that belonged more to myth than modern production schedules, and now sat there with a lollipop in her mouth like a tiny apocalypse enjoying theatre snacks.

Her eyes glowed faintly as she reached through time.

Not metaphorically or poetically , she actually did.

Her delicate little hands dipped into currents no human could see, pulling out moments the Heavenchilds and Maxtons had buried beneath money, blood, intimidation and influence. She plucked secrets from the past the way bored children plucked petals from flowers, whispering them into Phei’s ear while he repeated them aloud in that calm, almost gentle voice that made the cruelty worse.

There was no rage in him. No theatrical fury. No shaking finger. He did not need any of that. Rage could be dismissed as bias. Calm sounded like verdict.

"On the seventeenth," Phei said at one point, his gaze resting on the anchor with beautiful mildness, "Harold Maxton met with a private security consultant two hours before the accident report was altered."

Behind him, the Void-Ice shimmered, and footage appeared of Harold stepping from a black car beneath the rain, his face half-hidden beneath an umbrella while a man in a dark coat approached him near a private entrance.

The anchor’s lips parted.

The audience did not breathe.

And only Phei knew the private weight folded into that particular date.

"And three days later," Phei continued, "the Heavenchild legal office received a payment disguised under foundation expenditure. Charitable Outreach, I believe they called it. Beautiful phrase. Almost holy. They do love washing blood with paperwork."

The screen shifted to bank records.

Names.

Amounts.

Dates.

Someone in the audience gasped.

The anchor looked as though his soul had begun negotiating an early departure from his body.

Eira giggled above them, quietly delighted, kicking her feet while the lollipop clicked softly against her teeth.

To her, perhaps, this was entertainment. To everyone else, it was history being flayed open beneath moonlight.

The cameras caught everything.

The audience saw everything.

The world heard everything.

And beneath the sovereign cold of Hell’s Paradise night, while the moon watched like a silver-eyed witness and the wind bent the trees around the cliff mansion, Phei Ryujin Tiamat sat beneath the stage lights and dragged two legacy families into the open by their buried bones.

Darkness had hidden them for years.

Tonight, the favored child of the Void had decided darkness was done babysitting cowards.