My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 980: Lucienne-Chaos Deal!

Eira doubted it.

The Monster did not strike her as someone who fled because a stronger name was spoken.

Lucienne did not feel like the type to retreat from fear. She felt like the type to smile at fear, ask it to sit beside her, and then study whether it would be useful later.

No, Eira suspected something else.

She suspected Lucienne had defeated the First Princess, or at least pushed her far enough that the situation forced the Matriarch herself to step out and intervene.

And then...

Eira’s wings slowed slightly.

Then came the possibility she did not like thinking about... and—

And here Eira wasn’t very confident making the statement, even alone, even in the privacy of her own skull where no powerful thing was supposed to be listening... but: it would explain why Lucienne disappeared for years only to return years later:

’Could it be possible that the only way the Matriarch got her kidnapped grandson back was after she made a deal, or reached some certain agreement, with the Monster?’

A bargain.

An agreement.

’A condition maybe?’

A bargain made between the Ryujin Tiamat Matriarch and the Monster who called a kidnapped child her Little Husband.

Eira felt a chill move through her despite the night air already being cold.

"No," she whispered, shaking her head sharply. "Forbidden thought. Ugly thought. Absolutely not touching that without at least three escape routes and a written apology from fate."

She forced the speculation away:

Some truths had teeth, and some theories were merely traps waiting for curiosity to step closer.

Eira was many things, but she was not stupid enough to keep staring into the mouth of a possible ancient agreement between a family matriarch and Lucienne.

That way led to headaches, death, or worst of all, explanations from powerful people who spoke in riddles because apparently clarity was illegal after a certain cultivation level.

And yet the thought left a residue she could not scrub off, because if such a bargain existed, then every soft thing Lucienne had said tonight took on a different shape:

A prisoner rescued too early may still believe the lock is negotiable.

The Monster had said that about Anahita.

But Eira wondered now, cold to her small bones, whether Lucienne had ever once, in all these years, believed her own lock around Phei to be negotiable, or whether she was simply the most patient creditor in existence, waiting on a debt only a handful of beings even knew had been signed.

She pushed the Monster from her mind and focused on her next assignment.

Below her, something moved through the dark.

Eira’s eyes widened.

Amusement came first, bright and sharp.

Then curiosity.

Then, very quickly, suspicion.

Far beneath where she floated weightlessly in the cold upper air, a hidden procession moved through the night like a ritual that had misplaced its temple.

In the lead was Danton, floating forward with grim purpose, his figure wrapped in one of those concealed ceremonial robes people wore when they wanted to look mysterious, dangerous and deeply allergic to normal clothing.

Behind him moved three more robed figures, each positioned around a chained group of captives being dragged through the air and shadow.

Eira leaned forward slightly, her small body almost motionless in the wind.

They were not ordinary chains.

The captives were bound at their wrists, ankles and throats, each limb locked by dark restraints inscribed with faint, pulsing runes. The bindings glowed with a cold, cruel light, wrapping around their bodies like serpents forged from authority and suppression.

Every chain seemed connected to the robed figures around them, forcing the prisoners forward in silent obedience. Not walking, flying freely but being pulled.

’Like slaves.’

Eira’s expression changed.

The amusement faded.

Five.

There were five of them.

’Five World Transcendent powerhouses.’¹

Chained by Maxtons.

For a moment, Eira simply stared.

Then her lips parted slightly.

"Well," she whispered, the night swallowing her voice, "that is... unpleasantly interesting."

World Transcendents were not insects:

They were not ordinary guards, elders or decorative family experts hired to stand behind spoiled heirs and look expensive.

World Transcendents were being already at the precipice of forging their Soul Realm within their souls, nurturing mountains, seas, laws, and living cycles until those internal realms could impose themselves upon reality.

Every movement carried the World Essence itself; every breath disturbed the surrounding laws.

When they descended upon a battlefield, the terrain bent beneath their domain, weaker cultivators found their cores suppressed, and ordinary formations cracked beneath the weight of a world colliding with the heavens.

To see one bound was shocking. To see five chained together like captured animals was absurd.

To see Maxtons involved made it worse.

While the Maxtons collapsed beneath the world’s gaze, their name dragged through ash, their crimes stripped bare and their authority publicly wounded, they had already shifted their attention toward a far greater design. They could not care less about ruined reputation, markets, and the outrage of ordinary society meant little beside the pieces now moving in secret.

Beneath the spectacle of their ’downfall’, something older continued to turn in silence, deliberate and ritualistic, a hidden catastrophe vast enough to demand World Transcendent captives.

Eira’s eyes narrowed.

"What are you rotten little nobles doing now?"

And then a colder thought arrived, the kind that did not knock. Danton. It was Danton at the head of this.

Danton, who carried something in his blood the Maxtons wanted badly enough to kill for, leading a procession of chained being only a few level to become gods leading through the dark on the very night his family burned in public.

He floated at the front like an officiant. Whatever this ceremony was, Danton was not its prize being carried to slaughter. He was, at least tonight, its hand.

Eira did not know yet whether that made the Danton more terrfying or infinitely more doomed, and she disliked both branches of the question with equal sincerity.

Danton floated at the head of the procession, unaware of the small fairy watching from above. His expression was obscured by the hood’s shadow, but his posture carried tension. Not fear, exactly.

Urgency; like he was carrying something valuable, dangerous or forbidden through a night that had already become too crowded with consequences.

The three robed figures behind him maintained their formation with careful discipline, each one guarding a different angle around the prisoners.

Their robes were dark and heavy, patterned faintly with symbols that disappeared whenever moonlight tried too hard to touch them. Even from above, Eira could feel the suppression formation around the captives, a dense, glacial pressure folded over their power to keep it locked inside their bodies.

The runes on the chains did not merely restrain movement. They smothered essence, gagged their power and pressed the World Transcendents down from within, reducing giants into cargo.

Eira’s gaze sharpened with cold interest.

That was not simple kidnapping.

’That is preparation.’

Ritual preparation, perhaps?

Sacrifice, maybe?

’Or worse.’

Because when powerful families began moving chained powerhouses through the night in hidden robes, the options rarely improved.

Nobody wore secret ritual clothing to deliver birthday cakes. Maxtons, tragically committed to pattern, saved that fashion choice for murder, summoning, sealing, forbidden transactions and ceremonies where someone inevitably screamed in a language nobody had bothered translating beforehand.

Eira hovered higher, hiding herself deeper between the layers of night.

Her earlier fear of Lucienne settled somewhere behind her ribs, still present but no longer leading. This was her task now. Her master needed to know. Phei needed to know what moved beneath the wreckage of the Maxton name, because wounded families were often more dangerous than victorious ones.

’Victory makes people arrogant; ruin makes them inventive.’

And Maxtons, even collapsing, had always been very inventive with cruelty.

Eira’s wings trembled faintly, not from fear this time, but from focus.

She thought, briefly, of Cassiopeia, who carried that same Maxton name and had spent her whole life trying to scrub the blood out of it, and of how this particular discovery would land on her if it touched her nephew.

Danton was her blood too.

Eira tucked that worry beside the others, a small sad stone in an already heavy pocket, and kept watching.

"Five World Transcendents," she whispered, watching the chained figures drift beneath the ritual-robed guards. "Danton leading. Maxton bindings just like that Lesser God Witch. Hidden movement after the interview disaster."

Her eyes gleamed.

"Oh, Master," she murmured, voice soft with dark amusement, "your days at this island just got worse."

Then she paused.

A small smile touched her lips.

"Or better. With you, those are usually the same thing."

Below her, the procession continued through the cold darkness, carrying its bound powerhouses toward whatever secret the Maxtons had been desperate enough to preserve.

Eira followed.