My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 763: Renewal, Destruction and Rebirth

[Ding! New Element Awakened: PRIMORDIAL BLOOD.]

[Host — brace.]

His chest bloomed open like the throat of a furnace that had waited ten thousand years for its first taste of air.

An interior unfolding kindled beneath his ribs and surged outward through every fiber of his body in one single, merciless expansion.

The breath he had drawn a heartbeat earlier left him in one long, exsanguinated sigh as the new element seated itself inside him, heavy, wet, and ancient beyond reckoning.

It opened the way a flower opens, petals of raw sensation peeling outward from a single seeded point at the center of his being, each one carrying a different quality of the power now claiming him.

The first petal brought a thick, wet fullness, as though his lungs had been replaced by sponges soaked in something warmer and heavier than blood. The second brought a low dragging gravity while the element settled its full primordial weight into the architecture of his bones and claiming permanent dominion there.

The third brought a slow, committed thirst — alive, hungering, a mouth that had been waiting since the birth of blood itself for permission to drink.

His next exhale came out red.

Dark crimson mist seeped from the seams of his peeling skin, threading the air in slow, heavy coils that refused to behave like ordinary vapor.

It hung around him in sentient bands, pulsing, breathing, tasting the cathedral hollow the way a predator tastes the wind before it strikes.

Then his skin began to peel in long, obscene curls of his pale flesh that lifted from his arms in wet sheets, sloughing away from shoulders, chest, and ribs in slow, deliberate strips.

The imperial robe that had clothed him moments earlier simply vacated, the black-and-gold silk dispersing back into the powdered ruin of the hollow as the rising element refused to share its body’s surface with anything mortal.

Beneath the peeling skin the Dragon’s Regeneration answered in perfect, vicious synchrony — fresh flesh compiling at the exact speed of the unmaking. Two processes locked themselves to his heartbeat: abnegation and renewal, destruction and rebirth, all screaming through his nerves at once.

And from every open seam — from the long gashes down his chest, the curling sheets along his arms, the wet curtains sliding off his shoulders — blood rose in thick, arterial mists of blood that seeped from his body in heavy, deliberate threads the color of fresh slaughter against winter snow.

The mist did not drift. It coiled. It tasted the air. It claimed the cathedral hollow’s black-white shroud at its perimeter and began to vitiate it in widening concentric rings.

The black-white snowy floor beneath him saturated into deep, drowning crimson, the color spreading outward in slow, committed waves until the entire fifty-yard field had been exsanguinated beneath him.

Frozen ice-spires bled red along their flanks in long descending rivulets, as though they had been quietly hemorrhaging for hours and had only now been given permission to show it.

The canopy overhead darkened as the aura and blood climbed, turning every frozen leaf, every frozen branch, every ornament-bird suspended mid-flight into dripping scarlet silhouettes.

The black-white of his Void-Ice graduated into arterial darkness until the entire cathedral hollow stood drowned in a single, saturated red — a field of blood fifty yards across, born from the body of a seventeen-year-old boy who had not yet moved.

Phei stood at the center of it, skin peeling, skin compiling, peeling, compiling. His face registered nothing but the pain was absolute — plenipotentiary, sovereign, a scream that owned every nerve ending from the soles of his feet to the crown of his skull.

Every receptor reported catastrophic damage in unbroken chorus, the shedding and the rebuilding both registering as separate agonies that fused into one sustained, hellish roar his body should never have been able to contain.

Yet his face remained still, his flat amethyst eyes looked down at his own peeling forearms with the unhurried interest of a man examining an unfamiliar weapon that had just been placed in his hand.

His mouth moved.

"Mh."

The robe was gone.

So, he compiled another without looking.

The black-and-gold silk re-formed around his body in a single committed gesture, already stained at the hems with the rising mist of his second element — dark red bleeding into the silk’s lower edges and staying there, as though robe and blood had reached a private, hungry compromise.

He looked up.

The blood-mist was rotating.

Long, dark red bands swirled around his body in patterns the cathedral hollow’s air had never been built to host.

The bands moved fast — fast in the unhurried way that followed intent rather than physics.

And all the bands were sharp.

They were not merely in the air... they were cleaving the air.

The cathedral hollow’s geometry behind him wavered visibly along their rotation paths — narrow seams opening in the very substrate of reality, hairline fractures of darker-than-dark where the element’s edge had passed and the world behind it had not yet remembered how to exist.

The seams tried to close. They failed. Every revolution of the bands re-opened them a fraction wider, stretching the fabric of existence until something somewhere was bound to tear.

Eira hovered at a distance, her dark-diamond eyes wide.

She had been alive a long time. She had never watched a cosmic element score the substrate of her own world.

Phei tilted his head.

The element offered itself and simply uncoiled in his chest the way a clenched fist finally opens — the long-clenched primordial substrate of his second element relaxing its fingers one at a time and laying its open palm before his will.

The offering rendered itself in his body as a slow, committed unfurling that began beneath his ribs and travelled outward through his shoulders, his arms, down to his fingertips, until every digit sang with the new substance ready to be spent.

The Primordial Blood was not patient. It was hungry. It wanted to be used. It wanted him to spend it across the cathedral hollow’s substrate and pay whatever price the spending demanded.

He grinned.

Devil-shaped.

Phei raised his right hand, palm open to the blood-drenched air above him, and the mist answered before the gesture had even finished.

It pulled inward in a single, wet rush of living red, racing across the long slope of muscle from elbow to wrist and thickening there with deliberate, hungry purpose until a gauntlet of his own blood had formed — glossy, pulsing, beaded with thick slick that caught the crimson light and held it like fresh wounds refusing to close.

The element did not merely cover his flesh. It claimed the arm as its own territory, coiling around muscle and bone with the intimate familiarity of something that had always known the shape of him and had only now been given permission to wear it.

He flexed his fingers once, and from beneath the nails the claws were formed.

They pushed outward in slow, deliberate extrusion, five on the right hand and five more on the left when he lifted it, each one tapering to a point so sharp the cathedral hollow’s air visibly recoiled from its presence.

They were not weapons he had summoned from outside himself.

They were rather, extensions of his own substance — bone made fluid, will given edge, the primordial hunger of the new element made manifest in curved, sepulchral lengths that gleamed with the same dark mirrored red as the gauntlet.

When he swung his right hand through the air in a casual, exploratory arc, following his imaginative instincts, five long parallel cuts opened in the fabric of the world itself.

They did not bleed... they simply ceased to be.

Five clean strips of pure absence hung suspended at chest height, thin wounds in reality where the claws had passed and the world behind them had not yet been permitted to return.

The crimson field beneath him held its breath for one long, exsanguinating heartbeat while the cuts remained, refusing to close, and only then did the dark red air roll across them in slow, grudging waves of self-repair.

Even after the healing, faint sepulchral lines lingered in the air like scars the cathedral hollow would carry until the awakening ended — proof that something had carved through its substance and left it thinner for the passage.

Phei hummed low in his throat and turned his attention to the crystalline figure hovering at what she had clearly believed was a safe distance.

Eira raised her hands at once, wings flaring in instinctive warning.

"Master—"

The word barely left her before he swung his hand toward her.

Not the claws this time but the mist.

The dark red around his open palm collapsed inward and exploded outward in the same breath, a dozen dense projectiles forming in the time it took the swing to finish — each one slightly larger than a shotgun shell, surface glistening with living slick, edges already keen enough to part the crimson air ahead of them.

He named them as he released them, voice casual, almost bored.

"Blood Bullets."

The element answered with hunger forming countless sharp blood red bullets thick as three fingers and they flew forward... all if taking a single instant.

They were so many that they filled the sky, Eira wouldn’t be able to escape unless she was so fast or the void.

They tore forward in a long, wet shriek of displaced air, and Eira twisted sideways with the desperate velocity of an Original who had finally stopped pretending this was still training.

She didn’t run so fast or open a void portal, so...