Chapter 548: Grandmother’s Teachings: Charity Begins at Home

"Sorry, what?"Phei blinked, still processing the beauty in the power suit like she'd just announced she was here to repossess his soul.

Melissa shrugged one shoulder, the picture of weary inevitability. "At least one of the reasons she graced us with her presence is you. We'll get details after we finish this meeting — assuming the room hasn't frozen over by then."

Phei exhaled long and slow, accepting yet another bizarre footnote in his already surreal life.

The truth was, Phei's concept of aharemhad never come from dog-eared manga or late-night anime binges and degenerate light novels had led him astray.

It had begunat home, rooted in pure desire and iron discipline.

His grandmother hadn't simplyhada harem. She had run a full-time, twenty-four-sevenoperation.

Twenty-somethingwomen who literally shared her bed, answered to her like she was a CEO with benefits, loved her, feared her, or — more often — did both at once.

They existed in a tight orbit of devotion and raw, unfiltered desire that spun around her like planets around a particularlylustysun. No polite metaphors like"close female companions"or"devoted attendants"nonsense.

This was the real thing: a functional, breathing, sweat-soaked ecosystem offemaleattention orbitinga single matriarch.

That was where theseedhad been planted. Not in some dusty paperback and fantasy novels where the hero accidentally collects wives like Pokémon cards but right there, in the actual living room of his grandmother's house, watching women drift in and out of rooms with that specific, serene energy of people who knew exactly whose they were — and wereweirdly, blissfully contentwith it.

He had been there when he was two and visited regularly until he was seven, so young at the time. Young enough not to grasp the mechanics, but old enough for the shape of it to lodge in his brain like a stubborn splinter made of pure, unadulterated"huh."

And splinters have a way offestering.

Slowly the way all genuinely dangerous ideas do in a thousand tiny, almost imperceptible shifts in what the brain decides counts as"normal."

Since then, he would lie awake at night in room the Maxtons had shuffled him into and think: How good would it feel if I were like Grandma? A steady rotation of eager women. Zero relationshipfirefights. Zeromarriage-drama-inducedheadaches. Ifone got upset, there was always another waiting, blissfullyunbothered.

It wasn't just a fantasy. It was an ecosystem. Self-regulating. Self-perpetuating. Beautiful in its glorious, chaoticdysfunction— like a coral reef built entirely out of mutual attraction andpoorly concealed jealousy for his grandmother.

And just like that, without him even realizing thefoundationwas being laid, he had started down this horny rabbit hole.

He didn't notice the slope until he was seventeen, face-first off a building in a desperate bid toend it all, when the System blinked awake inside his skull and delivered its verdict: Oh, so this is whatyou've been low-key fantasizing about since you could tie your own shoes? Congrats. It's 100% real, achievable, and — by the way —here's a magic cockto get you started. Welcome to Level One, champ.

Life, it turned out, was90%mental gymnastics and 10% blaming my wiring on my grandmother's liberal weekend habits.

Phei's eyes refocused on the dining room doors, where the newcomer came like a glacier in stilettos.

Her heels clicked against the marble with the precision of gunfire and her assistant trailed half a step behind, clutching a tablet like it was the only thing standing between them and spontaneous combustion.

The problem—aside from the sudden subarctic climate—was glaringly obvious.

"I don't know this one,"Victoria said, her voice cutting through the tension with the bewildered honesty of a puppy shown an unfamiliar treat.

The question hung in the air, identical on the lips of all three sisters, and, if Phei was being brutally honest, his own as well.

He had grown up swimming in his grandmother's harem ecosystem. He knew most of the women by sight if not by name, could probably have picked them out of a lineup blindfolded based on shoe choice alone.

But this woman? New. Utterly unfamiliar.

Melissa gave a single, slow nod — part acknowledgment, part silentI told you so.

"She's the newest addition,"Melissa confirmed, her tone dropping into something closer to amused explanation.

"Don't you see how young she is? Madam snapped her up just a few weeks ago. She's been sent to handle her very first official Ryujin Tiamat family matter — apparently, cutting through the Maxton family's particular brand of dense is now part of her onboarding the harem."

The girls took it in.

They were used to this—the Madam's habit of collecting women the way other people collected art or real estate. A new addition every few years. Sometimes more often. The same appetite her grandson had clearly inherited, because genetics were a bitch with a wicked sense of humor and the apple hadn't just not fallen far from the tree—it had landed directly on the tree's roots and started growing an identical tree right next to it.

Phei watched the woman approach the table.

She walked like she was late to something far more important and this room was merely an inconvenient stop along the way.

Her eyes swept the room once—dismissed Harold, dismissed the grandfather, dismissed the grandmother, dismissed the girls—and landed on Phei.

Stayed on Phei.

Just a fraction of a second longer than everyone else got. But a fraction was enough. He could feel it—the weight of beingassessedby someone who had already decided what he was and was now simply confirming the file matched the face.

She knew exactly who he was. She had been briefed maybe?

Or she had probably read a dossier on the flight over that contained more details about his life than he had about his own.

Cool. Great. Wonderful. Another terrifyingly beautiful woman who knows more about me than I know about himself. Add it to the pile.

Phei had another thought.

One single, deranged, absolutely certifiable thought that he would never say out loud because even by his standards it was pushing the boundaries of sanity, good taste, and basic self-preservation instinct: Can I cuck Grandma?

She wouldn't mind, would she? This woman was gorgeous. Stunningly, devastatingly, skull-buckle-wearinggorgeous. And she belonged to his grandmother, which made her—by the logic of his own bloodline's absurd traditions—basicallyfamily-adjacent.

So why notcuckthe one person on this planet who can kill me with a snap of her fingers?

Why not take the newest woman from the collection of the woman who had inspired his entire journey into harem-building and see if thestudent had surpassed the master?

Because she'll kill me, the sensible part of his brain said.

But what a way to go, nevertheless.

****

A/N: Did I talk too much? 😂