Chapter 1365: Back to His Paradise

Valentina’s lips curled instantly while Maddie and Sierra exchanged a look containing far too much agreement, Noor lowered her gaze with the faintest smile, while Cassiopeia attempted the rather difficult task of behaving as though the thought had not crossed her mind at all.

Instead, he slowly closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

Paradise Island filled his lungs.

Something inside him relaxed.

"Ah..."

He had missed this.

Even the air smelled different; familiar.

Home!

Memories seemed embedded within every breath, familiar traces of Essence and Mana overlapping in patterns that his senses recognized before his mind bothered naming them.

Phei opened his eyes again.

Something else had changed; he could truly feel what his own return was doing to the island.

"Thank you, my love. I was aiming to please!"

Soraya beamed.

Everyone else continued staring at him as though something wearing Phei’s face had returned from another world.

An anomaly, if Phei were being honest.

Well, he was one, wasn’t he?

The physical changes were only the easiest things to notice. Yes, he had become more handsome. Yes, the immortal-like refinement of his features had somehow become even more unfair. Yes, his body looked smooth, bright and deceptively soft enough that several people probably needed to remind themselves that it had been tempered into something monstrous.

But standing near him was where the real difference became impossible to ignore.

Several people’s eyes widened again as Phei’s full presence reached them.

The reaction spread through the room far more intimately than the distant pressure they had sensed from outside.

His women felt a warm tingling that travelled through them before sinking lower, awakening desire with embarrassing speed as their bonds reacted to Phei’s return. The effect was not something Phei was intentionally doing to them, yet whatever had changed inside him had deepened the instinctive attraction already created by their connections.

Cassiopeia stiffened faintly.

The Void construct between her thighs trembled in response to him, vibrating with enough awareness that her breath caught before she controlled herself. Of everyone present, she felt his arrival more sharply because something in her pussy was literally something Phei had created.

Her eyes lifted toward him.

’What the hell did you become?’

Rhea, Cherry, Sharon, Savannah and Halsey looked from Phei toward the women around them with increasing confusion.

They could clearly tell something was happening.

They simply were not experiencing it.

For reasons only Phei’s strange abilities seemed to understand, the deeper pull of his presence that was awakening lust in his women did not simply spill over onto women belonging to his friends or people with whom he possessed no such relationship. They could recognize his beauty, sense the frightening depth of his cultivation and appreciate the fact that he had become absurdly more beautiful than any imagination, but whatever invisible sexual instinct was currently making several of his own women squeeze their thighs together simply passed them by.

His slaves though reacted differently.

The female Demon gad felt something before she could stop herself— Her body tightened while an old instinct screamed and surged through her blood and soul, telling her that something vastly higher within the hierarchy she had already accepted had returned stronger than before.

Desire existed in the reaction too; hot and immediate lust to wish he could fuck her, but beneath it came something more primitive: the urge to lower herself before him.

Seraphine experienced nearly the same thing.

Her whole being recoiled and leaned toward Phei simultaneously, fear and attraction tangling until even she seemed irritated by her own body’s response.

The Dragonkin’s reaction was worse.

His muscles locked for an instant as draconic instinct recognized something inside Phei that cultivation alone could not explain. Submission pressed through him so violently that one knee almost bent before pride and awareness caught the motion halfway.

The Elves reacted in subtler ways.

The Moon Elf lowered his head slightly toward Phei, almost a bow, and offered no explanation for why he had done it; it was a courtesy to Phei and gratitude to saving him and others and also as the leader of this whole family.

The Flower Elf brightened instead, excitement immediately dancing across her expression as her senses tried following the strange overlapping energies around him. The Origin Elf simply stared for several moments, felt exactly how much stronger that presence had become, and scoffed before turning her face away.

’The cruel Dragon has become even stronger.’

Of course he had.

Apparently whatever frozen nightmare he disappeared into had looked at Phei and concluded that the dragon needed more ways to become impossible.

Phei surveyed everyone with a huge smile, genuinely delighted simply to see familiar faces again.

Then the most important surprise finally moved.

A small silver-white figure appeared more clearly within his arms.

Several people who had been too distracted by Phei himself now focused properly upon the creature he was carrying, and the room became confused all over again.

The Dragon Lady rested comfortably against him in a reduced draconic form, small enough to be carried without difficulty but still unmistakably a true Dragon. Her blue-silver-white scales glittered beneath the penthouse lights with crystalline hints of blue, while elegant horns swept backward from her head and folded wings rested neatly along her body.

She looked beautiful—

She also looked like she could remove someone’s hand if they made the catastrophic mistake of assuming small meant harmless.

Phei’s fingers moved gently over one of her folded wings; the Dragon Lady merely shifted closer.

Phei walked toward Soraya before the woman had fully processed what was happening and carefully placed the small Dragon into her arms.

Soraya’s eyes became enormous.

"Please my love, hold my little sister for me," Phei said casually. "She’s shy, you see."

Then he walked away after a kiss on her forehead.

Soraya remained frozen.

In her arms now contained a Dragon.

’A fucking Dragon.’

She looked down slowly.

The Dragon Lady looked up at her.

Neither seemed certain how they had arrived at this arrangement.

Phei was already gone.

Right now nothing else in the penthouse mattered to Phei anymore because Melissa stood only several steps away, and for nearly a year he had imagined this moment in far too many versions.

During the coldest nights inside the Primordial Frozen Zone, when the storms screamed hard enough to make mountains sound alive and even his newly tempered body occasionally decided existence was overrated, Phei had entertained himself by thinking about what he would do when he finally got back to her:

He would kiss her until she forgot whatever lecture she had prepared for disappearing so long, carry her straight toward the bedroom regardless of how much Melissa Ryujin Tiamat pretended dignity still mattered, bury his face against her neck and breathe her scent in until the scent of primordial frost finally left his head, and spend an unreasonable amount of time reacquainting himself with every beautiful curve he had missed.

He had developed plans.

Very detailed plans, in fact, several of which would probably earn him a slap before Melissa kissed him anyway.

Every single one disappeared the instant she looked at him.

Phei crossed the distance between them so quickly that Melissa barely managed to breathe before both of his arms wrapped around her and pulled her flush against him.

The strength behind the movement should have been overwhelming, yet it softened perfectly around her at the final instant, holding rather than crushing as he buried his face against her hair and simply stayed there.

For Phei, nearly a year collapsed into that embrace at once:

Every frozen morning when his thoughts wandered toward home, every night beneath alien skies when some stupid part of him wondered what Melissa was doing, every battle after which he wanted to hear her call him reckless while pretending she was not relieved he had survived.

All of it returned through the warmth pressed against his chest until his eyes closed and his voice came rougher than he intended.

"Gods, I missed you, Mels."

Something inside Melissa gave way at those words.

Her arms snapped around him with enough urgency to surprise even Phei, one hand clutched the back of his white shirt while the other buried itself immediately into the unfamiliar length of his hair.

She pulled him closer even though there was almost nowhere left for him to go, and the laugh that escaped her trembled halfway toward a sob before she swallowed it. Two weeks had passed for her, only two weeks of knowing Phei was somewhere she could not reach, of being told time moved differently there and trying not to imagine how much differently.