My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 756: Mirror Dimension

The moment Sienna’s door clicked shut, the floor died before a sound, sharp, percussive cracking punched through the corridor like a fist through stained glass, each fracture sound announcing itself with the brittle musicality like it had been holding itself together through sheer courtesy and had, at last, been released from the obligation.

The ceiling split first in a long jagged slash that tore from the recessed lighting to the far wall, widening from hairline to finger-width in a single breath, then kept going — branching, forking, the fissures multiplying across the entire hallway ceiling like roots spreading through wet earth, each crack spawning two more, each fork spawning four, until the entire ceiling was a web of fractures so dense the original surface was barely visible between them.

The walls and marble cracked too, lines raced along every surface at once, leaping from ceiling to wall to floor in cascading bursts that chased each other down the corridor like lit fuses, before the hallway groaned in a deep, tectonic sound and it began to peel apart.

The floor Sienna had walked through — the long Empyrean-blue carpeted hallway, the recessed lighting, the polished surfaces that had, moments ago, been indistinguishable from the real thing — shed itself in sheets.

Sections of wall curled away from the structure beneath them the way bark peels from a birch in late summer, drifting downward, slow and weightless, thinning as they fell until they were translucent, then transparent, then gone, dissolving into particulate shimmer that scattered like pollen in a windless room before the pieces touched the ground.

The corridor surrendered, each layer gave itself up without resistance — panels drifting, ceiling curling inward like a burning letter’s edges, the ambient light flickering and dying in a slow cascading wave that rolled from Sienna’s door to the elevator in four unhurried seconds, end to end.

Behind the peeling walls there was no steel.

There was nothing but a depthless luminous void where architecture should have been, yawning open in widening strips as more panels peeled free and floated down into it.

A dimension — and it had been a dimension, a separate meticulously constructed pocket of folded reality stitched into the building’s substrate that had held its shape long enough to do its job, and now it was letting go all at once.

And then it was gone.

The whole thing simply ceased and folded back into whatever seam of reality it had been carved from, its last shimmering remnants scattering upward in slow helical threads and thinning to nothing against open air.

And right where it had been, the real floor appeared.

This one teemed with life...

Staff in crisp Infinity Chaos uniforms pushed service carts through the corridor, carried stacked linens against their chests, nodded to residents who strolled past in the unhurried way of guests paying enough per night to believe hallways existed for their personal convenience.

A couple emerged from a penthouse three doors down, laughing softly, his hand on the small of her back, their day already beginning.

A room service attendant knocked twice on a far door and waited with his hands clasped behind his back, patient, professional, blissfully unaware that the corridor he was standing in had, until four seconds ago, been doubled — that a second version of this exact hallway had existed in a folded pocket of dimensional space directly on top of the first, like a transparency laid over a photograph, and that the woman who had walked through it had left a trail of raw Nether Energy potent enough to crack mirrors and jolt a sleeping infant seven floors below into screaming terror its parents would spend the next three hours failing to explain.

But she had done all of it inside the Mirror Dimension — a pocket of folded space woven around the corridor and the corridor alone, sealing her passage away from every living soul on the real floor so that no one would see, feel, and no one would choke on the slow divine haemorrhage of a Nether Goddess whose body was tearing itself apart from the inside while she walked thirty metres to her bedroom door.

A Mirror Dimension, someone had built it for her.

Hayashi exhaled.

His whole chest dropped with it — the breath like he had been holding something immense in place for far too long.

He had been sustaining the dimension while Sienna walked thirty meters of folded hallway without killing anyone, and the cost of that sustaining was now announcing itself across every nerve his body possessed.

His hands — which had been pressed white-knuckled against the polished brass rail hard enough to leave dents that the maintenance team would later attribute to a luggage cart — peeled free and hung at his sides, trembling faintly.

The tremor ran from his fingertips to his wrists.

His forearms ached deep in the muscle — the ache of gripping a ledge for hours... his shoulders burned.

He stood in the real elevator.

The genuine cabin with its genuine cello soundtrack playing something by Dvořák and its genuine security camera blinking in the upper corner.

He looked up at the blinking camera.

Gave it a thumbs up.

The doors slid open.

Staff along the corridor flinched at his appearance — a man in a ceremonial black suit stepping out of an elevator they hadn’t seen arrive, which was concerning, and looking like he had just completed a physical feat they could not identify, which was more concerning — then recovered with Infinity Chaos speed and dropped into bows.

"Hayashi-sama."

"Hayashi-sama."

He barely nodded, walking past them.

His legs carried him down the corridor to Sienna’s penthouse on muscle memory alone, because the rest of him — the part that had spent the past ninety seconds constructing and sustaining a dimensional pocket — was already trembling at the thought what waited behind the door.

The lock read his biometric and clicked open, he stepped through without breaking stride.

The penthouse hit him in the throat.

Nether Energy, raw and uncompiled, hung in the vast space in slow churning ribbons of black-violet haze that filled every corner from entire penthouse to vaulted ceiling.

It had, in the perhaps ninety seconds since Sienna had crossed the threshold and collapsed, spread through the penthouse with the unhurried territorial confidence of smoke filling a sealed room — except smoke dispersed and thinned and eventually found equilibrium, and this did none of those things.

This draped itself across the penthouse with deliberate weight, coiled around like a serpent coiling around a sleeping branch as it pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows in thick smears that blotted the city light to a bruised sullen violet.

It curled into the folds of the silk curtains and nested there, burrowing in, settling into the fabric with the committed satisfaction of something making itself comfortable in a home it had decided belonged to it.

The fog did not drift aimlessly but actually prowled — rolling in slow heavy waves across the marble, pooling in corners the way water pools in low ground, thickening around the bedroom door where the young princess lay in a density that turned the air visible and the visible air hostile.

Near the bedroom, the haze was so dense it had weight — Hayashi could see the silk curtains nearest the door sagging under it, the fabric bowing inward as though something heavy had been draped across the rod.

One breath of this would drop any other man with indifferent lethality — the cosmic equivalent of a woman rolling over in her sleep and obliterating an ant she never knew was on her pillow.

Hayashi breathed it in anyway.

He tasted ozone and old iron and something deeper, something that scraped the back of his palate like swallowing live embers, a slow hot burn that clawed its way down his throat and settled smouldering in his chest.

But his constitution was not of a human, at least not a normal one.

The reasons for that were his own, buried in the reason why Madam had hired him precisely for this slim, improbable, cosmically unfair margin — the difference between a man who should have died the first time he tasted raw Nether Energy and a man who had, instead, metabolized it and remained standing with his suit still perfectly straight.

He looked at the bedroom door.

It was closed and the youngest Ojou-sama lay behind it on the floor, unconscious, her body split open and still leaking, the Nether Energy pouring out in slow, committed waves the way blood pours from a wound the body has long since stopped trying to close.

Hayashi sighed and closed his eyes.

He did not need to, but a man who had spent decades perfecting the impossible was entitled to one small theatrical flourish, one heartbeat of indulgence, because his only audience was unconscious and the cameras had already received their thumbs-up and, in the private ledger of men who do the impossible for a living, he had earned the right to make it look dramatic.

When he opened them, grey light bloomed in the depths of his irises — strange, depthless, cold, a light that did not illuminate but displaced whatever had been there before, shoving the brown and the warmth.

The fog nearest his face recoiled a quarter-inch, flinching like an animal that had expected a den and found a forest fire instead.

He clapped his hands.