Phei sat at the kitchen island while the status window hovered in his vision, glowing like a bad idea that had learned how to use electricity.
Blue light where blue light had no business existing, and he couldn't stop grinning, the kind of grin you get when you either invent fire or accidentally become rich before breakfast. Possibly both.
Below him—and yes, very literally below, sprawled on the actual marble floor—Melissa was working. Naked as the day she'd entered the world, except now she was covered in… evidence.
Their evidence.
Scrubbing the tiles like her continued existence depended on erasing every trace from stone that probably cost more than his entire childhood. Which, when you considered consequences in a grown-up way, it very well might.
Earlier she'd bolted for the bedroom in a panicked sprint, post-orgasm haze barely registering it. Took her phone and hid it.
The phone.
The one that had been recording everything. Every sound, every movement, every moment of his aunt—his actual aunt, his dead father's sister—getting her married life completely rewritten by her nephew's Dragon.
When she'd shown him afterward, breathless and oddly proud, the screen shaking with footage of her face coming apart under him, his body stretching her open in ways geometry probably frowned upon, her chest bouncing with each impact like one of those novelty desk toys that never stops wobbling—he'd just smiled.
Welcome to the modern age.
He didn't need proof. Didn't need receipts or trophies or some weird victory parade.
His body was already its own résumé, and once other women discovered what he was working with, the word would travel faster than gossip through a high school hallway. Still, the thought of watching it later wasn't… academic.
"Stimulating" felt too polite. It would be filthy. Educational. A visual record of how far he'd traveled in less than a day.
That was the unhinged part.
Not even twenty-four hours. Just a few stolen hours while her husband and kids were off pretending to be functional members of society, blissfully unaware that their wife and mother was back home getting absolutely dismantled by the family disappointment.
He'd really come a long way.
His gaze drifted back to the status window, those numbers sitting there like they'd always owned him.
[STRENGTH: 65/100]
[ENDURANCE: 65/100]
From fifty to sixty-five. Fifteen points apiece. On paper it sounded unimpressive, the kind of gain you'd shrug at if you were a fitness influencer trying to sell supplements. Still well under that smug "average healthy male" benchmark sitting at a perfect hundred like it had never skipped leg day.
But he felt it. In his blood. In muscles that had finally decided to participate instead of freeload. In the way his body answered him now, responsive instead of resentful. In the stamina that had kept him upright for hours when the old version of him would've folded like a cheap lawn chair.
Visually, he hadn't turned into a Marvel casting call. Still lean, still one missed meal away from looking fragile. No gym-rat bulk, no protein-shake bravado. But beneath that, something had changed. Power ran through him now, quiet and steady, like live wires buried under concrete.
And his Dragon—Christ, his Dragon—was still there. Heavy. Assertive. Even after everything. Angled toward Melissa's bent form like it had laid claim to the kitchen itself. Which, frankly, felt accurate.
Veins traced the shaft like infrastructure. The crown dark, swollen, unapologetic. Even half-soft it looked dangerous, the kind of thing that came with a warning label lawyers had argued over.
Dragon's Rod. The system hadn't been joking.
Still, the number that snagged his attention—the one that made his chest tighten in a way he didn't quite like—wasn't physical.
[CHARISMA: 75/100]
Seventy-five. Up from 50. A leap courtesy of marking Melissa, dragging him from "weak" (that word had stung more than it should've) to "average."
He wasn't anywhere near the hundred yet. Not the kind of face people remembered. Not the sort of presence that bent rooms around itself.
But he was moving.
Fast.
Unreasonably fast.
And the reason for that speed made his thoughts hesitate, like they'd just tripped over a name they weren't ready to say.
Thanks to Melissa.
Weird thing to think. Properly weird. He'd spent ten years cursing her name in his head, fantasizing about her suffering in all sorts of creative ways, dreaming of the day he could escape her cruelty and never look back.
And now here she was. On her knees scrubbing cum off the floor with tissues and cleaning spray like some kind of pornographic Cinderella, marked with his dragon tattoo right above her clit where nobody else would see it but them, her body permanently rewired—system's words, not his—to crave only him.
Making up for years of his treatment in the most twisted, sexual way possible. Not that it was about revenge anymore. He liked her now which was weird too.
He could admit that, at least in the privacy of his own skull. Could acknowledge that without her—without her hunger that she'd been hiding for years, her submission that had come out all desperate and needy, her willingness to be claimed by someone she'd treated like rubbish for a decade—he wouldn't be sitting here with a system full of powers and a cock that could apparently ruin lives.
She'd been the catalyst, hadn't she? The first domino that knocked all the others down.
And she'd keep being useful. Had to be, really. He'd marked her. System said he couldn't abandon marked women even if he wanted to, which... he didn't think he did? The jury was still out on that one, deliberating in the back of his mind while he focused on more immediate concerns.
The intelligence and perception stats hadn't surprised him much, if he was honest.
[INTELLIGENCE: 150/100]
[PERCEPTION: 150/100]
He'd always been smart. One of the few students top of his classes at Ashford Elite despite everything working against him—the hand-me-down uniforms, the constant bullying, the lack of sleep, the stress that never really went away.
Perceptive too, had to be when you lived in a house where everyone wanted you gone. You learned to read rooms like books, read moods like weather patterns, anticipate danger before it arrived so you could make yourself scarce.
But now he had another use for those stats, didn't he? Another hobby to allocate his intelligence toward that had nothing to do with quadratic equations or British literature essays.
Not just academics anymore. Not just survival.
Now it was: fucking all the hot women in Paradise and their hot daughters while I'm at it.