His Charm Speech was level 3 now. Passive. Always active, no cooldown, no duration limit. Every word he spoke from now on would carry weight—20% more persuasive to everyone, 60% to anyone aroused, and even 5% to people who hated his guts and wanted him dead.
Mental. Properly mental.
He could walk up to Sierra right now and she'd actually listen to him instead of spitting venom and laughing with her friends.
The second wave hit his chest—Dominance Aura expanding outward like invisible pressure, like the air itself was bending to make room for him. The space around him felt denser, subtly warped, as if his presence bent the atmosphere by existing inside it.
Dominance Aura, expanding from a whisper to a field.
Twenty-five feet.
Melissa gasped from the floor, sharp and sudden.
Phei looked down. She'd stopped cleaning, was kneeling. Her thighs pressed together tight. Her breathing quickened, chest rising and falling faster. The cloth slipped from her fingers. She looked up at him like she'd just walked into a room and forgotten why she'd come in, breath catching, pupils blown wide. Her posture shifted unconsciously.
"Your Presence…It's stronger," she said softly, confusion threading through the awe. "You didn't touch me, but I can feel it. Like pressure."
Phei didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
"Finish," he said.
The word landed heavy. Settled into her bones.
She shuddered and immediately went back to work, movements faster now, sharper, driven by something deeper than instruction. Not fear. Not exactly. Something closer to instinct.
Level two, then.
Submissive targets felt it. Felt him.
The confirmation chimed.
[LEVEL UP COMPLETE]
[CHARM SPEECH: LV.3 – PASSIVE]
[DOMINANCE AURA: LV.2 – PASSIVE]
[REMAINING EXP: 150]
[CURRENT ABILITIES STATUS:]
Charm Speech Lv.3 [0/250 EXP to Level 4]
Dominance Aura Lv.2 [0/200 EXP to Level 3]
Taboo Multiplier Lv.1 [1/3 Conquests to Level 2]
Cucklord's Dominance Lv.1 [1/3 Victims to Level 2]
Phei leaned back against the island, letting the satisfaction spread slow and controlled, like the burn of good liquor rather than the rush of cheap adrenaline.
This wasn't chaos.
This was infrastructure.
And he was only just getting started.
But the real cheat—the one that tilted the board so hard it was almost unfair, the trump card he'd been handed without asking—was Taboo Multiplier.
A flat twenty percent increase to success on anything illicit. Forbidden. Socially radioactive.
And in Paradise, everything he wanted lived behind velvet ropes and warning signs.
Seducing his step-sisters? Taboo.Taking his aunt to bed? Already done, and so far past taboo it barely had a name anymore.Going after Mrs. Adriana—the neighbor, the best friend, the woman who looked at him like she'd enjoy watching him bleed? Insanely taboo.Pursuing women tied up in reputation, status, rules, expectations? All of it taboo, every last bit.
Every target on his list existed in that screaming grey zone society loved to condemn out loud while secretly orbiting in private.
Which meant every attempt he made received the bonus.
Twenty percent. Every time.
It was absurd in the same way discovering fire immunity in a lava dungeon would be absurd. The thing meant to destroy him had been inverted into fuel. The more scandalous the act, the smoother the execution. The more outrage it would cause if discovered, the easier it became to pull off.
Game logic. Cruel, elegant game logic.
And unlike most cheats, this one scaled.
And it didn't stop there.
He could level it.
Level two doubled the effect. Forty percent. Absurd.
Level three tripled it. Sixty percent, which stopped being an edge and started being outright cheating.
But Taboo Multiplier didn't care about EXP. It didn't respond to grinding or hoarding points. It leveled through action.
Through bodies.
Through conquests made in situations that made decent people avert their eyes and clench their morals tight. Each woman claimed under circumstances society would label wrong nudged the bar forward.
Right now, the system read:
[1/3 Taboo Conquests to Level 2]
Melissa.
She was the first fracture. The proof of concept.
Two more and the multiplier doubled. Every forbidden move after that would slide into place with terrifying ease.
So the question wasn't whether he'd do it.
It was who came next.
His step-sisters immediately came to mind, each difficult in her own distinct way. Victoria's cruelty sharpened by intelligence. Delilah's casual malice disguised as humor. Sienna's lethal indifference, the hardest wall of all. Each represented a different challenge, a different kind of resistance that the system would be very interested in watching him dismantle.
Then there were the outer circles. Mrs. Adriana next door, hatred worn like perfume, hostility so practiced it had become flirtatious without her realizing it. Other academy women, technically adult, socially shielded by reputation and rules, whose lives revolved around maintaining the illusion of control.
Every option pulsed with risk.
And reward.
The possibilities stacked up, overlapping, branching.
His pulse picked up. The Dragon stirred, not from exhaustion or hunger, but from anticipation. From scale.
His pulse picked up despite himself. The Dragon stirred, responding not to flesh but to possibility. To the sheer scope of what had opened in front of him.
This wasn't excitement the way adrenaline junkies described it. This was deeper. Strategic. The thrill of standing at the edge of a map and realizing it extended far beyond what anyone had admitted.
But excitement without discipline got you exposed. Got you expelled. Got you broken in a locker room or dragged into consequences he wasn't ready to handle yet.
Rushing was how you died in Paradise.
But patience?
Patience built leverage. Patience built inevitability.
Before his thoughts could spiral fully into planning—before his brain could lock onto the problem and refuse to let go—Melissa stood up from the floor. The tiles gleamed now, spotless, erased so thoroughly it was as if nothing had happened at all.
She reached for his hand. Her fingers trembled.
"Come with me," she said softly. "I have a gift for you."
Phei lifted an eyebrow. "A gift?"
"Upstairs. My bedroom." She tugged gently, already turning toward the staircase at the back of the kitchen. "I… I prepared something. Before you woke up. Just in case."
He followed, curiosity overriding caution. Not because the risk wasn't there—but because he knew it wasn't real.
But he was already looking at the early fruits of the system. Already watching power compound. Already feeling how fast things could accelerate.
And it had only been a few hours since he'd woken up like this.
Imagine a week.
A month.
A year, with time to really sink his teeth into Paradise's population of beautiful, frustrated, tightly wound women.
Paradise wasn't prepared for him.
It was his for the taking. One conquest at a time.
And for the first time in his life, he wasn't in a hurry anymore.
Funny how much time you suddenly had once you stopped planning to die.