The dragon's harem

Arad and Haru finished eating what he had cooked and left some for Gojo and Liliana to heat up. After that, he took Haru by the hand and started guiding her around the whole house to explore it.

Even when weakened to the level of a normal human, Arad still felt how weak and fragile Haru was, just from her tiny and soft hands. Her abilities were extremely powerful in their own way, but she was no better than a mortal human girl.

Arad, on the other hand, was a three-meter-tall giant who could wrestle bears and kill a shark in the ocean with his bare hands. So he had to be extremely careful and gentle with her.

Haru wasn’t that worried. She clenched her hand on Arad’s massive palm, holding tightly and following him around. With her other hand, she touched the walls, stairs, and furniture as they slowly walked by.

She had to feel the entire place and map it inside her head, using stationery things as monuments. The stairs are connected to the entrance’s living room, they have twelve steps, and the last one is a bit shorter than the ones before. Turning left, she could find the door to the vault, and to the right, there are several rooms.

Memorizing the place like this was difficult for most people, but not for her. She had spent hundreds of years living like this after all, except that she only needed to memorize a few places in hell and one massive castle when living in Alina.

Haru also had to remember people using their voices instead of faces, so she seemed to have made quite a lot of friends in Arad’s castle.

But what was most impressive about her was that she could use echolocation better than Jack and Alcott. Albeit that skill was almost useless in a place as dense as a house. Let alone when a loud and violent storm is raging outside.

They weren’t going to stay here for too long, but it would be nice if she could comfortably move on her own. Arad knew better than most that she didn’t like needing someone to guide her. Not because she hated getting help, but because she loathed being a burden on someone else.

After a whole hour of walking around the entire house, the two finally looped back to the entrance’s living room, and sat at the dinner table again.

While Arad looked fine, Haru looked pale and exhausted. It was expected, because while she looked calm and collected, her brain was going into overdrive trying to memorize the whole place.

Seeing her this exhausted, Arad worried about the time they’ll have to leave this place and travel this accursed world. Can she handle it? Probably, but it won’t be easy. He’ll have to carry her around the whole time. Thankfully, she was light and didn’t weigh much, so letting her ride on his back would be efficient.

“How was it?” Arad asked as he sat her on a chair and went to grab some water. He wasn’t thirsty, but felt that not getting anything to drink would be lacking. Especially since, to a devil like Haru, water was a luxury that no devil could afford, and she could only drink it after starting to live in Arad’s castle.

Haru looked around with a somber face. “This place is weird on so many layers to the point it’s horrifying. What strikes me the most is the strange feeling I get from it.”

She touched her chest.

“I feel like a lump is stuck in my throat, fear of death. It’s as if I know that I’ll die in the next second, but with my power, I can tell that I’ll live for centuries to come.” She smiled, “As far as my power can see, I’m still alive.”

She shifted in her chair.

“The other feeling I get is hard to explain without sounding stupid…” She twitched. “I’m getting really, really, really, horny. If I stop thinking for a second, my thoughts always drift to sex. I can’t help but feel a primal urge to get pregnant and bear a child. It’s a strange feeling that I never felt before.”

Arad looked at her as he poured two large mugs of cold water and headed back to the table. Taking a seat facing her, he pushed one of the two mugs in front of her, grabbed her hand, and put it on the handle.

“Your water.” He noticed her flinch a tiny bit when he touched her without warning. The powers of the Mother of All Life seem to be affecting her pretty bad, probably because she is a Seer and is sensing the truth of this place.

She smiled. “I can tell where the mug was just by the sound of you putting it down.”

Arad shrugged, “I also knew you put your hand in a soup bowl once because the maid pushed it toward you a bit. Sound is unreliable, especially when there is a snowy storm outside.” He looked at the window and frowned.

“So? What’s so wrong about this place?” He knew about Death and the Mother of All Life, but he did want to hear the perspective of a Seer.

Haru caressed the mug in her hands, feeling its shape for a few moments before bringing it to her lips. After taking a greedy gulp of the refreshing water, she looked at Arad with a somber face. She had finally pushed all of the stupid, horny thoughts to the back end of her brain, sealing them away behind an endless wall of thoughts about this place and what its truth is.

“A Seer’s powers aren’t just limited to seeing the future. We can sense the past, emotions, and even truth. I can walk into a house and tell that the family living in it is sad, even if I have never seen them. I can see a beautiful garden and tell you that once upon a time, a tragedy happened. I can touch a woman’s belly and tell her how many children she’ll have, which genders, what they can achieve, and if she’ll see them all to adulthood.”

She put the mug down and shifted her head around, listening to the quiet rumble of the storm outside.

“This place is weird. It’s alive, but dead. I can tell that the most heinous and evil crime against life has been committed thousands of times here, and that the most radiant and blessed miracles of life itself have also been born within these walls.” She started shaking.

“I feel like both thanking and cursing whoever lives here.” She could put her thoughts into a single idea. This place is making her afraid of death to the point of wanting to leave offspring.

Arad leaned back. He agrees, this isn’t a place mortals or gods should be allowed to visit. It’s where Death and Life coexisted, a sacred place in a sense.

“As expected, right?” He sighed, and Haru nodded. He already told her that Death herself and the Mother of All life lived here, or this place was at least one of the many houses they used.

“Yes… But no.” She slowly turned her head, as if looking around. “Something else, this place, not the house, but the region or the forest, I guess, it’s making it harder to use my power.”

At that moment, she regretted pushing the horny thoughts and the fear of death to the back of her mind. The single thought that crossed her mind almost made her go mad. She desperately tried to resist, let the insidious allure of reproduction engulf her mind, or at least allow the cold fear of death to wash away all reason from her brain, but alas, it was all useless.

She wished Arad would start choking her to death so she could feel scared and forget. She wanted him to pin her down and started violently breeding her so she could focus on that. But none of that was going to happen, and she was left with the creeping madness.

She started shaking, and soon extended her hands toward Arad as if calling for help. He rushed in and carried her with a worried face.

“Are you all right?” He asked with a hoarse voice, and she gave him a pained smile.

“I’m… just, give me a moment to calm…” She started crying uncontrollably, and he sat her on his lap, waiting for her to calm a bit.

She considered asking him for help, but then, she would forget what truth she just saw. So she had to endure the madness and try to calm down in his arms. If she felt herself going a bit too deep into the madness, she could then ask him to pull her out by any means necessary.

She cried, and cried, and sobbed, and sobbed again. Moments became minutes, and those minutes turned into hours. Two hours after she started crying, she finally managed to stop shaking, holding on to Arad’s massive torso like a terrified little animal.

“The Fates… they have foretold of this place.” She could barely force those words out, but what came out of her lips finally made Arad pause for a second to think.

“This place… we’re in Limbo.”