My Taboo Harem!

His downward momentum had vanished completely.

He looked toward the place where he had been falling, then lowered his eyes toward his own feet.

"No way." This deserved confirmation.

Phei jumped deliberately, using enough strength to launch himself far higher than any normal human had business jumping indoors. He allowed himself to fall, waited until gravity had built sufficient momentum and activated Void Step immediately before impact.

The descent vanished with him; when Phei emerged several meters away, his body was completely still again.

His eyes brightened.

Entering the Void erased his existing momentum.

That was enormous.

If an attacked or enemy physically hurled him through a building, blasted him from a cliff or drove him toward the ground at enough speed to turn ordinary people into unfortunate stains, Phei could potentially Step before impact and emerge somewhere else without carrying any of that force.

His grin returned.

"Okay. You’re slightly less pathetic."

Naturally, once Phei discovered something useful, restraint immediately became unemployed.

He Stepped across the room, vanished again before his feet had fully settled, appeared beside the windows and folded away a third time to emerge behind where an imaginary opponent might have been standing.

***

By the fortieth attempt, his landings had improved dramatically, by the fifty, he could emerge almost exactly in the posture he intended.

The sixty made his temples pulse.

Phei stopped.

The room seemed to tilt slightly, though the floor had not moved but his perception had.

The spatial hollows he had begun noticing around the lounge no longer felt perfectly reliable. One seemed slightly closer than it truly was, while another initially appeared suitable until concentration revealed that his strained perception had distorted its shape.

Phei frowned and deliberately sharpened Minimal Void Sense.

The hollows became clearer, though the sensation remained imperfect.

"So that’s the catch."

There was no cooldown and apparently no arbitrary restriction preventing him from using the ability repeatedly.

Void Step remained ready.

Phei was the weak link.

Every rapid Step strained his painfully shallow understanding of the Void, and once his perception became sufficiently unreliable, continuing to teleport would become less of a battle technique and more of a very creative method of gambling with his own anatomy.

He waited several moments while the pressure behind his eyes faded surprisingly quickly.

"Fine."

That limitation he could respect.

It meant mastery mattered.

Phei turned toward one of the solid dividing walls enclosing the lounge. The Void Step description explicitly claimed ordinary physical obstacles could be ignored, and he knew another room existed directly beyond this wall. His current perception reached far enough to identify an empty section of floor on the other side.

He focused.

Then disappeared.

The wall might as well never have existed.

Phei emerged in the adjoining room without passing through stone, approaching a doorway or disturbing the wall in any visible way.

His eyebrows climbed.

A moment later he Stepped back into the lounge.

"Oh, that’s filthy."

Concrete, steel, locked doors and ordinary vaults were essentially decorative if he could perceive a viable destination within ten meters.

His thoughts immediately sprinted toward the obvious limitation.

"What about formations?"

The System answered this time.

[Void Step Lv.1 bypasses ordinary physical obstruction because Host does not cross the intervening matter.]

Another line appeared.

[However, spatial seals, stabilized-space formations, sufficiently powerful Domains, divine barriers and techniques capable of locking or suppressing spatial hollows may obstruct or prevent Void Step.]

Phei’s excitement became slightly more civilized.

Of course there was a catch.

A normal wall could not stop him because the wall itself never stood along a route he travelled but formation specifically designed to stabilize or seal space, however, could lock or remove the hollows his ability needed.

"So if someone seals space around me..."

[Host may be unable to Step beyond the sealed region.]

"At Level One or lower levels of the ability, right?"

[Correct.]

Phei smiled; that final answer mattered far more than the limitation.

He could work with that.

Still pleased with his discovery, Phei selected a room much farther through the villa. He knew it well, had seen it before during day and could picture almost every piece of furniture inside.

He activated Void Step but nothing happened.

Phei frowned and tried again.

Still nothing.

"The hell?" But understanding drawn on his face; knowing somewhere existed was insufficient, memory could not substitute for actual awareness of the location where he intended to emerge.

Phei clicked his tongue.

There went his promising future career as the world’s most invasive surprise guest.

Still, that limitation also explained why Minimal Void Sense had awakened alongside Void Step: the farther and more accurately he could perceive, the more useful his movement would become.

His attention drifted toward the couch and another stupid thought appeared: Phei focused directly on its center.

Consort’s brow furrowed from concealment.

Surely he would not...

Phei activated Void Step.

His body vanished and then he appeared beside the couch rather than inside it.

Phei stared at the furniture; the Void had rejected his attempts.

Interesting.

He tested the possibility again by deliberately selecting a point within the solid wall, once more, his emergence shifted sideways toward the nearest viable empty space.

"Good."

Apparently the ability possessed enough instinctive protection to prevent him from dematerializing with half his organs embedded inside architecture.

Phei deeply appreciated that consideration.

Discovering otherwise would have been a remarkably educational experience lasting approximately one second.

He resumed moving through the lounge with less structure now, testing instinct rather than description. One Step carried him across the room, another backward, another beside the window. He Stepped two meters upward, rotated while falling and disappeared again before emerging behind his previous position.

Every attempt became smoother.

The ability itself had not grown stronger. Its range remained ten meters, and the Void still handled his existence with something resembling the grace of a cosmic fist. Phei, however, was beginning to understand how to surrender his position without instinctively resisting the sensation.

That was when Minimal Void Sense caught something else.

A faint disturbance remained wherever he entered or left.

It was tiny, almost nonexistent, yet once Phei deliberately searched for it he could detect the momentary wrongness left behind where his existence had vanished into the Void and returned elsewhere.

Space had not been torn.

It had simply noticed that something had cheated.

Ordinary senses would probably never detect it, but someone with sufficiently powerful spatial perception might. Another Void user almost certainly could, while a powerful Domain could potentially feel the disturbance occurring inside its territory.

"So I’m not completely untraceable."

Another limitation to eventually trample over.

Phei appeared beside the couch once more and stopped when his gaze landed on the darkness underneath it. Something about the shadow scratched gently against his instincts.

There was no danger there, only possibility so Phei focused upon it but nothing happened.

He turned toward a deeper patch of darkness gathered in the far corner of the lounge and tried again.

Still nothing.

Minimal Void Sense barely acknowledged either one.

Phei frowned.

"So shadows don’t count."

[Correct.]

"Darkness?"

[Not at Host’s current understanding.]

That wording caught his attention.

The System had not said impossible.

Only that Phei did not understand enough yet, he looked back toward the shadow beneath the couch. At Level One, a shadow was merely somewhere light failed to reach, while darkness remained darkness. Neither automatically contained the spatial hollow required for Void Step.

Yet something inside Phei continued scratching at the connection with it.

’Void. Absence. Shadow and Darkness.’

They were different things, certainly, but perhaps somewhere deeper they touched the same hidden foundation.

Phei imagined a battlefield where an opponent confidently kept twenty meters between them. He pictured himself stepping backward into his own shadow and simply ceasing to exist there, only to emerge from the darkness beneath that enemy’s feet before the bastard even realized the first shadow had become empty.

His smile widened.

"Now that would be fucking cool."

From concealment, Consort’s lips curved faintly.

For now, shadows remained ordinary shadows. Void Step remained limited to ten miserable meters, Hollow Touch could only disturb weaknesses he first managed to perceive, Minimal Void Sense barely deserved to have Sense included in its name, and repeatedly using Void Step gradually turned his spatial perception into something he would prefer not to trust with the placement of his internal organs.

Pathetic Level One abilities. That had been his first impression.

After actually testing them, however, the insult had become difficult to defend.

Hollow Touch could create exploitable flaws in defenses brute force might never overcome. Minimal Void Sense could reveal erased traces, hidden things and swallowed pieces of existence, perching beyond just his senses and his eyes. Void Step granted genuine instantaneous movement, ignored ordinary physical obstacles, erased momentum and opened directions of attack or retreat that ordinary speed could never reproduce.

At Level One, all three remained crude, limited and poorly understood.

They were also already dangerous.

Unfortunately, Phei did not need them to become terrifying several years from now.

He needed them terrifying tonight:

His gaze drifted toward one particularly large number sitting inside his Status Window.

EXP: 720,000.

A slow smile spread across Phei’s face.

Why the hell was he standing here training like some poor cultivator armed with nothing except patience and several hundred years of free time?

Phei raised one hand toward the three blue ability windows.

"System."

The windows trembled faintly in response.

His grin widened.

"Let’s spend some EXP."

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