Harem Cultivation System

The instant the void swallowed her, Ariel landed in a world of grey silence — no ground she could see clearly, no sky above her, just an endless horizon the color of dead ash stretching in every direction, swallowing sound the moment it left her lips.

Standing across from her, porcelain skin gleaming like cracked glass under some unseen light, was a woman who hadn’t so much as blinked since the fold sealed shut behind them.

"Interesting little dimension your friend cooked up." The woman’s voice was smooth and hollow, like something spoken through stone rather than a throat. "I am Meren. Shatterflesh, they call me. My skin doesn’t break."

"That’s cute." Ariel rolled her neck, crimson essence already gathering at her fingertips in slow, drifting motes. "Neither does my patience, and you’re already testing it."

"Everyone says that." Meren took a single, unhurried step forward. "And everyone learns the same lesson eventually. Doesn’t matter how sharp your blade is. Doesn’t matter how much power you pour into a single strike. My skin doesn’t break. Not from claws, not from swords, not from the collapsed ceiling of a mine that buried me alive for three days when I was young enough to still bleed."

"Riveting backstory." Ariel’s grin didn’t waver, though beneath it her mind was already turning the problem over, testing angles. *If cutting doesn’t work on her, then brute force definitely won’t either. She wants me to try and fail the same way everyone else did.*

Meren moved first — not fast, but relentless, closing the distance in a straight, unbothered line, both palms raised, porcelain fingers splayed like she’d never once considered the possibility of losing a fight in her life.

Ariel didn’t wait for the strike to land.

"Flutter One: Dance of Agony."

A ring of crimson butterflies detonated outward from her body, a hundred blades of condensed Dao given wings, tearing into Meren from every conceivable angle at once — a storm of overlapping slashes that would have reduced a lesser opponent to ribbons in a single heartbeat, the kind of technique that had cleansed entire corruption zones in one sweep back in Toru Village.

They shattered against Meren’s skin instead. A chorus of chimes rang out across the void, high and brittle and almost musical, and when the drifting dust settled, Meren stood exactly where she’d been standing a moment before — without a single mark to show for it.

"I told you." Meren stepped forward through the settling essence, entirely unbothered, close enough now that Ariel could see her own reflection warped and distorted across that glassy porcelain surface. "My skin doesn’t break."

"Good thing I wasn’t actually trying to break it." Ariel’s grin didn’t falter, even as she twisted her body just enough to let Meren’s follow-up palm strike graze past her ribs instead of connecting dead center. The blow still stung — Meren clearly hit harder than her calm demeanor suggested — but a graze she could work with.

She used the opening to plant her staff hard into the ground, crimson essence spreading outward from the point of impact like roots digging into soil that wasn’t really there.

The dust that had scattered from her first attack answered the motion, reversing course mid-drift — no longer aimless fragments settling into nothing, but a swarm regathering itself with purpose, curling around behind Meren rather than in front of her where she could see it coming.

"Persistent." Meren spun on her heel, unfazed, already tracking the movement with cold, clinical interest. "It won’t matter how many angles you attack from. Nothing gets through. I’ve had centuries to make sure of that."

"You keep saying that like it’s the only thing that matters." Ariel’s staff came up in a slow, deliberate arc, buying herself another half-second to let the swarm finish repositioning. "But skin isn’t armor, sweetheart. It’s a seal. And every seal — no matter how old, no matter how proud you are of it — has a seam somewhere."

The swarm surged on her signal, not toward Meren’s chest or her limbs this time, but toward the narrow gap at her collar, the soft hollow beneath her jaw, the thin, almost-forgotten skin at the inside of her wrists — every place where hardened porcelain met the ordinary flesh underneath, however small the margin.

Meren’s confidence cracked for the first time as the essence found purchase, seeping in through gaps she genuinely hadn’t known existed after centuries of relying on a defense that had never once been properly tested. It threaded down beneath armor built to withstand blades and fists, not something that simply refused to attack the surface at all.

"What — what are you doing to me—" Her hollow, unbothered voice finally cracked, panic bleeding through the cracks in her composure the way the essence bled through the cracks in her skin.

"Essence." Ariel tilted her head, watching with something almost like sympathy as Meren’s breathing turned ragged, her hands flying up to claw uselessly at her own throat. "My talent was never about cutting through defenses. It’s about getting past them entirely. You spent centuries building an unbreakable wall, Meren. I just walked in through the door you never knew you’d left open."

Meren tried to retreat, tried to gather whatever technique might have saved her — some counter-measure, some trick learned in all those long years of surviving worse than this — but the crimson essence had already spread too far, constricting around her windpipe from the inside rather than the outside, filling every small hollow space her armored skin had never needed to protect because nothing had ever gotten close enough to try.

Her knees buckled first. Then her whole frame swayed, porcelain-pale skin flushing an unnatural shade as the essence tightened its final grip. Her hollow, unbothered composure finally broke into something rawer — something like fear — in the half-second before her eyes rolled back and she folded silently to the ground.

Ariel exhaled slowly, letting her staff dissolve back into a scattering of drifting red motes that faded into the grey nothing around her.

"Not even a scratch," she murmured, glancing down at her own unblemished arms with quiet, private satisfaction. She turned Meren’s unconscious body over gently with the toe of her boot, almost thoughtful. "Three days buried alive and she still thought a little suffocation would be new to her. Poor thing."

She didn’t linger to gloat further, though the thought crossed her mind more than once. Instead, she flicked her wrist toward the seam in the dark that would fold her back toward the plane, already wondering how the others were faring on their own fronts — particularly Haruki, though she’d never admit just how much of her attention had been split between finishing her own fight quickly and worrying about his.

"Hang on, Haruki-sama," she whispered to no one, stepping through the fold. "I’m coming."

The grey plain, and Meren’s unconscious body upon it, vanished behind her without a sound.

— End of Chapter —