Harem Cultivation System

The governor’s estate reeked of scorched iron by the time Haruki and the others finally made it through the front doors — no small feat, given that the guards stationed there had spent the last ten minutes staring at Vex like she might start swinging at them too.

"Lord Haruki Chen." The governor himself met them in the entrance hall, a thin, harried-looking man whose fine robes did nothing to hide how badly his hands were shaking. "Thank the heavens you arrived when you did. That thing in the courtyard—"

"Was sent by an organization calling itself Kargekin," Haruki finished grimly. "We got a name and a laugh out of the deal. Not much else."

The governor’s already pale face lost another shade of color. "Kargekin," he repeated, the word clearly not new to him. "You’ve heard of them, then?"

"No." Nibel’s voice was flat, sharp. "Which is exactly the problem. An organization capable of fielding a construct like that and a combatant who can vanish into thin air shouldn’t be a complete unknown to a guild investigative division. So either your intelligence network has failed spectacularly, or someone’s been sitting on information."

The governor flinched, and in that flinch, Haruki read everything he needed to know.

"Which is it?" Haruki asked quietly.

A woman’s voice answered instead, cutting crisp and cold across the entrance hall before the governor could stammer out an excuse. "The second one, obviously. Though I’d frame it less as ’sitting on information’ and more as ’waiting for the right people to arrive before wasting it on the wrong ones.’"

A woman in the dark blue robes of the Cultivator Guild’s investigative division descended the estate’s grand staircase, a thick folder tucked under one arm, expression unreadable behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

"Investigator Sana Reid," she introduced herself, not offering a hand. "I’ve been tracking whispers of Kargekin for the better part of two years. Every lead dead-ends the same way — witnesses vanish, records get ’misplaced,’ and the one operative we ever managed to capture alive dissolved into ash the moment we tried to interrogate him properly."

"Convenient," Rosalia muttered.

"Extremely." Sana’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "What isn’t convenient is that an organization this well-resourced, this good at covering their tracks, decided today of all days to make themselves loudly, deliberately known — right as the four of you happened to be flying in."

"You think we were the target," Haruki said slowly, the pieces already clicking together with uncomfortable speed. "Not the market district. Not the governor’s estate. Us."

"I think," Sana said, opening her folder and producing a single, hand-drawn sketch, "that whoever sent that beast into the market knew precisely which airship was inbound, and precisely who was aboard it."

The sketch depicted the corruption pattern from the beast’s hide — the same branching black fissures Haruki had seen on the boy’s leg, rendered in exacting, clinical detail.

"This matches a corruption signature logged in a sealed guild file two years ago," Sana continued. "A village called Toru, on the edge of the Yuxian-Rinxia border. Officially, the incident was attributed to natural corruption zone progression. Unofficially—" she paused, glancing at Haruki with a look that was equal parts suspicion and grim curiosity, "—I’ve spent two years trying to prove that Toru Village’s outbreak was deliberately engineered. And failing. Until this morning."

The room went very quiet.

"You’re saying Kargekin caused Toru Village," Haruki said, voice dangerously level, "and used the exact same method today, in the exact same prefecture I was flying into, on the exact same day I arrived."

"I’m saying the evidence points that way, yes." Sana’s clinical composure didn’t waver, though something in her eyes softened slightly, watching the muscle working in Haruki’s jaw. "I’m sorry. I know that’s not an easy thing to hear."

"It’s not about easy." Haruki’s hands curled into fists at his sides, old grief and fresh fury tangling together until he could barely tell them apart. "It’s about why. Why does it always come back to that village. Why does everything keep dragging me back to those bodies."

"Because someone wants you dragged back to them," Vex said, arms crossed, her earlier feral amusement entirely gone, replaced by something colder, more calculating. "That’s the only explanation that fits. This isn’t coincidence. This is bait, and you already took it the moment you stepped off that airship."

"Then it worked," Ariel said quietly, stepping close enough to rest a hand against Haruki’s arm, grounding him before the fury could fully take hold. "But that doesn’t mean we have to keep playing by their rules from here."

Sana studied the group for a long moment — the exhausted, blood-and-ichor-streaked cleansers standing in the governor’s entrance hall, the newest addition among them practically vibrating with barely restrained violence — and something in her expression shifted, calculating recalculated.

"There’s something else," she said finally, lowering her voice as though the walls themselves might be listening. "Kargekin isn’t just causing corruption outbreaks for the sake of chaos. Every incident I’ve logged over the past two years, Toru Village included, has one thing in common: afterward, small teams of their operatives comb through the wreckage looking for something specific. Survivors describe them searching, methodically, house by house, ignoring valuables entirely."

"Searching for what?" Haruki asked, though some cold, instinctive part of him already dreaded the answer.

"I don’t know." Sana’s frustration was evident, genuine. "That’s the piece I’ve never been able to confirm. But whatever it is, they haven’t found it yet. Which means, prefecture after prefecture, village after village—"

"They’re still looking," Nibel finished grimly.

"And today, in your case," Sana said, closing her folder with a soft, final snap, "they made themselves known instead of hiding. Which tells me one of two things. Either they’re getting desperate."

"Or?" Rosalia prompted.

Sana’s eyes moved back to Haruki, sharp and assessing.

"Or they think you already have whatever it is they’re looking for," she said quietly, "and they’re done being patient about getting it back."

The words settled over the entrance hall like a physical weight. Haruki thought, unbidden, of a small woven basket in a ruined hut, of tiny chubby hands and a crescent-and-sun symbol glowing on an infant’s forehead, of a name he and Ariel had chosen together beneath the moonlight.

*Luno.*

He said nothing. Not yet. Not until he understood the shape of the danger well enough to know how to protect what mattered most without simply painting an even bigger target on it.

"Then I suppose," he said instead, voice carefully even, "we’d better figure out what that something is before they do."

Sana’s gaze lingered on him a moment longer, as though she’d caught the flicker of something unspoken crossing his face — but if she had, she chose, for now, not to press.

"There’s a vault beneath this prefecture," she said instead. "Sealed centuries ago, predating even the guild’s records. I think that’s where this all leads. I just haven’t been able to get inside."

Haruki exhaled slowly, the last of his fury settling into something colder, more focused — the same resolve that had carried him off a cliff’s edge and back into a life worth fighting for.

"Then let’s go find out what’s worth killing an entire village to hide."

— End of Cultivation —