Raj hovered in the ill-lit sky above a scarred world, voice bellowing as if the mountains themselves had lent it their ribs.
"If you want to stop me, Tathagata, you're dreaming!" His words were not merely speech; they were accusation, grief and a razor-edged promise all braided into one. "Launch every missile you have. Aim them at the Great Thunderclap Temple. I will use the lives of all you bald donkeys to commemorate my beloved wife! I will have billions buried with her! I will tear down your order and return everything to chaos!"
His tone was the sound of someone who had crossed a line and found the black concrete of inevitability on the other side. Winter seemed to fall into the hollow of his throat; those who listened felt a cold that had nothing to do with climate.
"Master, as you command," came Red Queen's answer — clinical, crisp, without the tremor of hesitation.
Below them, steel mouths opened from buried silos. One by one, lids rose as if the earth were coughing up iron suns. Rockets, blunted at their tips, ignited and rose. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand — the count multiplied into a terrible, precise arithmetic of doom.
Guanyin's face went stone-white. Even the saintliest of facades could not mask the reality: a rain of nuclear fire aimed at the heart of the Buddhist sanctuaries would end more than a temple. The cosmic balance she and her kind had been guarding wavered like an old reed.
With the calmness of a practiced savior she called up her Nine-Rank Lotus Platform. Petals like polished shields flew out, each one humming with a bitter, holy light. They struck the rockets.
Explosions did not follow the trajectory she expected. Each lotus petal contacting an ascending warhead detonated it mid-flight into a blooming star — nine hundred suns exploding almost together, a sky turned into a furnace. The world became the image of an apocalypse painted by a mad child.
Raj laughed then — not a small laugh but a tearing, triumphant sound. "Still playing saint, Guanyin? Do you realize how many you've killed with this? The karmic scales will tilt with your name on them. My wife will not die alone — she will be accompanied. She will not be forgotten."
Guanyin's voice trembled. "No… I was trying to save lives—"
"Save your ass!" Raj's contempt was a living thing. He spat words of divine indictment with the force of a man who had seen a lifetime of betrayals in one flash. "You call yourselves saviors while severing what makes humans human: love, attachment. You strip people of ties and then judge them. Who are you to decide value? Who are you to play god?"
The hatred in his voice was almost palpable, an odor that clung to fabrics and memories. He spoke of taking the three symbols from her head, of watching Gods fall into mortality. Those were promises, not empty boasts.
Then, the sky split with a bolt of red lightning, fat and hot as a falling column. It struck Guanyin and wrapped her in a blinding pain that made Raj's vision tunnel. When the light finally thinned, the scene that waited for him made his grin widen with a savage satisfaction he had trouble hiding.
Guanyin knelt, stripped of her luminous radiance. The Nine-Rank Lotus beneath her bore ragged edges. Once-splendid vestments hung torn and sodden. The majesty was gone; in its place was a woman cowed and mortal. Fear pooled in her eyes. For a moment the world simplified to the space between Raj and that kneeling figure.
He dragged her by the collar so that she was at his height. "I won't kill you quickly," he said. Each word fell like a slow hammer. "That would be cheap. I will let you live. Live to a hundred. I will make you know what it is to be trampled upon. You will learn in a thousand ways what you taught others."
Guanyin's skin lost color like fruit left in salt. Raj's fingers found the base of her jaw; his hands were surgeon-strong. He dislocated it with a precise, cold motion — a grotesque guarantee that she could neither bite down nor end it herself in one sharp motion. She made a sound that could have been prayer; it might have been a scream.
Somewhere farther out, a voice arrived: measured, weary, carrying an old-world patience. "Fellow Daoist, show mercy."
Maitreya glided in, his expression a mixture of resignation and tactical concern. "Please release my junior sister."
Raj looked up at him with a sneer that bore raw grief. "Who will stop me? Tathagata? Bring him down and I will topple him from his seat. Tell me: who will deny me my right to bury the world with my woman?"
Maitreya's shoulders tightened. He was not ignorant; he never had been.Tathagata was wounded, the Buddha-realm cracked and bleeding, and as Future Buddha he could not afford to let entire orders collapse. Yet force here was like making a storm: it could ravage a village to save a field.
As the two standoffed, a familiar voice — soft and metallic with Vaani's unruffled logic — slid into Raj's ear: "Master, the mistresses are fine. Spatial turbulence swept them into a nearby plane; I can locate and bring them to you."
A single flare of hope lit Raj's face. It was brief and then replaced by a new set of cold calculations. The bracelet on his arm had shattered. The Banana Cave lay ruined beneath Guanyin's falling petals. The women were out there somewhere; if they were alive, he owed them not only rescue but protection like a fortress around their future.
He had let arrogance rule him — and that error nearly consumed everything he loved. Never again.
But for now, there was only escape. Rules and long-game strategies could wait for the night after the world stopped burning. He thought of the Great Thunderclap Pillars he had already marked for destruction; the counteroffensive he had unleashed had stripped Guanyin of her radiance in a single sick, savage hour.
The response from the saints would be catastrophic. He took Guanyin with him and vanished from the battlefield in a blur; Maitreya only had time to gawk as a piece of the sky seemed to fold itself over like a curtain.
Inside a cramped, unfamiliar living room, a cluster of women — Tie Fan, Tie Shan, Yuxin and the four maids — blinked awake into a world of electric light and flat-screen glow. They were disoriented in the way those ripped from one context always were: clothing and culture clashed, the scent of city air was wrong, and small machines hummed like incomprehensible insects.
Tie Fan was first to steady herself. Leadership was natural to her. She rose, sensing the weight of responsibility like a physical strap across her chest, and pulled her sisters and maids in a slow, calming sweep.
"Where are we?" Tie Shan asked, looking around at television screens and a sofa she could not name. She was younger, quicker to frustration, quicker to need. Her hands smoothed at a cushion she did not understand, the motion half-comforting, half-irritable.
A short-haired woman opened the door and stopped dead in her tracks. She had eyes that assessed quickly. "Who are you?" she asked, alert but not hostile.
Duan — Tie Fan — stepped forward and explained, in simple terms that forced her voice into neutral clarity: "We are from Bi Yun Mountain. My name is Duan — Tie Fan — and these are my sisters and our maids."
The short-haired woman's face shifted in comprehension: not every world's demons would recognize Raj's women, but rumor and rumor's echo travels fast. "You're Heartbound Demon Emperor's wives?" she asked, incredulity making her voice spin.
"Who is the Heartbound Demon Emperor?" Duan looked confused. When did she become his wife?
"The Heartbound Demon Emperor is Lord Raj. Aren't you Lord Raj's wives?" Zhang Xiaodan asked curiously.
"When did Young Master Raj have the nickname of Heartbound Demon Emperor?" Yuxin asked strangely.
"Of course, it was the battle between him and Guanyin that time!" Zhang Xiaodan said, and without being polite, she directly pulled the Duan women to sit on the sofa and said: "I am the Hundred Flower Demon King on Huaguo Mountain… That day, I saw thousands of suns rising in the sky at the same time, the shattering of continents — your names preceded you. We watched the sky turn red. Oh! I forgot to introduce myself, I'm Zhang Xiaodan, Hundred Flower Demon King of Huaguo Mountain"
The story tumbled out in strands.
The female households here had seen the same thing: the world fractured, islands rose and fell, and the saints had been exhausted into dormancy. Word had spread of Raj's madness and his famous command.
In certain quarters the demonic hearts had found the idea romantic; a lover who would obliterate the world for them seemed an extremity of fidelity. Zhang Xiaodan admitted with a crooked smile that many had fallen for the myth.
The Duan women's faces folded at the news that no one had heard from Raj since the confrontation. Rumors were wild — some said he'd vanished with Guanyin, others claimed Maitreya had struck.
The women's grief was immediate, raw; Tie Shan's voice broke, Yuxin's breaths came shallow, and the maids sobbed in a chorus. Tie Fan began to braid her own fingers, a coping gesture that steadied her like an anchor.
"Find him," Tie Shan spat through her tears. "If someone killed him, I will make them pay."
Duan — Tie Fan — breathed and forced a small, sharp plan into being. "First, we must know where he is. Second, we must ensure we are safe until he returns. Let us not waste energy on vengeance when survival is needed."
Zhang Xiaodan found herself oddly tender to these imported women. Her lifestyle was different, her world modern — televisions, clothes, cars — but she had room for compassion. She shepherded them into her home and gave them clothing that would not scream 'costume' to a modern crowd.
It was strange and comical for the women to switch robes that smelled of incense for synthetic fabric and zippers, but the distraction did them good. Zhang Xiaodan noticed how their eyes brightened at simpler things: a bowl of soup, a couch to sprawl on, an electric kettle.
She also noticed that when Raj's wives stopped wailing and began to plot, they found a kind of purpose. Tie Shan — restless, fierce — suggested outward actions first: they should not parade misery in public. Tie Fan, older and calmer, suggested subtler things: get news, make allies, gather intelligence.
"Let us go shopping," Zhang Xiaodan suggested with theatrical levity — half a bribe, half a lifeline. "When you are dressed like this, waiting becomes easier. The Demon Emperor will not want to see you broken when he returns."
They went. The plaza lights were garish to their eyes at first, the mannequins obscene in their stillness. Crowds shifted as the women moved like a single force of nature: several of the largest beauties gathered into one improbable group. Heads turned. Whispers passed. Tie Shan stiffened at the attention; protective muscle memory made her fist clench like a small human barricade.
Then, quiet air sparked.
Someone outside the mall, drawing a crowd, had photographed a man in ancient garb and posted it online.
The street hummed with small devices delivering the same flash of image and the same small chorus of salivation. Tie Shan felt the heat of strangers looking and flared at the thought. She followed the crowd and …..
And then he appeared.
Raj's figure filled the doorway like a memory arriving. He looked broken and enormous at once: his robe a tattered flag, dust in his hair, blood in places that the clothing could not hide. There was an aura around him that bent shadows; people stepped back unconsciously.
Tie Shan could not hold herself. She practically launched across the floor, tears gone from grief and refocused into ferocious joy. Yuxin followed, palms to her mouth. The other women swarmed him; small hands tried to measure whether his flesh hurt, fingers repeatedly seeking the familiar proof that he still breathed.
Raj moved among them like a man retrieving what the world had taken while promising himself he would never lose it again. He patted their hair, hushed them, whispered apologies that tasted like guilt.
"I didn't protect you," he admitted to Tie Fan who stood quietly near him, eyes like polished stone. "I let arrogance put us in danger. I will not let that happen again."
Tie Fan cut him a look of weary, fierce love, then turned into organizer. "Good. We will hold you to it."
There was an exchange of vows that was not romantic in a single-thread sense. This was a covenant of people bound by a violence they had tasted. Tie Shan and the others pressed their foreheads to Raj's chest and declared, in words that were simple and fierce, that they loved him — the man who would tear the heavens for them and the man who would mend what he had torn.
Raj listened to their vow and, between the surge of adrenalin and relief, a new resolve assembled behind his eyes. The Guanyin incident had been an unpayable near-loss and a merciless lesson.
He would not again allow hubris to be the chink that exposed those he loved. From this point on, their survival would be a project of engineering and paranoia combined.
He began, there in the mall, to sketch plans in his head. Not just weapons — the world already had too many — but layers of safety:
Redundant spatial anchors, placed in multiple safehouses so that if one ring shattered another would hold.
• A distributed bracelet system: not a single living-storage ring but several smaller, interlocking micro-bracelets that would prevent a single shatter from dumping everyone into the abyss.
• Aerial denial protocols around all known harem locations — kinetic dampers and automated micro-flares to confuse homing ordnance.
• An AI watchdog network (Red Queen nodes) dedicated to the women's micro-environment, with override passcodes only Raj could use.
• A set of emergency "shadow shelters" — underground, shielded with anti-sense fields that could cut them from the observational threads of gods and saints.
• Psychological safety: emergency rituals and narrative protocols (if a saint bluffs, do not panic; if a saint strikes, fall back to predetermined coordinates).
• Vaani-linked recall beacons embedded in each woman's jewelry — low-power, hard to sense, and able to pull them across planes without relying on one bracelet.
• A permanent inner circle of trusted defenders: a small guard trained specifically for harem rescue, with authority to act without apology.
He told none of this aloud yet. He did not need to. Tie Fan caught the outline of strategy in his face and gave the smallest, ghost of a nod that was all the approval he needed.
In the plaza's hum, among the flashbulbs and the shouts, something softer happened. Tie Fan — the one who had been first with him through earlier nights and decisions — moved closer to Raj and said, quietly, "We will stand with you. But be careful; your anger could cause you trouble. Calm, keep your mind calm, we'll always support you in, Husband."
Her use of his intimate name was a balm. He answered with a promise that was more than words: a look, a hand tightened around hers, and the set of his jaw that declared a new chapter had begun — from now on he would be meticulous to the point of obsession.
For the harem, for the women who had given themselves to him, he would construct a small world within the world, a place where no god or saint could casually reach.
Tie Shan took Raj's hand and squeezed until his fingers whitened. "You're back," she said simply.
"Yes," Raj answered. The word was small, full, and absolute. The collision with Guanyin had almost taken everything. He would pay that debt in vigilance every day until the end of his time.
The women leaned into him, and for a long, trembling moment the world felt as though it could be stitched back together with their arms.