Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 818

Chapter 818: Rings of Travel and Storage

I stood in the center of the Tech Hub. The orb pulsed behind me—that mysterious, color-cycling sphere with its persistent golden heartbeat. ARIA’s confusion still echoed through our link, but she’d accepted my silence.

For now.

A hush had fallen over the room, the kind that comes before lightning decides whether to strike or just threaten.

I took a breath. And with a sigh that carried the weight of everything I’d become, I closed my eyes. Spread my arms wide. Like a superhero accepting his destiny. Like a supervillain welcoming his throne.

Like something in between—something new, something that didn’t fit into the neat categories humans had invented for power.

The pose felt ridiculous. I knew that. Some part of me—the part that was still old Peter Carter, still the bullied kid who used to flinch when Jack Morrison walked past—wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.

Standing in a ghost mansion, arms spread like Christ on the cross, about to summon rewards from a system that had turned my life into a fever dream. But another part of me—the part that had grown teeth, grown power, grown into something that made gods nervous—knew this was exactly right.

This was my character moment. Every power fantasy I’d ever had while lying in my shitty bed in our shitty apartment, dreaming of being more while the world treated me like less—this was all of them coming true at once.

Every comic book pose.

Every anime transformation sequence. Every video game cutscene where the protagonist ascends to their final form.

I was living it. Me. Peter fucking Carter.

The charity case. The doormat. The nobody. Now standing like a god demanding tribute. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I embraced it anyway.

The breath I took was deep. Theatrical. The exhale came sharp—dramatic and alive in the stillness, cutting through the ambient hum of impossible technology like a blade through silk.

And I intoned:

"System... My Super Mystery Box."

"Master—" ARIA’s voice came urgent, alarmed. "Energy readings are spiking. The room is—I’m detecting fluctuations beyond anything I can measure. The scales aren’t built for this. The numbers don’t make sense. Master, what’s happen—"

She went silent. Not cut off. Not interrupted. Overwhelmed. For the first time since I’d created her, ARIA had encountered something that exceeded her processing capacity.

Something that made even a near-ASI go quiet with awe. A machine intelligence, vast enough to simulate entire civilizations in microseconds, reduced to stunned silence.

That alone should have told me how far beyond ordinary this had gone.

[DING!]

The notification didn’t just echo in my mind. The room responded. The walls pulsed—those organic-technological lines flaring brighter, cycling through colors like the orb behind me had infected them with its prismatic rhythm.

The floor vibrated beneath my feet, a deep bass hum that I felt in my bones more than heard with my ears.

The air itself thickened, charged with energy that made the fine hairs on my arms stand at attention. The temperature fluctuated—hot, then cold, then something that wasn’t either, something that felt like standing at the edge of a thunderstorm and a furnace simultaneously. And there was a smell.

Ozone. Sharp and electric.

But underneath it, something else—something ancient, something that smelled like dust in temples that hadn’t been opened in millennia, like the air in tombs where pharaohs slept, like power that had been waiting so long it had developed its own scent.

The scent of epochs turning over in their sleep and deciding, today, they would wake.

Madison gasped, stepping closer to me instinctively. Soo-Jin’s hand twitched toward her weapon before she caught herself. This wasn’t just a system notification. This was a moment. The kind civilizations remember in scripture.

The kind that gets carved into stone so future generations can argue whether it really happened or was just the best story they ever told themselves.

[Super Mystery Box received...]

[Manifesting...]

Reality rippled. In the air before me—exactly at eye level, exactly at arm’s reach—space began to fold. Colors bled together. Light bent around a point that shouldn’t exist, creating a visual distortion that hurt to look at directly.

A sound emerged from the distortion. Not loud, but present—impossible to ignore.

It was like a hum.

Like a heartbeat.

The universe clearing its throat before it spoke your name.

Tech lines traced across its surface—cyan and gold, pulsing in rhythms that matched my heartbeat. But beneath them, deeper, older, I could see other patterns. Runes. Glyphs.

"Beautiful," Madison breathed. She wasn’t wrong.

Rings.

Two of them.

Black as the midnight between dying stars. Black as the abyss that had once devoured my enemies whole and left no echo. Black as the void that birthed oblivion and then forgot its own name.

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