Phei had the urge to wake Eira up and test the ability with an audience like her.

But he didn’t.

How long was his Elemental Companion going to sleep?

He’d left her in a state that should have required, at most, an hour of recuperation — not the comatose, drool-producing, pillow-desecrating torpor she was currently in with the solemn, almost religious dedication of an ancient Void-Ice fairy who had once watched empires crumble like frostbitten leaves and now treated unconsciousness as her personal art form.

’Beauty and her sleep, indeed.’

He supposed even primordial beings who had witnessed the invention of agriculture — and the subsequent rivers of blood it inspired — required their restorative sleep.

’Lest she wakes up cranky enough to flash-freeze the continent.’

Phei squared his shoulders in the dim penthouse and feet planted with the deliberate poise like he was preparing to unleash forces he barely comprehended yet refused to show the slightest tremor of uncertainty about, as if he had stared into the abyss and found it blinked first.

"Perfect Domain."

Azure light detonated into existence as soon as he intoned:

But it was not the gentle twinkle of stars, but the violent birth of a new firmament;

It began at his feet as a constellation of cerulean shards, each one a splinter of void-ice ripped from the corpse of a long-dead cosmos, erupting from the marble floor like the first glacial spears of an apocalypse that had been waiting eons for permission. They pulsed with a cold so absolute it didn’t merely lack warmth; it devoured the very concept of heat, rendering the penthouse’s dim lighting a sickly, jaundiced joke by comparison.

The sparks ascended in spiraling currents, multiplied with the frantic hunger of a plague of frozen locusts, and coalesced into filaments of azure energy that wove themselves into the air with the geometric malice of a spider god spinning a web across the throat of reality itself.

And then the dome manifested around Phei in a single, fluid cataclysm of will in a hemisphere of translucent azure light that didn’t merely expand but commanded space to yield.

It had then surged outward from his position like the opening of a primordial eye that had slumbered since before time learned to count, racing through the walls of the penthouse, the floors above and below, the glass and steel and concrete of the Infinity Chaos Hotel as if matter was a polite suggestion rather than a law.

The domain extended in every direction until it encompassed its full hundred-metre radius, arriving with a faint resonant hum that vibrated not in his ears but in the roots of his teeth, a subsonic oath that reality had been temporarily rewritten in his favor...

...Then it vanished.

The visible architecture of the penthouse dissolved into the ambient atmosphere as though it had never deigned to exist — there was residual glow, no lingering shimmer, nothing to betray that a sphere of absolute cosmic privacy had just been erected around a seventeen-year-old dragon godling standing alone at the summit of a hotel that suddenly felt very small indeed.

But Phei could feel the Perfect Domain.

The domain’s presence lingered in and at Phei awareness like the ghost of a crown pressed upon his brow — intangible, invisible, yet undeniably there. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

It was a boundary etched in the invisible ink of dead stars and a demarcation that did not need to shout because the very concept of observation had been politely asked to leave the premises and had complied without argument.

The invisible fortification encircled Phei at precisely one hundred metres in every direction, thrumming with the quiet, patient authority of a wall that knew itself to be unbreachable because nothing in existence could even perceive the question of testing it.

’So that it?’

That was it, indeed.

Phei’d anticipated with his naive optimism of a man whose recent diet had consisted almost exclusively of increasingly ludicrous abilities — some supplementary gift.

He’d expected to be some kind of omniscient surveillance; the capacity to watch, with the detached amusement of a true god, every pathetic scurrying within his self-imposed kingdom.

’That’s how Domains work, no?’

Indeed but in novels and animes:

But the Perfect Domain offered Phei no such courtesy of seeing anything happening in his domain.

It was a shield, as live-evidence suggested, not a throne-room window.

Just a one-way mirror the size of a city block that prevented external observation without granting him so much as a peephole.

He was as blind inside it as he had been before — the only difference being that whatever secrets he couldn’t see, no one else could either:

’A mutual blindness that feels, strangely, like power, then? I will take that.’

But something else nagged at him.

What if the entity he wished to blind — the adversary, the voyeur, the pervert, or the hypothetical Immortal with the hypothetical throne and the hypothetical power that could unravel souls — was already inside the Domain?

Because no matter how fiercely he willed it, no matter how he pressed his intent and will against the domain’s parameters like a thief testing a vault door, he could not manipulate it beyond the crude binary of activation and dismissing it.

’On. Off. Present. Absent.’

He could contract it — shrink the radius to something more intimate, a lover’s cage rather than a city block — but he could not selectively exclude an individual already standing within its boundaries.

Which means, as long as the threat was within it; then the Domain is a fortress with its gates wide open and the enemy already warming themselves by the hearth.’

Which didn’t mean that the limitation diminished how terrifying the ability actually was:

In fact — given the sheer, unconscionable magnitude of its primary function, the capacity to render a Cosmic Dragon invisible to gods and Immortals and omniscient beings who had watched the first light bloom in the void—

’The small flaw is, on any sober assessment, laughably negligible.’

The equivalent of discovering that the sword capable of severing the thread of destiny itself had a hilt that required you to hold it at a slightly awkward angle.

’Inconvenient for the dramatic pose, perhaps... Irrelevant to the decapitated corpses it would leave in its wake.’

Focusing, Phei dismissed the Domain:

It collapsed without fanfare or drama — the invisible perimeter contracted inward at the speed of a thought that had changed its mind, the second-skin sensation evaporated like morning frost under the gaze of an indifferent sun.

Reality returned to its default state of being potentially observable by anyone with the altitude, the inclination, and the poor life choices to try.

He did not ask the System about whether external parties could perceive the Domain’s activation. Because the azure light — those violent shards of void-ice and the briefly visible dome that had expanded through solid matter like a ghost with better real estate — had been something of a neon sign announcing "Something God-Tier Just Happened Here."

But logic, cold and merciless, dictated otherwise:

If the Domain’s entire raison d’être was perfect invisibility, then announcing its activation to the very entities it was designed to hoodwink would represent a design flaw so spectacularly idiotic that even the System, in all its twisted benevolence, would have hesitated before bestowing it and calling Perfect.

You did not light a beacon to signal the deployment of your ultimate stealth ability. Only he could see it come to life. That was the only conclusion that didn’t insult the word "Perfect."

’Now...’

With the mechanical particulars catalogued and filed, his mind returned, with the reluctance, akin to circling a particularly sharp blade, to the woman who had started all of this:

She had walked into his penthouse uninvited, endured his less-than-hospitable welcome, materialised a box from whatever interdimensional handbag she carried, and stood there in that sinful, provocative, barely-existent dress — a scrap of fabric that existed in the dangerous borderlands between lingerie and a formal declaration of hostilities — until he’d accepted what she’d brought.

He didn’t know whether to thank Consort.

Well. Credit was due where credit was due, even if the recipient would likely respond to verbal thanks by attempting to separate his head from his shoulders with a blade older than the concept of mercy.

Not that he would ever voice the gratitude aloud; not to a woman whose default expression suggested she viewed most of existence as a regrettable clerical error she had been tasked with correcting.

But in the quiet, private ledger he maintained for debts both bloody and otherwise, Phei acknowledged it to himself.

After all, she had given him an overpowered — no; she had been the catalyst, her presence, her mission and finally, her audacious decision to materialize in his penthouse wearing something that could make a saint reconsider his vows and a demon blush.

All of it had provoked the System into dispensing this ridiculous, wonderful, terrifying ability.

And one day — one distant, carefully orchestrated, probably extremely bloody day — that ability would evolve into something that would make his adversaries wake in the night sweating at the mere thought of him.

So while that didn’t alter anything between their rotting past and present — while their mutual antipathy remained a living, breathing thing that would likely end with one of them bleeding on the floor of some opulent ruin — it was thanks to her that he now possessed a tool capable of making gods avert their eyes.

But that wasn’t all.

She had also traversed whatever nightmarish dimensional corridor connected her master’s domain to his penthouse in sovereign Tower, excavated the One Above’s gift from whatever dusty corner of in hi walk-in closet Phei had buried it in, and — with the quiet, immovable insistence, as if her job description read ’ensure delivery is accepted, by force if necessary, and yes the blade is part of the uniform’ — compelled him to open it.

Right there. Right then.

’And what a gift it is.’