Harem Overlord: I ALWAYS Finish Quick!
Chapter 66 Codename: Aurora (2)

At a remote location, inside one of the thousands of Dawn Pavilions on the planet…

The sentry guard ran down a corridor. His heart was pounding in his chest, his mouth dry, and the floorboards seemed to groan beneath his feet.

The guard rushed and opened the door to his boss's office.

Thundering alarms rang out all around as the sentry guard shouted, "I have an alert for Aurora. Is she inside her office? Please, can you pass on a message or allow me to enter?"

A prim, beautiful secretary sat at the desk, not acknowledging the blaring alarm.

The prim girl looked up and begrudgingly replied, "Yes, Aurora is in her office, but she cannot be disturbed now. Leave your message with me."

The guard said, "Right now is exactly when Aurora has to be disturbed. Please let me speak to her. Now." He raised his voice further at the end of the sentence to convey the importance.

Nonplussed, the secretary replied, "As I said, Aurora cannot be disturbed.

The guard cursed, brushing past the prim secretary, and tried to open the door.

The secretary gasped, "Stop, you maniac, you'll be hanged! Aurora said not to interrupt her no matter what!"

The guard growled, "This is the one occasion where Aurora said always to interrupt her. A person she was investigating entered one of the Dawn Pavilions."

"Well, good grief, why didn't you say that?" the secretary said, immediately buzzing the door open. "You better tell her that yourself and explain the situation."

The guard entered the soundproof office. Aurora stretched, her lithe body taut like an oiled spring. She let out a long breath, the soft sound of music filled the office.

Aurora's eyes peered out from under the thick azure locks of her hair, her hazel green eyes shone from behind her black lashes. Her lips were painted a deep crimson. She wore a short skirt and a low-cut blouse, the top button undone, exposing the swell of her breasts.

"Is there a problem? I requested that no one disturb me for at least 20 minutes," She said, trying to hide her annoyance.

With a bow, the guard said, "I'm sorry for disturbing you, Miss. Please excuse me, but an alarm notified us that a person you were investigating has tripped your aura sensor in one of our locations. I thought you needed to know this immediately."

The woman stood motionless, still as a statue, the only movement being the slight quiver of her chest.

Aurora looked up into the face of the guard, and said in a soft voice, "Are you sure?"

Seeing the guard nod, she regained her composure, pointed to the screens, and commanded, "Bring up the monitor of the lobby and instruct the front desk to keep them there as long as possible. I need to assess the situation, but no matter what, you need to keep him there."

The guard pressed a few buttons on the console, and the monitor flickered to life.

Aurora leaned in, scooting to the edge of her chair. She breathed in the scent of the room, the faint smell of the incense burning on the altar, the lingering aroma of coffee and chocolate.

On the monitor, two guards were seemingly questioning a black-haired young man. He was gesturing around the room, pointing at various beautiful features.

'Is he a builder? A buyer? A decorator, perhaps?'

The young man then turned and looked straight into the lens of the camera, his piercing emerald eyes staring out at her, daring her to look away. He had long black hair and a square jawline.

Aurora's heart raced, and the blood pounded in her ears. She could feel her skin burning and knew it would be glowing red when she stood up.

Her breath caught. Those eyes. The eyes called to her from years gone by. 'How many people have those eyes? Eyes that beckoned with an unspoken promise of warmth, comfort, and love.'

Aurora rose and walked to the screen. She raised her hand, palm flat against the surface. The muscles in her forearm tensed. Her fingers twitched. She caressed the face of the man on the screen, envisioning herself running her fingers over the smooth skin, the fine hair. 'He is so handsome. I bet my child is at least this handsome.'

Her arms hung limp at her sides, the delicate bones of her wrists exposed, the nails painted a soft pink.

It had been thirteen years since Aurora last saw her child's face. Thirteen years from when they took him away.

She had signed a contract hundreds of thousands of years ago, but it was the biggest mistake in her life. Her best friends at the time, Deja the Holy Phoenix, Sersal the Red Dragoness, and Iva Kheaweth, had come to her with an idea to sign a contract with her smaller Heavenly Kingdom, The Dawn Pavilion.

How naïve she had been.

She had been so eager to sign the contract to be on the same level as her friends and their large kingdoms that she hadn't even read the fine print.

Because of that mistake, her force was voided of its status as a Heavenly Kingdom and downgraded to civilian status, while she was turned into nothing more than a tool for the Holy Alliance with no real power.

She had festered with hate for years until, one day, she found a loophole that would allow her to bypass and void the contract, achieving her dream of making the Dawn Pavilion a Heavenly Kingdom once more.

But the loophole was more complex than she'd hoped. The contract stated that not only could she, nor anyone with her family's blood, create a Heavenly Kingdom, but she couldn't even transfer the Dawn Pavilion to a non-related female and let them rule it in her stead. Only a male would suffice.

But for that, the male needed to be able to cultivate.

So she spent the next hundred thousand years searching until she found it, the pill of unlimited power.

It was a pill so powerful it could raise an A-Ranked cultivator directly to the peak of S-Rank, but it had one other property that nobody looked at.

The ability to make anyone a cultivator.

===

One of the clauses buried deep in the contract was the 'Education Relocation Clause'. Every 100 years, a member of the Holy Alliance would 'relocate' one of her underage kin to their empire for education.

Thirteen years ago, the human empire came knocking and said they were being generous this year and would take a male instead a female.

The human empire said that they would care for them and educate them. Then only a month later, they said he died in the school fire. But when she went to the school to look for the body, she knew it wasn't her adopted baby. It wasn't his aura that surrounded the dead boy's body they claimed was his.

She was convinced he wasn't dead. For years she sent guards to scour the planet for her adopted son.

They found nothing, no trace of him.

But looking at the man on the monitor, she knew it wasn't him. Her son would be an 18-year-old blonde man with emerald eyes. The hair, the face, nothing was familiar except the eyes. Maybe it was the similarity to the eyes that tripped up the sensors. Maybe she incorrectly coded the aura scans.

"There's someone that entered Pavilion 384B that I need to see right away. I need to ask him a few questions," she said, turning to her secretary.

The secretary replied in a clipped voice, "OK, I'm sure many people just came into the building. Can you tell me what he looks like?"

Aurora almost shouted, "'Whatever's happening in the lobby, record it and tell the guards in Pavilion 384B to stop the black-haired boy and contact me back."

'What was wrong with this secretary?'

"I'll do it," the guard assured Aurora and turned to leave.

"No, I've got it." The prissy secretary raised her nose and glided to her desk, "You can handle the recording on your end." She pointed to the door, letting the guard know it was time to leave.

The secretary slowly turned off the alarm and pulled up another hologram, turning to make sure Aurora's door was closed.

A figure appeared on the screen, waiting for the message.

"I believe subject one has somehow made it into Pavilion 384B. The grand empress, Iva Kheaweth, has stated that Aurora isn't to have contact with him before the wedding, so get him out."

The hologram disappeared, and the secretary primly sat down on her chair.