Cui Mingyao expressionlessly grabbed Jin Chengbin by the hair and yanked him straight up from the floor.
Jin Chengbin grimaced in agony. This was the exact action that had just been inflicted upon Jiang Zhengze, but receiving it himself was a completely different story. The long hair he had once taken such pride in had now become his fatal weakness.
A top-tier Alpha’s pheromones were not to be underestimated, and their fury under rage was even more overwhelming. Instinctively, he felt nauseous, wanting to drop to his knees, beg for mercy, and escape the room.
“What do you think you are doing?” Veins bulged on the back of Cui Mingyao’s hand as he lowered his stance and stared straight into Jin Chengbin’s eyes.
Jin Chengbin instantly turned ice-cold all over, a soul-shaking tremor gripping his entire being. “I…”
The noisy chatter and laughter inside the room vanished instantly, replaced by a profound, dead silence.
Zhen Haoyu turned pale as he looked toward the pitiful Omega collapsed on the floor.
Jiang Zhengze’s eyes were half-open, his purple pupils filled with shattered, fathomless, and unfathomable murky light.
“Cui… Cui Mingyao, wasn’t it you who told us to come and break him in…” Jin Chengbin almost bit his tongue off saying this, cold sweat oozing from his hair roots. “It’s not the first time… Why make such a big fuss?”
With a loud crash, Jin Chengbin’s body slammed heavily onto the coffee table. The impacted wine bottles shattered everywhere, their fragile bodies bursting apart on the floor as red, yellow, and white liquids exploded together, splashing all over him.
The Alphas standing nearby sharply inhaled, their hearts pounding like thunder as they unconsciously took a few steps back.
Cui Mingyao’s face was brimming with murderous rage, yet he refused to let him off. He grabbed a transparent glass ashtray and smashed it right onto Jin Chengbin’s head!
The crowd of Alphas was scared stone-sober. They raised their hands, but not a single person dared step forward to intervene.
Has Cui Mingyao gone completely insane?
Shibal, someone is going to die at this rate!
Cui Mingyao dropped to one knee, raising the glass ashtray high in his right hand. Every single time he lifted it, the blood smeared across the transparent glass grew thicker.
Meanwhile, Jin Chengbin on the floor had already been beaten beyond recognition, his teeth loosened, crying out in agonizing misery.
“Ahhhhh!!”
“Stop it, ahhhhh…”
Pressing his palms together in despair, he wept bitterly for mercy. “Ahhhh, let me go…”
Brawls between Alphas were filled with a bloody atmosphere, leaving no room for backing down when fighting over the ownership of an Omega.
However, a top-tier Alpha was vastly different from ordinary Alphas like them. With boundless strength and inexhaustible energy, their pheromones were even more tyrannical, forcing Alphas within a hundred-meter radius to drop to their knees and submit.
Their hearts grew gradually cold. At this moment, Jin Chengbin’s miserable state might well be their own impending fate.
This had nothing to do with a fair fistfight. This was purely one-sided torture!
“Warning, warning! OOC warning!” A sharp, childlike voice suddenly blared in his head as 007 frantically roared, “Cui Mingyao, stop right now! Persona collapse! Deducting twenty points!”
Cui Mingyao’s descending fist paused, belatedly halting his movements.
The ashtray crashed heavily onto the floor, blood trickling down its rounded contours and staining the edge of the brown carpet black.
Frowning, he let go of the hair in his grasp and slowly stood up.
Jin Chengbin, beaten beyond human recognition, slumped limply onto the floor, having completely lost consciousness and passed out cold.
Cui Mingyao stood up with a cold expression, glancing past the trembling Alphas behind him as he apathetically spat out a single word: “Get lost.”
The shivering Alphas felt as though they had just been granted amnesty, scrambling and crawling out of the room. Zhen Haoyu swallowed hard and kindly dragged Jin Chengbin out with them.
The Alpha pheromones weakened slightly, allowing Jiang Zhengze to catch his breath. He looked haggard, wet strands of hair clinging to his forehead, and every single wound on his body radiating raw pain.
The rum-scented pheromones forcefully and aggressively shoved aside the other Alphas’ pheromones, wrapping layers upon layers around Jiang Zhengze.
Overbearing, intense, and tyrannical.
Jiang Zhengze instinctively curled his body inward, forcing his eyes wide open to collide straight into a pair of light brown eyes.
With his back to the light, Cui Mingyao’s expression was somewhat obscure. The latter loomed over him from above, his expression betraying neither joy nor anger.
Jiang Zhengze’s body trembled violently as he scrambled desperately from the floor, crawling on his knees right to Cui Mingyao’s feet.
His slender, feeble legs dragged across the carpet, the rough fabric scraping his knees red and swollen, while the bell at his ankle chimed with every movement, crisp and resonant.
“I’m sorry… I was wrong.” Jiang Zhengze bent forward, pressing his forehead against Cui Mingyao’s calf with a voice so hoarse it was barely audible. “Don’t let them torture me anymore. I’m begging you.”
Cui Mingyao’s breathing hitched. The protagonist of The Dodder Flower was kneeling stark naked right before him.
So thin that his shoulder blades protruded and pushed against the skin of his back, the completely shredded clothes failed to conceal his skin at all, hanging off him in a hypocritical pretense.
Slender, fragile, and beautiful.
His body was ice-cold, and only the tears falling against him burned with scorching heat.
Cui Mingyao’s interior received a massive shock. Stunned for a moment, he swept his arm out, grabbed a blanket from the sofa, squatted down, and draped it over Jiang Zhengze’s body.
An unexpected warmth enveloped his body. Jiang Zhengze’s heartbeat paused. In a daze, he opened his eyes wide and slowly raised his head to look at the person who had covered him with a blanket.
Cui Mingyao?
The blood flowing through his veins seemed to freeze. He felt an overwhelming, disorienting shock. The pupils in his purple eyes dilated for a fraction of a second, crystal-clear teardrops still clinging to his trembling eyelashes.
What exactly was he trying to do?
Cui Mingyao furrowed his brow and raised a hand to wipe away the tear at the corner of his eye.
Jiang Zhengze snapped backward in a recoil, dumbfounded.
“You…”
Before the words could fade, Cui Mingyao suddenly dropped to his knees right in front of him, leaning forward to kowtow heavily several times in a smooth, fluid motion without a fraction of hesitation.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, bro!” Cui Mingyao spoke at lightning speed, keeping pace with his kowtowing rhythm, his words overflowing with sincere remorse. “I’m sorry, bro, I came a step too late! To actually let these beasts… I’m sorry!”
“Shibal, OOC warning, OOC warning!” 007 screamed piercingly. “Aigo ya, what on earth are you doing? How can a dominant top be kowtowing?! Are you insane? Immediate execution!”
“Deducting 100 points! You are not allowed to kowtow anymore, get up right now!”
Cui Mingyao had no time to care about 007’s warnings. As a pure-hearted, model youth who had never done a single bad thing in his twenty-one years of life, he realized the moment he transmigrated that he had beaten the protagonist bottom half to death. How could he possibly still have the face to play the role of an overbearing, aggressive top?
“Big brother, I’m not Cui Mingyao, and I didn’t mean to abuse you. Aiyou, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” As Cui Mingyao grew more agitated, his pheromones dispersed even more densely, though he remained completely oblivious to any abnormalities at the moment. “I was wrong. I will never let those beasts step foot inside my house again for the rest of my life. Jiang Zhengze… Are you alright? Why do you look so pale?”
Jiang Zhengze kept his head down, tightly wrapped inside the sky-blue blanket. A thin layer of sweat beaded on his forehead and the tip of his nose, and his slender, pale fingers trembled uncontrollably, making him look utterly miserable.
The top-tier Alpha’s pheromones were like an airtight wall, trapping him inside a square box as the pungent rum forcefully drilled into his nasal cavity and rampaged wildly through his lungs.
He could not straighten his back, and his consciousness was rapidly blurring.
Is this a hallucination? Or has he already passed out and is dreaming?
Cui Mingyao is kneeling on the ground, apologizing to him?
“Bro, how are you feeling right now? Do you need to go to the hospital?” Deeply worried, Cui Mingyao gripped his arm and gave him a gentle shake. “Jiang Zhengze?”
Jiang Zhengze’s limp body swayed with his shaking. His eyelids felt as heavy as a thousand pounds, and he dizzily closed his eyes.
“No way, Jiang Zhengze, what is wrong with you!” Cui Mingyao used his palm to brush aside the strands of hair and pressed it against his forehead. The moment his palm touched the skin, it felt as though it had been scorched by a glowing red furnace.
“Ah!” he cried out in alarm. “So hot! Is this a fever? Those godforsaken beasts, not even sparing someone who is sick!”
Recalling the bruises and red marks he had just seen on Jiang Zhengze’s body, Cui Mingyao figured his condition was far more than just a fever.
“007, what do I do?” Cui Mingyao remembered he still had a system at this moment, supporting Jiang Zhengze’s body as he anxiously asked, “Should I be sending him to the hospital in this state?”
His conversation with the system took place via brainwave communication, internal to the two of them and invisible to anyone else.
007 gnashed its teeth and fumed, “You finally remember me? You remember that I exist?”
“?” Cui Mingyao was too panicked to care about the flashing warnings from earlier.
“Cui Mingyao, oh Cui Mingyao! The dignity of a dominant top has been smashed to pieces right here by you!” 007 went frantic. “Jiang Zhengze thinks he’s hearing things. Good thing he’s passed out right now, you better watch yourself!”
“That’s not the point. The point is, don’t I have some doctor friend? The kind who can arrive in five minutes?” Cui Mingyao looked down at the unconscious Jiang Zhengze, whose body instinctively leaned into his embrace, leaving him utterly at a loss. “Saving lives is urgent!”
“Aigo…” 007 gave up trying to reason with him, blurting out a string of Korean curses. “Just send him to the hospital first. It’s only a ten-minute drive from here.”
Before the words finished, Cui Mingyao wrapped Jiang Zhengze snugly inside the blanket, slipped an arm around his waist, hoisted him securely onto his shoulder, and stood right up.
With furrowed brows and a solemn expression, Cui Mingyao stared straight ahead and strode forward with long, wind-swept steps, his wine-red bathrobe billowing along and exposing his solid, well-built pectoral muscles.
Lifting an adult single-handedly with effortless ease, he felt amazed by his own strength. He had been like that when beating people earlier too, clearly not exerting much force, yet leaving people beaten into such a state.
Yet after taking two steps and weighing him in his arms, he realized just how featherlight Jiang Zhengze truly was.
“Aish… Are you out of your mind?” 007 started shouting again. “Did you learn this sushi-roll wrapping method from neighboring Japan? A dominant top must maintain his image at all times! A princess carry! An arm around the shoulders and an arm under the knees kind of princess carry! What are you doing throwing him over your shoulder?!”
“Because my shoulders are wide, so he’s held more securely.”
“…”
Cui Mingyao paused in his tracks, hesitating. “Would a princess carry between men be a bit too ambiguous?”
“Wayaoyaya… There’s no saving you, immediate firing squad execution!” 007 shrieked in anger. “Stop making that idiotic face of yours, and besides, you’re planning on walking outside wearing just this bathrobe?”
“Even though this is an R-19 manga, you can’t just be letting things hang out carefree for everyone to see!” 007 scolded furiously. “The dominant top’s face has practically been thrown away by you.”
Cui Mingyao looked down. His belt had come undone, and the slippery fabric dangled loosely down both sides of his body.
Beneath his neat, sturdy abdominal muscles, his 32-centimeter thermos stood indomitable, looking down upon the world.