“Tap, tap, tap.”
A pure black, coffin-like carriage wound its way through thick fog. On closer inspection, the smoke came from the black beast pulling it, a creature covered head to toe in armor hard as iron, red light glowing from its eyes, sulfur smoke billowing from its nostrils.
Faintly visible among the smoke was the shadow of a pale purple butterfly, dancing gracefully.
A pale hand lifted the curtain on the side of the carriage, revealing half of Lu Jingxing’s gloomy face. His short black hair fell softly to the bridge of his nose, and his pale green eyes, like a frozen lake, glanced casually downward, estimating his odds of successfully jumping out and going home. After a long moment.
His pale fingertips let go in defeat, and the smooth curtain of some unknown material drifted back down.
Forget it. It wouldn’t kill him anyway.
The despair had started two nights ago.
Lu Jingxing had recently been thinking of picking up a side hustle. He’d heard writing novels made money, so before bed he’d been browsing for some good fiction to study, hoping to learn from the best. Instead, in the middle of the night, he’d stepped straight into a landmine of a story by midnight, his worldview was cringing right along with his senses.
It was a Western fantasy tagged as a power-fantasy. The male lead was set up as righteous and glorious: he was the God of Light, and also the Creator God, who descended to the mortal world once every thirty thousand years to spread light among his believers.
But this time, right as the plot began… the male lead’s incarnation got his legs broken in the opening scene, his eyes blinded, and was dumped by the roadside like a rag.
Drawn in by the prose, Lu Jingxing fully expected a classic “suppress first, then rise” face-slapping story, so he subscribed. He stayed up half the night watching three or four side characters appear one after another, but the protagonist just kept getting more and more miserable.
Losing patience, he opened the comment section:
“WARNING! Everyone run! The minor noble who first appears before the male lead is nothing but a crossdressing little pervert who, upon seeing a pretty boy, wants to take him home as a personal valet and secretly turn him into a doll!
Later, when he enters the academy, he’ll meet a sadist pope! And a demon surnamed Lu will show up at his side to screw him over! And after that there’s a big villain who tortures him both body and soul!
I’ve just caught up to the freshest mouthful of crap in the latest chapter the male lead is already dead, and a bunch of villains are plotting how to steal his divinity! Disperse, brothers and sisters. This author is simply taking revenge on society! I’m blacklisting this author for life!”
Lu Jingxing: “…”
His fully-subscribed hand trembled slightly.
He was so angry his chest hurt. He tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep, his head full of “trash author, give me back my hard-earned money”and when he opened his eyes again, he was at a crime scene.
Faced with blood covering the floor and ceiling of the entire room, Lu Jingxing nearly passed out. Thinking he might have some bizarre hidden personality, he trembled in terror for half an hour until the memories came flooding in.
He was a demon who had just completed a deal with a human and had come to settle the man’s life. Oh, settle…
F*ck! Is that how you use that word?!
Lu Jingxing sat slumped where he was. In the pool of blood at his feet lay a parchment contract, and at the edge of the red-black handprint, a single character was faintly visible: “Lu.”
Whether it was a demon’s iron nerves or something else, as he stared at that character, more and more memories surfaced… and they felt strangely familiar.
Huh? This demon surnamed Lu had taken a mission to go after the incarnation of the God of Light?
Wait… why did that sound a bit like that trashy novel he’d been reading?
Digging through more of the original owner’s memories and verifying them for a long while, Lu Jingxing shut down completely.
He sat in silence for half the night before coming to terms with it: Fine, since I’m here anyway, I might as well do some good for society. A demon like the original owner, with hands soaked in blood, deserves to face justice.
In that deeply disturbing, sanity-draining room, he found a fairly sharp bone-cleaving knife.
“Sorry, brother. This world and I both need a bright future.” The bright future never came.
Because demons cannot die easily.
Lu Jingxing had been brutally counter-punished by reality, and now sat in the carriage, exhausted in body and mind, not caring who was pulling it or where he was being taken anyway, whoever wanted to torment the male lead could go right ahead; he was done.
Having settled this, Lu Jingxing closed his eyes for a nap, refusing to think about what exactly the “clack-clack”-ing skulls swaying inside the carriage, the eerily red foot mat, or the little stove that was somehow letting out soft wails in time with the crackling charcoal were supposed to be.
The carriage rolled steadily onward, the enormous black beast running under the daylight, passing through brightly colored houses, through bustling, deafening markets and crowds.
Lively hawking cries rang out, and a sweet child’s voice, mere inches away, faded into the distance:
“Mommy, I suddenly feel so cold, like… like I’m about to turn into a big block of ice.”
“But the sun is so nice today… Oh, God of Light above, why are you so cold?”
In the shadow beneath the bridge of his nose, Lu Jingxing’s lashes twitched.
He raised a hand and knocked on the carriage door, and just as the carriage was about to enter another market, he suddenly said:
“Stop.”
The trembling of the carriage gradually ceased. The instant his cold voice rang out, the swaying skulls, the mat quietly oozing strange liquid, and the little stove wailing in rhythm all fell abruptly silent. Crack.
Something burning in the stove made a sound as it struck the air. Lu Jingxing glanced over, just in time to see the little tin stove with its wrinkled human face stretch out the hook-like ears on either side, reach up to poke at the burning things above it, then nonchalantly shrink back.
Lu Jingxing: “…”
He blinked, doing his best to keep his pupils from trembling, took a deep breath, and looked away. From outside came a soft, androgynous voice:
“This is a good spot”
“We’re about to enjoy a splendid show. After all, the star of it is rarely seen on ordinary days.”
Hearing that gloating voice, Lu Jingxing had a bad feeling.
Adhering to the principle that “the original owner’s friends are all enemies,” he kept his composure, doing his best to maintain the cold, cruel, taciturn persona of the demon Lu, and said simply:
“Cut the nonsense.”
“You know what interests me.”
The voice outside carried a hint of laughter as it slipped into the carriage, like a grudge clinging to one’s back in midsummer, sending a bone-deep chill through him:
“Do you not smell it?”
“That surging, nauseating power of Light, polluting all the surrounding air with its stench… Without a doubt, He has descended, and He is nearby.”
From the description, Lu Jingxing could roughly guess what was going on. His gaze turned to the translucent curtain, fixed on the sulfur-colored wisps of smoke, and he thought: When it comes to severe air pollution, you’re the real culprit.
Outwardly, without so much as a blink, he shifted the blame onto the little stove in the carriage.
“The smell in this carriage is absolutely dreadful.”
The fellow outside the carriage laughed for a moment. “My apologies for not being more considerate. Next time, I promise you’ll have a pleasant journey.”
After a pause, that voice chuckled softly again. “But I can imagine it, with all the Lord of Hell’s years of arrangements, the way He appears is bound to put us in a rather good mood.”
Lu Jingxing lowered his eyes and pondered for a moment, then replied lazily:
“Let’s go take a look.”
Above the market, the sky was awash with morning glow, brilliantly resplendent. The people of Sun Town loved to paint their low houses in bright colors deep red, pale blue, soft purple, dark green standing side by side, and under the sunlight, the whole world was filled with colorful joy.
At the center of the street stood a pure white statue of a god, the kind that could bathe in the first ray of daylight. Now it was gilded in a layer of shimmering gold. The statue’s head was bowed, revealing only its long, slightly curled waves of hair.
A woman knelt near the statue, forehead pressed to the ground, devoutly murmuring prayers. A child passed by clutching fresh wildflowers still dewy with morning moisture, and upon reaching the statue, rummaged through the bouquet in their arms, finally picking out the most beautiful sunflower and carefully placing it at the statue’s feet.
When Lu Jingxing approached, the first thing that caught his eye was the sanctity radiating from the statue lofty, untouchable, impossible to profane.
His gaze swept up and down, and he couldn’t help wanting to see that face clearly.
But after taking a few steps closer, he noticed several strands of faint golden hair on the ground behind the statue.
The original text’s description of the male lead’s mortal form abruptly jumped into his mind:
“From a distance, a half-conscious golden-haired beauty lay there, clothes in tatters, covered in wounds, his holiness gone, his whole body broken like light veiled in dust.”
Lu Jingxing froze for a moment.
A cold, sinister aura pressed against his back, snickering: “A bunch of fools bow and pray day after day to a cold block of stone, never knowing that the god they revere most is now lying miserably right before their eyes.”
Lu Jingxing was struck by the perverse undertone in those words, and glanced back at the person behind him, the one who had come to take him out today still looked like a normal man with a center-parted hairstyle, but now, licking his lower lip, butterfly-like patterns had actually surfaced on his face.
Lu Jingxing’s throat tightened. Wait!
This guy who could grow butterflies on his face… wasn’t he one of the villains who went after the male lead in the original text?
Something occurred to Lu Jingxing, and his gaze swept around again sure enough, not far away was a child of about ten or so wearing a red dancing dress and a pretty hairpin, lifting the hem of the skirt, brazenly trampling over the beautiful stones and flower garlands of roadside stalls as servants aggressively cleared the way, a whip in hand, lazily flicking it against the backs of people ahead. Here it comes!
This was the plot point where the male lead’s mortal form was about to be picked up by the cross-dressing little pervert to be made a servant, which in reality meant being turned into a doll!
Lu Jingxing’s heart pounded nervously, not knowing how to prevent the tragedy from unfolding, watching as the little pervert drew closer and closer to the male lead while the butterfly man behind him watched the show at his leisure.
He slowly held his breath.
Reason and morality kept colliding and when the cross-dressing little noble’s party was less than ten meters from the statue, Lu Jingxing, face taut, doing his best to imitate a pervert’s manner, carefully delivered the line:
“Relying on humans to torment him…”
“Don’t you find it terribly boring?”