Samuel had always felt that this visitor was a bit strange, everything he’d done from yesterday to today was odd. For instance, one second the man was trying to feed him a strange flower, and the next second the flower seemed to have vanished, and he’d become so… delicate.
Samuel had only intended to help the man steady himself and then step back. But when his palm cupped Lu Jingxing’s elbow to pull him up, the skin he touched, which had been slightly cool, immediately began to warm, and before long it was scorching hot, hotter than his own hand.
“You…” What’s wrong?
The spring-breeze-like voice had barely begun to form when the sensation at his fingertips went wrong.
Lu Jingxing, for the moment, had no attention to spare for anything else. He was overwhelmed by the heat inside his body, thinking only of leaving this room quickly to recover. He didn’t even care that he was exposing his magic, his tricks he melted into water, fleeing through every corner of the room in a panicked scramble.
To Samuel’s eyes, this scene was a great mass of pitch-black ink, so dark it seemed to swallow light itself, suddenly splitting into thousands of fine threads that fell to the floor, then gradually shrank until not a trace remained.
Immediately after, the world reverted to a dull gray haze.
The Rococo-style room that others saw, the pale blue bed draped in lace, the wallpaper covered in tiny floral prints, the exquisite wardrobe painted snow-white all of it, in his eyes, was drained of life and could show no color.
The first color he had seen since losing his memory was that black tinged with evil, a black that seemed forever capable of luring his soul down into the abyss of hell.
He could feel his instinctive, deep loathing for that aura.
And yet now, he sat quietly on the edge of the bed, listening to the growling of his stomach, carefully recalling that mass of deep black he’d seen over the past two days, and that cold temperature that had slowly turned warm. One floor below.
Lu Jingxing, Lu “Clay Doll” Jingxing had barely recovered his human form. Sitting in a room piled with clutter, he saw that his arms, always bloodless and now exposed where his clothes didn’t cover them, had turned bright red, and the color even spread all the way to his fingertips.
Without needing a mirror, he knew his face and body must be in the same state.
Sitting among a heap of discarded furniture, it took him a long while to calm down before the heat in his body subsided slightly. He couldn’t help tilting his head back to stare at the snow-white ceiling.
At its center hung a battered candle chandelier, overused, its waxy drips winding down the arms like tears. Through the position of that chandelier, he was looking up at Samuel’s room upstairs.
Recalling the strange sensation he’d felt after leaving the man last night, Lu Jingxing gazed for a long time, then lowered his head to look at his palm. A demon’s palm didn’t even have fine lines, the few creases it had were as rigid as carved paintings.
He couldn’t figure out why that rose had vanished into his palm.
It had been such a concentrated power of light…
Yet it had been absorbed by him, a demon through and through.
Instinct told him this had something to do with that tiny bit of golden power he had previously absorbed back from Samuel.
Pondering this, Lu Jingxing repeatedly opened his palm and clenched it again, as if by doing so he could conjure back the golden rose he had accidentally “eaten” and return it to the male lead.
He tried searching for the magic power contained within his own body, checking whether anything differed from before. Half an hour nothing. He glanced gloomily out the window at the sky, then curled back up into a dejected little mud doll.
Samuel thought he might actually starve to death in his room.
Until he heard the sound of the door opening, and a strange black mass slowly drifted over to him. Then, the aroma of baked wheat flour wafted into his nose.
Along with a rich, sweet scent of pumpkin.
He sat quietly for a while, then raised his hand to touch that thing, but the back of his outstretched hand accidentally knocked against the wooden cabinet by the bed, sending a sharp stab of pain through it.
By the time he reached out again, the black had already evaporated, vanished without a trace.
His fingers found a soft white loaf, its surface brushed with a little oil. Outside the castle.
A young man with soft black hair, dressed in white robes, stood outside a dried-up round pool containing only a mermaid statue. A horn-shaped soft roll appeared in his hand as if by magic. He took a bite, and his brows began to knot.
The bread did produce the taste a human palate should perceive when eaten. It was terrible.
An expensive white bread worth a whole silver coin, yet hard, full of grainy bits, with no sweet or salty filling whatsoever.
Thinking of how pitiful the male lead would look in the future, encountering so many perverts, and now he couldn’t even eat a proper meal Lu Jingxing, utterly deflated: I’m useless.jpg
A breeze blew through the garden. The nearby trees, taller than a person and unpruned, rustled, their uneven branches and long shadows swaying. As the gentle wind passed, the man turned around and stared at this little garden, suddenly thinking of Samuel, who was still shut in his room, never having stepped outside.
Keeping someone locked up all the time wasn’t right either.
Either he should find a way to let the male lead live the life he wanted, just avoiding those perverts.
Why not, tonight, under the pretense of taking him for a walk, quietly let him escape and hide him away, then keep trying to restore his divine status afterward?
While thinking, Lu Jingxing, like a sunflower facing the sun, circled slowly around the garden, and unknowingly stopped at an overgrown flower bed. Wild roses now grew rampant there, their stems covered in thick thorns, their blooming pink, yellow, and purple flowers nearly as large as a person’s fist.
Delighted by this wild charm, he raised his hand to touch the largest bloom, the moment his pale fingertip made contact, the flower began to wither and yellow from the tips of its petals. He snatched his hand back as if shocked, but it was too late; he could only watch helplessly as the withering spread rapidly from the petals backward, until even the wild, thorny stem curled up into a withered rope.
“This…”
Samuel finished the bread and pumpkin soup completely clean, felt his way up from the edge of the bed, and walked a few steps toward the direction of the light. He bumped into chairs and other furniture along the way; after carefully moving them aside, he reached the window.
Sunlight streamed in through the window and fell upon him, and the light elements danced joyfully over his body.
His long golden curls slid down from his shoulders. Samuel opened his palm, and a very faint, very pale wisp of gold gathered at his fingertips, lingeringly circling them once.
The color that burst back into his vision was that overwhelmingly domineering deep black.
Samuel couldn’t help shifting his gaze, watching that black humanoid aura standing motionless. For no discernible reason, he could sense that the other’s mood was quite terrible.
“Are you certain you wish to let him out?”
When Butler Brent appeared before Lu Jingxing again, Lu Jingxing stared at his lips for a long while, unable to tell whether it was because fresh blood hadn’t been wiped away, or because of some other reason.
He controlled his mind to keep it from wandering, and answered calmly: “Mm, the way he looks right now, like a lamb awaiting slaughter, really doesn’t excite me… I want to see eyes full of hope one second, then plunging into despair the next.”
“You truly have wicked tastes,” the butler said, bowing to him as if accepting the order, yet glancing up at him from below with lowered lashes, his blue eyes brimming with amusement. “As always, it delights me.”
Lu Jingxing: “…Go, quickly.” Stop being a pervert here.
He watched the butler’s retreating back, and while the other wasn’t paying attention, quietly conjured a wisp of black mist from his fingertips to follow along, lest the butler secretly make a move on the male lead behind his back.
If it weren’t for that reaction from this morning, blushing and going weak in the knees the moment anyone got close, Lu Jingxing would of course have wanted to follow along himself.
Now all he could do was lean by the castle window under the moonlight, bathed in that pale silver glow, his gaze tracking that faint golden figure, like watching a little sun that hadn’t yet gone home in the night landscape.
“Creeeak…”
It was at this moment that the strange sound reached his ears.
The temperature around him had dropped at some point.
Lu Jingxing’s relaxed mood from “raising the male lead” didn’t last long before he warily turned his head, wanting to see what dared to be so bold as to invade the territory of two demons.
But wherever his gaze fell…
Everything around him warped and twisted his vision.
The ceiling lamps stretched and bent; the bookshelves and bed took on bizarre shapes both square and round, as if a convex lens had been pressed against his eyes. Not only was the world horribly deformed, the distorted images also sent sharp pain shooting through his mind.
He wanted to close his eyes and not look, but something hot trickled from the corners of his eyes.
As if locked inside this stagnant, grotesque world, Lu Jingxing’s very capacity for thought ground to a halt. He stood there blankly, until a very soft laugh and the world finally regained a bit of color.
Flowing moonlight enveloped him.
And he uncontrollably revealed his true form: sharp black demon horns in his hair, his nails turned black, and a long tail tip hanging by his feet, listless, not even swaying.
The sensation of recovery came first from the top of his head.
A cold hand, its aura countless times more evil than his own, was stroking him, and a unique voice like an ancient chant slowly fell by his ear: “You can’t even bear this much?”
Like an ant pinned to the roadside by an irresistible finger, he would be crushed to nothing but dust the moment the other applied the slightest pressure.
Now that the force had loosened slightly, he was left with nothing but the instinct to gasp for breath.
Panic and terror exploded crackling up his spine and through his skull. Lu Jingxing barely lifted his head, and amid the cracking of his cervical vertebrae, he saw a pair of blood-red vertical pupils.
And what he had taken for silver moonlight was, in fact, the other’s hair color.
Lu Jingxing, having recovered a sliver of consciousness, finally began sluggishly scrolling through his mind:
“Run!” The villain big boss, the Demon King of Hell, has arrived!…
But there was no running.
His body couldn’t move at all.
The icy cold coiled around the back of his neck, gripping the nape of his fate with a force that seemed determined to shatter him, bones and soul alike freezing him solid. The Demon King before him grew larger and larger in his pupils.
When their noses were about to touch, the other stopped, the corner of his lips curving into a slight arc as he asked in a tone as elegant as a chant:
“Little thing, why do you smell a bit… special?”
“The power of light it truly makes one unable to control oneself…”
He looked over leisurely, with a hint of fastidiousness, as if appraising the pastries at a tea party: “Unable to control the urge to crush you.”