Chapter 70 : Chapter 70
Volume 1
Chapter 70 : The Love God’s Whisper (10)
He was standing on one of the monster’s largest limbs, only a single step away from its main body.
In other words, not only had he not been thrown farther away from Eluka, he had actually been thrown closer to her.
“But... why?”
To be safe, should the man not have thrown him as far away as possible?
Muen did not have time to think it through.
In his field of vision, the light suddenly dimmed.
The man had come before him again, calmly staring down at Muen.
That terrifying pressure immediately bore down on him like a mountain.
Muen’s breathing caught, and he did not dare think about anything else.
He flipped to his feet and circulated his battle aura.
He had to open the distance.
Shadowstep!
BOOM!
Just as Muen began the opening motion for Shadowstep, the man suddenly stamped his foot.
In an instant, the entire monstrous limb trembled violently, like an earthquake of catastrophic force.
Shadowstep was, after all, a special kind of footwork.
It could not be used without contact with the ground.
So Muen’s center of gravity immediately wavered, and the Shadowstep he had not yet managed to unleash was interrupted again.
This time, the man had not even used a martial skill.
Before him, Muen felt like a childish boy.
Every move that looked impressive in his own eyes was nothing more than a child wildly swinging a branch in front of this man.
Full of openings.
Crude to the extreme.
To even respond seriously would have been an insult to the man.
“Damn it!”
Muen had already cursed who knew how many times today, and being toyed with so casually by the man only provoked the ruthlessness in his heart.
So he abandoned all restraint and slashed again with both blades.
But if the man still retained any human emotion at all, he probably would have sighed.
Sighed at Muen’s choice at that moment.
Because in battle, allowing oneself to be ruled by emotion—was fatal.
The man extended his hand once more, meeting the twin flashes of Muen’s blades.
The blade-light streamed like silk, like two arcs of moonlight, so tight that even water seemed unable to pass through.
And yet the man’s hand slipped strangely through the gap between those two arcs and pressed lightly against Muen’s chest.
Terrifying internal force erupted from his palm, and Muen was blasted away once more.
“Cough, cough...”
Muen’s stomach churned violently, and he vomited more sour fluid.
Before he could even curse again, the man stepped forward and arrived before him.
Another palm strike.
And Muen was sent flying again.
It was as if the man had suddenly become addicted to this move, endlessly catching up to Muen without ever giving him a chance to get back on his feet.
Palm.
Fly.
Vomit acid.
Palm.
Fly.
Vomit acid.
Over and over again.
“Young Master!”
Watching her Young Master get played with like a broken sandbag, Ann grew even more frantic, driving the metal under her command into a more reckless assault than ever.
“Haha, Master, why are you so agitated? Could it be that Mr. Muen is the one you love?
That won’t do, Master. You can only accept my love!”
Eluka laughed delightedly.
Even having countless limbs shredded apart by steel could not shake her joy in the slightest.
“At first, I was planning to let Mr. Muen accept my love too, but looking at it now, wouldn’t it be better if Ade just beat him to death?
Come on, Master. Why don’t you surrender? If you do, I might consider sparing you.”
“In your dreams!”
Ann bit out the words in reply, then took a deep breath and forcibly calmed herself.
The discipline of a perfect maid always allowed her to control her emotions better than most.
And in a moment of crisis like this, a calm mind was always quicker to notice what was wrong.
So as Ann’s thoughts raced, desperately trying to figure out how to get Young Master out alive, she quickly noticed a clue.
Why was it that after getting beaten around by the man for so long, Young Master seemed to be completely fine aside from vomiting up last night’s dinner?
...
“Cough, cough. I see now. I understand.”
Leaning against the monster’s enormous body, having finally emptied the last contents of his stomach, Muen looked helplessly at the man before him and smiled bitterly.
“Even if you wanted to fool Eluka, could you not have used a different method? Feeling like I was about to puke out my entire stomach really was not pleasant.”
The man remained silent.
He merely watched Muen in silence.
Nothing could be seen in those vacant eyes.
Like a puppet.
And yet—Who said a puppet had no heart?
“Save her.”
This was the first time the man had spoken in front of Muen.
His voice was hoarse, as if he had just returned from hell itself.
“All right.”
Muen was not surprised in the slightest. He simply nodded seriously.
“I’ll free her from this.”
The man did not care about the difference between “freeing” and “saving.”
Or perhaps he already knew that for the Eluka of this moment, “release” was the same thing as “salvation.”
The man reached out again and grabbed Muen by the shoulder.
This time, Muen did not resist.
He let that iron-vise grip squeeze him until it hurt, then lift him like a chick and hurl him away.
At this point, Muen was no longer all that far from Eluka.
But the man still used all his strength.
So he flew fast.
“Huh?”
Eluka finally reacted.
And all her happiness vanished in an instant.
She had been betrayed.
By the one she loved most.
“Why? Why?!”
Eluka shrieked hysterically:
“Ade, you’re betraying me?
Why? You had already thrown yourself into my embrace. You had already shared in my love. Why doesn’t Lord Love’s power work on you?
Why?!”
Under the extreme fury of betrayal, the monster’s entire body began to shake violently.
Several hundred faces wailed in pain at the same time.
Countless cries of “love” rose like the midnight howling of ghosts, sharp enough to rupture the eardrums.
The warped flesh began writhing with unprecedented frenzy.
Countless bizarre limbs burst crudely through the skin before the flesh could even finish splitting open, sending blood spraying everywhere.
Then, wrapped in that foul-smelling blood, those limbs surged toward the traitor and toward Muen, utterly disregarding Ann, who had seized the opening and was attacking with all her might from the front.
The man did not resist.
He allowed the warped limbs to seize him, bind him, envelop him, and gradually devour him.
Soon he would merge with Eluka once again.
This time, there would be no special treatment for him.
He would become just one more face among those hundreds.
His eyes were still vacant.
And yet in the deepest part of them, something seemed to flicker.
Just like before.
Why betray you?
Did that even need to be asked?
Because I love you, Eluka.
I am sorry that you were deceived.
I am sorry that I failed to stop you.
But in the end, at least let this useless man be of some use.
At the final moment before he was completely swallowed,
the man raised his one remaining hand.
Then his five fingers curved slightly, like the claws of a beast.
In that instant, thunder roared!
An invisible shockwave spread rapidly outward from the center of his palm.
But the target was not the space around himself.
It was the warped limbs pursuing Muen.
...
This was...
my final act of love.
...
Eluka’s shriek cut off abruptly.
Because a figure had crossed through every obstruction and finally arrived before her.
“Yo, Eluka.”
Standing atop the writhing flesh, Muen looked down at that still-lovely face.
As casually as if greeting an acquaintance, he said softly:
“Good afternoon. Have you eaten yet?”
“The roast whole lamb you treated me to last time was delicious.”
Postscript: Sorry I’m late. I’m posting both chapters together today.
On Release
It’s finally going premium.
First of all, I still want to thank all of you readers for your support and affection, and thank my editor as well for the support.
I could not have made it this far without all of you.
There really is not much to say about the release itself, so let me talk a little about the book.
First, this book—especially the opening plot—really does have quite a few problems. There are some logical flaws, and many readers have pointed that out.
To be honest, when I first wrote it, I did not feel there was any real logical problem, because my own logic was very simple.
The protagonist transmigrates.
He knows he is the doomed blond villain, while the original protagonist is the ultimate Soaring Phoenix who can tear through everything in this evil-god world setting.
The protagonist feels he cannot win against her, so he gives up and tries to coast along instead, planning to apologize to the original protagonist and peacefully remain the Duke’s son.
Then the black book appears and throws him a prophetic dream of a future where he dies by a thousand cuts.
So the protagonist concludes that such an even more tragic ending must have happened because he recklessly changed the plot, causing the world’s corrective force to act.
So compared to death by a thousand cuts, he chooses to follow the original plot anyway, meaning he attempts to drug Selicia, fails, and gets stripped of his noble status.
But unexpectedly, through a strange twist of fate, he actually succeeds.
Now that I put it like that, does the logic not feel a bit smoother?
But perhaps because I was too eager to patch over that part of the logic, I overexplained it. Combined with the fact that every reader understands things differently, that instead made many people feel that part of the story was too stupid or too “poisonous.”
In the end, it was still my lack of control over the plot, and it gave many readers a poor reading experience. So let me apologize to you all first.
The second problem was my writing approach at the beginning.
Because in the setup, the protagonist is an ordinary person who transmigrated into the body of a blond villain, he would not, like a typical domineering protagonist, actively compete with the original protagonist for destiny or anything like that.
He only wants to “stay alive” and “be happy.”
So when conflicts arose, I used a large amount of inner monologue to try to show the protagonist’s struggle.
Because compared to a protagonist who charges headfirst against heaven and earth, I personally prefer the kind of protagonist who is clearly afraid inside, yet can still overcome that fear and make choices that warm the reader’s heart.
But too much inner monologue not only made the protagonist feel a bit fractured as a character, it also made him seem somewhat “weak.”
Anyway, I am sure no reader would have liked the male lead during the Selicia arc.
So once again, I apologize to all of you readers, and at the same time, thank you for continuing to support me despite such major problems on my part.
Of course, once a problem is discovered, it has to be corrected.
Actually, starting from the maid arc, and especially from the Eluka arc, aside from the protagonist’s commentary, I have no longer given him too much inner monologue.
I have tried to shape him more through his actions rather than his thoughts. Looking at it that way, does it feel a little better now?
All these issues come from my lack of plot control and my insufficient writing skill.
If any readers still feel there are problems, you can leave them in the replies under this post.
I will read them one by one.
Now that I have talked about the problems, let me return to the plot of this book.
The first thing I want to say is that none of the heroines in this book will simply fall in love for free.
Including Ann. Her affection level is the highest, so she appears first, but the plot still needs to correct her “distorted” love.
So every heroine will have a long-term route, and that process of winning them over is the book’s “main storyline.”
As for the question many readers have asked—why there has not been much interaction with the other heroines—I only want to say that within the first volume, I genuinely could not find a place to insert the other heroines without sacrificing the coherence of the plot.
But starting from the second volume, as new settings and scenes open up, the protagonist will have very interesting interactions with nearly every heroine, so please look forward to it.
And from the worldview that has already been shown, everyone should be able to tell that the later story is going to be very exciting.
As for when volume two begins... for me, it already started several chapters ago. Heh.
All right, that is enough chatter.
Once again, thank you all for your strong support.
I hope you will continue to support this book.
Ahem. If you still have any tickets in hand, it would be even better if you could vote for me. Ahem.
Although I really have been a bit busy these past few days, I promise you that your votes and tips will definitely turn into actual bonus chapters later.
Please check the pinned comment in the comments section for details.
Then, I wish every one of you readers happiness every day, and I will see you in the next chapter.