Chapter 226: So I’m the Protagonist After All (22)
From afar, the lord in luxurious robes was pinned beneath, covered by the cultivator’s light-colored clothes, at a clear disadvantage.
In reality, Sui Yihuan only needed to lower her gaze to see the pure black neck ring tightly against the cultivator’s skin, a curse that could severely injure a cultivator’s meridians with a single blow—
It was also her handiwork.
The Demon Lord closed her eyes. When she opened them again, red threads naturally extended from her fingertips, connecting to the black neck ring, creating a strange image in the room.
Then, Su Mingxiu was pulled away by the uncontrollable force, forced to separate from the other person by a small distance.
Taking advantage of this time, Sui Yihuan slowly regained her composure, locking the beast in her heart back in its cage. She didn’t look at the cultivator whose movements were restrained and who should be unprecedentedly angry. She coldly answered her question in a low voice, “I don’t like it.”
“Whether it’s you, or what you do, I don’t like it.”
The room fell silent.
She didn’t even dare to look at Su Mingxiu’s expression.
But the person who was pulled away didn’t show any anger at all. She just sat on the black patterned carpet on the floor by the table, slowly tidying her sleeves. She also raised her hand and touched the red thread connected to the black ring around her neck. As soon as her hand touched it, she froze…
It was actually warm?
Sui Yihuan, who hadn’t expected her blood curse to be touched by the other person, trembled slightly. The people she had cursed before usually died instantly.
So she never knew that when another person touched these blood threads… it would feel so terrifying, especially when touched so gently—she almost reflexively withdrew this power.
The place under Su Mingxiu’s fingertip suddenly disappeared, leaving her touching air. She looked up at Sui Yihuan. After a moment, realizing that her Great Ascension stage cultivation was definitely not enough to pry the answer she wanted from this Demon Lord, she listlessly put away the food on the table and turned to walk towards the corner.
Her sleeve was suddenly grabbed.
The cultivator stopped, turned to look at the other person indifferently, and heard Sui Yihuan’s dry command, “You haven’t said what exactly is inside your body.”
“I don’t want to tell you anymore,” Su Mingxiu said.
The hand gripping her sleeve tightened, showing the other person’s hesitation. After a moment, the high and mighty lord of the Demon Abyss still chose to speak again, “Is it life-threatening?”
“Guess.”
The Demon Lord, without the memories of her reincarnations, was tormented by the infuriating lines from a lover’s quarrel for the first time. She felt both helpless and a little angry… But after all, she was the one who hurt the other person first, so in the end, they could only part on bad terms.
Su Mingxiu took out a set of cloud brocade bedding from her interspatial bag and laid it out on the floor in the corner of the room. The satin was of excellent quality and extremely comfortable, making Sui Yihuan unable to say, “Go sleep on the bed.”
The two of them lived separately in the small room, not speaking to each other. Sui Yihuan would go out every day for a long time, and every time she came back, she looked exhausted.
But she rested for very short periods, sometimes not resting at all, simply handling Demon Abyss matters at the table. Through the thin curtains, sometimes the demons reporting outside would glance up and see the shadow of the other person walking behind the gauze.
Strange rumors spread. There wasn’t much entertainment in the Demon Abyss, so the gossip of the higher-ups became the talk of the demons after tea and meals. It was said that the new Demon Lord only looked cold-blooded, cruel, and violent on the surface, but in reality, she had taken a fancy to a princess from some race and hid her in the Black Stone Dock.
The rumors were vivid, but the two protagonists at the center of the gossip were still in a protracted cold war, completely unaware of it.
That day, after Sui Yihuan returned from the blood prison beneath Black Stone Dock, she saw Su Mingxiu lying on her back, seemingly asleep. Looking at that graceful figure, after a long time, she still couldn’t resist her worry and wanted to take advantage of Su Mingxiu’s unguarded state to find out what exactly had been planted inside her body.
But as soon as she held her breath and approached, her shadow falling on the other person, her hand had just reached out when it was caught—
The person who opened her eyes and looked at her showed no signs of drowsiness. There was even a smile in her eyes, like she had caught a cat sneaking into the bed.
Sui Yihuan inexplicably felt a little embarrassed and squeezed out a sentence that lacked credibility, “Your blanket fell off, this Lord is picking it up for you.”
“Since the Demon Lord is so kind, why not return my grumpy little girl to me as well?” Su Mingxiu raised an eyebrow and smoothly continued her words.
Sui Yihuan: “…”
She broke free from the other person and wanted to leave. Who knew that the person on the bed would immediately raise her hand and wipe her face, removing the disguise that had been washed away long ago and only concealed by a spell, revealing that beautiful face that was so stunning that one couldn’t look away.
Taking advantage of the other person’s momentary daze, Su Mingxiu abruptly pulled her into her arms, “If I had known you liked my face so much, I should have cried in front of you with this face when you said those hurtful words earlier, and see if you could still be so heartless.”
…What was she talking about?
Sui Yihuan was held tightly in her arms, smelling the much fainter fragrance on her body. She didn’t know how this Great Ascension cultivator, who could be called an ancestor in the nine continents, could say such shameless words.
Only those mortal women, and those women who were good at using bedroom tactics, would use tears as weapons. How could Su Mingxiu also?
But these thoughts only flashed through her mind.
Knowing that she had no resistance to her, Sui Yihuan tried to get up from her arms with a tense expression. But the other person held her very tightly, and it was difficult to break free with just strength.
“Let go.”
“You were clearly the one who threw yourself into my arms, why do you want me to let go?”
“You!”
Sui Yihuan knew that she couldn’t win against her verbally and didn’t want to continue this entanglement. Red threads appeared on her fingertips again, trying to control the other person to let go.
But Su Mingxiu hugged her very tightly, at the same time using her will to resist her blood curse. The final result was that the black neck ring was almost deformed, and the beautiful woman’s face was flushed, she didn’t know if it was from being choked or from pain.
But even so, she didn’t let go, just instinctively increased her strength, pressing the thin body under the luxurious robe tightly into her arms, as if wanting to rub her into her bones.
Sui Yihuan had no choice. She didn’t dare to really hurt her, so in the end, she loosened her control with a dark face, “Have you hugged enough?”
“Not enough, never enough.” If someone had told Su Mingxiu in those previous worlds that she would eventually become a loyal dog type of top, she wouldn’t have believed it, and would even have beaten that person up.
But after knowing that her rebirth, the passage of time, and these repeated encounters and love were all exchanged with the life of the person she loved, she could no longer harden her heart towards this person.
After personally measuring the other person’s waist with her palm, Su Mingxiu found that she was really thin. Her heart was filled with pity, and she couldn’t help but be moved. After hugging her for a while, she couldn’t help but want to get closer.
Her kiss traveled along the other person’s cheek, finally stopping on Sui Yihuan’s palm, “Pushing your luck.”
The other person looked away, pressed her palm against her lips, and said in a stiff voice.
Su Mingxiu pulled her palm away, smiling even more enchantingly than the Lycoris radiata transplanted from the underworld beneath Black Stone Dock, “Then say again that you don’t like me, and I won’t kiss you or hug you anymore.”
“I—”
Sui Yihuan started to speak perfunctorily, completely forgetting why she was being so obedient. But just as she uttered one word, her head was turned, and she looked directly into Su Mingxiu’s smiling eyes, “Look into my eyes and say it.”
“Uh…” The Demon Lord was annoyed by her many requests. After looking into those eyes that were more beautiful than the stars for a moment, she looked away impatiently. When she spoke again, the person beneath her raised her head, like a swan stretching its neck towards the sky, and sealed her lips, not uttering a single word.
This time, it seemed that she had the upper hand, but she was being restrained and couldn’t escape at all, not even able to speak properly.
The second time she tried to speak, Sui Yihuan only managed to utter the word “I” before being stopped again.
Finally seeing through this cultivator’s cunning tricks, the Demon Lord stopped speaking. Su Mingxiu cupped her cheeks, rubbing her nose against hers affectionately, “Why did you stop talking? Don’t you dislike me? Do you want me to say it for you?”
The restrained lord didn’t say a word, she didn’t know if she was looking for an opportunity to break free from her entanglement, or if she was tired of the previous meaningless tug-of-war and was waiting for her to get tired of it.
But Su Mingxiu didn’t care about this. She just kept a certain distance from her, every word falling on the other person’s lips, her breath sometimes hot, sometimes cold. It seemed like she was about to kiss her again, but she never got closer.
She slowly helped the other person say the words:
“You don’t like me, so you wouldn’t feel guilty for knocking down my roses, and you wouldn’t want to personally compensate me; you don’t like me, so when you see me being used by my master, you wouldn’t feel heartache, you wouldn’t feel that your appearance has caused such a heavy blow to my life…”
“You don’t like me, so in the Zhenhai Tower secret realm, if I were the one poisoned, you wouldn’t want to help me detoxify. Even if we had some accidental entanglement, you wouldn’t care if I abandoned you; because you don’t like me, so even if you see that I got the mermaid pearl, a blessing for love from the merfolk, you wouldn’t be envious at all, nor would you be interested in it, and wouldn’t have any thoughts of taking it…”
“You really dislike me so much. After all, I just look like your old friend now. Even if I come to the Demon Abyss, I can only be a insignificant stand-in for that unknown old friend of yours, right?”
Clearly, every word Su Mingxiu said was based on the premise that Sui Yihuan didn’t like her. But after being listed with so many obsessions, so many absurd thoughts, Sui Yihuan thought in her heart:
So she already liked her this much?
Seeing that the Demon Lord had nothing to say, Su Mingxiu’s touch on her cheek became even more gentle. She had long known the reason for her experiences in those previous worlds. The person in front of her didn’t have the memories of her previous life, so she didn’t know about those past events, and didn’t know the original trajectory—
But for Su Mingxiu, she had watched helplessly as the other person’s trajectory gradually overlapped with the past.
She had also long known why she had received that rose, that teacher-student relationship, that lovely omega… and the unreasonable merman, the willful little emperor…
Every experience she had was a regret and compensation from the past Sui Yihuan to her.
The rose that originated from the small garden, even though their encounters in the two lifetimes were different. But as long as the other person had once set foot in that spiritual garden of the Hundred Flower Sect, she would feel regret for its destruction later… And it became even more uncontrollable later.
When she was arranged by the Heavenly Dao to those worlds, Su Mingxiu had been impatient. Because she didn’t know what kind of traps the disguised system would set for her, and initially she didn’t know that these protagonists were all Sui Yihuan’s obsessions.
So she had hesitated when facing them, and even had thoughts of giving up because the other person was too immature…
But only after being reborn did she understand what kind of treasures were hidden in those worlds she had experienced. It was the unspoken love from another person. Even if the ending was the scattering of her soul, she had given those feelings to her as a gift without reservation.
—Even if Su Mingxiu would never know the truth, even if Su Mingxiu might not be able to be reborn. But if she failed and died in these illusions, there would also be another person’s love buried with her. Even if she died, she would die in a beautiful dream filled with love.
Now.
Sui Yihuan, whose intentions were partially exposed by her, didn’t want to face it. She just quickly adjusted her expression while Su Mingxiu was reminiscing about the past, forcefully restraining the restless little deer in her heart that was clamoring to see her beloved.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The person beneath her came back to her senses, chuckled softly, and when her eyes curved into crescents, the small mole under her left eye also became gentle.
“Yes, you don’t know, and there are indeed things you don’t know—”
“For example, aren’t you curious why I waited half a year to come find you?”
Sui Yihuan pursed her lips. This was her most common action to suppress her emotions, but it was seen through by Su Mingxiu.
But the cunning cultivator only piqued her interest and didn’t say anything further. As if in exchange, she playfully flicked the snowflake earring on her ear with her fingertip and asked, “Then you answer my question first. You should answer me this time.”
“The green rice balls I made for you before, were they delicious?”
Leave a Reply