chapter 4

Anyone else with wounds this severe would have lost consciousness long ago.

Perhaps oblivion would have been a mercy.

Jiang Tingxue, however, remained awake from beginning to end.

He fought every instinctive reaction. Even when my fingers brushed wounds deep enough to expose bone, he never let out a single gasp.

Only the occasional tremor in his body betrayed how much he suffered.

Without his cultivation, he now had the body of an ordinary mortal. Sheer willpower was the only thing holding him together.

Not long ago, he had tried to drive away his final lifeline and surrender his last hope of survival.

Yet now he spent every shred of strength preserving the final scraps of his dignity.

Contradictory. Strange.

I desperately wanted to know what he was thinking, but Jiang Tingxue had no intention of enlightening me.

The eyes that might have revealed his true feelings remained hidden beneath layers of white gauze.

I asked politely, “How were your eyes injured?”

“Ghostly energy has invaded the apertures around them.” With some effort, Jiang Tingxue caught the hand I was using to tug at his trousers. “…There are no wounds below my waist.”

Oh, I knew that. I only wanted to make him speak.

Still, his answer was better than I had feared. I had thought his enemies might have gouged out his eyes, which was why I had not dared remove the bandages.

If ghostly energy was the only problem, I merely needed to draw it out of his body.

I touched the gauze over his eyes with exquisite care.

“Leave your eyes to me.”

“I will give you back a world full of light.”

As a pure-blooded succubus, I could feed on human spiritual energy, demon energy, or the yao’s vital essence.

Even the resentful energy of ghosts – condemned by all Three Realms – was merely a less appetizing meal to me.

The ghostly energy in Jiang Tingxue’s body might have stymied anyone else. For me, it was simplicity itself.

I only had to eat it.

But if I made the process too obvious, Jiang Tingxue would easily guess what I was.

After my rejected proposal a century ago, I had reflected painfully on the reasons for my failure.

Human cultivators rarely liked demons, since our peoples were rivals. Among demons, they most despised succubi, who fed on humans.

And Jiang Tingxue was the most orthodox of cultivators, a sword cultivator to his very bones.

Considering how fiercely he clutched his clothes and resisted even having medicine applied, the answer was obvious.

He had to be the most rigid, conservative, inflexible sort of man.

If he discovered I was a succubus, he might start fighting me again before his wounds had even healed.

…Not that I was afraid he would hate me. I was afraid he would injure himself and cost me my investment!

To protect that investment, I devised a somewhat indirect method.

I brought Jiang Tingxue a bowl of blood-restoring medicine.

“Drink. It’s time to treat your eyes.”

He felt for the bowl, took it from my hands, and drained the contents without asking a single question.

I stared at him. “You aren’t even going to ask what’s in it? If I’d brought you an aphrodisiac, you’d be completely at my mercy.”

Jiang Tingxue: “?”

After a moment’s silence, he said, “If you’re trying to frighten me, wouldn’t most people threaten me with deadly poison?”

Oh. Right. I had forgotten that “normal” meant very different things in the Human and Demon Realms.

“Sorry, sorry. I’ll remember next time.” I set the empty bowl aside. “But who says I was only trying to frighten you?”

Once I had confirmed that his external wounds had healed completely, I placed one hand on his shoulder.

With a slight push, I sent Jiang Tingxue sprawling onto the bed.

Before he could react, I climbed over him.

“I am no selfless healer. My medicine isn’t free.”

“Surely you know that when someone saves your life, the proper repayment is to offer yourself in marriage?”