Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 136: Good Atmosphere, Bad Atmosphere
Myss’s rational mind told him that he should take the opportunity to probe Sogné’s memories.
But his instincts made him turn his head and give Salaar an interested, questioning, “Hm?” Under Sogné’s puzzled gaze, the magic that had just begun to stir vanished in an instant.
“I said we should rest early today.” Salaar looked as though he had just breathed a sigh of relief.
Myss had a nagging sensation of having finally won, but not quite decisively. Salaar had definitely seen through what he had been about to do and interrupted him in an emergency.
…But why? Based on Myss’s understanding of Salaar, perhaps Salaar might selfishly want to linger in this long dream for a little longer. But at most, that would make him less proactive. He would never deliberately obstruct Myss.
So was probing Sogné too dangerous? Or had Salaar already figured something out?
Myss casually abandoned the thought and reached out to pull at Sogné’s face instead. The little brat could not run away anyway. There would be plenty of time later.
“Must… protect… hope… everything is not… over yet…”
As luck would have it, several black shadows appeared beside the dining table at the same time.
They huddled together, bent over, looking deeply pained.
“Daylight has come… but daylight is not the only thing that came…”
“Hide… hide…”
“Black coffin…”
Sogné showed no reaction, as though he had long since grown accustomed to them. For once, Myss listened carefully to the dreamlike fragments and committed them to memory.
……
Night.
No, more accurately, there was no night here. Outside the window, the sky remained an unnaturally vivid blue with white clouds. But once the bedroom curtains were drawn, the room grew dim enough to resemble nighttime.
They were inside a dream world, where even cleansing magic was unnecessary, yet Salaar still solemnly took a bath. So when he entered the room, his hair was still faintly damp.
The instant Salaar stepped inside, Myss shut the door with a thud like a hunter trapping an animal. The entire room sank into a honey-thick haze.
The outline of the bedframe became soft and indistinct.
Myss was still wearing the clothes from earlier that day and stood between Salaar and the bedroom door, as though Salaar might suddenly make a run for it.
Salaar: “…”
The corner of Salaar’s mouth twitched.
“I’m not going to run.”
Myss gave a satisfied snort, crossed the room in two steps, and dropped onto the edge of the bed. He generously opened his arms toward Salaar. The gesture looked less like seduction and more like provocation.
“Come on!”
Watching Myss flap his arms, Salaar suddenly thought of a wild beast encountering a powerful enemy and spreading itself wide to appear larger. It looked as though they were about to charge into battle rather than climb onto a soft bed.
Salaar struggled hard to suppress a smile. “I have to tell you, humans have a bad habit. The more we reach moments like this, the more we care about the ‘mood’.”
Myss stabbed Salaar with a look that plainly said, Why are you so troublesome?
Salaar smiled and shook his head. He took a candle from the stand in the corner and lit it beside the bed. A layer of warm light spread through the dim room, making the shadows seem even sweeter and thicker.
Then Salaar sat down beside Myss and quietly looked up at the ceiling, lost in thought.
Myss: “What now?”
“This is Kendrick’s body. It still feels a little strange,” Salaar said softly. “Even though Kendric abandoned this body, it still…”
They had already kissed countless times before. Myss himself was using the slave’s body! In more than three hundred years, Myss had never seen Salaar agonize like this.
He strongly suspected Salaar was stalling for time.
“This is a dream, Salaar. The you here is nothing more than a consciousness. What are you overthinking for?”
“…Right. This is a dream.”
Salaar froze for a moment, then smiled again.
He raised both hands and slowly wiped them across his face, as though removing an invisible mask. His fingers passed through his black hair. The strands seemed to ignite, turning into brilliant gold.
Between his fingers, those two lapis-lazuli eyes became faintly moist, their gaze winding around Myss like climbing vines.
When Salaar lowered his hands again, Myss saw that familiar yet unfamiliar face.
Myss instinctively stopped breathing. He couldn’t help slowly raising a hand and touching Salaar’s cheek with his fingertips.
…This was the first face he had ever seen when his consciousness was born.
How strange. Kendrick Karns’s body had been altered by Salaar until its build was almost identical to his former one. Even the face carried traces of the Salaar from long ago.
But Salaar had never possessed Kendrick’s damp, gloomy air. He had always been crisp and clear, like autumn sunlight.
Logically, Myss should have long since grown accustomed to the difference.
Yet the instant he clearly saw that face, Myss felt as though something had clenched around his heart.
For a moment, he forgot what he was supposed to do next. Forgot what goal he meant to accomplish. He even forgot where he was.
He simply looked at him, just as he had at their very first meeting.
“Salaar?” After a long while, Myss called softly, his voice slightly hoarse.
“It’s me.” Salaar lowered his hands completely. “I keep forgetting… this is only a dream, and I’m very skilled in mental magic.”
“Salaar.” Myss called his name again.
“I’m here.” Salaar smiled—a smile with his true features, wearing the same expression that had graced the face of “Kendrick”. Myss suddenly realized that inside the seal, Salaar had never smiled this gently at anyone else.
Salaar really did like him. For the first time, Myss understood that with startling clarity.
The concept that had once made him smug suddenly became real, heavy, and close enough to touch.
The candle beside the bed flickered. Myss’s mind tangled into a mess, and for a moment he had no idea how to continue.
Salaar, on the other hand, calmed down. He didn’t mock Myss as he had imagined, nor did he continue with a joking remark.
“May I hold you?” His voice was soft.
Myss nodded blankly. Only afterward did he realize what Salaar had asked.
Salaar climbed off the bed and bent down; his shadow nearly swallowed Myss whole. His arms moved around Myss’s back.
Myss sat rigidly in place, watching that face draw closer and closer… only to pull away again.
Something warm and smooth brushed across his cheek. Only belatedly did Myss realize that Salaar had just untied the ribbon at the back of his hair.
Without the ribbon holding it in place, his long gray-white hair cascaded down like a waterfall. The pomegranate blossoms tangled within slid loose as well, their vivid red even more striking.
Oh. He was letting my hair down so the bun wouldn’t press uncomfortably against the back of my head later.
Myss held his breath and waited for the Hero to approach again. A tingling sensation rippled across his skin, and the blood in his veins felt as though they had been replaced by boiling mercury.
For the first time, Myss discovered that the sound of his own heartbeat was annoyingly loud.
But Salaar didn’t climb back onto the bed. He watched the long hair spill down and gently exhaled, then he carefully bent lower and knelt onto one knee before Myss.
It was not a posture of submission. Salaar opened his arms and wrapped them tightly around Myss’s waist, burying his face against Myss’s soft stomach.
Myss’s brain seemed to turn into mush. For a while, he couldn’t think clearly.
Everything was too surreal that he couldn’t even identify his own emotions. Amid the confusion, Myss instinctively raised a hand and gently stroked Salaar’s brilliant golden hair.
At that moment, the strands were immersed in dim shadow and looked almost black.
Myss’s hand suddenly tightened.
How strange. In the span of a single heartbeat, he understood exactly how Salaar felt.
The Salaar resting against his legs was only a phantom from the past. That body had aged and decayed little by little before Myss’s own eyes, with no possibility of ever recovering.
When their journey ended, Salaar’s consciousness would return to that nearly corpse-like body and disappear completely.
After so many days, Myss once again imagined Salaar’s death.
This weight. This warmth. All of it was false.
At some point in the future, Salaar would vanish before Myss’s eyes and turn completely to dust. Just like the Salaar in front of him now, he would disappear entirely and exist only in the depths of Myss’s memories.
How ironic, Myss thought in broken fragments. He had already known that Salaar loved him, just as he had always known that Salaar was destined to die—either in Myss’s victory, or in Myss’s destruction, disappearing alongside him.
But at this moment, Salaar’s love and Salaar’s death both became unbearably real at the same time.
The most vivid Salaar Myss had ever known was already half dead. That head of brilliant golden hair existed here and could only exist here.
Just like the endless daylight outside the window —just like the home Salaar desired. They were things destined never to exist in reality.
Myss suddenly felt an uncomfortable pang. He tightened the fingers buried in Salaar’s hair, unsure how to make the strange emotion disappear. His throat went dry, and his chest felt filled with lead.
Waves of inexplicable anger battered his thoughts, but he had no idea where to vent that rage.
Myss sat there angrily for quite some time, then sniffled loudly.
“Myss?” Salaar raised his eyes slightly and looked up at him.
“I’m upset,” Myss said in a muffled voice. “I think I understand why you want to stay here now. Damn it.”
“Really? …I thought you’d never understand me in your entire life, and somehow you actually saw through me.”
Salaar buried his face again. “Ah, being understood by your enemy is never a good thing.”
Myss felt a mix of smug satisfaction and irritation at the same time. He smacked Salaar on the head.
“Shut up. Let me finish being upset first. We can do it later. Right now, the… atmosphere isn’t right.”
Had Salaar been feeling something like this ever since they entered this place? Myss couldn’t fathom how he could still smile.
Tentatively, Myss bent forward and wrapped his arms around Salaar’s head.
Silence swayed along with the candle flame. Drops of wax slid down the candle one by one and slowly hardened on the wooden table. Objectively speaking, of course, all of it was only a trivial, fleeting dream.
One minute… Two minutes… Ten minutes.
At last, Myss’s mind cleared somewhat. He drew a deep breath, released Salaar’s head, and patted his own chest. “Let’s continue.”
That pat immediately dislodged a flattened loaf of bread. It slid down beneath the fabric and smacked Salaar directly on the head.
Salaar: “…”
Salaar: “…Pfft!”
“What are you laughing at? How was I supposed to know the dream would reproduce everything this accurately?!”
Myss pulled out the other loaf, which was still in place, and slapped it onto Salaar’s head. Salaar instinctively jerked his head aside, sending the bread flying heroically through the air. It smacked against the wall and slowly slid to the floor.
Looking at the valiantly fallen loaf, Myss failed to suppress the laughter in his voice. The Archdemon pressed his lips together several times before finally bursting into loud laughter.
“Oh, how intense.”
Salaar couldn’t stop laughing either, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.
“This is the most absurd ‘atmosphere’ I’ve ever experienced. Even those terrible books written about me never had this much imagination.”
Myss’s body shook continuously with laughter. Salaar rested his head on Myss’s lap, his face flushed and hot from laughing.
“I need to confess,” Salaar said once he finally calmed down, still lying across Myss’s legs.
Myss braced both hands behind himself on the bed and panted for breath. “Confess what?”
“—I feel so happy.” Salaar played with the end of one loose strand of Myss’s hair. “In this ridiculous place made entirely of lies and impossibilities, we somehow managed to put everything else aside and simply be together.”
“The home I first imagined wasn’t even this good.”
“Your first imagined home?” Myss curiously scratched the back of Salaar’s head.
“Yes. The first home I imagined.” Salaar muttered, “To tell you the truth, the first time I ever thought of ‘home’ was when I saw you… though I suppose we weren’t exactly living together back then.”
Myss thought back to the darkness inside the seal and that lonely little house. “You had a very strange imagination.”
“No. You don’t understand.” Salaar said, “That was the first time I realized…”
He abruptly stopped, his expression stiffening. Then he raised his head and looked toward the door.
“I see.” He said, “So this is what the ‘Blind God’ wants. No wonder…”
No wonder what? Myss stared down at Salaar in complete confusion.
Salaar closed his eyes and slowly released a long breath. When he spoke again, his voice was clear and calm.
“I know what you want now, Blind God.”
“I can give you what you want. But you have to make a deal with me.”
The author has something to say:
I swear I’m getting them into bed in this arc!!!
First, let’s have Salaar peel a few onion layers of himself to set the mood. [applause]
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