Chapter 2: Hold Me Tight

Lin Zhihan kept watching her. Her lips moved several times before she finally spoke.

“So… did the binding work?”

The icy rain roared down around them.

The succubus clenched her jaw and remained silent. The collar beeped in response instead.

“Would you like to enable voice-control mode?”

Lin Zhihan didn’t answer right away.

But she could see Vaniel’s tail curling in on itself. Her entire body was tense, the veins in her arms standing out. Even her wings trembled slightly.

It didn’t look like fear so much as an effort to keep herself from using force.

Lin Zhihan fell quiet for a moment.

Then she pretended not to notice the girl’s resistance.

“Come home with me, then.”

She held out a hand. The well-defined knuckles of her long, slender fingers looked pale against the rain.

Vaniel immediately recoiled, as if Lin Zhihan had offered her not a hand, but a passage straight to hell.

The beautiful eyes she lifted were full of wariness and hatred. But when she got a good look at Lin Zhihan, she paused.

If she was being honest, this human was beautiful.

But… she looked like a bad person.

A pointed chin, pale skin. She looked down at Vaniel, her narrow, phoenix-shaped eyes partly obscuring her pupils, long lashes shadowing the dark gaze beneath. A small mole rested on her left eyelid.

She had the face of a classic villainess.

Compared with the beautiful succubus, Lin Zhihan looked more like the devil.

No—according to the story, Lin Zhihan really was a devil in human skin.

And yet, beneath those wicked-looking features, her eyes held a trace of pity as she looked at the succubus.

Vaniel, lost in her newfound hatred of humanity, didn’t notice.

At Lin Zhihan’s gesture, the system started fussing in her ear again.

“Wrong, wrong, host. You shouldn’t try to help her up.

“In this world, succubi aren’t worthy of being helped by their masters. Humans are afraid of devils’ power, so they’re especially cruel to the succubi they can control.

“Succubi are slaves. They must never be treated like people.

“Besides, you have a nasty personality. You’ve been oppressed and forced to scrape by all your life, and you’ve had to pretend to be kind. Now that you finally own a slave, all the evil inside you has been brought to the surface. You should test whether she’ll obey you. Order her to crawl all the way back to your place.”

Lin Zhihan fell silent in the rain. She interrupted the system with a question it hadn’t expected.

“Where did the original Lin Zhihan go?”

The system faltered. “Uh… what?”

Lin Zhihan pressed on, her voice level.

“Where’s the real Lin Zhihan? The one who was cruel enough to do all the things you want me to do?”

Why didn’t anyone else have a system? Why was she the only one forced to play the villain or be erased?

Where was the original villain?

The system clearly hadn’t expected Lin Zhihan to figure that out.

“She… ran into a little trouble,” it stammered.

“So she failed.”

“!”

The system seemed startled. “What?”

“The purely evil Lin Zhihan, the original villain of this script, failed to recreate the plot. And I’m guessing she failed more than once.”

The system wanted the plot to run smoothly, but it didn’t know how to make that happen.

So it had begun creating different versions of Lin Zhihan, hoping to find one who could keep the original plot on track.

That was why the story kept falling into a time loop.

The system finally blurted out, “Oh my God! How did you know?”

“…”

Lin Zhihan had only been testing it.

The system seemed to realize it couldn’t hide the truth anymore. At last, it admitted it.

“Fine. This story keeps going wrong for some reason.

“That time, the protagonist woke up too early and turned the tables on the villain. She cut out the villain’s tongue, splattering blood all over her own face, and that somehow activated the collar. The villain couldn’t command the collar, and the collar didn’t strangle the protagonist. She exploited the bug and escaped.

“Even when the collar was properly locked and the protagonist went home with the villain, the plot still went wrong. She kept skipping ahead and killing the villain right away!”

Lin Zhihan didn’t understand. “If the protagonist kills someone and breaks her seal, hasn’t the goal been accomplished?”

“How could that work? It isn’t supposed to happen! At first, the protagonist isn’t that decisive. She shouldn’t be able to predict what the villain will do!

“And then that skips all the sexy—cough.”

The system hastily rephrased. “It skips a lot of… very important scenes! We have to start over.”

Lin Zhihan frowned. “What scenes?”

“Uh, you know. Those scenes.”

“…The egg-laying scenes?”

The system sounded as if she’d hit the mark. “Well, sure, but there are other things, too! They’re all important!”

“…”

Lin Zhihan had barely accepted that her world was a novel.

Now it turned out to be a tasteless one.

Apparently, Vaniel killing her wasn’t the important part. The important part was being abused by her.

Lin Zhihan took a deep breath and looked at the succubus. Her expression grew more complicated.

“I just want to carry you home.”

If the plot wasn’t set in stone, then maybe her choices weren’t limited to abandoning her conscience or dying.

Vaniel looked up at her, eyes full of suspicion. She seemed to think Lin Zhihan was just waiting for her to agree before she started beating her.

Lin Zhihan didn’t say anything else. She reached out in the dark and grabbed Vaniel’s wrist.

“Ah!” Vaniel flinched, squeezing her eyes shut.

But the beating she expected never came.

Vaniel looked up again.

Lin Zhihan’s hair clung to her cheeks in the rain, but she was still beautiful. Her dark eyes were so deep they seemed to reflect Vaniel’s face back at her.

“Hurry up. Do you want your master to stand in the rain all night?”

Vaniel’s eyes widened. She breathed in quick, shallow bursts, like a cat with its fur on end.

Lin Zhihan ignored her and crouched down, lifting the succubus onto her back.

The system immediately cried out in her ear. “What are you doing?”

“I’m carrying her home.”

“Why?!”

“Think about it. The Lin Zhihan who made her crawl home failed. Just following the plot hasn’t worked either.”

The system paused. It couldn’t deny that she had a point.

Lin Zhihan went on. “We have to keep her from cutting out my tongue and killing me. I’ll take her home, then… force her to lay golden eggs. I keep going until she kills me and gets her devil identity back. Right?”

The system nodded eagerly. “Right!”

Lin Zhihan knew it had failed many times already. It was desperate to keep the plot going, but clearly no longer confident about how to do that.

She breathed out and said with conviction, “So the best plan is to be nice to her at first, let her lower her guard, and betray her later. The more it hurts, the better.”

The system was stunned.

Could Lin Zhihan really be the villain they’d been waiting for all along?

It thought about it, then ventured, “But if you’re such a wicked person, why would you really carry her home?”

Lin Zhihan didn’t blink. “Even the most wicked person knows how to protect her property.

“If I make her crawl home, I don’t have the money to pay for her treatment. She’ll take longer to recover, which means it’ll take longer for her to lay golden eggs.”

The system considered this. It made perfect sense.

Besides, Lin Zhihan’s expression was still so cold that she looked every inch the merciless villain. It was incredibly convincing.

The system was satisfied. “Exactly. You should carry her home!”

After convincing the system, Lin Zhihan focused on getting the succubus onto her back.

Her palm closed around Vaniel’s soft, full thigh.

Vaniel looked only a little shorter than her, nearly five-foot-seven, and she had a pair of wings besides.

Lin Zhihan staggered before she found her balance. Then, without a word, she gripped Vaniel’s legs and hoisted her higher.

“Hold on to me.”

Vaniel was still in shock. Her wings had flared.

She’d never been this close to anyone before, let alone a human!

She clenched her teeth and went rigid, unable to understand what this human was doing.

Ever since she’d opened her eyes in the human world, the scenes around her had seemed strangely familiar.

And sometimes, visions of the future flashed through her mind.

The details changed from vision to vision, but one thing never did: the human who would become her master was a devil in human skin. Her face was vile, her soul filthy.

Vaniel didn’t understand.

Why was Lin Zhihan pretending to be so kind?

The collar was already locked around her neck. She was Lin Zhihan’s slave now. One command, and she’d be shocked. She could barely fight back.

Could Lin Zhihan have an even more evil plan than the one in Vaniel’s visions?

Those visions flashed before her again—pain, humiliation, suffering so vivid she felt it all over again. Her whole body trembled.

She stared at the slender nape of Lin Zhihan’s neck. A violet glow deepened in her eyes, and her nails sharpened.

An impulse rose in her.

She could just cut the human’s throat and end this.

“Oh, and bring the umbrella.”

Vaniel froze. Lin Zhihan had interrupted her thoughts.

She was already crouching again. Vaniel looked blankly in the direction she pointed.

An old umbrella lay on the ground, almost entirely broken.

“Come on. It’s an important piece of your master’s property.”

“…”

Watching Lin Zhihan stare at the broken umbrella like a miser, the succubus, who’d been clenching her fist and preparing to slit her throat, felt a wave of wordless disbelief.

She stiffly reached out and grabbed the handle.

Once Vaniel had the umbrella, Lin Zhihan gripped her legs again and started forward, one step at a time.

“You can use it to cover yourself, if you want. But you’re already soaked. Let’s get you a hot bath when we’re home.”

Vaniel bit her lip but said nothing. She had no idea why this human was saying things that sounded almost caring.

The collar was already around her neck. If she killed her master, she’d pay for it…

Vaniel pressed her lips together. Fine. She’d wait until Lin Zhihan showed her true colors. Then she’d kill her.

She wanted to see what Lin Zhihan was really planning.

Lin Zhihan was exhausted, barely keeping herself upright as she walked.

It took a long time to reach the neighborhood where she lived, a place much like a slum.

The buildings were crammed together in a tangled mass. Garbage littered the ground, and the downpour had churned up the mud.

She made her way through narrow alleys until she reached a shabby brick house. Its walls were old and mottled, several panes of glass were broken, and some of the roof tiles sat crooked. The whole place looked ready to collapse.

As soon as she reached the door, a girl hurried out with an umbrella.

“Little Han, did you forget your umbrella?”

The girl jogged toward them. She looked up—and came face-to-face with Vaniel’s mismatched eyes.

“Ah!” she screamed, dropping her umbrella in fright.