It was an endlessly long time. Shahan had clearly specified one night, but in reality it seemed to mean until he collapsed from exhaustion. JeJe was caught in his hands and changed positions countless times, taking whatever pose he desired. 

Heavy flesh slapped wetly between her thighs. Each time something thick filled her inside and withdrew repeatedly, the reason she barely held onto burned black. Shahan embraced her with both arms, breathing heavily while moving his body somewhat roughly. 

JeJe squeezed her eyes shut at the thick musk that clawed through her lungs like talons. She desperately tried not to show her distaste, but she couldn’t help feeling severe revulsion at his scent.

Then, struck by a sudden thought, she forced herself to embrace Shahan’s shoulders. She let out coquettish moans and barely managed to move her hips. This was probably what Shahan wanted. 

The command to treat him like a lover. What was contained in that murderous voice was clearly a warning. She hypnotized herself, but it was useless. 

She tried to picture Narcissus’s face, her former lover, instead of Shahan, but only painful memories surfaced and she eventually closed her eyes. But Shahan wouldn’t easily allow her to avoid his gaze.

“Ah, ahh, mmm, huh, ugh!”

“JeJe, say you love me, look straight into my eyes and call my name and say you love me.”

Red marks were vivid on her chest where the snake had bitten. Shahan treated her like a stranger. 

He looked at JeJe the way he would when dealing with the countless women who had spent nights with him, whispered meaningless sweet words, and focused solely on physical pleasure. No, he seemed to be trying to appear that way.

“I have to do it first before you’ll open your mouth. Yes. JeJe, I love you more than any woman in this world. I loved you. Now it’s your turn. Did you forget we promised to be lovers to each other just for tonight? So hurry up…”

The love Shahan mechanically poured out was something he had never felt for even a single moment in his entire life, and ultimately an emotion he had given up on. 

He only knew how to protect himself from being hurt by someone he loved, but didn’t know how to protect that person from his own twisted desires. 

He couldn’t fully comprehend even after decades and centuries the ridiculously stupid emotion that primitive mud humans were constantly swayed by.

“JeJe…”

He cupped her face, distorted with pain, in both hands.

“Even saying one word that you love me is such a difficult thing for you.”

He had never been loved. What he received from countless people wasn’t love but awe, praise, and fear toward an unknown being, and what remained afterward was the distance between them and himself that could never be bridged. 

A life that shone most brilliantly at the highest place surrounded by the most noble ones, yet was like an empty shell inside. That was his entire life.

He remembered the words Persephone Rotran had spat out in desperation long ago. That he would never be loved. That he couldn’t gain even pity from JeJe, whom he loved, even in death. 

She had spouted such insolent words. So what had he done to that woman? Had he called several lower-class slaves to violently ass*ult her right before his eyes? He couldn’t remember well. How had the situation escalated to that point? 

Yes, surely JeJe had been the root cause of everything then too. Persephone Rotran had refused to wear a wig. As he gradually couldn’t find similarities between the two women, when Persephone also refused to wear a wig, his anger flared to the top of his head.

‘I’m not JeJe.’

The sight of that insolent woman crying and screaming was still vivid in his mind.

‘No matter how much you force me to whisper love, I’m Persephone Rotran, not that d*mn JeJe.’

That day, Shahan felt intense murderous intent toward someone for the first time. It was qualitatively different from the instinct he felt when hunting herbivores simply to satisfy hunger – it was true k*lling intent.

Suddenly he flinched and trembled. Only when he saw JeJe below him, panting and screaming in horror, did he finally come to his senses.

“Sha, Shahan…”

“Ah.”

Her silver-blue eyes, blurred with tears, were filled with terror. His disheveled reflection showed in them. The noble Shahar an Mahura, who possessed the greatest beauty on earth and had been praised as a god from birth, wasn’t there. 

Instead, an ugly and filthy snake covered in silver scales that he had so desperately wanted to hide was coiled around the woman’s n*de body, its white eyes gleaming brightly.

“Ahhhhh!”

A sharp scream tore through the air. JeJe screamed. Ah, ahhhhh! She screamed endlessly. She screamed until her valley echoed, with a voice growing hoarse, and struggled to escape from him before finally bursting into tears. 

Shahan reflexively opened his mouth but no words came out. Only disgusting metallic sounds leaked out intermittently. 

‘Ah, this won’t do. I should comfort her not to be afraid. That I never intended to threaten you while wearing this beast’s skin, I should reassure her.’

Then suddenly the screaming stopped. Shahan embraced the unconscious JeJe with his long, hideous body.

‘We promised to be faithful lovers to each other just for tonight.’

He slowly lowered his body. He licked the unconscious JeJe’s face with his forked tongue and rubbed her swollen red chest with his scale-covered body. Cold and damp. What flowed in this filthy body was probably not blood either, but mucus cold enough to chill the bones. 

The skin on the part of his body that was slowly rubbing between her legs peeled off slightly. Shahan felt his body heating up with uncontrollable excitement and slowly began to carry out what he had planned. 

Had his body ever been this hot in his life? He felt like he would be consumed by flames. If JeJe hadn’t fainted, at this moment he felt like he could whisper about unknown love for days and nights, swept up in ecstasy.

Though he loved her borrowing human words, he had never experienced exactly what emotion that evoked. But if the heart pounding like it would explode was evidence of the love they spoke of, the answer was already decided.

Shahan’s eyes gleamed gloomily as he pressed his body closer inside her. He was different from other celestial beings who dutifully chose suitable women to impregnate for offspring. 

He alone had realized emotions they could never understand even if they died and came back to life. For the first time in his life, Shahan was swept up in an intense impulse qualitatively different from before. 

He wanted to have children with the woman he loved, and his desire felt naturally justified. That’s why…

Shahan, swept up in desire so intense it made his head spin, pushed two protruding organs that had emerged outside into the woman’s n*de body. He twisted his body covered in disgusting skin wildly. He poured out overflowing amounts.

Ahh.

Dozens of fireworks exploded in his darkened mind. They began to illuminate him who had been trapped in pitch-black darkness for hundreds of years and fill his surroundings with beautiful colors. His mind grew distant from the painfully bright clusters of light. 

Shahan panted like mad and exhaled satisfied breaths. Dirty, sticky liquid oozed out between the swollen, interlocked junction.

At that moment, JeJe opened her eyes. Her unfocused, wavering pupils seemed not to properly grasp the situation that had just occurred.

“P-please save me…”

And the next moment, at the small voice that leaked out, everything about Shahan stopped like a lie. 

The time that had been circling without order like loose strings on a stringed instrument, the intense vitality that had surged from within his body, the unfamiliar sensations that had burned this way and that in flames – everything stopped at JeJe’s single word.

“Please save me, Lord Shahan. High Priest. I’ll say I love you. I’ll say it as many times as you order, so p-please don’t kill me…”

He had just poured his seed into the body of the woman he loved. But that woman was wrapped in terror that seemed like she would faint soon, begging him for her life, asking him to save her. 

With eyes like she was looking at the most terrible monster in the world.

How could I ever think of k*lling you? No, if you want, I can say I love you as much as you like, I can now give you the love you want – he wanted to say. 

It was the single desperate, heartbreaking truth he could swear on God’s name. But the sound that leaked from his mouth was an unclear metallic noise that even he couldn’t understand. 

The threatening snake sound that made JeJe half-faint again. At this moment, that was all the sincerity Shahan could show her.

* * *

Screech.

After colliding with the extreme magical power flowing through the barrier several times, Lucifer finally succeeded in infiltrating Moon Temple. That task alone had taken considerable time. Lucifer trudged across the inner courtyard, leading his exhausted body. 

Since it was a barrier that sealed powerful magical power or divine power accumulated inside the body, he had to remove all demonic energy from within to break the spells carved there. 

In other words, Lucifer, being a non-human race, had to temporarily eliminate his demonic energy to prevent it from flowing out, and could only enter after taking on a perfect human appearance.

‘I might get scolded by Lala if I’m caught, so let me just take a quick peek and go.’

Actually, he hadn’t intended to act like such a stalker. Having confirmed that Lala was living healthily and well, he had planned to return to the Misty Forest before it was too late. 

But the words he had heard from Lala on the way to the temple bothered him, and he absolutely couldn’t bring himself to leave.

‘She’s still living serving that unpleasant human as her master.’

In Lucifer’s memory, Shahan was an unparalleled piece of trash who had laid crying JeJe on a bed and forced intercourse on her. 

At the time, he couldn’t grasp the detailed circumstances and was swept along with the flow of the situation, but he had always been grinding his teeth, planning to thoroughly punish him if they met again.

“Uh, hah, mmm…”

Then suddenly, at the unpleasant moaning that pierced his eardrums, his thoughts stopped abruptly.

At the end of the long corridor, disturbing noise was endlessly leaking from inside a pitch-dark room without a single point of light.

“Ah, haah, ugh… I do, …Shahan, I love you.”

He thought it might be an auditory hallucination. As he got one step closer to Lala, his longing for her grew uncontrollably, so he thought her voice was echoing in his ears.

“…”

Shahar an Mahura. I love you. If you want, as many times as…

—You’ve been pretending not to know and ignoring it, haven’t you? That she doesn’t love you as much as you love Lala.

—When bodies grow distant, hearts grow distant too, don’t they?

—Humans don’t even have imprinting abilities like demon beasts.

Snap. At that moment, something that had been tightly wound broke. He stood frozen in the pitch-black darkness that seemed to swallow his entire body, taking in and taking in again Lala’s desperately pleading voice.

“I love you, Lord Shahan. So please… Huk.”

That was the last voice Lucifer heard from his beloved wife before his reason collapsed.