How Could the Villainous Young Master Be a Saintess?

“Milian, I’m the one who should be envying you. You still have people you care about. You still have your family. You still have a home. Since childhood, your entire people have adored you. Your sister protected you so carefully, afraid you’d break if held in her hand, afraid you’d melt if held in her mouth. You had a happy, perfect childhood.”

“I still remember being malnourished as a kid because I couldn’t solve the problem of basic food and clothing.”

“Oh, no. Maybe you don’t know this, Milian, but I actually hadn’t even solved my malnutrition problem before I enrolled. You should still remember what I looked like when I first entered school, right? Back then my face was covered in acne, and I was sallow and skin-and-bones.”

“At worst, the worst thing you’ve ever gone through was probably fighting with your sister, or having friction with your own people, right? You’ve definitely never experienced what it feels like to know that if you don’t get serious, your life itself won’t continue.”

“......” Milian lay across Vinny’s shoulder in silence.

[Virtue +80.]

[Current Virtue: 6839.]

Seeing that Milian had gone quiet, Vinny kept quiet too and focused on moving forward. His soul had already been cut in half, so even walking was extremely difficult. Carrying a completely immobile Milian on top of that only pushed the difficulty even higher.

Honestly, even though Vinny had promised Milian they would make it back to the surface, he had no confidence in that himself. They had fallen into a place that was very likely a Demon God Realm. Any Demon God Realm had its own set of laws, and for mortals to survive in one was almost a delusion. It didn’t matter how high your realm was.

Laws had nothing to do with strength. They killed anyone instantly, regardless of realm. In here, a grandmaster was just as fragile as an ordinary person with no Soulcaster at all.

Vinny kept moving forward, searching for some chance to escape this place. But at the same time, he also had to avoid looking too closely at the scenery around him so he wouldn’t suffer contamination and shock to his mind and soul. That alone made everything difficult.

“About before... I’m sorry.”

“Hm?” Vinny suddenly heard Milian whisper softly against his ear from his back. The voice was so faint it felt like it might dissolve into the wind if he failed to catch it.

“Sorry for what? Milian, you already said that earlier.”

“Not for the same thing.” Milian seemed to have trouble getting the words out. “This time I mean that thing. Though you probably won’t accept it anyway.”

“What thing?”

“What else could it be? I mean what happened when we first enrolled. I gave you trouble back then, didn’t I?”

“Oh. Which time exactly?” Vinny said. “Milian, you gave me trouble so many times when school first started that I have no idea which one you mean.”

“Ugh! ...This princess back then...” Milian choked on her words.

“All right, Milian, you really do have a lot of free time on your hands. Should I praise you for how much better your mentality’s gotten? We’re trapped here with no idea how to get out, and you still have time to reminisce about the past. If you want to apologize, you can wait until after we get out.” Vinny said.

“What if... there isn’t a chance later?” Milian fell silent for a moment, then spoke in a tiny voice, almost like a murmur to herself.

“Huh? What did you say?” Vinny hadn’t heard clearly and frowned.

“Nothing. I just want to say it now. Can’t I?” Milian puffed out her cheeks.

“Sure. Do whatever you want.” Vinny didn’t think much of it. He tightened his hold on Milian behind him. Those pale, soft, rosy legs of hers seemed like they would sink in with the slightest squeeze, as though he could pinch water out of them.

“Did you feel that?” Milian suddenly asked after a long stretch of silence behind him.

“Feel what?” Vinny’s brows lifted. Elves had very sharp senses. If Milian was asking that, then she had definitely sensed something abnormal.

“There’s a creature coming this way. Fast.”

“What? From which direction?” Milian had effectively become Vinny’s ears.

“It’s—” Before Milian could finish, Vinny heard it too. It sounded like something slick dragging and scraping across the ground. Before he could even turn, a massive shadow fell over them.

Vinny felt his scalp go numb. His neck turned little by little, almost mechanically, and he discovered that at some point a gigantic blue slime creature, like an enormous slug, had appeared behind him.

A glowing bulb-like object drooped from its head. Its eyes were like an insect’s compound eyes, crammed full of countless tiny red “beans” that blinked up and down in irregular rhythms. Just looking at it made goosebumps crawl all over the body.

The slime monster’s mouth looked like a giant zipper, slowly opening from the middle and releasing a nauseating stench.

Vinny and Milian both froze. Milian shrank against his neck, not even daring to lift her head, burying it like an ostrich.

Vinny’s instincts told him to run. He couldn’t use magic. No matter whether this creature was strong or weak, if it held any hostility toward them, neither of them would get away. But his legs refused to obey him. They were rooted to the ground and wouldn’t move.

Moving around in this grotesque world was already incredibly difficult. Faced with a moment like this, it became completely impossible to run.

Vinny even began to wonder whether he could still turn into Vanessa at all. His soul itself wasn’t even whole anymore.

The creature seemed very interested in them and leaned in with that huge mouth.

Vinny could smell the rotten stench spilling from it, like the smell of a corpse that had soaked in water and rotted—but also not quite that.

Just when Vinny thought the two of them had been targeted by the monster and there was no way out, the creature sniffed at their scent, seemed utterly uninterested, and closed its mouth. Then, right in front of their eyes, it dragged its long, heavy, sticky body away and started heading back the way it came.

“We... were spared?” Vinny said in surprise. “That thing doesn’t seem interested in us.”

But why? Was the creature a herbivore or something?

A Demon God Realm didn’t support freeloaders. Vinny didn’t believe a native lifeform from a Demon God Realm could possibly be anything simple.

“QUIT JOKING AROOOOUUND!!” At that moment, a heart-rending scream caught both their attention.

Vinny and Milian both jolted in shock.

After all, hearing a language they could actually understand in a place like this was astonishing all by itself.

Then they saw a man in tattered clothes, filthy all over, with hair sticking out wildly, running toward them like he’d gone mad. His horrifying eyes were bloodshot, and he looked so hysterical it was as if some nerve in his brain had snapped.

He just kept running back and forth right in front of Vinny and Milian, and there was no telling what exactly he was running from. From the look of it, nothing seemed to be chasing him from behind.

Vinny had wanted to go over and exchange information with the man, to ask where he came from and how he had been exiled here. But now it was clearly impossible. The man’s mind was obviously not normal anymore. There was no way normal conversation could happen.

It was hard to imagine. This place felt as though it were under crushing gravity, yet the man was somehow still running that fast.

It looked more like a last burst of strength before death.

And the blue slug creature that had been moving farther away suddenly seemed to catch the scent of some supreme delicacy. It turned around, came back, and stared at the screaming man.

“AAAAAAAHHHH!” When he saw the giant blue slug, the man didn’t show any fear. He just kept running back and forth.

As if something was chasing him, and he wanted to escape, but had no idea where to run, so all he could do was circle in place.

It gave the impression that his brain had lost the ability to judge direction, leaving him to flee in blind panic.

Very soon, Vinny saw a cluster of white flames ignite across the man’s body.

The fire was abnormal. It didn’t burn the man to ashes all at once. Instead it kept burning steadily, and his body was consumed like firewood, shortening section by section. In the end, a full-grown man was burned down until he was the size of a five-year-old child, still running around on the ground. The noises coming out of him became stranger and stranger, as though the pitch had been dropped and then warped into something sharp.

The two of them watched helplessly as the insane, mentally collapsed man was burned into something like a ball of charcoal. The charcoal ball was black all over, and on its surface seemed to be the imprint of a human face twisted in agony. Just looking at it was grotesque and horrifying.

The giant slug watching from the side began blinking its compound eyes wildly, as if it had been lured by an irresistible delicacy. Its huge zipper-mouth split open, and a powerful suction dragged the wailing charcoal ball straight into its mouth. Even after swallowing it, it still wasn’t satisfied. Its long green-caterpillar-like tongue smacked around inside its mouth, as though savoring the lingering taste.

After eating the charcoal ball refined from a living human being, the giant slug dragged its body away in satisfaction, leaving a wet trail across the ground as it lazily departed.

“......” Vinny and Milian watched the scene in silence.

“Will we end up like that too?” After a long time, Milian finally broke the silence.

“No.” After a moment of thought, Vinny answered, “We’ll get out of here.”

“In this place, once you go insane, you get assimilated by this world and then devoured by those monsters, right?” Milian seemed to want her voice to stay calm, but several tremors still slipped through.

She didn’t want her emotions affecting Vinny, but she couldn’t help it.

“When one of us finally can’t hold on anymore and goes crazy, the other one will definitely go crazy right after too. Then we’ll be eaten together by these monsters and become nourishment for this grotesque world.”

“...Maybe we were tricked.” Vinny didn’t answer her question directly. “The contents of that diary weren’t fake, but it probably had some things mixed into it that the Demon Pillar deliberately wanted us to see, to guide us here and make us open the stone door.”

“Hundreds of years have passed. At some point, that stone door was probably modified by the Demon Pillar into an entrance leading into Tyrelis Continent. It was just waiting for something on the inside to open the door for them.”

“And we just happened to become the ones who opened it.”

But there was still one thing Vinny couldn’t figure out.

According to everything that had been passed down in the world, Tyrelis Continent had always been protected by an invisible power of laws. Otherwise, there was no way to explain why the powerful Demon Pillars had never been able to invade Tyrelis Continent directly. Even Erunes had only been able to rely on human power to achieve the indirect projection of its kin into Tyrelis Continent.

So how had the master of that red-eyeball priest managed to open a portal in Tyrelis?

Vinny suddenly remembered something. Before Gaflei Fort had ever been built, rumors had said this place used to be a sacrificial site dedicated to a Demon Pillar.

Combined with the fact that this had also been a place where [Divine Authority] was produced, and that the surrounding space was extremely unstable, with many of the old researchers having been sliced apart by spatial turbulence and thrown into other spatial frequencies...

Vinny felt as if he had found the answer.

Maybe that Demon Pillar had seized precisely that chance.

“How many people are we going to drag down with us?” There was now a tearful quiver in Milian’s voice.

“Don’t say that, Milian. Precisely because we know we let out something that never should have existed on Tyrelis Continent, that’s why we need to find a way back to Tyrelis and make that thing crawl right back where it came from.” Vinny said.

Milian said nothing and stayed quietly against Vinny’s shoulder.

He had no idea how much more time passed after that. Vinny only felt his movement growing more and more difficult. This place was like a swamp. The harder he tried to push forward, the deeper he sank, and the more strength it took to pull himself free.

Added on top of that was the mental contamination this grotesque world inflicted. Vinny had no idea how much longer he could hold out.

“...Vinny.”

“What is it?” Milian had been silent so long that Vinny had almost thought she had fallen asleep.

Though it didn’t matter whether she was asleep or not.

As long as the two of them were together, it was still companionship. At least he knew he wasn’t alone. If there were only one person here, that loneliness and mental assault would drive the descent into madness even faster.

“How much longer are you going to keep carrying me?” Milian asked suddenly.

“What kind of question is that? Obviously until we find an exit.” Vinny said as if it were only natural.

“And what if we don’t find one?”

“Then we won’t know until we’ve looked. Milian, if you keep assuming the worst possible ending first and then working backward from that, the process itself is naturally going to be miserable.”

“But how far can you really go while carrying me?” Milian asked again.

“What, you golden-haired idiot, are you trying to learn self-sacrifice now? Spare me. Don’t pull that nonsense. Do you really think you’re that kind of person?” Vinny clicked his tongue.

“No.” Milian answered very directly. “Aren’t you the one who’s always thought I was a spoiled, childish kid who doesn’t know how to think about other people?”

“Are you?” Vinny asked in return.

“I am.” Milian admitted calmly.

“Then isn’t that enough? If you know that’s what you are, why are you trying to act like some self-sacrificing saint? You’re making it sound real.” Vinny thought her mood felt a little strange, but he still said it.

“Just stay put and stop overthinking. If you can’t move, then don’t worry about it. Just do your job as my radar.”

“...Tch. I was just saying it casually. Can’t I?” Milian fell silent for a moment, then changed the subject. “Also, what’s a radar? Why do weird words like that keep popping out of your mouth?”

“Oh, then don’t say it next time. I almost believed you.” Vinny said irritably.

“If you have any sense, stop saying things like that. If I lose you here, how am I supposed to explain that to the school when I get back? If your sister and your people come after me asking where you are, what am I supposed to do then?”

“You really are exactly the same as always—your head’s still full of nothing but yourself. Think about me a little too, all right? If you absolutely insist on sacrificing yourself, could you at least leave behind a will explaining the situation?” Vinny teased.

“A final statement? Want me to dictate one?”

“Dictate my ass, Milian. Looks like after spending all this time around me, your sense of humor really has improved a lot. What good is dictating something like that? You need paper and a pen, understand? Where am I supposed to find paper and a pen in a place like this??”