Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 330: A Peaceful Walk

”Khwaa! Ah! Ackh!”

Asmodeus choked on his tea and started coughing.

”Goodness, what happened to subtlety?!” he spluttered, thumping his chest a few times before glaring at me with wounded disbelief. ”You can’t just open with that! There’s etiquette to these things!”

”Oh?” I leaned back in my chair, wholly unimpressed. ”Because last I checked, you’re a Demon Prince who keeps invading my dreams uninvited. Forgive me if my manners didn’t make the cut.”

He clicked his tongue, his crimson eyes narrowing with exaggerated reproach. ”Okay, one, you wound me. Truly. Here I was thinking we’d eased into the banter phase of our relationship already. And two, you are the one barging into my dreams. We’ve been over this.”

”One, we don’t have a relationship,” I replied flatly. ”Two, that’s not the point here.”

”Mmm,” Asmodeus hummed, taking another careful sip of his tea. ”Denial and diversion. Classic coping mechanisms.”

I ignored him. ”Answer the question, demon.”

He studied me for a long moment over the rim of his cup, his expression slowly turning unreadable. Then, with showy care, he set the cup down on the table.

”Yes,” he said at last. ”That Bleeding Moon used to be my daughter.”

Gone was his mischief.

Gone was his humor.

All that insincerity drained away, replaced by a vulnerability so raw and unguarded that even I felt something twist painfully in my chest.

”She was turned into that by the gods,” Asmodeus continued quietly. ”She was... punished for mercy.”

I squinted at him. ”That’s not how moons work, you know.”

”That’s not how gods work either,” Asmodeus muttered, letting out a soft, humorless laugh as his gaze remained fixed on his cup. ”And yet, here we are.”

Fair point.

•••

After drinking the fine tea and eating some genuinely delicious pastries, we stepped off the cliff and began walking — yes, I mean this literally — on the sea of clouds.

The firmament stretched endlessly beneath our feet like a solid arch, reaching as far as my eyes could see. The wind was gentle and the view was nothing short of divine.

”I made her,” he said after a while, a strange sadness seeping into his voice, one I wasn’t yet accustomed to hearing. ”Back when I was still serving the heavens’ will. When I was still an angel of the highest order. I was lonely.”

I glanced at him but said nothing.

He continued, the crimson in his eyes glimmering faintly. ”My entire existence was spent fulfilling the gods’ orders. I was sent to countless worlds, tasked either with nurturing civilizations so they might grow... or exterminating them like vermin. Anyone who dared defy the heavens, anyone who tried to step outside the bounds of fate, was annihilated by my hand. I was both the voice of the celestial choir and the blade of sacred judgment. I was the end of sinners and rebels and dreamers alike.”

Asmodeus exhaled slowly, the sound of it nearly lost to the wind brushing past us. ”I obeyed every command without question or hesitation. I told myself it was necessary. That it was righteous. That I was preserving some greater balance I would one day understand.”

His voice quivered. ”And I did. I did understand. But it wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t what the gods had promised us. I wasn’t fighting for righteousness. There was no divine pursuit, no greater balance. There was only greed. I was suppressing and destroying entire worlds to protect the greed of distant, bloated entities who called themselves gods simply because no one was strong enough to deny them that title.”

His fingers curled slowly like he was grasping at an old, bitter memory. ”I realized it too late. By the time I understood what I truly was, I had already drowned too many stars in blood. Too many prayers had gone unanswered because I was the one sent to silence them.”

He let out a shaky breath. ”But I didn’t leave. Because I was a coward. I was too afraid to go against the heavens. So I continued my work. I kept my mouth shut. I killed and killed and killed and killed... until it became too much to bear. I had seen so much sorrow, so much suffering, so much misery, and so much anguish that the darkness began to consume me. I... needed a ray of light in my life.”

We walked in silence for a long while after that.

Eventually, I broke it. ”So you made a kid?”

Asmodeus shook his head.

”No, much more than that. I made... a miracle. I birthed a little girl from my dreams, created from my desire.” His voice softened. ”A desire for a kinder world.”

I rubbed my face, the implications of what he was telling me set in all at once. ”You do realize that’s basically cosmic-level tax fraud, right?”

Because he didn’t actually give birth to a child.

He didn’t create a soul from a soul.

He practically created her from nothing.

Asmodeus laughed, shaking his head again. ”That’s exactly what they called it. Well, in their own words. Because she wasn’t technically born into the Loom of Fate, she was above it. Anyone can cheat their fate if they know about it and try hard enough. It’s nearly impossible, but not outright impossible. When you pull on your thread, it affects every other thread in the Loom connected to you. So the weight of the whole web adds onto you and it gets harder to move even a single strand. But since she wasn’t in the Loom at all, she could pull any thread without resistance.”

I groaned, already seeing where this was headed. ”That’s how she saved that prince.”

”Yes,” he replied with a nod. ”My sweet, kind daughter decided that a little child’s suffering was unfair.”

He was visibly struggling with the pain of reliving those events, but he didn’t stop.

”So she cut his thread, giving that boy what she believed was a fair chance at life. And the gods...” His jaw clenched. ”They panicked. I begged them. I told them she was just a child, that she didn’t understand what she had done. I howled and cursed and pleaded and grovelled. I fell to my knees before them, but they didn’t listen. They descended upon that world, morphed everyone who supported her kindness into insects... and turned her into a moon, forcing her to watch over the world she tried to save forever.”

His voice eased into a whisper. ”Her soul is gone now. She’s dead. But even in death, she still suffers. That is how foul the hatred of gods is. That is how foul they themselves are.”

I hadn’t even noticed when the endless sea of clouds beneath my feet had transformed into the same silver lake as before.

Once again, a shattered sky loomed overhead. At its zenith hung the bleeding moon, and I could have sworn I heard a child’s hollow screams echoing through the air.

”The truth is,” Asmodeus was growling now, looking up, ”she was never a weapon. But they treated her like one. Not because of what she did, but because of what she could have done if she ever realized her true power. The truth is... the gods were afraid of one little girl.”