Bait for the Serpent King - Chapter 1

When I woke into my second life, I found myself trapped in a snake pit.

Cold, clammy sensations crawled all over me.

They felt horribly like the Serpent King’s insatiable lips roaming my body in my previous life.

The agony of childbirth had vanished from my lower body.

In its place was stark, overwhelming terror.

Rain poured down overhead. Beneath my feet lay the mud of a deep pit, its walls covered in overlapping coils of black snakes.

A figure in peach pink stood at the edge.

She looked down at me and laughed in triumph.

By the moonlight, I recognized my elder sister, Sang Yun.

“Don’t blame me, little sister. Blame the fact that I wasn’t meant to die!” She threw dry grass and branches into the pit, sending the snakes slithering in all directions with terrible hisses.

I dodged frantically. Dizziness swept over me, and I reached down to touch my belly.

My child was gone.

And I had been reborn.

The memory of everything that had happened before my rebirth made me grind my teeth with hatred.

In my previous life, the Serpent King had already been fiercely possessive. Once he learned I was pregnant, he would scarcely leave my side.

Then conflict broke out between the serpent clan and the merfolk in the Eastern Sea. As king, Yao Yuan had no choice but to deal with it himself.

Before leaving, he entrusted me to his most trusted shadow guard.

But that guard had long been sleeping with the serpent women in the harem and conspiring with them.

Since I had become mistress of the serpent palace, the king had favored me alone. Every other beauty in his harem paled beside me, and they hated me to the bone.

They dreaded Yao Yuan’s eventual reckoning, but could not bear to waste this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They decided to strike while I was giving birth.

The midwife they arranged for me was none other than my sister, Sang Yun, still suffering the aftereffects of the venom.

The Serpent King fought through bloodshed and rushed home without rest, but he was too late to see me alive one last time.

All that awaited him was a bed caked in blood, my cold body, and a stillborn child.

Enraged, Yao Yuan snapped my sister’s neck on the spot. He drenched his harem in blood, killing every serpent woman and the guard who had betrayed him.

Then he cradled my rotting corpse and killed himself with poison.

I could only watch it all unfold, too shocked for words.

I had always thought I was merely an outlet for his desires. Never had I imagined he loved me so deeply that he would follow me into death.

Now my sister and I had both been reborn, back on the day she was bitten.

This time she struck first, pushing me into the snake pit.

The same vicious smile from our previous life twisted her lovely face.

“I will be the Serpent Queen. You can stay here and feed the snakes, little sister!”

She must have wanted to reach the Serpent King before I did, trading intimacy with him for wealth and a lifetime of favor.

But she knew nothing of the ways he could torment a woman.

Even mute as I was, he had driven me past endurance.

His appetite knew no bounds. He clung to me every night.

He liked to hold my neck in his icy hand, pressing a fingertip against my throat to feel my vocal cords tremble under his doubled attentions.

Those blood-red eyes would brighten with pleasure at my pleas.

Given a second life, all I wanted was to stay far away from that greedy snake.

If my sister wanted this blessing so badly, she could be his queen!

Black snakes swarmed throughout the pit. They were also called seduction snakes: their bites were not fatal, but their venom inflamed desire.

In our previous life, my sister’s bite had made her give off an extraordinary fragrance, leaving beastfolk throughout the surrounding countryside restless with longing.

Now, trapped in the pit myself, I could only watch the black snakes draw closer, winding around my hands and feet with soft hisses.

I stared at the moonlight filtering through the opening. Despair was all I had left.

Rather than be violated to death by the beastfolk it would attract, perhaps I should end the suffering myself…

Had the downpour overhead suddenly stopped?

I looked up.

An oil-paper umbrella covered the opening, sheltering me from the rain.

The hand holding it was pale and cool-looking.

A clean fragrance drifted down.

A string of prayer beads hung from that slender wrist. The soothing scent of sandalwood filled the air.

In an instant, it cleared the turmoil from my mind.

“Help me…”

Hearing my own voice for the first time in so long, I felt tears spring to my eyes.

My voice was still there! In this life, I had not yet been poisoned mute!

I wanted to live!

I clutched the hand reaching down, grasping it as my last hope.

Dimly, I heard someone cry out above, “Your High—Young Master, this…”

A man jumped into the snake pit and lifted me out.

He gathered me carefully into his arms, carried me onto a fine horse, and cracked his whip as we raced toward the towering city gates.

“Back to the palace.”