How to Raise a Scheming Demon Lord - Chapter 1

Because of the child in my belly, I had no wish to see Xiuyan again.

Unfortunately, the Heavenly Emperor had a gift for making trouble.

The moment a truce was declared, he rushed to deliver me—the poor unfortunate rumored to have offended Xiuyan—to his doorstep.

“His Majesty heard that this spirit wench once had a falling-out with Your Lordship. He had her captured especially so that Your Lordship might vent your anger.”

As he spoke, the envoy gave me a hard shove.

He looked up at Xiuyan with a fawning smile.

Xiuyan lounged in the seat of honor above us, his long silver hair tied back, idly toying with a black whip.

His refined, handsome face was backlit, leaving its expression unreadable.

I rested a hand on my slightly swollen belly and sighed.

“Xiuyan, my little cub, you really are being naughty. Your master is here, and you won’t even call me Master?”

The hand holding the black whip paused.

It was apparently the first time anyone had heard the Demon Lord called “little cub.” The hall fell utterly silent.

The envoy from the Immortal Realm went ashen.

He seized my arm and tugged hard. “You spirit wench! How dare you be so rude!”

I shook him off with a cold laugh and straightened my skirts.

“Anyone who knows you would think you a noble, upright lord of the Immortal Realm.

“Anyone who doesn’t would take you for some lackey of the Demon Realm.”

The demons had always hated the immortals’ lofty opinion of themselves.

At my words, the entire hall burst out laughing.

The envoy’s short, thick, wormlike fingers shook. His face flushed scarlet as he spluttered, “You wench, you—”

Xiuyan suddenly lifted his eyelids. His long, still eyes swept toward us.

The envoy could no longer utter a word.

Xiuyan waved a hand. A demon soldier immediately stepped forward and restrained me.

He had, in effect, accepted the Heavenly Emperor’s kind gesture.

After more than four hundred years apart, I had expected Xiuyan to take his revenge and humiliate me mercilessly.

I had, after all, ground his pride beneath my heel.

That slender young man had knelt on the ground, his face white as paper, every word of his plea torn from him in anguish.

“As long as you don’t leave, I’ll do anything. Anything…”

In the struggle, I had broken four of his demon bones. Still, he refused to let go.

“Don’t abandon me…”

Demons were a fiercely proud race, and he had always been aloof. Yet then, he had humbled himself to the dust.

And how had I answered him?

I had caught his chin and forced him to look up.

“You said you’d do anything?”

His anguished eyes clung to mine, their rims red. The little crimson mole beneath his eye seemed to tremble on the verge of falling, making him look all the more helpless and despairing.

“Please, Master…”

In nearly a century together, he had never agreed to call me Master.

I had asked countless times, sometimes teasingly, sometimes in all seriousness. Each time, he had pressed his lips together and turned away, unwilling to comply.

Who would have thought that when he finally yielded, the first time he called me Master would be through tears, begging me not to leave?

“A young man discovering love for the first time. Such an innocent, gullible fool.”

I sighed softly and shoved his face aside.

“Do you really not see that I raised you only as a tool for my revenge?”

His already pale face turned whiter still.

“Unfortunately, you’re still far too weak. You’re nowhere near capable of avenging me.”

Then I knocked him unconscious and walked away.

Four hundred years later, this was how we met again.

He was the exalted Demon Lord.

I was his prisoner.

Given all that, I assumed the quarters he assigned me would be either a dilapidated hut or some crumbling hovel with wind blowing through every wall.

He was hardly likely to make my life comfortable.

Clearly, I had overthought it.

The place wasn’t shabby, though it was decidedly remote and quiet.

My escorts brought me to an elegant little palace, its courtyard full of magnolias.

Outside, however, burly demon soldiers stood all around, weapons in hand, their expressions solemn and their attention unwavering.

The cordon was so tight that not even a mosquito could have escaped.

It seemed Xiuyan intended to keep me under complete house arrest.