Survival Guide After Accidentally Kissing a Demon - Chapter 340

Chapter 340

A thick, gray-red sky hung oppressively low.

Below, red and black rocks crisscrossed and overlapped, forming steep, complex terrain.

Beili lowered her gaze to the ground racing backward beneath them like a river. Then she heard someone beside her say, “We’ve already been flying for three days. Why hasn’t that volcano changed at all?”

Cassius, who had used Beast Transformation to assume the form of a bat, stared into the distance with confusion in his voice.

“…Three days?”

Clarence and Beili spoke in unison, then glanced at each other.

The young man in Grey Wolf form seemed scorched by her gaze. He quickly looked away, his upright wolf ears abruptly drooping.

Beili blinked lightly. “I thought I’d only zoned out for a moment.”

“For me, it’s already been two weeks, perhaps even longer… Yet I haven’t felt hungry at all. How strange,” Clarence said with his eyes lowered.

Black gauze hung limp in the waves of heat as the Flying Carpet slowly came to a stop.

Beili raised a hand, sending some of the black Morpho Butterflies gathered beneath the Flying Carpet scattering in every direction.

The black grains trailing behind them were mist, and they vanished into the scorching air.

Beili asked quietly, “So whose sense of time is correct?”

The bat stretched its wings and transformed back into a blond man dressed in white in the blink of an eye.

“Perhaps we can take a look at this.”

Standing on the Flying Carpet, Cassius took an old metal pocket watch from an inner pocket of his white coat.

His slender fingers gently flipped open its cover.

“What I see is that it’s running a little faster than an ordinary clock. At first, I thought it was broken…”

Beili and Clarence also returned to their human forms.

The three of them stood on the Flying Carpet, their gazes fixed on the pocket watch.

The instant the cover opened, Beili saw the hands abruptly freeze. Only after a long while did the second hand slowly creep forward by one tick.

“Cassius, Magic Mentor…” Clarence had no choice but to address him that way.

“That pocket watch is moving far too quickly.”

He stared at the hands spinning so fast they were almost impossible to see, astonishment coloring his voice.

“Time here is moving too quickly for you.”

On top of that, not a single Morpho Butterfly she had sent out had returned.

Beili’s brows drew together as she looked at the boy with short, curly brown hair.

The volcano was clearly right in front of them, yet they had become lost in their own perceptions of time.

“Let’s go back for now.”

With that, her red eyes narrowed slightly. She mentally commanded the Flying Carpet to turn around and fly away from the volcano.

They had not been flying for long when the outline of the Town appeared in their field of vision.

Cassius opened the pocket watch again and saw that the hour hand had returned to its normal speed.

“It seems we’re not welcome there,” he murmured.

Beili said nothing.

This was exactly what she had expected.

After all, none of the three of them were people bound by fate to the secret realm in the original story.

…

The Flying Carpet carried the three of them above the only Inn in the southern Town.

Beili noticed that after their “brief” absence, the Town suddenly seemed to be packed with people.

They sheltered from the vicious sun beneath roofs tiled with red stone, while a small number had already fainted from the heat.

Judging by their clothes and attire, most of them were from the Tilisha Kingdom.

Had the war already begun?

Beili was still wondering when the Flying Carpet landed in front of the Inn.

She planned to leave Clarence and Cassius in the Town, then venture into the Far South alone and try again.

The three of them returned to their human forms and entered the Inn. Suddenly, they heard a familiar, icy voice.

“Two rooms.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have two rooms left. There’s only one, and it’s in the attic. It’s very cramped,” the clerk rattled off quickly.
“Let’s look somewhere else…”

Another timid voice spoke up.

“Oh, to be perfectly honest, there isn’t another Inn in this Town.”

Seeing the three figures who had just entered, the clerk jerked his chin toward them and added, “Perhaps by the time you two take a walk around the Town and come back, even the last room will be gone.”

The two people standing at the stone counter turned around.

Beili happened to raise her crimson eyes, and her gaze met a pair of violet eyes and a pair of pink ones.

It was Cyril and Susanna.

“Your Highness, and Miss Susanna-”

Clarence’s blue eyes brightened slightly. He strode forward and bowed to Cyril. “I never expected to meet you both here.”

“Mr. Clarence…” Susanna explained, “I only ran into His Highness by chance in Tilisha…”

Cyril swept his gaze across the group before it finally settled on the gray-haired, crimson-eyed girl.

Beili lifted her skirt and curtsied to him.

“We’ll take the remaining room,” he said.

“Very well,” the clerk replied. “If you have water, the room costs ten liters a day. If not, fifty pieces of Magic Crystal will do.”

“We’ll pay with water…”

Susanna silently took out a storage artifact shaped like a waterskin and poured a stream of clear water into the container indicated by the clerk.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she poured. Her pink eyes did not dare stray toward Bartholomew, and she did not even greet Doctor Cassius, despite knowing him well.

She kept her head lowered the entire time, like a frightened rabbit.

Beili did not look at her.

She was not surprised in the slightest to see Cyril and Susanna together.

She was merely curious what had made the two of them change their minds so quickly.

Remembering something, Beili turned to Cyril and asked, “Didn’t Your Highness use the Butterfly Brooch?”

The moment the question left her lips, her gaze fell upon the slightly open front of Cyril’s heat-resistant cloak.

Beneath it, his torn white shirt exposed a patch of wounds left by magical attacks.

It seemed he had suffered quite a bit along the way.

“I used it. Nothing happened,” he replied tersely.

He then accepted the key from the clerk. “Let’s talk upstairs. This isn’t the place for it.”

…

Just as the clerk had described, the attic room was extremely cramped.

A bed occupied two-thirds of the room, while the remaining space was taken up by the bathing area and toilet.

There was barely anywhere to set foot, let alone stand.

The attic’s sloping roof hung far too low.

After all five of them entered, they had no choice but to sit along the edges of the bed.

Beili and Susanna sat on the left, while Cyril, Clarence, and Cassius sat on the right.

“Time is precious, so let’s dispense with everything else.”

Getting straight to the point, Cyril lowered his eyes and asked in a stern voice, “You’ve already spent a year exploring the Far South. Have you made any progress finding that item?”

Everyone froze.

“A year?”

Clarence exclaimed softly, his blue eyes widening beneath his tea-brown curls.

“We’ve found nothing.”

Quickly accepting the discrepancy in time, Beili shook her head, Cyril’s cold features reflected in her crimson eyes.

“Time is completely distorted in the Far South. Each of us experienced it differently, but none of us felt that an entire year had passed,” she explained truthfully.

Cyril gave a slight nod.

“Tomorrow, I’ll enter the Far South with you to retrieve the item you mentioned before,” he said.

Cyril glanced at Doctor Cassius, then turned to Susanna and instructed her, “Susanna, since Doctor Cassius is here, you should remain at the Inn.”

Susanna parted her lips. A trace of uncertainty appeared in her pink eyes as her fingers tightened around her skirt.

“Susanna has to come too.”