The Immortal Is a Yandere - Chapter 4

I’d honestly thought the King had come sneaking over because his paranoia was acting up again.

Until now, with him lying half-dead and upside down beside me.

Xiao Yan had inflicted the injuries.

After beating him up, apparently still unsatisfied, Xiao Yan had stamped his head into the ground, filling his mouth with dirt.

“Your Majesty, there are simpler ways to get yourself killed. Just tell me you’re tired of living. You don’t need to keep scheming against my person.”

It took the King an enormous effort to pull his head out of the ground.

Perhaps Xiao Yan had beaten him stupid. Instead of fleeing for his life as usual, he actually dared provoke him.

He spat out the dirt and shouted, “Xiao Yan, you’ve been throwing your weight around in my Underworld for over ten thousand years! I’ve had enough! Today, either I die, or I perish!”

“Is there a difference between those last two things?” I asked weakly.

He wiped away another smear of blood from his nose. “It makes me sound imposing.”

“…”

Imposing? He was probably going to be a corpse today.

He didn’t become one, though. Xiao Yan kicked him into the River of Oblivion for a winter swim.

Watching Xiao Yan, I mulled over the last thing the King had said before the beating.

Did he mean Xiao Yan was finally about to die and make everyone’s day?

It had been a thousand years since Xiao Yan dragged me into the Underworld. Every day, he’d tended his flowers, played chess, and rolled me in his hand.

On the surface, he had the full set of hobbies for someone waiting to die. But he didn’t look remotely close to death.

No exaggeration: he could still eat a chicken, two plates of pork knuckle, three bowls of rice, and a huge platter of fruit in a single meal. The Underworld’s crows flew it all in from the human world so he wouldn’t barbecue them.

I knew those crows too. While imprisoned beside Soul-Severing Cliff, I’d taught them human techniques to pass the time.

All I’d achieved was helping them run Xiao Yan’s errands faster and better.

Utterly fucking ridiculous.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Not long before, I’d even tried bribing one crow I knew fairly well to poison Xiao Yan’s airborne food delivery.

It slapped me with its big wing.

“I know human cultivators like making empty promises, but other people at least give me something in writing! You just open your mouth and promise me this and that. Are you hoping that once Xiao Yan kills me, you won’t have to pay up at all?”

“Your heart’s blacker than a crow’s! How come being that pleased with yourself hasn’t killed you?”

Credit where due: it knew what was going on.

After slapping me, it fawned over Xiao Yan by bringing him an extra late-night meal. He ate with grease all over his mouth. No sign whatsoever of impending death.

Unable to figure anything out, I decided to ask him directly while he played chess against himself.

“I hear you’re about to die!” I said excitedly.

His hand paused over a chess piece. “Why? Want to come with me?”

“Thanks for the invitation. I like being alive.”

For once, he neither threatened nor mocked me. “I like being alive too.”

“!”

I nearly jumped. This was too strange.

I didn’t manage it, though. Xiao Yan pinned me down with a chess piece.

Then he tilted his face toward the sky at a forty-five-degree angle. A desolation I’d never seen before showed in his expression.

“Unfortunately, some people never realize that being alive is the greatest luxury of all.”

Stranger still.

I didn’t dare speak.

He looked at me. “What does your silence mean?”

It means I’m scared, I thought.

But I chose my words carefully. “Don’t you think someone as deranged as you is unsuited to wistful melancholy?”

My remark ruined his melancholy mood. Unable to keep it up, his mouth twitched, but he stubbornly insisted, “I’m a yandere. A yandere! If you’re good-looking, you’re a yandere. Only the ugly ones are freaks!”

“…”

It wasn’t until the King found me again that I learned what was really wrong.

It wasn’t Xiao Yan who was about to die.

It might be me.

Xiao Yan hadn’t come after me because I’d offended him. He’d done it because…