Tracing the Light - Chapter 3

While the Demon Lord was resting, I appeared out of thin air beside his bed again.

“Why am I not remotely surprised that you keep appearing out of nowhere?” he asked mildly.

An unhealthy pallor lay over his face. I could feel a terrible cold in his chest beneath my palm.

I pulled open his innermost garment. A blue flower of ice was forming on his pale chest, spreading fine strands of frost through every part of his body.

They carried a bone-piercing chill into his limbs. The cold poison ravaged his blood, as though he had plunged into a bottomless cavern of ice.

Even his inky hair frosted over, turning white in moments.

Anyone who had never suffered it could not imagine the pain.

Yet he clenched his teeth and refused to give it a voice.

Tonight was the full moon, when the yao’s spiritual power was at its weakest. The Ice Curse had seized its chance.

His power could not hold it back. All he could do was endure through sheer will. He must have been through this many times to remain so calm.

Everything had happened in the space of a heartbeat. I stared, dumbfounded.

The Demon Lord endured the pain, cold sweat covering his body. He raised his eyes to me, and there was a fragility in them, as though an entire river of stars had shattered.

He glanced at the dagger in my hand.

There was something self-mocking in that look, as though it would make no difference if I plunged it into him now.

But I hesitated.

I remembered how, whenever he sat at his desk reading, he lazily tucked me into his arms.

I remembered his casual indifference as he threw me out of the hall like a child having a tantrum, even though he knew I had come to kill him.

I remembered how he trusted no one completely, how cold and lonely his sleeping quarters were.

…

Somehow, he did not seem as wicked as everyone said.

I acted before I could think.

I laid my palm flat against that frozen flower and sent my fire-aspected spiritual power into his heart.

The heart sealed in ice began to beat.

The icy tendrils slowly withdrew. His white hair turned inky black again.

The Demon Lord stared at me, stunned by what I had done, bewilderment and disbelief in his eyes.

I stared at my own palm, my mind a blank.

Why had I saved such an evil monster? Had I done the right thing, or made a terrible mistake?

In a daze, I fled.

I went to Grandpa Crane’s cave and pounded on the entrance.

If I saved the villain who meant to kill my entire clan, I asked him, would I become a sinner condemned for all time?

Grandpa Crane showed me his Tracking Mirror.

It turned out the Demon Lord had thrown all my clan’s spirit foxes into the Myriad Wonders Secret Realm. They were happily searching for rare treasures. They hardly looked like victims!

He was preparing for a fight to the death with the cultivation sects, so he had put the unrelated immortal clans into the secret realm to keep them from helping the sects.

I asked Grandpa Crane why the Demon Lord hated cultivators so much.

Stroking his grizzled beard, Grandpa Crane said with serene wisdom, “All good and evil have their causes and consequences. His hatred of cultivators is the consequence. You should seek its cause.”

“How?”

“Use Lingqiu’s treasure, the Rewinding Sundial. Return to the past, find the cause, and change him.”

I formed a hand seal and summoned the Rewinding Sundial. It opened a rift in time and space. With a light push of my feet, I leaped inside.

The child was locked in a cage, covered in wounds, and still staring at the people outside with bloodthirsty eyes.

When he bared his teeth, he looked like a starving wolf.

He seemed ready to seize and maul anyone at all. Those sharp little canine teeth could easily pierce a person’s skin and tear them into bloody shreds.

Everyone who came near him instinctively covered their neck and backed away as soon as they met his eyes.

The slave trader beside him was already gripping his whip in fury. If the boy remained unsold today, he planned to whip him to death and be done with it.

I landed lightly in front of the child, crouched, and met his gaze.

Such a tiny little thing, glaring at me with all that bluster. He was trying so hard to look fierce.

His skin-and-bones body was curled in on itself. The marks on him showed that he had just suffered a savage beating.

Who would have guessed that someone so weak would one day become a Demon Lord who slaughtered all before him?

I tossed the trader a silver ingot, picked up the cage, and left.

Delighted, the trader bit the silver to test it. Finding it real, he tucked it into his robes with a grin.

Hah. I had been watching from nearby for a while. The man had a nasty habit of testing every ingot with his teeth.

Now that he had bitten mine, he could wait for the poison to kill him in a couple of hours.

The little boy was deeply suspicious of me. I wasn’t surprised. By then, he had already been sold several times.

Ordinary humans bought him for hard labor. Cultivators bought him for beast fights.

Rich cultivation disciples whose skills weren’t good enough to capture yao came to this market instead. They chose a young yao caught in a trap and passed it off as a trophy.

When they had too much time on their hands, they sometimes locked their captured yao together and made them fight.

This child was too wild for them to control, so they sold him off again and again.

The poor future Demon Lord. Just because his spiritual channels were sealed and he couldn’t use his power, he had to endure all this abuse over and over.

I decided to change the course of his fate, starting here.

He was a child. How much malice could he possibly have?

A few skewers of candied hawthorn and some sweet rice cakes should make him happy, shouldn’t they?