Chapter 2 — “Do It Yourself.”
Su Cheng froze for two full seconds before mechanically repeating, like a broken recorder:
“Murong Yue? My fiancée? Nanhe Academy?”
Maybe the author had spent all their brainpower writing smut and couldn’t be bothered with the plot, because the original story had shamelessly stitched together every overused fantasy trope imaginable.
First came the old grandpa soul trapped inside a divine artifact.
Then came the genius fiancée who despised the useless protagonist.
Classic fantasy novel staples.
On Lin Yun’s second day after transmigrating, the fiancée he’d been promised to since childhood traveled all the way from the imperial capital just to break off the engagement in person.
She and the people around her all believed the protagonist was trash. But after arriving at the Lin household, they discovered that the former good-for-nothing could now condense battle qi and had already passed the Warrior Attendant exam.
Even so, the fiancée didn’t change her mind.
Things ended badly. Lin Yun lost face, lashed out, and challenged her to a duel one year later.
…With this many matching details, there was no way it was just a coincidence in names.
Su Cheng slowly turned toward the dressing mirror in the bedroom.
A young girl stared back at her from the glass.
Dark curls spilled over her shoulders. Her skin was pale and luminous. Her features were bright and delicate, her nose tall and elegant, and her large amber eyes shimmered like autumn water beneath slightly upturned corners, lively with youthful spirit.
Her face hadn’t changed.
She looked exactly like the cannon-fodder Su Cheng.
Or rather—almost exactly like herself before transmigrating, except her complexion was healthier and her hair was thicker.
A level of beauty utterly unattainable for a sleep-deprived college student who survived on caffeine and all-nighters.
“Yeah,” one of the boys said, giving her a strange look. “You didn’t go insane from anger, did you, Su Cheng?”
Su Cheng: “…”
Great.
Even the name hadn’t changed.
She took a deep breath and started carefully fishing for information. The two boys looked fourteen or fifteen at most, with no real scheming ability, and before long they’d told her everything she wanted to know.
Now, instead of being related to the Lin family through marriage, she was the niece of the Lin family head. Her parents had died when she was young, so she’d been raised in her uncle’s household.
Because she couldn’t cultivate battle qi, she was a famous loser for miles around, mocked daily by her cousins in the Lin family.
And most importantly, the current head of the Lin family had no relative named Su among his in-laws—which meant the original “cannon-fodder Su Cheng” had been completely erased.
Su Cheng sat numbly on the edge of the bed listening to them. After mocking her for a while, the boys lost interest when they saw her blank, absent expression and eventually left with curled lips.
A few seconds later, she abruptly stood and looked around the tidy bedroom.
A massive wardrobe lined one wall. Nearby stood a simple vanity and full-length mirror, along with a four-poster bed layered in soft feather quilts.
She walked into the adjoining room.
It was an even larger study, its wooden shelves packed with books that all looked surprisingly new.
On the desk sat a thick volume titled:
Why You Can’t Condense Battle Qi: The Shocking Truth About Attribute Compatibility.
Su Cheng: “…………”
She slowly raised a hand.
Air currents gathered beside her fingers, condensing into a translucent green wind blade.
With a flick of her wrist, she hurled it out the window.
Crack!
A bamboo branch in the courtyard was cleanly severed. It tumbled onto a low decorative rock beside the pond, rolled over jagged stone, then splashed into the water.
Su Cheng let out a breath of relief—only to frown again.
She could still use magic.
So how the hell was she considered useless?
By now she understood it clearly.
Her current background was identical to Lin Yun’s, except for the name and gender swap.
Of course, Lin Yun himself had never possessed magical talent. After transmigrating, he only learned magic because someone else practically handed him cheat codes.
So what exactly was going on?
Su Cheng’s memories stopped at the moment she killed Lin Yun and watched Lin Zhen smash the bracelet.
Even if a fifth-rank warrior probably couldn’t truly destroy that thing, her goal had still been achieved.
Then what happened afterward?
Someone had spoken to her.
What had they said?
She tried desperately to remember, but her mind was blank. All she could recall was that strange sensation of sinking into endless emptiness.
And a gentle voice whispering beside her ear—
“Take his place.”
Su Cheng’s eyes widened.
“It was that thing…”
This was all its doing.
…But why?
If something like the “Heavenly Dao” existed in this world and needed the protagonist role to continue, wouldn’t reviving Lin Yun have been easier?
If it could rewrite her identity, bringing Lin Yun back should’ve been effortless too.
Su Cheng grabbed the thick battle qi manual from the desk and smacked herself in the forehead with it.
A dull ache spread through her skull.
Then despair settled in as she realized this probably wasn’t a nightmare.
She might actually have become this damned protagonist.
Legend of the Divine Throne wasn’t a normal power-fantasy novel. It was primarily explicit wish-fulfillment trash disguised as fantasy adventure.
And when a story contains too many sex scenes, readers eventually get desensitized.
Which meant the author kept escalating into increasingly bizarre and disturbing territory.
Reading it online for laughs was one thing.
Living through it was another entirely.
Some scenes became horrifying the moment you imagined yourself in them.
And the original novel wasn’t even finished.
What if the author had planned an ending where the protagonist ended up crippled, insane, missing, or dead alongside the villain?
Male-oriented webnovels had a long criminal record of exactly that sort of thing.
Su Cheng mentally collapsed for several minutes before forcing herself to accept reality.
First priority: learn this body’s abilities as quickly as possible.
Because she had a feeling she’d need magic very soon.
Elemental mages were elemental resonators. They could sense and alter the vibration frequencies of elemental spirits.
By channeling magic power through those spirits in specific patterns, spells were formed.
Most humans lacked that talent. They couldn’t perceive elemental spirits at all—only the resulting magic.
Elemental resonance was generally divided into four levels: low, medium, high, and exceptional.
Su Cheng possessed affinity with wind, fire, and lightning.
But because her wind affinity ranked high while the other two were only low-grade, the original owner of this body had specialized solely in wind magic and was far more sensitive to wind spirits.
At present, she knew four wind spells:
Second-tier Wind Blade.
First-tier Wind Calling, Wind Shield, and Windstep.
Wind Calling summoned a gentle breeze. Wind Shield created a protective current of air. Windstep wrapped wind around the legs to increase agility.
They were beginner spells—the foundation of countless higher-tier wind techniques.
Spell strength varied depending on the amount of magic power supplied.
Su Cheng silently recited Windstep’s incantation.
Her body immediately became lighter.
She poured in a bit more mana, bounced twice inside the room, and nearly hit the ceiling.
She repeated the process over and over, carefully adjusting the mana flow and studying the changes in effect until a faint headache began to form.
A sign of magical exhaustion.
Magic power was created when elemental spirits entered a mage’s body through meditation and fused with flesh and blood.
That fusion was the core of elemental mage cultivation.
As she practiced casting, she could also sense the wind spirits themselves.
Swift. Weightless. Elusive.
Impossible to grasp.
That was the nature of wind.
The moment she focused too deliberately on them, they scattered instantly, vanishing from perception altogether.
She tried to probe deeper, but it felt like chasing smoke with bare hands. Every attempt failed, and her headache only worsened, forcing her to stop.
She got up and began rummaging through the room, hoping to find more clues while also organizing money and valuables.
Then she suddenly froze.
Wait.
Where was the cheat bracelet?
The bracelet had been inherited from the protagonist’s father’s family and was considered an important keepsake. Lin Yun always wore it.
Now that her background mirrored his, she should’ve had it too—either on her wrist or somewhere in the room.
Su Cheng stared at her empty wrists.
She turned the bedroom and study upside down, digging through every accessory she could find.
Nothing.
The bracelet was gone.
A headache immediately started forming again.
That thing was trouble.
Sure, it brought the protagonist endless advantages, but it also attracted disaster after disaster. A blessing and a curse.
Either she needed to use it quickly—
Or get rid of it as soon as possible.
But now she couldn’t even find it.
Before she realized it, night had fallen.
Darkness swallowed the courtyard outside.
Su Cheng lit a magic crystal wall lamp and began shoving scattered drawers back into their cabinets.
Then suddenly—
A burning pain spread across her back.
She stiffened.
A second later, panic exploded across her face.
She tore off her outer robe, yanked apart her underclothes, exposing her pale bare back as she held up the lamp and twisted toward the mirror.
At the center of her back was a blood-red heart emblem wrapped in dark crimson thorned vines.
The twisting vines coiled like snakes.
Su Cheng let out a miserable wail.
“No!”
She’d inherited the protagonist’s curse too—
That brain-dead curse where, once it activated, you had to have sex with someone or die.
Su Cheng stared at the mirror in disbelief.
Lin Yun had been considered trash because of his unique constitution. He couldn’t cultivate the Lin family’s inherited battle qi arts.
In fact, most manuals were incompatible with him. Buying random techniques outside wouldn’t help either.
After the old man inside the bracelet awakened, he explained the reason and taught Lin Yun a cultivation method orally.
That very night, Lin Yun condensed battle qi for the first time.
And the curse activated.
The mark appeared on his back.
At the time, Lin Yun had no idea what it was. The old man recognized it as a vicious curse that stripped away life force. Whenever it flared up, the only way to suppress it was through certain very explicit activities with another person.
As for who cursed him—or why—those mysteries remained unresolved even a hundred chapters later.
But—
Lin Yun only activated the curse after condensing battle qi.
She was a mage.
Why did she still have it?!
Did battle qi have nothing to do with the activation condition?
Did it simply trigger automatically at a certain time?
The cursed emblem on her back glowed brighter and brighter, every line burning crimson.
Su Cheng’s expression twisted in agony.
Lin Yun’s solution in the novel had been to visit a brothel.
But that same night, a female supporting character—gravely injured—had snuck into the Lin estate.
The two ended up tangled together in bed. The curse was temporarily relieved, but it led to endless trouble afterward.
And the reason that woman appeared in the first place was because she sensed a dark aura coming from Lin Yun.
That “dark aura” had actually been the bracelet.
But now the bracelet was gone.
So this scene shouldn’t happen anymore… right?
“…”
Su Cheng frowned and glanced around.
The room had gone dim at some point. The magic crystal lamp had extinguished itself.
Wind howled through the open window, sending the sheer curtains billowing wildly into the air.
“You’re pretty sensitive for a mage.”
A low voice suddenly sounded behind her.
Su Cheng instinctively threw out a wind blade.
A shadow flashed before her eyes.
Pain exploded in her wrist as someone seized her arm, twisted it behind her back, and slammed her face-first onto the study desk.
Exactly the same treatment as the protagonist.
Su Cheng thought expressionlessly.
The female supporting character in the original story claimed she needed essence and blood to recover her strength. She’d intended to force the protagonist, pinning him down first—but Lin Yun had found her beautiful enough that he willingly went along with it.
“…Can you let me go first?”
Su Cheng sighed.
Her cheek pressed against the open pages of a book. Messy black curls spilled over her snowy bare back beneath the cold moonlight, gleaming like wet seaweed—
—or like a nest of twisting snakes.
The next instant, the strange curse tattoo suddenly flared brightly.
The thorn-wrapped heart burned scarlet against her smooth skin.
“Hm?” The person behind her sounded surprised. “That is—”
Scalding claws brushed against her back.
They pushed aside her tangled curls, tracing over the glowing emblem as hooked fingertips slowly dragged across tender skin.
“Yeah,” Su Cheng said flatly. “A curse. Don’t ask where it came from. I don’t know either.”
She privately thought this woman’s voice sounded lower than expected.
Maybe she was deliberately disguising it.
The person behind her paused.
“…You know what this is?”
“More or less.” Su Cheng sighed. “Mages spend all day buried in books. We accumulate a lot of useless knowledge.”
This person had recognized her as a mage immediately, which meant they were highly sensitive to elemental spirits—not like those meathead warriors in the Lin family who genuinely thought she was useless.
Su Cheng coughed lightly.
“So… could you let go first? I promise I won’t attack you again.”
The person behind her seemed about to speak—
Then suddenly gasped for breath.
The force restraining her loosened, followed by a muffled groan as they dropped heavily into the nearby chair.
Su Cheng glanced back.
And froze.
Desolate moonlight spilled through the room, illuminating the figure leaning near the window.
He was breathing hard, dressed in ill-fitting clothes. His robe hung open at the collar, exposing a broad, powerfully built pale chest.
Sweat soaked the hair clinging to his forehead. His head tilted back slightly as his sharp Adam’s apple shifted with each ragged breath.
A deep wound stretched across his waist and abdomen. Blackened blood seeped steadily from it, staining the surrounding fabric dark.
Only after several seconds did Su Cheng finally look at his face.
Dark curls.
Strikingly handsome features.
A high nose and deep-set eyes.
His irises were a cold pale blue, like a frozen lake in the dead of winter.
Yet beneath that icy surface, something scorching seemed to burn.
“Damn it…”
The man sucked in a sharp breath, pain flashing across his face before another low moan escaped him.
Clenching his teeth tightly, he yanked open his collar further, revealing a chain wrapped around his neck.
Golden light flickered along it, occasionally forming glowing runes.
The shifting light illuminated his skin—and the raised bluish-purple veins beneath it—creating an oddly decadent, dangerous sensuality.
Su Cheng’s gaze faltered.
Aside from the gender difference, everything else matched the original setting perfectly.
The female supporting character in the novel had worn the same chain.
“You,” the man said hoarsely between breaths, “your curse needs to be suppressed. Otherwise, you won’t survive until sunrise.”
Su Cheng looked at him with complicated disbelief.
“Conveniently…”
Every sentence seemed to cost him tremendous effort. Sweat rolled continuously down his face, his soaked lashes trembling like butterfly wings battered by rain.
Even so, Su Cheng didn’t dare relax.
The only reason he’d let her go was because he believed they could make a deal.
That didn’t mean she had any chance of escaping—or hurting him.
“I…”
The man’s breathing grew rougher.
The fabric behind him suddenly tore apart.
A pair of black bat wings unfurled from his back, still half-curled. Dark horns with spiral ridges emerged from beneath his hair.
Black markings spread across his face like twisting vines, winding over his forehead, eyelids, and cheekbones.
Then a scaled tail lashed out behind him.
Glossy black scales lined it tightly, and at the tip were two curved bone blades like twin scythes.
When they crossed together, they formed the shape of a perfect heart.
A succubus.
A high-ranking demon race from the distant western lands beyond human territory.
Long-lived beings.
Supposed servants of the Dark God.
Powerful, resilient creatures—even their young possessed terrifying combat ability.
Though they were weaker against holy light arts.
Of course, only mid-to-high-ranking clergy stood any chance against greater demons in the first place.
“I need… you too.”
The man inhaled shakily and tugged loose his belt with one hand.
That flexible tail snapped through the air, then coiled around Su Cheng’s waist and dragged her toward him.
She fell directly onto his firm, muscular thigh.
“I’m tired,” he murmured hoarsely. “Do it yourself, mage.”
