Chapter 19: It Looked Like It Would Feel Nice to Touch
Su Cheng snapped fully awake.
She had already been drifting in that hazy space between consciousness and delirium before, but this time cold sweat nearly broke across her skin.
“No!”
But the way they were positioned left her pinned as if by invisible barbs. She couldn’t even find the leverage to stand. Her body shook once before going limp again, collapsing weakly back into place.
Su Cheng sucked in a sharp breath. Fear tangled together with pleasure, and alongside the lingering stimulation running through her body, it made her tremble uncontrollably.
The black-haired man tilted his head at her and sighed softly. Then he lowered his hand, fingers sliding over the girl’s spasming waist.
“So you can be afraid,” he said with a smiling expression tinged with regret. “What a pity…”
As he spoke, he gripped her hips and lifted her effortlessly.
Su Cheng’s breathing hitched. A muffled sound escaped her throat as the wet sound of separation brushed past her ears.
Her knees were still braced against his waist. One hand pressed against his chest while she struggled to catch her breath, the other fumbling blindly with her clothes.
The god squeezed her trembling thigh, then casually wiped away the traces left there.
Su Cheng shot upright like she’d stepped on a spring. She was so unsteady she nearly tripped over the man’s bent leg.
She staggered back two steps, then froze.
Something felt wrong.
Their clothes, which had been in complete disarray moments ago, were suddenly neat and untouched again.
Even her belt seemed perfectly fastened.
Su Cheng: “…So it really was like that.”
The black-haired man raised a brow in surprise, his expression turning thoughtful, almost amused.
“You really do know how to surprise people.”
Su Cheng sighed. “You probably think I’m pretending after the fact, but honestly, I already suspected earlier that none of this was real.”
“Real?”
The god lounging against the steps let out a low laugh. He casually tugged the robe that had slipped to his forearm back over his exposed shoulder.
Then he slowly rose to his feet.
“The warmth you felt, the taste on your tongue, your pleasure, your breathing, your racing heartbeat…” He smiled faintly. “Were those experiences not real enough for you?”
“Humans only have so many ways to perceive the world.”
His gaze lowered to the girl before him.
“Reality doesn’t have to be physical. Shared experience can be real as well.”
That deep, beautiful voice flowed over her like slow hypnosis.
“What I give you can carve itself deeper into you than any tangible thing. Deep enough that you’d want to stay there forever.”
Su Cheng inhaled slowly.
“…After all that, the truth is still simple. This is Church territory, so you don’t dare come here in your true form. You can only send a projection.”
The god suddenly fell silent.
They were standing very close now.
Su Cheng tilted her head up. All she could see was his half-bare chest, pale as snow. Loose folds of fabric draped over taut skin like chains embedded in molten volcanic rock.
He looked tall and elegantly built, his chest and abdomen sharply defined like the ridges of snow-covered mountains. They rose and fell faintly with his breathing, gleaming with a polished sheen.
…Another illusion, probably.
Gods didn’t need to breathe.
“So your influence over me is limited too,” Su Cheng continued. “And I think I understand something else now.”
She slowly took a step back.
“I’m already a Favored One. So at the very least, I know this much.”
When gods chose humans as their favored, they never needed the human’s consent.
“Even if the one who chose me was a chief god and you’re only a secondary god, the process itself shouldn’t be any different.”
She spoke softly, piecing the logic together as she went.
“So everything you did had a purpose. You wanted me to become your favored, then discovered I didn’t meet the requirements.”
She didn’t know exactly what those requirements were.
But if her guess was right, gods couldn’t simply choose anyone they liked on a whim.
The target had to fulfill certain conditions.
Just like how, after she studied legal scripture and drafted contracts bound by restrictions, she’d been chosen by the God of Law and the God of Contracts.
The “conditions” were probably tied to a god’s divine authority.
“So you tried to tempt me.” Su Cheng blinked. “You wanted me to have a relationship with your illusion. No… probably more than that. I think I needed to display some kind of trait connected to lust or depravity during the process before I could become your favored. I don’t know exactly what it was, but your behavior made me think I had to abandon some personal boundary because of my desire for you…”
Like allowing him to touch her curse.
Or surrendering secrets under the influence of his charm.
That would complete the condition.
And after that?
If she ended up branded by the God of Lust and Corruption, maybe she’d be executed inside the cathedral itself.
Maybe she’d get lucky and escape.
Or maybe something even stranger would happen.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Your Highness.”
Su Cheng sounded exhausted now. She turned her face away, refusing to look at him any longer.
Otherwise…
With a body like that standing right there, the temptation was still overwhelming.
“…But I’m afraid I have to refuse you. I mean the whole favored servant thing.”
As for everything else, like him seducing her…
That wasn’t really something she had the power to refuse. It involved divine authority itself.
Unless she were a god, or perhaps a favored servant of the God of Purity with opposing powers, resisting that kind of temptation head-on was nearly impossible.
“…Is that so?”
The god sighed in disappointment, though he didn’t look upset at all. That half-smiling expression never left his face.
He lifted a finger and brushed it along her jaw, then laughed softly in delight.
“Good. This is much more interesting. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. An annoying person has arrived…”
At that exact moment, Su Cheng heard space itself begin to vibrate with a deep metallic hum.
Brilliant golden light split through the hall, mercilessly shredding the tangled vines. The crimson mist filling the air was devoured by a tidal wave of radiance.
Thousands upon thousands of golden beams exploded outward.
The entire room fractured like shattered glass, breaking apart in an instant into countless glittering particles.
The man standing before her tore apart as well, his body dissolving into ash-like fragments.
“Pathetic little clown.”
A cold, low voice echoed through the hall.
Su Cheng watched the fragments hover and spin in the air like a surging tide.
The lush male form was gone. In the darkness behind it, countless distorted limbs unfolded and overlapped in impossible layers.
Then everything vanished.
Su Cheng collapsed onto the floor.
She felt something rip away from her mind, and the world before her abruptly changed.
The prayer hall had returned to normal.
She saw the majestic pegasus statue again. Beneath it, the obsidian pedestal was entwined with vibrant green vines and decorated with lotus-shaped blue crystals glowing softly in the dark.
Ancient inscriptions were carved around the base, unfamiliar symbols raised in high relief, mysterious and solemn.
The hall was silent and sacred.
Blue and green hues intertwined with lush vitality. The eerie crimson from before had disappeared completely.
This…
This was probably what the hall had looked like originally.
“…And you.”
A cold male voice sounded suddenly behind her.
Su Cheng turned around.
A silver-haired man stood inside the temple.
His hair resembled frozen moonlight, flowing like a river of frost. His porcelain-white skin glowed with a hazy holy radiance, and the entire figure seemed submerged in light.
She couldn’t clearly see his face.
Only that he was very tall.
And dressed with alarming restraint.
A high collar wrapped tightly around his neck. Golden embroidery spread across the broad chest of his immaculate white battle robes.
The fabric fit too perfectly, outlining the fullness of his shoulders.
Su Cheng’s gaze paused.
Her eyes drifted lower, landing on the taut, lean line of his waist drawn tight beneath a white leather belt.
“If you continue looking at me like that…”
The moment he spoke, the hairs on the back of Su Cheng’s neck stood upright.
His voice was cold. Not ordinary cold, but like blue-white fire sliding down her throat into her stomach, making every organ seize beneath the frost.
“…this will be the last time you ever use your eyes.”
He spoke icily.
“You arrogant little blasphemer. Had you not resisted the darkness with unwavering will, I would never have permitted a second desecration.”
Su Cheng now knew exactly who this was.
“Sorry! Your Highness, I’m really sorry!”
She pressed a hand to her head and scrambled to her feet.
“I’m not very clear-headed right now. Well… honestly, I wasn’t very clear-headed before either.”
Lin Yun really had done something terrible to the statue before, so whatever punishment he got was deserved.
But she had only thought about it.
If even that got her hated by the actual owner…
That would be absurdly unlucky.
Su Cheng looked toward the figure wrapped in light.
“And especially in front of your statue. I’m guessing the ‘first desecration’ you mentioned refers to that, right? I just want to explain that a lot happened today, and I also got dumped by my fiancé… well, you probably don’t care about that. My point is, I really didn’t mean it.”
The silver-haired man said nothing.
Su Cheng suspected he simply couldn’t be bothered speaking to her.
In the original story, the God of Purity rarely spoke anyway. Most of his lines were just variations of I’m going to kill the protagonist.
Apparently changing genders hadn’t changed the personality much.
“I just genuinely admired the statue outside. I thought it was beautiful. Wanting to touch it was only the natural instinct people have toward beautiful things…”
She turned and pointed toward the statue in the center of the prayer hall.
“Look, I like this horse statue too. I want to pet it as well.”
“In fact, I probably want to touch this one even more, because it looks like it would feel really nice to touch…”
The temperature in the hall plummeted.
Su Cheng’s voice cut off abruptly.
For a split second, she felt fury erupt from the god before her.
The anger crashed over her like a tidal wave, almost enough to crush her outright.
Su Cheng: “?”
What now?
Did she say something wrong again?
“…Also, I genuinely have no idea why the God of Lust showed up here. I swear I didn’t want any of this to happen either. Otherwise I’d drop dead on the spot right now!”
She paused.
“See? I’m still alive, so I’m obviously telling the truth. Besides, you know I belong to the God of Contracts, so—”
Before she could continue, darkness suddenly swallowed her vision.
The silver-haired man had vanished.
Su Cheng: “…”
The God of Lust wanting her as a favored servant was one thing.
But deliberately choosing Church territory for it…
She had no idea whether he was targeting her specifically or simply provoking an enemy.
Still, since she was currently inside the cathedral, she needed to clear herself of suspicion first.
Especially because none of this had anything to do with her in the first place!
Thinking back carefully, the God of Purity had said she was “resisting the darkness.”
Clearly, he meant her refusal to become the other god’s favored servant.
Not the outrageous things she’d done with the God of Lust inside that mental realm.
Apparently even the Church’s greatest divine enforcer understood that kind of temptation wasn’t something ordinary humans could realistically resist.
The once-silent hall gradually filled with noisy voices.
Su Cheng turned around and found both doors of the prayer room jammed with priests and holy knights.
At least forty or fifty people were crowded there, craning their necks to peek inside.
Yet for some reason none of them dared step over the threshold. They were all awkwardly wedged in the doorway, shoving against each other in a thoroughly ridiculous scene.
Su Cheng: “???”
The clergy stared into the empty air with burning excitement, toward the place where the God of Purity’s projection had stood moments ago.
“His Highness manifested!”
“That was real, right?! Not an illusion?!”
“Of course it was real! It’s just that my spiritual power isn’t strong enough to see his face…”
“Forget the face. People would probably faint if they saw it anyway…”
“Worth it!”
Most of them looked fairly young, and they were all talking over each other in excitement.
Soon, several pairs of eyes turned toward the girl standing inside.
“…Is she one of His Highness’s favored?”
“Maybe. Earlier outside, she triggered the divine statue and…”
“Uh, I thought that was because…”
Su Cheng could vaguely hear them.
Apparently they had only seen the manifestation of the God of Purity.
Since none of them seemed aware the God of Lust had appeared too, they had naturally assumed the God of Purity came because of her.
“Good heavens!”
The young holy knight captain who had guided her earlier finally shoved his way through the crowd.
“Good heavens, my lady, how did you end up in here?!”
Su Cheng gave a bitter smile.
“You probably won’t believe me, but from my perspective, you people led me in here and then suddenly vanished.”
“What?” The captain looked equally stunned. “We were outside the whole time! We were just passing this doorway when you suddenly turned and walked inside. I shouted for you, but you ignored me. Then the doors sealed shut!”
Su Cheng: “…”
So she really had been forcibly dragged into the illusion by the God of Lust.
“How could I possibly bring you in here?” the captain said, shaking his head. “This is His Highness Cessia’s prayer chamber. It’s still under restoration and not even open to the public yet…”
Su Cheng’s mind blanked.
“…What?”
She knew exactly who that name belonged to.
“You’re saying this is the God of Purity’s prayer hall? This place?”
“Of course.” The captain frowned. “Isn’t that his statue right there?”
He pointed toward the pegasus statue in the center of the hall.
Su Cheng: “?”
Su Cheng: “………………”
