How to Win Over a Black Lotus

Next in the same series: "Haunted by the Demon Lord Night After Night"

"Blurb"

Chang Yuan transmigrated into a book. The System told her that the only way to survive was to save Wen Yu, a beautiful but tragic man with low cultivation who was bullied by everyone.

The good news: after waiting half a month, she finally found Wen Yu.

The bad news: she saved him, and the very next moment he tried to run her through with his sword.

Chang Yuan dodged the blade and stared at Wen Yu, who showed not a trace of remorse. Only then did she realize: this guy is insane?!

*

By day, Wen Yu smiled like a spring breeze, gentle as jade.

But behind her back, he was always trying to kill her. So she had to keep walking the razor's edge between life and death, doing her best to be the mad villain's loyal lackey and stay alive.

When Wen Yu cut down a horde of demons with his sword, crimson blood slid from its tip. He threatened her slowly: "See? This is what happens when you defy me."

Chang Yuan nodded furiously and decided to activate Plan B: make Wen Yu fall in love with her, then slip away.

*

Chang Yuan had a secret: her demon scent could bewitch people's minds and bend them to her will.

So Wen Yu fell hopelessly in love with her.

One rainy night, Chang Yuan entered Wen Yu's bedroom. A flash of lightning revealed a hidden door, which she opened by accident.

The farther she ventured inside, the more paintings she found hanging on the walls, until the whole room was covered in them. Every single painting showed her.

The young man blocking her way wore a sinister smile. "I love you so much. Can't you love me just a little more?"

Chang Yuan: ...Was the scent working a little too well?

*

Things went just as Chang Yuan wanted, smoothly to the end.

In the end, she was pierced by ten thousand swords amid Wen Yu's karmic hindrances. Her body and soul perished, and her scent faded away. Her death was so gruesome that even she would have been frightened by it. Then she happily faked her death and ran off.

What she didn't know was this:

After her death, Wen Yu did not return to normal. Instead, he knelt and begged the heavens for mercy, his once-black hair turning white.

*

Wen Yu was born under the ill omen of a disaster star, and everyone wanted him dead.

His parents treated him like a weed. Even when they branded his palm with a red-hot iron, he never shed a single tear.

But on the day Chang Yuan died, he wept tears of blood until they soaked his robes.

For decades, a living corpse, he went every day to the demon mountain in search of a peach blossom branch. But peach blossoms had gone extinct a hundred years ago. How could they ever bloom again?

Until one day, he heard the owner of a flower-dew drink stall grumbling to him: "That newly crowned Demon King used her scent to bewitch me yesterday and swindled ten jars of premium rose hydrosol out of me. What a racket!"

Wen Yu's hand trembled as he paid.

When they met again, he blocked Chang Yuan's only way out, his face dark, and locked her atop the great bed in the Demon Palace. In the dead of night, the palace blazed with everlasting lights. Chang Yuan sobbed hoarsely, trying once again to use her demon scent to make him stop.

But Wen Yu smiled cruelly and whispered in her ear: "I forgot to tell you something before. I was born without a sense of smell."

_

Theme: Uphold your own standards for distinguishing right from wrong and good from evil, and don't just follow the crowd.