After one night and half a day had passed, Frog Brother was still alive and had already returned to normal.
Meieruita drew a bit of its blood for study. “The curse has been completely eliminated.”
He said, “The potion can dispel the curse, but it has a chilling side effect that lasts about three to four hours. It’s not lethal and won’t cause irreversible damage to the body.”
An Luo took the Curse-Dispelling Potion that Meieruita handed him.
The purple potion was contained in a translucent glass bottle, giving off a somewhat psychedelic hue when held up to the light.
A lyric popped into An Luo’s mind unbidden:
She’s just my little sister, little sister says purple has such charm~
An Luo: “…”
What the hell am I thinking?
He cleared his mind, thought for a moment, uncorked the bottle, and drank it down.
Meieruita must have seen through his wariness, so he planned to administer a stronger dose to build his trust.
For the protagonist, even without this curse, killing An Luo would be a matter of minutes.
An Luo didn’t want to point out Meieruita’s intentions, nor did he want to confront him directly. Besides, the curse was always a hidden threat, so removing it was for the best.
The potion tasted average, not to the point of being undrinkable.
Meieruita took the empty bottle from An Luo’s hand. “Any sensations?”
His tone was calm, subtly reminding An Luo of a doctor.
The potion took effect quickly. The black flower mark on the back of An Luo’s hand began to fade until it vanished completely. At the same time, a bone-chilling cold crept up.
It was like wearing short sleeves outdoors in the freezing winter.
An Luo shivered and instinctively hugged his own shoulders.
He turned and walked to the campfire, feeling much better. He added more firewood to the pile and considered writing Hanzi Characters for “warmth” to use as a heating pad, but in the end, An Luo decided against it.
According to his previous plan, Hanzi Characters were the most crucial part of his escape. He had to exaggerate their limitations to the extreme.
He had just emphasized how difficult and troublesome Hanzi Characters were to use, so pulling one out now as a heating pad would contradict himself and arouse Meieruita’s suspicion.
…To ensure a smooth escape in the future, he’d just have to endure it for now.
The warmth from the campfire was unidirectional. His back was still cold. The chill from the potion was overbearing—one turn, and his back warmed while his chest froze solid.
He wondered if Meieruita was deliberately tormenting him. An Luo leaned toward “yes” and was about to gripe internally, but then he remembered this was the protagonist he himself had written. No killing was already a mercy, especially since this was just a side effect of the dispelling potion.
What good would complaining about Meieruita do? The boomerang would come right back at him.
—You wrote him yourself, after all.
“The campfire isn’t working?” Meieruita’s voice suddenly rang out.
An Luo answered honestly, “My back’s cold. Turn around, and the front freezes immediately.”
“Is that so?”
Meieruita jotted a few notes in his notebook, probably logging the experiment.
Amid the scratching sounds, Meieruita continued, “So it requires continuous heat supply. Once it stops, the residual warmth dissipates instantly, right?”
An Luo: “Exactly.”
He sneezed.
“I understand,” Meieruita said.
With his words came the sound of a wooden chair scraping across the stone floor. Footsteps drew nearer, and another person’s presence soon enveloped him. The wooden chair was lightly set down beside the campfire.
An Luo looked up. Meieruita sat by the fire with a book in hand, having brought the chair from the desk. His right hand held the book, and his gray-green eyes turned to An Luo. “Come here.”
Puzzled, An Luo rose from the stone serving as his seat and walked to Meieruita’s side.
Meieruita grabbed his wrist, and with a pull, An Luo was like a fish hooked—his feet left the ground, and in a blink, he landed in Meieruita’s lap.
His icy back pressed against Meieruita’s chest, his thighs atop Meieruita’s. Though An Luo was twenty-three and Meieruita wouldn’t turn eighteen until tomorrow, their builds differed vastly. An Luo could even be fully enveloped by Meieruita.
His face flushed red in an instant.
Meieruita’s question came from beside his ear.
Still calm, as if a doctor inquiring about symptoms in a businesslike manner: “How does it feel now? Better?”
“G-Good… much better…”
An Luo stammered, feeling both embarrassed and cozy. He didn’t want to leave. The two emotions tugged at him evenly in his mind.
“That’s good.” Meieruita held the thick book with one hand, supporting the spine while pressing the edges with his thumb and pinky. His thumb flicked slightly, and the pages rustled as they flipped to the desired spot. Then all fell silent. He said no more, simply focusing on the book’s contents.
His matter-of-fact demeanor oddly calmed An Luo.
Meieruita was a pragmatist, An Luo thought, so that explained it. But the question bubbled up from the lake’s depths: Why was Meieruita doing this?
Either for some gain or out of pure concern.
After a while, An Luo realized he was subtly leaning toward it being genuine care from Meieruita. He jolted in alarm.
Holy crap!
What masterful tactics!
Even with all his defenses, Meieruita could still gradually soften his attitude. An Luo broke into a cold sweat.
He frantically rifled through his mental library, reviewing the fates of villains blinded by Meieruita’s facade. His fevered mind cooled, elevating Meieruita’s danger level another notch.
If An Luo were just a reader, naive fantasies about the protagonist might be forgivable. But he wasn’t—he was the author who created him. How could he not know his own settings?
This wasn’t stubbornness.
Ancient people thought the Earth they lived on was flat, but educated moderns knew it was round because they’d been to space and seen it for themselves. Ancients relied on limited perception.
Facts were facts. No matter how flat the Earth looked, it was round.
Similarly, no matter how gentle and caring Meieruita appeared, his core held icy calculations.
As the author, An Luo knew this full well.
Yet even so, he couldn’t help but fantasize from Meieruita’s actions, deluding himself into thinking it was care.
But reality was absolutely not!
If he bought into it, death wasn’t far off!
In the modern world, An Luo might dare test the waters. Worst case, bad judgment cost emotions or money—not life. But this was the dark wizard world, where one slip meant death.
The world was dangerous enough. Trust the protagonist?
Imagine a serial killer next door, harboring murderous intent because you have dirt on him. Would you believe you could reform him into a good person, or bolt immediately?
Anyone but an idiot would prioritize survival and run.
That was gambling with life for a slim chance!
No gambler, no matter how reckless, would bet their life.
Of course, An Luo wasn’t deliberately slandering his protagonist. Meieruita was far from a serial killer, but the analogy felt apt.
He calmed down.
The prior embarrassment vanished instantly amid the lingering fear. Even Meieruita’s hand on his waist brought no sensation.
This was just Meieruita’s softening tactic—and it had nearly worked.
He exhaled long and slow.
Meieruita’s body heat seeped through the fabric. An Luo’s back no longer felt cold, and with the fire ahead, he was warm and comfortable all over.
But his heart was ice-cold.
Terrifying, Meieruita! Horrifying!
The firewood crackled softly. Meieruita read intently, seemingly oblivious to An Luo’s winding thoughts.
Pages turned lightly; he read quickly.
Held by him, An Luo grew bored as fear faded, but he didn’t dare ask for the Knight Novel, fearing its steamy scenes would expose him to social death.
He turned his gaze to Meieruita’s pages.
The text was long and obscure, as if readability hadn’t crossed the author’s mind. An Luo saw sentences spanning three or four lines without punctuation. He didn’t understand anyway, and it made his head spin. Before grasping a long phrase, Meieruita had finished both sides, thumb flicking to turn the page.
An Luo: “…”
He tried a few more times, sadly discovering that even skimming word-by-word without comprehension, he couldn’t match Meieruita’s speed.
An Luo had Lan Lian’s memories, and in them, the well-educated Lan Lian struggled with witchcraft books, taking over ten minutes per page.
He silently counted seconds in his head.
Meieruita finished two pages in just over a minute.
An Luo couldn’t help asking, “You can understand it all?”
“Mm.” Meieruita replied, “I no longer have any characters I don’t recognize.”
An Luo: “I mean, do you comprehend the content?”
“Yes,” Meieruita said. “It’s not difficult.”
An Luo fell silent, inwardly weeping for his own foolishness.
Why don’t I have such a useful brain?
The topic died, silence returning. An Luo grew sleepier watching, but toasting by the fire in Meieruita’s lap was too comfy to move. He planned to close his eyes for a bit.
And dozed off while at it.
An Luo’s breathing evened into long, steady rhythms. His head tilted back, resting lightly on Meieruita’s shoulder.
