Chapter 10: The Embrace.

“……Can I not die?”

Sylvia knelt weakly on the cold ground, refusing to let herself collapse.

Because in her mind, only two names burned fiercely—Aelia, Sophia.

Sylvia forced her nearly broken body upright and looked up at the towering existence before her.

“I have… two daughters at home. As long as you don’t kill me… I can do anything.”

“Oh?”

Rose let out a drawn-out syllable, as if she had tasted an unexpected piece of candy.

She looked down from above at this human woman kneeling on the ground, so small and thin she resembled a child.

At 1.75 meters tall, the shadow she cast was enough to completely engulf Sylvia, who stood barely over 1.4 meters.

“What makes you think a creature much shorter and smaller than other humans could be of any use to me?”

Rose lifted her foot and precisely stepped on Sylvia’s broken bones, then pressed down hard.

“And you say you can do anything? What exactly can you do?”

“Crack.”

A crisp sound of bone fracturing rang out.

Sylvia didn’t even feel the pain at first. It was a pain that surpassed her pain threshold, leaving her senses momentarily blank.

Then, in the next instant, the broken bones ground against each other and stabbed into her organs. Agony exploded across her entire body like a tidal wave.

“Ah—!”

A shrill, miserable scream tore from the depths of Sylvia’s throat.

“No screaming. Didn’t you just say you could do anything?” Rose said, continuing to press down.

“Crack. Crack.”

Sylvia bit down hard on her own fingers. Her nails broke and blood seeped out, but it still wasn’t enough to stop the sounds from escaping. Her body arched upward with all her strength, only to convulse and curl up again with the next wave of pain.

A calm, focused expression appeared on Rose’s face—not deliberate cruelty, but the kind of concentration one might have when tuning a musical instrument.

……

The edges of Sylvia’s vision were stained with distorted color blocks. Cold sweat mixed with the blood from her forehead flowed into the corners of her eyes and slid down her cheeks. It was impossible to tell whether it was sweat, tears, or blood.

She simply lay there, like a butterfly whose limbs were being torn off one by one by a mischievous child, yet still not quite dead. Its tattered wings fluttered weakly, but could stop at any moment.

From the cross came the sound of metal scraping against flesh—the noise of palms pierced by nails desperately trying to break free.

Rose did not turn around.

But she stopped.

She lifted her foot, moving the heel away from the completely collapsed, unnaturally soft area of Sylvia’s chest.

Rose lowered her head, examining her handiwork.

The left side of Sylvia’s ribcage was now unnaturally sunken. Her tattered clothes, soaked with cold sweat and blood, clung tightly to the caved-in skin. With her shallow, desperate, dying breaths, the area rose and fell extremely slowly.

Rose tilted her head slightly. Long hair slid over her shoulder and fell across her chest. There was neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction on her face.

“So obedient.”

Then, she squatted down.

Her fingertips began to move slowly downward.

They traced across Sylvia’s blood-stained neck covered in tiny wounds.

They slid over Sylvia’s delicate collarbones, which rose and fell violently from fear.

They continued across Sylvia’s thin shoulders, barely covered by her torn clothes and so bony they felt sharp to the touch.

Sylvia held her breath. She couldn’t move, and she didn’t dare breathe.

Wherever Rose’s fingertips wandered, Sylvia’s skin flushed with a shameful pale pink.

The pink spread from her neck to her earlobes, from her collarbones to her cheeks, like petals forcibly coaxed into bloom, opening shamefully on her broken body.

The pain throughout her body could not control this physiological reaction.

Rose took in every change on Sylvia’s body.

“You can do… anything, right!?”

Rose’s fingertips continued to roam across Sylvia’s body, sliding over her wrists so thin they seemed ready to snap, and across her small palms.

Sylvia did not dare answer. She didn’t know if this was even a question that allowed an answer.

She could only lie there in humiliation, allowing those ice-cold fingertips to wander across her slightly feverish skin.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

Rose suddenly withdrew her hand and stood up.

The motion was clean and decisive, as if the almost intimate touch just now had been nothing more than a hallucination in Sylvia’s dying moments.

But she did not walk away. She turned around to face Ilena on the cross. The sweet smile on her face had completely vanished, replaced by long-suppressed anger.

“If I had known earlier…”

“I shouldn’t have tortured that insolent little third party who dared to seduce someone to death so easily.”

“Instead, I should have…”

Rose’s lips stretched into an exaggerated grin.

“Given her the First Embrace.”

“Forever preserved her at her youngest, most beautiful, most suitable moment to be played with.”

“Then turned her into the most durable, most obedient, most thoroughly tamed plush toy.”

Her gaze slowly moved from Ilena’s deathly pale face back to Sylvia’s trembling, collapsed figure.

That gaze felt almost tangible, licking across every inch of Sylvia’s exposed skin that was flushed with shameful pink.

“And then, right in front of you unfaithful fiancées…”

“Day and night… entwine in passion.”

“Hahahahaha, wouldn’t that be interesting?”

On the cross, Ilena’s eyes—which had long since lost their light—now stared fixedly at Rose. In them appeared an expression Sylvia had never seen before.

“Then let’s start with the First Embrace first, so you don’t die too quickly and fail to keep up with my intensity later.”

Rose reached out and gently pulled the small, thin body—still twitching faintly from intense pain—into her arms.

Rose tilted her head and bit the tip of her own tongue. One drop, two drops, several drops of Ancestor’s true blood—red so deep it was nearly black—seeped from her rosy lips.

Rose leaned down.

Her ice-cold lips covered Sylvia’s equally cold ones.

The Ancestor’s blood, as if alive, forced its way from Rose’s tongue into the seam of Sylvia’s lips, sliding past her teeth and winding down her throat.

The moment she absorbed the Ancestor’s true blood,

Sylvia’s first reaction was cold—extreme cold. A chill deeper than the eternal night of the Demon Realm, so fierce it nearly froze her from the inside out.

Her second reaction was heat.

Beneath the ice, blazing flames suddenly erupted, scorching everything. The flames swept through every blood vessel, every muscle, every bone, and every nerve in Sylvia’s body.

Then her body began to heal.

The ribs that had been crushed inch by inch under the heel, broken and misaligned with bones protruding, were slowly realigning and reconnecting under the wash of intertwined flames and ice.

Every wound, every injury, greedily devoured the life force from that drop of Ancestor’s blood, healing, regenerating, and renewing at an almost frantic speed.

Sylvia convulsed violently.

It was not pain—or rather, not entirely pain.

It was an experience that surpassed the boundaries of her knowledge, something that simply did not belong to the realm of human perception.

No one knew how long it lasted. Perhaps only an instant, perhaps an entire century.

The convulsions finally subsided.

Sylvia lay limp in Rose’s arms, breathing heavily.