“I’ll come back to save you.”
Pryde muttered in a disbelieving tone.
Just a moment ago, he had been about to strike the neck of the black-haired man with the sword in his hand.
However, in that instant, he sensed her distress signal.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he teleported, and the sight that confronted him was…
Delphine, holding a sword, about to plunge it into herself.
In that moment, it felt as if everything he had built up until now had completely crumbled in an instant.
“Ioan.”
Delphine, gripping the sword, called his name in a sorrowful voice.
The beautiful face he was seeing again after a month.
However, without even a chance to properly take in that face which made him breathe, Pryde mumbled like a man out of his mind.
“Why, why go this far…? Do you despise and loathe me that much?”
He wanted to protect her.
That was his pure, genuine heart without a shred of falsehood.
But his own selfish desire to get her back had pushed her to this point.
To the edge of a cliff, pointing a blade at her own neck.
Then what the hell had he been struggling for, even selling his soul?
His turbulent eyes quietly became transparent.
Like a person who had flailed for a very long time to avoid sinking into the abyss, and finally given up.
“…Ioan.”
Delphine softly called his name with a heart that felt like it was crumbling.
He was breaking down right before her eyes.
At her call, Ioan gave no response.
He didn’t even call her Del.
With eyes that seemed drained of soul, dry and empty, he narrowed the distance towards her.
Swiftly, his slightly rough hand grabbed her wrist and pulled it towards him.
The familiar scent and warmth tightly pressed against her body, which had been trembling in the rain.
She was embraced in the arms of the man who had appeared in her nightmares every day for the past month.
Goosebumps broke out all over her body.
Not because being in his arms was terrible, but because she couldn’t believe that it wasn’t terrible to her.
‘I, even now, I…’
“You called for me.”
Burying his face in the nape of her neck was brief.
Soon raising his head again, he looked down at her with eyes sunken to an unfathomable depth and asked once more.
“You did that on purpose to call me. Right? Because you wanted to return to me of your own accord.”
Delphine quickly shook her head with reddened eyes.
No, no.
But Pryde also already knew the answer to his own question.
If it had been a mere act, he would not have been summoned here.
She had truly intended to stab herself.
To escape from him.
“Why on earth…?”
Reddened eyes.
Trembling voice and hands.
He began to plead with her, completely shattered.
“I don’t ask for much. I won’t even ask for your love.”
“Ioan…”
“Just, just stay by my side. Safe and happy. I’ll protect you till the end…”
“…”
“Don’t leave. Just stay with me. Within this empire…”
Hot tears flowed down Delphine’s cheeks.
The image of him in her nightmares, agonizing over not being able to put down his heavy burden, overlapped with him.
That burden was none other than herself.
The one he couldn’t let go of no matter how much he writhed in pain.
“Hic…”
She could no longer hold back the tears she had been trying to suppress.
Delphine clutched at the hem of his clothes as he pleaded with her in agony.
The desire to simply do as he said surged up.
The selfish desire to want to cover her eyes and ears, and live by his side, pretending not to know anything beyond the walls.
But she couldn’t do that.
For the sake of herself, the child to be born, and most of all, his soul…
After agonizing and shedding tears for a long time, Delphine asked in a shaky voice thick with sobs.
“But… what about after death, Ioan?”
“Your soul is safe. Even if you live with a bastard like me…”
“That’s not it.”
She cut off his frantic answer, sobbing.
“You. What about your soul?”
Pryde’s eyes widened in surprise at the completely unexpected question.
My soul?
It would probably be thrown into the deepest part of hell and suffer for eternity.
But what the hell does that have to do with anything?
If I can be happy with her for even a brief moment in this life, it doesn’t matter to me at all.
She seemed to have already read the answer to the question from his expression.
With a face a mess from crying, Delphine shook her head sadly again.
“That’s not love, Ioan.”
Pryde laughed, his face showing he absolutely could not accept it.
If this isn’t love, then what is it?
Towards him, Delphine continued in a tearful voice.
“That’s why I’m leaving. Because I love you. …But you don’t love me.”
Nonsense.
As Pryde was about to refute that…
“Ioan.”
The beautiful, moisture-filled emerald eyes turned to him.
Delphine spoke in a trembling voice, yet so clearly.
“I love you.”
If there was a moment he had wished for all his life, wouldn’t it be this very instant?
Her looking at him with those beautiful eyes and confessing her love.
However, despite hearing the words he had never dared to wish for all his life, Pryde’s expression contorted as if he had been insulted.
“Again, trying to deceive me…”
His lowered self-esteem and pathetically low level of inferiority complex prevented him from accepting her love as genuine.
He asked in a rapidly agitated voice.
“Then why did you run away? Why are you trying to leave me even now?!”
“Because I love you.”
Delphine clung to his arm and cried out in a desperate voice.
“That’s why I’m leaving.”
“…!”
Pryde furrowed his brows, feeling like he would go mad from confusion.
They were words he absolutely could not understand.
I came up from the bottom of that hell and dedicated my life to protecting your heaven.
Beheading thousands and staining my hands with their blood.
But, but you’re leaving me because of that?
“So please…!”
Before she could even utter the words to let her go, her lips were roughly devoured.
It was a bizarre kiss.
Completely different from before, when he would always carefully approach her as if reaching out to something he worshipped whenever he touched her.
A deep, rough, obsessive kiss…
Delphine suddenly felt that it might be the first time he was making contact with her exactly as his desire dictated.
As he approached relentlessly as if wanting to swallow her whole, he finally pulled away, and their touching lips parted.
Before she could even escape the lingering sensation of the deep kiss, Ioan murmured in a low voice.
“If you really intend to leave me…”
“Ah…!”
The hand holding the sword was swiftly pulled.
Now the tip of the sharp dagger was pointed at Ioan’s Adam’s apple.
Blood flowed down from the thin red line that appeared on the white skin.
“Ioan!”
He stared straight at her with hollow eyes and recited.
“Kill me and go.”
“What on earth are you…”
“Why? Can’t bring yourself to kill me directly?”
He laughed with a face that had lost all reason.
“You know they’re the same to me. No, leaving me alive in this empire and departing is an even crueler thing to do.”
“Please don’t do this, Ioan.”
“If you can’t even kill me… stay by my side. Delphine Pembrook.”
“No.”
Delphine answered in a sobbing voice.
“I don’t want us to live like that, neither dead nor alive!”
Simply surviving isn’t truly living.
Delphine believed that survival and life were different.
But right now, she couldn’t see at all which path was the way to life for this man, herself, and the child.
Even if she could see the way, she didn’t have the strength to walk that path.
“So please let me go…”
“I said I can’t.”
No matter how much she cried and pleaded, he remained adamant.
Finally, Delphine gave up trying to persuade him.
Right. If you were the kind of person to easily let me go, I wouldn’t have resolved to run away in the first place.
“Ioan…”
Delphine embraced her forearm engraved with the teleportation magic circle with one hand.
Then she whispered to him with the same eyes she had when confessing her love.
“I’ll come back to save you. If I’m the one who ruined your life, I’ll also be the one to save you.”
An indescribably beautiful light began to pour out from her body.
A light stronger, purer, and more beautiful than anything else.
Pryde absentmindedly gazed at her figure being enveloped and blurred by that light, momentarily filled with a sense of reverence.
It wasn’t because of her external beauty that he came to love her to the point of devoting even his soul.
You’re always upright, righteous, and straightforward.
To me, you shine blindingly bright.
Always unhesitatingly moving forward in the direction you’ve decided, you are always, so piercingly lovely to me…
“I’ll come back to save you.”
She recited resolutely amidst that brilliant light.
Male lead is a Love-Obsessed Merman
When he discovers she has gone, he risks everything to pursue her on land, enduring agonizing pain to transform his tail into human legs…
One-line summary: Male lead chases female lead. The male lead’s love is a bit sick, an invincible love brain.
Synopsis
During a voyage at sea, Jiang Yang accidentally captures a merman.
Servant: I heard that mermen are fierce and brutal.
Jiang Yang looks at the merman obediently rubbing her palm like a puppy: “You call this fierce and brutal?”
Servant: I heard that mermen have no human nature.
Jiang Yang looks at the merman with wet puppy eyes, obsessively calling her ‘A Yang’ like a childish infant: “You call this having no human nature?”
With great difficulty, she releases the merman back into the sea and returns to shore.
Who would have thought that in less than half a month, the merman, who should have been freely wandering in the South China Sea, would shed his scales, endure the pain of losing his tail, transform into human legs, and come ashore to find her?
He kneels at her feet, rubbing her palm, with merman tears rolling down: “A Yang, don’t abandon me.”
_____
Please help me, I want to bring you the best possible things.
If you find any chapter or novel with poor translation and editing quality, let me know by commenting directly under that novel or chapter. I will retranslate it as soon as possible.
[Touch the gear icon in the bottom right corner of the screen to move to the next chapter if you want.]
