Kaniel suspected he would be deprived of peaceful nights for the rest of his days. Yet he slept well. No nightmares. No abominations crawling up his mind whatsoever.

He didn’t even have to sleep on the cold stone floor like he had been doing while in imprisonment.

Warm and… fuzzy… and, when he woke, he stared at the ceiling for a long while while reluctant to awaken from his slumber.

“I wish I could sleep forever…” Kaniel mumbled to himself. Sleep was an exit out of nihility for the awake ones.

“Why?” a feminine voice came from his right. “I, for one, despise sleeping. It brings us the closest to death.”

Right. The morning might not have been the best of times to ponder about depressingly philosophical bullshit. More importantly, just now, who the heck was that?

To the right, he turned his head. Lazily. There, on a rocking chair, sat a vampire with an old, tattered book that lay on her lap, watching him curiously.

Disturbing it was. Disgustingly so. Even in a cell, he had had some bare privacy. Being watched over by a demon while he slept was a refreshingly suffocating experience. One of a kind.

Her crimson eyes peeked over the edge of the pages, fixed on him. She studied him as if he were some animal.

“Good morning, Lumine…” His eyes took time to adjust to the sunshine spreading across the room. He propped himself up on his elbows and perked his brows at Lumine as she rocked back and forth on a wooden chair.

Lumine, sensing the discomfort in his stare, sighed. “I don’t sleep like you humans do, remember?”

“And?” Kaniel blinked emptily.

“And?” Lumine asked in confusion, staring at his bare chest full of scars—predominantly whip scars—marks, burns, and, most noticeably, the lack of muscles. The lord looked like he had starved inside some shrouded cave for a decade and worked on a plantation with no spare food for another, which couldn’t be told from his handsome face. Even a corpse would be livelier in appearance.

Kaniel drew a deep breath, scrubbing his face. His fingers pressed into his brow before sliding down to cover his eyes, which narrowed as they stared past. “Do you lack basic awareness, or are you pretending to be an idiot? What the hell are you doing inside my room?”

“Is there something wrong with it?” she asked brazenly.

“Understood…” He dropped his hand and glanced sideways, muttering, “Imagine you are sleeping. You wake up to see some stranger standing over your head. What would you feel like? What would you do?”

“I would wonder why they’re there, so I would ask them why they’re there?”

Kaniel was lost for words there. It made sense. Yet, at the same time, it didn’t. It definitely didn’t. How convoluted.

Sometimes, something that seemed totally reasonable would have no logical explanation behind it. Sometimes, nothing made sense at all, no matter how long one wondered, even. Sometimes and some other times, all attempts to string sense together unraveled into a mess of threads of confusion, frustration, and an endless, perpetual quest to chase down a thousand ‘whys’ only to find looping back to the original ‘why not’ that started it all, the uncertainties defining existence more than any certainty ever could—

“You look lost. Are you pondering the meaning of life or something?” she clowned on him. “Still at the age of having an existential dread? If it’s this hard to think, why not put some faith in the gods?”

Kaniel nodded in agreement. Too much self-awareness spirals into self-reflection and becomes self-pity. If there was any teaching to get out of any religious scripture, it was that overthinking was terrible. But how did the gods even come into the conversation? She wasn't trying to switch the topic, was she? He wasn’t being played at his own game, was he?

He glared at her. She, too, watched him with a question etched across her face. Kaniel had a bigger question on his mind, though.

Her staring at his body didn’t weird him out. What weirded him out was that her staring at his body didn’t weird her out. Those who had seen his frail form before would either laugh or scorn him in disgust. Understandably so. His stature was faring worse than that of a slave. Then, a question naturally arose.

Why did she look at him as if he were… a normal human being? Perhaps because she was a demon. If anything, he saw keen interest in the form of curiosity in her eyes. Kaniel would have been deeply touched and perhaps even fallen in even deeper love had he had any capacity for love in that ill heart of his. Unfortunately, he didn't.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” he commanded calmly, snatching the book off her lap. Had it been two years ago, he'd still have plentiful emotions. He had once read that love could cure anything. Even such people as himself. Yet he was broke beyond repair.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“Huh?” He skimmed through the book's contents. “Huhh?! What the…” As he read, his hands shook, and his eyes shifted from the book to Lumine and from Lumine to the book. Then again. “What the fuck is this shit?!” For a moment, he forgot that he was born a noble.

“I read it for the story,” she deadpanned.

Kaniel flipped the book in his hands and glanced at its cover. A vividly drawn illustration stared back at him. A goblin, just like any other, taller yet thinner than a regular human, with shark-like teeth set in a maddening grin. His pointy nose cast shadows over his menacing expression and no less menacing eyes. Held in his spindly arms was a beauty, an angel, delicate and wide-eyed. At the top was the name of the book:

Gobta and his harem of demon girls

“...”

The story begins with Gobta waking up with an outlandish desire to create a harem of demon girls. He sells his soul and is sent to Hell to fulfill his dream.

Despite the long length of the book, the patterns were consistent, and the story was very simplistic.

Gobta, the warrior, the man among men, the lord among goblins referred to as khan as per tradition, fights powerful monsters, saves demon girls, and makes love to them. Rinse and repeat.

Most of the book consisted of the love scenes, though. The only not-so-simple part of it. The author took all his mastery of craft to write those descriptive scenes, yet when it came to the fighting or the story itself, it was as though a different person was writing it.

“Is this guy fucking a dragon?!” Kaniel asked the obvious obliviously, staring at the pages, barely restraining himself from tearing them apart. “What does a dragon have to do with the demons?” How did somebody even come up with this? To start, an average dragon was fifteen times as big as a human and ten times as big as a goblin. “He… he didn’t just slither with his whole body in—”

“Oh,” Lumine took the book away from his hands, fearing that he’d get to the part where Gobta made love to a tree. Her favorite part. The book would have then definitely been burned. “If you read from the start, you’d understand it perfectly makes sense.” She nodded to herself. “This story is actually very rich. Gobta is a deeply multilayered character. The symbolism and crumbs of foreshadowing thrown across are impeccable. It also teaches many things about monster anatomy that you’d have otherwise never known—”

“Wait, he doesn’t fuck monsters now, does he?” Kaniel blurted.

Shit. She slipped up. “Oh, come on. One can’t appreciate proper literature without prejudice,” she tsked.

After witnessing abominations from the faraway cosmos, Kaniel had thought nothing could surprise him again. Yet, within him, something deep inside he didn’t even know he had—broke. The fuck was a fucking goblin fucking up a fucked up—

“Anyway, what’s on today’s agenda, Boss?” Lumine asked.

How did they even have such a book? An average book costs a house. A book with such vivid illustrations like this would cost a fortune. So, just why, why did it even exist? What kind of cosmic monstrosity wrote it?

“Boss?” She nudged his shoulder to awaken him from his nightmares.

“Since when you’re calling me a boss?” He snapped her hand away, shivering. Thanks to the two-week journey with Ehrina, he was fairly accustomed to madness. Yet the undeniable truth was that none could fully get used to it. As such, without a shroud of doubt, there was only one way to suppress the undefeatable. By not losing.

“Now? Lord sounds lame, Boss,” she said, unabashed.

And to not lose to an unstoppable force, one simply had to become an immovable object.

Kaniel pushed himself up, the morning light a warm glow across his form, the sheets rustling as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, bare.

“You in your right mind?” Lumine asked, instinctively rocking back on her chair, her composed mask softening into a subtle red. Her eyes darted to the side before she stood up and moved toward the door.

Thankfully, Lumine was nowhere near Ehrina’s level of crazy. If it were Ehrina, she’d just sit and body-shame him, laughing like a maniac. At times, Kaniel wondered whether he’d even seen a fraction of what hid beneath the facade of a victimized priest. But those were the problems for the future—if he ever met her again—and he was sure he would.

“First, let’s take a walk around. Then the Adventurer’s Guild. Then the smithies. Finally, we’ll visit the church.” He first reached for the garments laid out nearby and began to dress, then sliding into a simple tunic that clung to his broad shoulders and pulling on trousers.

Lumine turned to see him. “What’s gotten into you? The winter is still way ahead.”

“So? What do you suggest? We sit around and read that cursed book of yours?” Kaniel walked to her as they left the room and entered the hallway. “Why lose time?”

If she pressed on, he’d have to give a viable answer due to his Sincerity affliction, so the skill of dancing around the topic as much as he could was of the utmost essence. He couldn’t tell her he had so little time before being sent to the first floor.

The name Darklands and the description told him there’d undoubtedly be a swarm of undead creatures.

He had a chance to share his ownership with one and only one person, ideally someone who possessed light magic or had an affinity with light, a mage or an elementalist. However, he was uncertain whether they would function inside the inheritance grounds supposedly dominated by the system.

Still, Kaniel was sure that if he looked enough, he’d find someone capable.

“Hmm… I wonder what Zoya made for breakfast,” the vampire said, walking to his right, tilting her head in slight contemplation, brows furrowing.

Kaniel looked at her, thinking for a fraction of a second. “Yeah, no.”

“What?” Lumine asked.

“It’s nothing…”

To think that this demon wouldn’t even form a proper sentence talking to him yesterday.

To be fair to himself, Kaniel didn’t hate her company. Perhaps they could develop a good friendship over time. They both were inherently antisocial bookworms and had many things in common—

“Also, that technically wasn’t fucking,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I’m talking about the dragon.”

Yeah, no. Just no.