Chapter 121 – That’s enough [1]

The kick landed square on his face, just at the lower edge of his jaw, sending a pulse of pain through Cassius’s skull. He groaned and cursed, flinging Isolde’s leg away with a whip of his right hand.

Isolde immediately jolted upright and sat on the bed, her purple eyes settling on Cassius as he massaged his jaw with a deeply wronged expression.

"Well, what?" She said, defensive, with a faint crooked smile. "Who told you to bite me? Why can’t you be normal for once?"

"You just kicked your husband’s face while he is internally fighting a Tier Five poison." Cassius shook his head, opening and closing his mouth to loosen the stiffness in his jaw. "I don’t even know what to say to you."

"First of all, it was instinctive. I... I didn’t do it on purpose." Isolde said, feeling bad now as she took in his current state. "Second of all, why did you bite me like a savage?"

"I was just too happy." Cassius answered, slowly pushing himself from lying down to sitting up, his back finding the crimson headboard.

Ignoring his wife’s puzzled and confused gaze, he tilted his head slightly and checked on the Snake Loop for the poison. It was only a third away from closing. To the naked eye, the progress appeared to have stalled entirely.

But deep inside him, Cassius could feel movement. Slow — agonisingly so — but the White Snake was striving relentlessly to close the loop, pressing its jaw toward its own tail.

Too slow, though. Far too slow.

And at that realisation, the White Snake turned its jewel-like, blood-red slitted eyes on him and hissed. The Last Born understood immediately what it wanted.

’The Salt of Crimson Starlight.’ He mused, his expression thoughtful. ’It wants me to ingest the Salt and push my body into faster adaptation by flooding it with the lethal component directly.’

Extraordinarily dangerous. But Cassius could feel the quiet confidence of his Innate — subtle but unmistakable — telling him he would not die.

’Not die.’ His lips twitched. ’But definitely not without pain.’

This damn Innate.

Despite the obvious prospect of agony looming on the horizon, Cassius already knew he would do it.

But not yet.

He turned his full attention back to Isolde.

She was sitting cross-legged on his bed, her beautifully striking face arranged into something serious yet delicate. She was waiting. And Cassius knew exactly what she was waiting for.

Since the moment he had decided to create the merchant company and the sect — using the Origin Store as their foundation — Cassius had known a day like this would come sooner rather than later.

A day where he would have truly no choice but to be fully open with Isolde. To tell her about the Origin Store and the Fated Quest. But doing so meant explaining how he had obtained them.

He could simply say it was the product of Ananke’s Mysterious Blessing, a Blessing that touched the very core of Mother System, which governed all things, even the gods.

That, in itself, was something Cassius had always been curious about. Why could Ananke’s Blessing achieve such things? He had asked her once, and received nothing but a vague answer about how the Gate of Fate and Secrecy was anchored to one of the fundamental Authorities of Mother System.

Plausible. But not fully convincing.

None of that, however, was the subject worth thinking about in this particular, suddenly stressful and dreadful moment.

Cassius could have chosen to lie to Isolde. She would never know or even begin to guess. After all, who would readily believe in reincarnation? In transmigration?

Those were concepts as elusive as the concept of freedom that mankind had been wrestling with since the beginning of time. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

’But I want to be honest.’ He thought, exhaling softly, the stress of it real and pressing. He closed his eyes to gather himself. ’I want to be honest with her, because she has been honest with me. I want her to know, with everything I have, who I am. What kind of man she is choosing to live and end her life with. I owe her that. I owe her all of it, so that she can decide for herself with everything weighed and considered.’

Yes. Decide. Decide whether she wished to be with a man like him, a man who had arrived in this world for reasons still unclear to him. A man destined to be a Villain, to go against the main characters, a man who could die at any moment and drag her down with him.

With all of that considered, Cassius came naturally to the conclusion that he had to be honest and transparent.

That decision brought with it a fear he had never expected to feel again since being reincarnated into this world. A fear that had haunted his life back on Earth:

The fear of abandonment.

It crippled him far deeper than anything else...so deep, so profound, that Cassius began to tremble faintly as an unresolved trauma surfaced from somewhere buried inside him, constricting his chest without mercy, threatening to choke the breath from his lungs.

Ananke watched the state Cassius was in and felt her heart quiver at the insecurities her Blessed had never even known he carried.

But how could she truly blame him?

He had lost his father, his mother, and his baby sister. And then, after managing — somehow — to move through all of that, he had lost Katherine. The very first person to look at Cassius and see an angel.

Her angel.

Because his untainted presence beside her had given her the false impression that salvation might still be possible for someone who had done what she had done.

And yet she had died. She had died and left Cassius — back then Noah — alone in the world again.

Four people he had loved deeply...gone.

These situations were different from the current one, yes. But the mind did not require identical circumstances to poison itself with crippling fear. It only needed one frightened thought about a situation...and everything collapsed into the same feeling regardless.

The mind was treacherous like that.

[Everyone might abandon you.] Ananke said suddenly at the exact same moment Isolde moved closer to Cassius, pulled him into her arms without a word, her eyes plainly pained just from the sight of him afraid, folding upon himself in a way she had never seen before.

[But I will not, my Beloved Blessed. I will not abandon you. I am a goddess, killing me is harder than you can currently imagine. And besides...]

She smiled, watching Isolde’s eyes harden with the particular fear of someone watching a person they love become small.

[...do not underestimate the love of Isolde. Nor the love of your family. And tell me, my Beloved Blessed, do you not know who you are? You are the Last Born.]

Cassius’s heart shook.

He felt his head being lifted gently and carefully, as if he were something so fragile that a careless movement might shatter him.

He raised his eyes fully, and found Isolde’s face an inch from his own. Her purple eyes were wet with unnamed tears that refused to fall. They were so impossibly beautiful that Cassius hated himself for being the reason they carried sadness.

"What are you so afraid of?" Isolde asked and pressed her forehead against his own and whispered, "Don’t be. Don’t be afraid, Cassius. Because you being afraid means I have failed as your wife. Failed as the partner you can say anything to without burden...without fear."

She paused, and felt him beginning to settle, his heartbeat slowing. She held him tighter, and felt something rise inside her: a love and protectiveness that had no prior warning, as if he were something precious that needed to be shielded from the world.

It was a strange feeling. One that had come from nowhere. But Isolde embraced it entirely.

"Did I fail as your wife, Cassius?"

"You... you didn’t, darling." Cassius managed. "It’s just me. It’s me who is rotten with insecurities I never even knew I had. Insecurities that make me act this embarrassingly in front of you." He chuckled at himself. "I am sor—!"

"Don’t be." Isolde cut in. "I will not love you less for showing me your insecurities. I will not love you less for being willing to let me see a side of yourself you are embarrassed by. I will not love you less... for simply being you, Cassius."

"But," Cassius said quietly, "will you accept me?"

Isolde smiled.

"I have chosen you. I am choosing you. I will choose you every single second of my — no, of our lives, until there is no longer any need to choose." She chuckled faintly. "And you know what? I would still keep choosing you even after the need disappears."

Cassius laughed at her words, the anxiety and fear loosening their grip considerably. "Who taught you to say things like that, Isolde?"

"Well," she said with mock arrogance, "I am an excellent learner. Soon enough, my analogies will be better than yours."

"Hahahah. No chance. That is mine, just forget it."

The tension dissolved instantly. And after a moment of comfortable silence, Cassius finally parted his lips.

"Well." He smiled crookedly. "Where should I begin?"

—End of Chapter 121—