The Demon King is an Idiot [BL]-Chapter 199: I didn’t want to be a monster.

"Bai YiJun, I really want to ask you this," Jie Fu Lian thinly smiled as he questioned, "Why did you do it?"

"Huh?" Bai Yijun raised an eyebrow, feeling confused as he asked, "What do you mean?"

The smile on Jie Fu Lian’s face did not falter as he questioned, "Why did you frame me? Heaven’s eye...?"

"..." Bai YiJun’s mind immediately went blank and his body stiffened up.

"Did you think I’d never find out?"

Bai YiJun looked down at the floor, feeling his own guilt weigh him down as he heard Jie Fu Lian’s question.

"Bai YiJun, tell me," Jie Fu Lian pressed on, "Why did you do it?"

In the end, Bai YiJun responded with a single question, "How did you know?"

"I was hoping I was wrong," Jie Fu Lian sighed as he spoke, "I couldn’t believe what I had seen so I kept asking myself: How could it be you? It couldn’t be you. It... Shouldn’t be you."

Bai YiJun didn’t have the courage to raise his head and meet Jie Fu Lian’s eyes so he kept his head lowered and listened silently.

"You might not remember it but when I first got Changbo, I excitedly showed it to you. At that time, I asked you why you weren’t getting a spiritual sword for yourself and you said that you didn’t need it since you already had one with you. At that time, I kept pestering you to show me your sword and then, you finally gave in and showed it to me. You said it wasn’t anything special and that you wouldn’t even have the chance to use it. I didn’t think too much about it and just believed your words."

"I never thought I’d see it again," Jie Fu Lian continued with a sigh, "Especially not in that situation."

Bai YiJun didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or not as he heard this. It seemed like the final curse left by the master of curses had been effective.

In the end Jie Fu Lian really did find out who heaven’s eye was.

"When you came to save us in the abyss," Jie Fu Lian continued with a thin smile, "I saw it clearly and hoped that I was wrong. I tried to convince myself that it just looked similar and I didn’t bother dwelling on it too much. Deep down, I knew that I was right but I didn’t want to acknowledge it so I kept a hint of doubt in my mind."

"And then?" Bai YiJun asked.

"And then I saw Xian Li in your manor."

"Xian Li," Bai YiJun’s eyebrows creased together as he questioned, looking as if he had no clue who Jie Fu Lian was talking about.

"It’s the girl you saved from the beast mountains," Jie Fu Lian spoke, clarifying the situation, "If it weren’t for her, I would’ve kept forcing myself to believe that it wasn’t you."

"Do you know her...?"

Jie Fu Lian gave a nod as he confirmed it, "I do, purely by coincidence. She was there when I joined the Xu clan’s investigation. She was sensible and smart so I ended up remembering her name and face. We met Huo Feng at the bottom of the beast mountains and he was looking for his junior martial sister. I didn’t think it would be that girl. When we went up, we found the dead river dragon with its heart ripped out by a demon. I immediately knew that it was the work of Heaven’s eye but I still didn’t want to believe that you were Heaven’s eye. I was still doubting it and needed something more solid to make me believe the truth."

"I didn’t really expect to see her here," Jie Fu Lian sighed as he continued, "And it didn’t look like she recognized me. She had a bandage on her leg and it looked like she had been recently wounded so I asked her about it. She didn’t suspect anything and simply told me that a kind-hearted man had saved her from the beast mountains when she was heavily wounded. I hesitated a little when I asked her how her injuries had managed to heal so fast. Do you know what she said?"

"It was the heart..." Bai YiJun muttered, realizing his mistake.

Jie Fu Lian nodded his head with a soft chuckle, "That’s right. She told me that you made a soup for her and that the soup had helped with her recovery. It was a soup made from the heart of a river dragon. That’s when I put the pieces together and decided to accept the truth. The information she gave me was the proof that I needed." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

What followed was a long silence before Jie Fu Lian asked, "So tell me. Why did you do it? I really want to know. Was our friendship a lie? Did you never care about me? Were you always just pretending? Since the beginning itself, was it all a trap?"

Bai YiJun immediately shook his head as he desperately defended himself, "It wasn’t a trap! I wasn’t pretending! Our friendship... Wasn’t a lie!"

"Then why?!" For the first time, Jie Fu Lian raised his voice against this man as he questioned, "Why the hell did you frame me?!"

Tears started streaming down Bai YiJun’s eyes as he shook his head and spoke, "I didn’t know they would believe it. I really didn’t know that it would..."

"End up killing me?" Jie Fu Lian taunted, "I’m not asking you what you believed in or not. I just want to know why. Why did you do it? Why did you kill your own brother and why did you frame it on me?"

"Bai LiuXian needed to die..." Bai YiJun spoke, a hint of sadness flashing through his eyes as he remembered what had happened. "Our father was a demon and we were half demons. I never asked to be a half demon but I guess the heavens never cared about what I wanted. I was ashamed of the truth and wanted to hide it away as much as possible so I researched more about half-demons and I came to learn about you and the sword left behind by Xue Lan. That sword had the power to hide one’s demonic scent and for me, it was just what I needed. As for you... I knew it since the beginning itself. I knew that you were a half demon because you used the art of controlling spirits."

"So that’s why you hated me?"

"No!" Bai YiJun firmly spoke, "I never hated you. Even though you were a half-demon, you were different and your difference intrigued me. You were innocent and kind. No matter how one would see it, nobody could guess that you were a half-demon. You made me believe that perhaps being a demon wasn’t such a bad thing after all. You made me accept myself for who I was. You made me believe that it was the choices that we make which shape our destiny and not the situations that are forced on us."

"And what changed that?" Jie Fu Lian asked with a soft disappointed sigh.

"My brother..." Bai LiuXian sniffled as he replied, "My brother broke the sweet hopeful dream that you made me believe in. He reminded me of what it truly meant to be a half-demon."

"Hmm?"

"Bai LiuXian used to kill people," Bai YiJun spoke as he continued, "He not only hunted them down and murdered them but also ripped apart their spiritual cores and consumed it. You see, he wasn’t a half-demon since birth. Although he was born to a demon and a cultivator, he was a demon with human skin. He didn’t have a spiritual core and in order to make up for it, he ate spiritual cores of the people that he killed. As for me, I wasn’t born a half-demon either. I was forced into becoming one. I was forcefully fed spiritual cores and that’s how I developed my own spiritual core. He and I were quite alike but at the same time, we were also very different."

"Bai LiuXian had always hated the fact that he wasn’t born with a spiritual core and was envious of me. When he came to know about how I became a half-demon, he decided to copy those despicable methods. He hunted down weak cultivators and killed them just to harvest their spiritual cores. One day he became a half-demon and that’s when I learned the truth. At first, I couldn’t believe it and kept telling myself over and over again that my brother wasn’t a monster, but... I was wrong. By the time I realized it, he had already turned into a monster. By the time he became a half-demon, he was already used to the blood and killing. He had started to enjoy the hunt and didn’t care about the reason anymore. Even after becoming a half-demon, he continued to kill people."

"If that’s true then why didn’t you just report him?"

"I couldn’t report him," Bai YiJun shook his head as he spoke, "If people knew that he was a half-demon, they would know about me as well and just like him, I would also be seen as a monster. I didn’t want to be a monster..."