Saving You, Villain - Chapter 93
Luke, who had belatedly noticed me, quickly pulled the shard of glass from my neck, but it was too late. My fragile life force was already slipping away.
My body collapsed limply. Thud. My head hit the hard floor with a loud crack, but I felt no pain. I mustered all my remaining strength to lift my heavy eyelids. Blood-red eyes filled with malice met mine, but I could see them slowly dulling to gray.
Camian’s face was consumed by uncontrollable despair. The moment the red light that had bound him shattered, he sprinted toward me. Ah, the contract has been broken. Good.
Camian scooped me into his arms, pressing his hand tightly against the gaping wound in my neck. Tears that had gathered in his eyes dripped down onto my face.
Someone who cries like this couldn’t possibly be an evil demon.
“No… Liv, no.”
I wanted to wipe away his tears, but even breathing was too much of a struggle. A relentless chill seeped deep into my bones. Is this the cold of death? I imagined my body stiffening, like a fish frozen in a freezer.
“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone again. Please.”
His desperate breaths warmed my cheek. Again? What did he mean by “again”? Was my mind failing me before my body? I couldn’t understand his words. The only emotion left in my rapidly cooling heart was regret.
Camian, don’t cry. Don’t suffer because of me.
But I couldn’t even offer him a final word of comfort. All I could do was watch his face crumble as I hovered on the edge of death.
His warm lips pressed against my forehead. Camian held me desperately, covering my face with kisses. His anguished sobs echoed through my skin.
Ah… I’ve failed.
Camian still cared for me. As I lay in his arms, a cold metal object slid down my body. It was the hourglass pendant I had placed on Camian’s desk long ago.
“Liv, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I can’t let you go like this. Liv, please…!”
No punishment—no matter how excruciating—could compare to the agony of leaving him now. Leaving Camian, who was pouring his warmth into my rapidly cooling body, who was sobbing so desperately for me, felt unbearable.
Ah. This is the end.
The sound of the world abruptly stopped, as if cut by a knife. Camian was speaking to me, but all I heard was the cold, still quiet of a blue dawn. My body sank deeper into the abyss. The last thing I saw was Camian’s tear-streaked face, and then everything went black. I plunged into the darkness.
***
My soul drifted through the water. I let myself be carried along by the currents, flowing endlessly to somewhere unknown. Eventually, I passed through the lightless depths and fell into the vastness of space. After enduring the suffocating darkness, countless stars appeared before me.
This place was vast and lonely. The stars whispered to me, You’re here again, aren’t you? Their voices chirped like birds, filling me with questions. But while my mind was busy pondering, my body relaxed, even in this unfamiliar space. As I floated in the void, a flood of memories rushed into my mind, as if someone were forcibly cramming them in.
I watched these memories with detachment, like a wax figure stripped of emotion. Lives and deaths, repeated over and over. This wasn’t my first time in this space. I had defied the flow of time, reversing its course to return to the past, only to meet tragic ends again and again. Whether it was from overwhelming despair or the toll of a disease that ravaged both my body and mind, I had taken my own life in each cycle. Ah, so that’s what it was. I was… repeating the same life.
And at the beginning and end of every life, Camian was always by my side.
***
The Camian I met during my fourth return was vastly different from the one I’d first encountered.
How was Camian during that first meeting? He was silent, emotionless, and his very presence seemed capable of killing with just a glance. The villagers—Debra, Jex, and everyone—feared him, and rightly so. Camian treated them with nothing but disdain, considering them less than insects.
One day, Leo, who had drunkenly grabbed my hand for the first time, ignored my pleas to let go, his nose red with alcohol. In that moment, Camian had reached out and gripped Leo’s head with his large hand. Even as Leo writhed in pain from the pressure, Camian didn’t let go.
Camian was prepared to kill Leo, without hesitation or guilt. The villagers tried to intervene but were paralyzed by Camian’s overwhelming aura.
“Let go of him, Camian!”
I eventually stepped in. Camian looked at me, genuinely puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand why I was stopping him. He even asked me, as if I were the foolish one, If someone bothers you, why not just kill them? I was dumbfounded. Who had raised him? I tugged at his clothes, pulling him toward me, and bowed apologetically to the stunned villagers in his place.
As soon as we returned home, I sat Camian down and began to lecture him.
“Hey, demon. You have to grant my wish if you want my soul, right? So cooperate with me.”
“How much longer?”
“How much longer? Come on. My wish is to have a friend I can talk to, not live alongside some murderer from a horror story.”
Camian stared at me, his face devoid of emotion.
“Ugh, you don’t understand what I’m saying?”
I pounded my chest in frustration, but Camian remained unresponsive.
“Even the dead have more life than you.”
“……”
“What I mean is, if you want to be my friend, at least pretend to act human.”
A slight crease appeared in his otherwise perfect brow. It was a barely noticeable change, but I felt an overwhelming urge to celebrate that he had responded to me at all.
I plopped down next to Camian and grabbed his large hand in both of mine.
“I’ll teach you.”
Camian, the demon, resembled a wild beast. It wasn’t that he enjoyed savage rituals, but rather that he moved purely on instinct. Anything that got in his way, he killed without hesitation. If something bothered him, he bared his teeth. If you could split open his chest and look inside, you’d probably only find a cold, empty space. I resolved to warm his veins with my own warmth, hoping that over time, his heart would grow as warm as mine.
I wanted to scatter emotions into his mind—teach him the beauty of the seasons as they change, the joy of watching a little squirrel clutching an acorn twice its size as it scampers away.
I taught Camian about the world. At times, he seemed perplexed, as though he didn’t understand what I was saying, but he never argued or mocked me.
“You mustn’t hurt animals or people weaker than you.”
“I know. It’s not even worth killing them.”
“No! That’s not what I mean…!”
How could I explain this? I scratched the back of my head in frustration, while Camian watched me silently with his empty, shell-like eyes.
“This world isn’t one we live in alone. Nature, animals, humans, and even you—we all live together. When the villagers scatter leftover grain for the birds during harvest, or when a stray cat brings back a mouse to leave at the doorstep, or when rain falls to prevent forest fires in autumn—that’s all because we respect and care for each other.”
Camian’s face twisted slightly in confusion.
“What’s wrong?”
“You say we don’t live alone?”
“Yeah. From the moment we’re born, we’re not alone. Family is proof of that. My parents may be gone, but Debra and Jex have become my family.”
“……”
Camian didn’t respond. A chill crept up my spine. Could it be…?
“Wait, are your parents… gone too, like mine?”
“My parents are alive.”
“What? I almost freaked out thinking I misspoke.”
But Camian’s expression remained troubled. I had thought the mention of family would help him understand what I meant, but he looked as though he’d only sunk deeper into confusion.
“Listen, Camian. You might seem cold and heartless now, but I’m sure you weren’t always like this. When you were little, you probably cried a lot in your mother’s arms. Now imagine… if you didn’t have parents back then…”
“My parents never held me.”
“What?”
“What does family have to do with living together?”
Camian’s voice was emotionless. He remembered his earliest moments after birth. He told me that right after he was born, he was wrapped in black cloth and taken somewhere—a place colder and darker than a winter’s night. No matter how much he cried, no one answered. Instead of food, they supplied him with magical energy to survive. After he learned to walk alone in the darkness, the demons of the underworld began to appear. He learned to kill before he learned to speak. He didn’t even understand the concept of time—he had never been taught what it was. All he did was endlessly kill, over and over again in the darkness.
The ceiling was soaked in blood, which dripped down like rain. Flesh and intestines piled beneath his bare feet. Camian used his long nails to skin the demons and used their hides as blankets, realizing that lying on their bodies was more comfortable than the hard ground.
As the days went by, the number of monsters increased. Camian, forced to survive, instinctively learned to wield magic. The day he first unlocked his magic, the black walls that had defined his entire life crumbled.
Blinding light flooded his eyes. He heard murmuring voices—so different from the growls of monsters. The sound of shock and exclamation surrounded him. Confused, Camian radiated his murderous intent. The dying screams of the monsters had been far more tolerable. As Camian stood there, bewildered and exposed, the endless circular audience around him burst into applause and cheers.
It wasn’t until he learned language that he understood what they had been saying: “We predicted 100 years, but it only took 6 for him to break free from the lab on his own.” “The birth of a new demon king.”
Camian’s mother, the demon queen Celiana, had sensed an immense magical power within him even before he was born. She created that experimental chamber to test his abilities. If Camian hadn’t broken free after just six years, Celiana had planned to keep him trapped in that horrific darkness for 100 years.
But Camian’s power far exceeded Celiana’s expectations. Realizing that it was impossible to control him as a servant, she felt threatened. So, as soon as Camian reached the age when he could be summoned by contract, she hastily sent him to the human realm. That’s why Camian ended up being summoned by Liv’s weak summoning circle—it was all part of Celiana’s plan.
The day I heard about Camian’s childhood, I spent the entire day in his arms, crying. I cursed his parents on his behalf and comforted the child he had once been. Camian, not understanding why I was crying, kept telling me, “Stop crying. It’s annoying.”
From that day on, I made a vow: I would teach Camian everything his parents hadn’t. I would show him how beautiful the world could be.
“Camian, you don’t have to kill any monsters when you’re with me.”
“……”
Instead of the stench of blood, I gave him the scent of flowers. I cooked for him, showing him how food could be a source of warmth and joy, and eventually taught him how to cook himself. Camian quickly became better at it than I was. I joked, “You should do the cooking from now on,” and without hesitation, Camian took up the pan and cooked whenever needed.
Though he remained cold toward the villagers, he no longer tried to crush people’s heads like he had with Leo.
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