Black Magic Rose Chapter 9

Chapter 9: The Rose Mark

The thunder and rain outside the window raged for half the night, finally subsiding just before dawn. Shu Yijin lay on the guest room bed, completely sleepless. In the darkness, his crimson eyes were wide open, staring unfocused at the ceiling.

The fragments of Wen Jingheng’s memory were like a giant stone dropped into the ancient, icy lake of his consciousness, and the ripples were far from settled. The specific, minute pains, loneliness, and struggles belonging to a human were starkly different from the countless grand tragedies he had witnessed throughout his long life. They were more vivid, and more… invasive.

He tried to use his usual rationality to analyze and deconstruct these memories, viewing them as intelligence to understand the enemy’s weakness. Yes, a weakness. A person with such a profound yearning for warmth must have exploitable vulnerabilities. This should be beneficial for him to dismantle Wen Jingheng’s will and subsequently break the Seal.

But an inexplicable sense of irritation lingered.

He recalled the steady heartbeat he felt when his palm was pressed against Wen Jingheng’s back, and the image of the young boy curled up in a corner, clutching a dead kitten, within the torrent of memories. These two images overlapped strangely, causing a minute hesitation in his usually clear desire for Annihilation.

“Unnecessary interference,” Shu Yijin muttered softly in the dark, his voice cold, trying to dispel this unfamiliar emotion. He was the Evil God; his goal was the destruction of this hypocritical world he loathed. Wen Jingheng was merely a step and an obstacle toward that goal. What did the feelings of the step, or the past of the obstacle, matter to him?

However, another voice echoed in his mind: Precisely because he was an obstacle, he needed to be firmly controlled. Mere energy contact could trigger such a strong memory resonance. If Wen Jingheng’s consciousness awakened further, or even recovered some of his power, the situation would become much more complex. He needed a more stable, concealed, and completely self-controlled method of monitoring and an Energy Anchor Point.

A plan gradually became clear amidst repeated deliberation and self-persuasion.

He could not be satisfied with passive contact and probing. He needed an “eye,” a “coordinate,” a mark deeply imprinted upon Wen Jingheng’s Source Blood, a mark belonging to him. This way, whether Wen Jingheng was asleep or awake, no matter where he was, he could not escape Shu Yijin’s perception. Simultaneously, this mark could serve as a more efficient energy channel, continuously and silently eroding the Seal from within.

And the form of the mark, he had already chosen.

The next day, the weather cleared. The sky, washed by the rain, was pristine blue, and sunlight streamed through the curtain gaps, casting bright patches on the floor. Yesterday’s gloom seemed to have been swept away.

When Shu Yijin walked into the room carrying warm water, his face had returned to its usual calm and gentle demeanor, even showing a bit more focus than usual. As always, he meticulously wiped Wen Jingheng’s face and arms first, his movements gentle, his eyes concentrated, as if his entire being was devoted to this “work.”

“The weather is lovely today, and the sun is warm,” he said in a soft tone while wiping him. “It’s a pity you can’t go outside to see it. But it’s alright, I will bring the outside air to you.”

He walked to the window. This time, he gently pulled back a sliver of the curtain, allowing a ray of golden sunlight and air scented with fresh earth to flow in. The sunlight fell precisely near Wen Jingheng’s chest, illuminating the fabric of his pajamas in that area.

Shu Yijin returned to the bedside, his gaze fixed on the chest illuminated by the sun. He took a deep breath, as if making a certain resolution.

“Jingheng,” his voice dropped even lower, carrying a strange, almost chanting rhythm, “I don’t know if you can hear me… but I hope you can feel… I want to have a deeper connection with you.”

He stretched out his fingers, which trembled slightly (this time not entirely a pretense), and gently undid the top two buttons of Wen Jingheng’s pajamas, revealing a small area of his chest and the clear lines of his collarbone. Wen Jingheng’s skin was pale from long-term lack of sunlight, but the muscle contours were still clear and strong.

Shu Yijin’s fingertip, carrying a trace of almost imperceptible, highly condensed divine power, lightly touched the spot directly above Wen Jingheng’s heart on his left chest.

The moment the fingertip met the skin, a minuscule, almost invisible stream of black light, like living ink, seeped from Shu Yijin’s fingertip and silently penetrated beneath Wen Jingheng’s skin.

Shu Yijin closed his eyes, his entire focus concentrated on the mark that was about to form. He manipulated the faint but fundamentally potent divine power, carefully tracing a complex and ancient rune within Wen Jingheng’s flesh and energy field. This process required extreme precision; he could not alarm the Holy Energy dormant within Wen Jingheng, nor could he leave any obvious traces of power fluctuations.

Fine beads of sweat once again appeared on his forehead, and his face paled slightly. This consumed far more mental energy than simple energy probing.

As the final stroke of the rune was silently completed, an extremely faint mark, looking almost like a bruise from broken capillaries, quietly surfaced above Wen Jingheng’s heart on his left chest.

It was a Black Rose, still in bud.

The outline of the petals was delicate and beautiful, yet it exuded an ominous, profound sense of darkness. It was imprinted on Wen Jingheng’s pale skin, faint and elusive, almost undetectable without close inspection, yet it seemed alive, maintaining a strange synchronization with Wen Jingheng’s heartbeat.

It was done.

Shu Yijin slowly withdrew his finger and let out a long, quiet breath, carrying a hint of imperceptible fatigue, but more so the satisfaction brought by absolute control. He could clearly feel that through this mark, a deeper, more stable connection had been established between him and Wen Jingheng. He could vaguely perceive Wen Jingheng’s life state, and could even faintly “hear” a background noise in the depths of his consciousness that was clearer than before and no longer absolute silence. Simultaneously, the mark was continuously and extremely slowly absorbing the scattered energy within Wen Jingheng, and imperceptibly loosening the Seal connected to it.

This Black Rose was both an eye of surveillance, an Energy Anchor Point, and a seed of destruction buried within the Savior’s body.

Shu Yijin extended his finger and gently brushed the faint mark with his fingertip, a seductive yet cold curve forming on his lips.

“It suits you well, Jingheng,” he whispered, his voice carrying a hint of pleasure. “Elegant, powerful, yet destined… for a dark bloom.”

What he did not know was that the moment the Black Rose mark formed and established a connection with Wen Jingheng’s life essence, in the depths of that endless conscious darkness, Wen Jingheng—who had been using Shu Yijin’s contact and voice as coordinates—felt an unprecedented change.

A new, clearer, and more stable “point of light,” like a lighthouse suddenly lit on a dark sea, firmly anchored itself in his perception. That point of light carried a dark, mysterious attraction, originating from the same source as the feeling Shu Yijin brought, yet it was deeper, and more… inseparable.

He could even vaguely “feel” that the location of the light point corresponded to a certain part of his body, transmitting a subtle tactile sensation that was both fully present and not repulsive.

This unfamiliar mark did not bring discomfort; instead, it acted as a clearer signpost, guiding him toward a certain direction. He instinctively gathered all his consciousness, attempting to move closer to that quietly blooming, dark “rose.”

And Shu Yijin, looking at Wen Jingheng’s still peaceful sleeping face and the mark belonging to him on his chest, felt that the slight irritation caused by yesterday’s memory shock was soothed by this sense of absolute control.

A chess piece, after all, was just a chess piece. No matter what past he had, it could not change the final outcome.