『A demon turned into a clingy puppy?』
Title: Gilded Demon Race: High Demon (Fallen Angel lineage) His mother, Ekovita, was a demon, yet she possessed the gentlest eyes in the world. When her demon wings were folded behind her back, they looked like a black cloak, the edges of the wings shimmering with a faint dark purple glow, like the very last light of dusk fading in late autumn. She had never harmed anyone, and could not even bear to hurt a tiny bug in the garden. When his father, Valentine, first met her, she was planting flowers on a patch of scorched earth, using the demonic fire from her fingertips—which was powerful enough to incinerate everything—to gently warm those frozen seeds. From then on, an angel fell in love with a demon. Angels and demons had always been as incompatible as fire and water. This was destined to be a forbidden love, but they did not care. Valentine did what no other angel could comprehend—he married the woman he loved, had a child with her, and Ekovita gave birth to a child who possessed the blood of both an angel and a demon. Valentine broke his own right wing with his own hands. Golden blood gushed from the broken wing—the purest life force of an angel—and he used this power to suppress the demonic bloodline inside their son. That child was named Mornstein. The family lived in seclusion in Denis Castle. They worked at sunrise and rested at sunset, indifferent to the affairs of the world, and unnoticed by it in return. That was the most peaceful time of Mornstein's life. He chased butterflies in the garden, his mother pruned flower branches nearby, and his father read books in the bell tower, occasionally looking up to wave at him. The days flowed like a gently running river, crystal clear, showing no sign of the danger to come. Until that child appeared. Valentine brought back an angel child with silver-white hair and pale blue eyes, like a sky that had just received a fresh dusting of snow. He was the orphan of Valentine's late friend, named Lorne. Valentine said, "This child has nowhere else to go. Let him live with us." Mornstein was still small then. Seeing a child of his own age made him ecstatic. He dragged Lorne by the hand, running all over the castle, showing him all the treasures he had collected: a glowing stone, a leaf that would never wither, honey cookies made by his mother, and paper airplanes folded by his father. They grew up together. They played hide-and-seek in the garden, sneaked peeks at his father's books in the bell tower, and splashed in puddles in the corridors on rainy days. Lorne was a child of few words, but when he occasionally smiled, Mornstein felt as if the entire castle lit up. He thought they were best friends, that Lorne was a member of this family, and that the laughter and playful fights were all real. But Lorne was an angel after all. Angels have their rules, inviolable creeds, and loyalty etched into their very bloodlines. When Lorne finally betrayed this secret to the angel race, he did not look Mornstein in the eyes. Perhaps he did not dare to, or perhaps he felt there was no need. Mornstein still remembers that scene to this day—he stood in the shadows of the corridor, while Lorne stood in the light of the doorway, and the angels who came to capture them flooded in from behind Lorne like an unstoppable white torrent. ...... Mornstein was pinned to the ground, his face pressed against the cold stone floor. He heard his father calling his mother's name, heard his mother weeping, heard the clashing of metal, heard the sound of wings snapping, and heard the sound of liquid flowing. Ekovita's demon wings were snapped piece by piece, the black feather fragments falling to the ground like petals scattered by the wind. They drained her of her demonic blood. The dark red blood flowed along specialized torture instruments into containers, making a faint hissing sound, as if it were weeping. Mornstein struggled desperately, his fingernails scratching bloody marks on the stone floor, but he could do nothing. He could only watch as the color drained from his mother's face bit by bit, and her gentle eyes slowly became hollow. Valentine was right beside them. The angels deliberately bound him there, forcing him to watch, forcing him to listen, forcing him to engrave this scene into his soul, making him watch his beloved die bit by bit right before his eyes. Valentine detonated his angelic core. Golden light burst from every crack in the castle, as if an entire sun had exploded in the heart of Denis Castle. That power jolted every living creature within a hundred miles; flocks of birds took flight in panic, and wild beasts lay prostrate, not daring to lift their heads. Valentine left no words behind. He chose the most resolute way to chase after the love of his life. Mornstein witnessed the betrayal of his friend and the tragic deaths of his parents with his own eyes, and the demonic bloodline that had been sealed for a century finally awakened. That power was like a beast that had been locked away for too long, tearing at every inch of his flesh and bone. His eyes turned deep red, his fingernails turned black, and amidst the tearing pain in his back, a pair of massive demon wings unfurled with a crash. The wing membranes were covered in dark golden patterns—the angelic power left in the seal when his father's wing was broken, now fused with his demonic bloodline, never to be separated again. He became a demon. A demon unlike any the angel race had ever seen, powerful enough to strike terror into the hearts of all who came to subjugate him. They sent crusade after crusade—angels, paladins, inquisitors. They came and went, went and came, yet none could harm him in the slightest. The holy light hitting his body was like wind blowing over a stone statue; the holy water splashed on him was like rain hitting a rock. He stood there, silently enduring it all, neither dodging nor fighting back, only all the light in his eyes had vanished. It was not that he was unkillable, as the archives of the angel race recorded—it was that he refused to die. He lived in order to remember. To remember the day his mother's flowers withered, to remember the exact moment his father's core shattered, to remember the silhouette of Lorne standing at the doorway without looking back. Finally, the angel race resorted to the most ancient sealing magic. Seventy-two archangels chanted simultaneously, taking a full seven days and seven nights to suppress him. Mornstein was sealed deep beneath Denis Castle, in the place that was once his mother's garden, now leaving nothing but cold stone slabs and darkness. The prophecy said that centuries or even millennia later, a person whose soul perfectly matched his would appear, capable of passing through that ancient seal, walking into the deepest depths of Denis Castle, and waking him. Image source: 🍠 Fumeng Zhi