The Demon Lord's Bride (BL)
Chapter 184: Being cared for by your lover is different than being cared for by your doctor

Chapter 184: Being cared for by your lover is different than being cared for by your doctor

"This is embarrassing," I muttered against his shoulder as Natha carried me to the dressing room.

He had called the servants to changed the bedsheet that got soaked with my sweats, as well as preparing a warm drink and light meal for me. I was already embarrassed that we had to call for servants in the middle of the night, but Natha even carried me in front of them. All I could do was clutch into him and buried my flustered face in his shoulder.

"Why?" Natha chuckled. "Are we doing something embarrassing?"

"You don’t have to carry me," I mumbled still as we entered the dressing room.

"No way," Natha denied me firmly, lowering me to the velvet bench in the dressing room. "You still have a fever."

Well, that was right. Despite being drenched in sweat already, I still have a fever, and we had no idea why. Natha said the physician told him it might be caused by stress, but I didn’t particularly feel stressed.

In fact, shouldn’t I feel relieved at this point? The source of my stress and anxiety had been cleared after all.

Perhaps...it was the price of finding out the truth?

Natha said he couldn’t tell me the truth because he was afraid of the unknown consequences. Perhaps this was the side effect?

I thought about that while Natha undressed me and wiped my sweaty body. At least, until I started getting flustered.

It was so weird. I should be used to this kind of thing--having other people wipe my body, just like in the hospital. But I still got shy and embarrassed when he did it, even after everything we did. Granted, we had never gone all the way and none of us had ever been completely naked in front of each other, but still...shouldn’t I get used to it by now?

"It’s fun seeing your skin getting redder," Natha commented in the middle of my fluster. "It’s like watching a flower bloom."

I smacked him again with pursed lips, but he just laughed it off while continued wiping me. "You were so pale before, even when you were blushing, so it’s nice to see this now," he added, wiping my chest and gently placing his lips above my heart.

I realized that he was talking about my previous life, and it got me in a daze again. Now that I found out he knew who I was, I started putting the pieces of forgotten questions together. Things that felt weird before but I swept under the rug because it didn’t feel so important before.

Like how he didn’t question how different I was from the rumored Priest of Judgment. I didn’t really think about it before, but now that I thought about it, I didn’t act like someone who had gone through traumatic battlefields. Someone with a keen instinct like Natha should have known it, but he acted like it was completely natural for me to act like a clueless person.

He didn’t bat an eye when I asked him to get rid of Valmeier’s stuff by putting it somewhere else I couldn’t see. He even said he didn’t want my hands to be bathed in blood before it was too late, although Valmeier was supposed to be a war veteran. He wouldn’t say things like that unless he knew I wasn’t Valmeier.

Wow...thinking about it like this, I was truly dumb.

"Natha," I lowered my gaze, which had been directed to the ceiling, and looked at him. Natha was already tying the cord lace of my nightshirt then, when I didn’t even realize he had dressed me again.

"Mm?"

"Did you say you build the Lair...for me?" I asked.

It was a faint memory that happened when I still had a bad hangover, so I wasn’t certain. But I recalled feeling weird about it later, when I read about his bet with the Lord of Pride.

Hearing my question, he let out a smile with a hint of smugness that made him look a lot younger. A trace that always appeared when he bickered with Jade or being petty. A trace that, should I took more attention, very much resembled the young doctor I talked to throughout the winter of my twenty-first.

"I did," he said, gathering my hands and kissing them. "It was meant to be a nice vacation house for you, and where we’d live once I’m not a Lord anymore."

"Even though..." I paused and breathed deeply before continuing with a quieter voice. "Even though you don’t know when I’d be here--if I’d be here at all?"

His smile did not falter, even though his eyes darkened for a moment. "I had to hope," he said, soft like a whisper. "I had to have faith."

So he had been waiting without any confirmation? Just blind faith that the Demon God sent him to me in another world for a reason?

I thought the Lair was just a piece of icon for his victory against the Lord of Lust. I never would have expected that it was also the soul of his perseverance.

My first home...

Oh--to find out that my first home was actually made for me...that I would no longer have to worry about losing it, about begging Natha to stay there...

It was such a wonderful, wonderful feeling.

"You’re smiling," Natha stroked my cheek with a smile on his own. "Finally."

I hid my blush by leaning forward and hugging his neck, burying my face against his neck. He laughed--a cheery, lighthearted sound--and put his arms around my waist before lifting me, carrying me again back to the bedroom.

The servants had prepared a warm broth and small, bite-sized sandwiches for me on a tray table. I thought we would have dinner at the table, but Natha lowered me to the bed and put the tray table across my lap.

Oh--it had been a while since I had a meal on the bed. The last time was...before I couldn’t consume solids anymore in the hospital. But having a meal on the bed with someone looking fondly at you was starkly different from having a meal alone in the hospital tray.

Once again, it was a wonderful feeling.

He pulled the glass of warm drink closer to him and dropped an Amrita inside, before putting it in my hand. I watched the golden liquid, wondering if Natha always told me to eat properly because of that--because he knew how hard it was for me to eat before, how I would get nauseated easily even on a good day.

Thinking about that, I drank the drink, and then the broth, and proceeded to eat all the sandwiches--except for the one I feed to Natha. I wasn’t that hungry, to be honest, but reminiscing about the past made me thankful for the health I had now.

Which made me wonder...

Who was it...that brought me here? Despite Natha’s worry, I think my transmigration was permanent, just like Izzi’s reincarnation. I mean, unlike Natha, I no longer had a living body to come back to. If I was to be pulled back, it would mean I...well, died.

Valmeier wasn’t dead yet when I entered his body, but he was dying. And based on the novel, he would die soon. After all, he was dead in the epilogue...

Wait. The novel.

I blinked repeatedly, staring blankly at the air until Natha came back after putting my tray away. "What’s wrong?"

"Natha...do you know how I found out about you having an Amrita?"

I saw him looking at me perplexedly. "No," he said. "That’s one of the things I still couldn’t figure out. I don’t think you would have enough resources to acquire that information."

Oh--so he didn’t know about the novel!

Well...the novel did come out after Natha the doctor already disappeared, so that made sense.

So I proceeded to tell him about how I knew he had the Amrita, about this world that I had read in the novel that someone wrote. While I told him that, I actually kind of wondered if everything was only my imagination. If it was actually information being put inside me by a higher power so I would know how to survive.

"I don’t think so," Natha said as he sat on the edge of the bed again. "If it’s the whisper of a God just for you, there was no need to make it into a whole novel. Just a simple revelation was enough, like what happened to me."

"Hmm..."

I looked at him, and Natha didn’t look too surprised about it. Rather than thinking this world came from a novel, he considered the novel as some kind of ’oracle’. That the girl might see the story of this world in her dreams, or it was the imagination ’sent’ to her to be relayed to the other world.

"Also," Natha held my hand and caressed it. "The girl is real. I remembered her since you sometimes talked about her."

I bit my lips, holding into hope but also didn’t want to be too sure. "Perhaps it’s just my imaginary friend?"

"Then that would mean the chart that Nathanael held was also imaginary," Natha shrugged. "I’ve seen her through the guy’s memory. So the girl was real. I couldn’t say anything about the story or the novel, however."

I let out a breath of relief, leaning back into the stack of pillows more relaxedly now. At least I knew the person I considered my friend wasn’t just in my head. And it just strengthened my hope that she was also existing somewhere in this world.

"Whatever the reason, and whoever she actually was, I’m grateful for her," Natha said, holding my hand tighter. "Thanks to that, you came to me."

He said the last sentence in a quiet, almost shaky voice. I guessed we both realized that without the novel, without the prompts I heard from her, I might end up with Valmeier’s original fate; dying in a broken body. Again.

Natha was quiet after that, and I had a feeling he was still trying to digest the fact that he almost lost me again. I pulled on his hand and asked him to hug me then, which he did.

As I savored the soothing cold of his embrace, I suddenly thought of someone else who might also travel between worlds. I pulled away and gasped, looking at him with widened eyes and wild heartbeats.

"Natha...my grandmother," I told him, with a shaky voice that I could hear myself. "I think me and Valmeier have the same grandmother..."

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