Deviant: No Longer Human

"What are you smiling at like that...?"

The voice was soft, tinged with sleep and suspicion.

From the high walls of a dark stone citadel, jagged and ancient, overlooking the world like a corpse staring down from a throne, a man stood at its edge, gazing into the crimson-stained horizon. He chuckled softly to himself, as though the world below was a stage… and he alone remembered all the endings.

Behind him, she approached.

A single black silk ribbon barely covered her body, more temptation than clothing. Her hips swayed like serpents dancing beneath moonlight, her bare feet silent against the cold shinny obsidian floor.

Yanyan.

Once broken, now whole, or at least, pretending to be.

She had long stopped counting years. Like him, she now understood that a hundred years meant nothing. A thousand was a blink. The old him used to say "not much time has passed" when she was still mortal.

Now, she said the same to herself.

After that cursed night, the night she remembered, she didn't run..

She found peace in this endless madness.

It wasn't that he didn't want her.

It was that the she broke every time he did.

They stood now at the edge of a ruined keep, what locals called the Haunted Castle, perched high atop a cliff. Below sprawled a city glowing with life: makeshift pagodas, red lanterns, parades of soldiers and musicians, all flooding toward a majestic palace down the winding stone road.

It was the King's Festival.

And yet… the real ruler stood here. Hidden, and watching.

To the mortals below, this castle was cursed. They whispered of demons, of ghostly lovers who devoured all who entered.

They weren't entirely wrong.

"You wonder if changing history would affect anything?" Wang Xiao murmured, still watching the scene below.

She blinked. "What?"

"You've thought it," he said. "if no superior being resists, I can force the timeline to bend. Rewrite it."

He turned, the glow of the sun catching the edge of his blood-red eyes.

"But it's not worth it. Time always asks for payment. In energy..."

She lowered her gaze. He'd told her before rewriting time to gain power was a fool's trade.

The cost far outweighed the benefit.

Better to walk forward, build strength the long way.

His voice interrupted her thougts.

"You see that one?"

He pointed toward a chariot rolling into the square below.

Inside, a small figure squirmed.

A young girl, no older than four, with snowy white hair, eyes too sharp for her age, and a scowl that didn't belong to this world. She wrinkled her nose at the noise, covered her ears from the drums, then peeked out the curtain and stuck her tongue out at the guards escorting her.

Yanyan narrowed her eyes.

"She looks… irritated."

Wang Xiao chuckled.

"She probably hates these buildings. Likes caves, thinks people are loud."

A few of the armored guards gave her helpless glances as the noble beside her dragged her back into the carriage with a sigh.

Yanyan tilted her head. "You want her?"

He smirked. "You already know her."

She raised a brow.

"Do I?"

"I suppose not in this era," he said softly, eyes narrowing. "But you will."

Yanyan frowned. "I don't really… mix well with children."

She wasn't lying. She hardly stepped outside anymore, except to meditate, or bathe in pools to steady her unstable energy. Her mind had been focused.

Solely... On control.

Because that was what it took, billions of years, just to touch the nature of Dark Energy. Even now, she wasn't confident she could fully Transcend within the next hundred billion years.

She had thought she was special… until she met Wang Xiao.

She had thought she was fast… until she faced her bottleneck at Quasi-Transcendent.

And yet, no matter how far the gap remained, he never once looked at her with disappointment.

Only with that same… smile.

Wang Xiao had never measured his daughters, or anyone, by strength.

That was what Yanyan once believed.

And yet… the more she observed him, the more strange it all felt.

He spent most of his time meditating in silence. Not to achieve some grand enlightenment. Not for a breakthrough, just to grow stronger. Even if it was just a tiny sliver more. Even if it meant sitting still for a hundred million years just to deepen a single thread of his spirit.

When not meditating, he was either staring blankly into the horizon…

Or making love to her.

That was all.

She used to think he was just patient.

But now she saw it.

He was obsessed.

Amelia once said the same. Bitterly.

"He patiently waited until he was stronger than me... just so he could rape me without asking."

Yanyan remembered dismissing her then, Amelia always did enjoy whining. Playing the victim came naturally to her.

But now…?

Now she wasn't so sure.

There was no love in his eyes when he looked at strength. No admiration, no curiosity.

Only calculation.

And yet, for all that…

He never cared about his daughters' power.

He never asked Yanyan if she'd advanced. Never asked about her bottlenecks, never even offered to help.

She, who had crossed billions of years, who had stood at the edge of Quasi-Transcendence, he hadn't said a word of praise.

Not even once.

Was it because he believed they'd never catch up to him?

Or because he simply… didn't care?

She couldn't understand.

How can someone obsessed with power… be so indifferent to the power of others?

Perhaps he believed strength solved everything.

Perhaps he saw the world in two colors, those beneath him… and himself.

It was ironic.

Cruel.

People born in palaces never understand the hunger of those raised in gutters. And those who claw their way to wealth, the first-generation rich, often become the most ruthless of all. They look at the poor not with sympathy, but with disgust.

Wang Xiao was the same.

He looked at the weak, not with pity, but with revulsion.

Not because he forgot where he came from.

But because he remembered too well.

He remembered falling from that cliff.

He remembered begging for strength on that cursed ship.

He remembered the pain of powerlessness, the helplessness under Eleanor's whims when he was trapped in Xianthera, a caged thing, fed and touched, but never free.

That was the fire that burned him forward.

A few more days passed.

And then… he began sneaking off.

To bully a child.

Yanyan watched from a distance, arms crossed, somewhere between laughter and despair.

He'd wait until the girl was alone in the garden, then appear behind her with terrifying silence, snatch her hair ribbon, or lift her by the collar like a kitten and dangle her over puddles. Sometimes he'd just stand beside her and say:

"You're not noble at all."

To which she'd screech:

"Let go, you crazy old perverted uncle! I'll KILL YOU!"

Yanyan didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Until she saw the girl's eyes in the moonlight.

Bright and beautiful aqua, like a coral reef, piercing and rebellious.

And suddenly… it hit her.

Aurora.

That wild, foul-mouthed, white-haired gremlin throwing rocks at passing guards was... future Aurora, the very same goddess known for her elegance, her quiet wisdom, her noble grace.

Yanyan stood frozen.

"She's… a prick," she whispered.

Wang Xiao appeared beside her without a sound.

And smirked. "Told you she was faking it."

"Mm…" Yanyan nodded, her eyes still drifting toward the horizon. Then her lips curled slightly.

"…What about that little slut of Athene?"

Wang Xiao raised an eyebrow.

She chuckled. "You never liked her. So I don't either."

It was petty. Childish, even, but honest.

When they last visited her, far across the scorched plains to a militaristic tribe, they were... disappointed.

She was still there, a girl barely into her teens, swinging wooden swords with awkward movements, sweat pouring down her temples, her expression rigid, composed.

Too composed.

"Quite determined for her age." Yanyan muttered, her tone unsure.

Wang Xiao didn't blink. "She's not fighting herself. She's fighting everyone else."

His eyes narrowed, watching her from afar, and even across such distance, there was something piercing in his gaze. As if he could see straight through the shell she wore.

"All it takes is one gentle touch," he said. "And she'll cry like the little girl she is."

Yanyan was quiet.

She finally understood what he meant.

Athene's father had once been a war general of their tribe, a proud, stoic man who lost one critical battle.

He slit his own throat before dawn.

The mother and daughter were left exposed, and the mother did what she could.

She used her body.

To protect her daughter, to stay relevant, to survive.

Night after night, Athene would lie curled on the ground, hands over her ears, trying not to hear the moans behind the wooden walls. Her mother's soft sobs after the men left. The smell, the shaking.

She hated it.

Not her mother, no, never her.

But the fact that she had to.

That she had to kneel to live. That safety meant submission. That survival came with moaning under strangers.

And most of all…

That everything they had was a shadow cast by someone else.

Her mother had lost two backers already.

This third one?

He was just another version of her father, confident, smug, but one misstep away from abandonment.

And as long as you belonged to someone,

you were disposable.

"…As long as you're beneath someone, you're subject to their whims..."