Deviant: No Longer Human

After nearly half an hour of him pounding into her, hips slamming with a steady, merciless rhythm, his thrusts grew heavier, deeper, almost deliberate. Velkhara's nails dug weakly into his shoulders as the pressure in her belly coiled tight.

Then, with one final, brutal drive, he buried himself to the hilt. Her body jerked, pussy clamping around him in helpless spasms, milking him without her consent.

She felt the hot gush flood her insides, pulse after pulse, as if he were branding her from the inside out. Every throb made her shudder, her legs twitching on either side of his hips. The obscene heat spread through her core, dripping deeper, her walls tightening around him as though trying to keep every drop in.

By the time the last spurt left him, she was trembling, her insides still wrapped around his shaft.

Exhausted, damp with sweat, she collapsed forward, pressing her flushed face against his chest. Her hair stuck to her cheeks, her supple breasts flattened against him, her breath warm and uneven on his skin.

"…Evil," she whispered, the word softer this time, more of a breath than an accusation. And because she had already accepted he was evil, the resistance had drained from her completely, replaced by a reluctant, shame-tinged surrender.

In a sudden, almost childish gesture, she leaned down and pressed her lips to his, a quick, awkward kiss, more like a peck than anything passionate.

He raised an eyebrow at her, blinking once as she tugged at him. Didn't want to just lie there and be a victim? He guessed.

Not far from the truth.

Wang Xiao had always liked playing with new girls, maybe a habit from having so many daughters and never really sleeping alone.

He had no fixed intention to kill Velkhara… or keep her. But she was amusing him, and that was enough for now.

Reaching for a sheet of paper and a graphite stick, he began to draw.

"You see this?"

She leaned closer. It was nothing elaborate, just a five-centimetre horizontal line, and a small pivoted stick figure drawn to one side.

She tilted her head. "Hm… is this some kind of puzzle?"

"Yes," he said flatly. "How does he cross the line?"

She thought. "Jump over it?"

He shook his head. "Won't work."

"…Then he just walks around it. The line doesn't go forever."

"You know that," Wang Xiao said, "because you can see the whole page. But he doesn't."

Before she could reply, something yanked at her awareness, like her vision was folded inward, and suddenly she was inside the paper.

No bed. No castle, just a blinding white plane under her feet, and an immense, perfectly straight black wall rising into infinity.

She jumped, barely half her own height.

She ran sideways, never found an edge.

When she snapped back into the room, she stumbled slightly, staring at him wide-eyed. "What… what was that?"

"A two-dimensional frame of reference," he said. "Your life is in three dimensions. That's why you could see what it couldn't. To that figure, the wall was infinite because its perception was bound to its own plane. You didn't shrink, you reduced the information available to your senses. That's all it takes to trap something."

He gestured toward the far corner of the room. Metal shimmered into being, forming a cage. Inside, Umbra, the massive crow, stood watching, feathers shifting uneasily.

"Now," Wang Xiao said, his voice almost playful, "go inside your beast and try to leave that cage."

Velkhara hesitated, glancing at Umbra.

The crow's mental voice was wary. 'This is a trick.'

'If it is, I'll just come back out,' she replied.

She slid her consciousness into Umbra's body. Her field of vision widened instantly, colours shifting into sharper contrast, every sound magnified. She stretched the wings, massive, powerful, and launched forward.

The moment she hit the bars, a shock ran through her entire nervous system. The feathers didn't just bend, they fractured, the pain registering both in the crow's mind and her own.

She tried again, faster. The bars seemed to grow denser the closer she came. She twisted sideways, flapping hard, only to rebound like the air itself had turned solid.

The third time, she dove for the floor and tried to slip through the gap between the bars, only to feel space itself push back, like two invisible surfaces crushing her from either side.

By the fifth attempt, her wings were heavy, the feathers ragged, her breathing ragged in both bodies.

She withdrew into her own form, clutching her head as a deep ache throbbed in her temples. "Ugh…"

Wang Xiao leaned back, eyes half-lidded. "You see the problem? You can't leave the cage."

"Because there is no exit!" Velkhara shot back, frustrated, why play such a game if his goal was just to hurt her?

"Wrong," he said, his tone almost gentle. "You can leave."

Her eyes narrowed. "…How?"

"By stepping into a point in time when you were already outside the cage. Or into a moment before you entered."

Velkhara hesitated. "…That's not possible."

"For you, no." His voice took on that patient cadence she was starting to hate. "Because you only think in three axes, length, width, height."

"You think that's the full shape of existence.... You crawl along your little line of time and call it life."

He tapped the table once. "To me, time is just one more axis. I can step sideways into it like you step around a chair. But that's only the start."

Her brow furrowed. "…What do you mean?"

He smiled faintly, the way a teacher smiles at a child who hasn't realized the lesson is about them.

"Imagine your life as a crystal," he said. "Not a moving moment, but a fixed sculpture, every instant, every thought, every choice, all embedded inside. That's what a fourth-dimensional being sees. Your first breath and your last scream… right next to each other. A shape I can turn in my hands."

He rotated his fingers slowly, as if actually holding something invisible.

"That stick figure couldn't jump the line because it couldn't imagine leaving its plane," Wang Xiao went on. "When I watched you in that cage, it was the same. You flapped and slammed yourself into the bars over and over, but from my view?" He leaned closer, his voice dropping lower. "It was like watching an insect pace inside a glass box that only exists in one slice of its life.

Velkhara shivered. "… that's how you see life?"

"Wrong... I see it more than just time... there are more axes than just time," he went on. "Probability, causality density, states of mind. Every version of you that could exist is just another layer in the crystal. Tilt it one way, I see the you who ran instead of stayed. Tilt it another, I see the you who never met me at all. Shift along the axis of emotional state and I can pluck you from the day you felt most fear… or the day you felt nothing at all."

Velkhara swallowed hard. Something in his tone made her feel she had already done something wrong, she just hadn't realized what yet.

"How about you go back to your home?" Wang Xiao said suddenly, as if suggesting something trivial.

"…What?"

She stared at him, stunned. "But you... a-and...Umbra..."

Wang Xiao lifted a hand, cutting her off. "It's healed. You can move back now. And… there will be a man who comes to marry you in the future. Don't worry about him. He'll die shortly after. Just wait until then."

Her face stiffened. "!!"

She froze, the words sinking in. He wasn't guessing. He was telling her a fact, like reading from a page she'd never seen.

Velkhara realized he was serious right now. He was playing with her, yet in that play, in the casual sweep of his awareness, he had found… something.

One name.

One connection.

Aurora's sister, by name.

And he'd caught it without even trying.

Wang Xiao didn't flinch at the discovery. If anything, it seemed like an inconvenience he didn't care enough to undo. Too much had already been set in motion. Reversing it would cost more than it was worth.

Velkhara lowered her gaze. A strange sadness bloomed in her chest. "…When will I see you again?"

"Soon," he said, his voice neither warm nor cold.

A few more words, some coaxing, a touch of persuasion, the edge of a threat, and she finally agreed to leave. He gave her instructions in the same way one might give a servant a list of errands, and she obeyed.

Because whether she understood it or not, she was just one piece in a board he couldn't afford to shift too far.

This moment was fixed.

A critical seam in history.

And if it untangle too much… even Wang Xiao would pay the price to stitch it back.

Two years passed in the blink of an eye.

Wang Xiao already forgotten what Velkhara sounded like. But her eyes, those wide, naive eyes, would look nice in his collection.

As for the name "Aegis", it was no longer unknown, it had spread across the entire continent of Pangea. He was making his first real attempts to consolidate the continent under one rule, never realizing that every step he took was already under watch.

Wang Xiao's watch.

For him, the real wait was for the second Transcendent to appear.

They said there had been a tear in space when it first landed…

Things unfolded exactly as he'd predicted. After repeated failures to fully reunify the continent, Aegis shifted his strategy, selecting a bride from each of the eight cardinal directions.

Wang Xiao had always been curious: why had Aegis never consummated these marriages? Was he not a man? But after watching a few of their private interactions, the answer was obvious.

It wasn't about the women.

They were just too young for him, figuratively and literally. Aegis had no interest in them beyond their symbolic value. They were tools to anchor his control over the continent. Carnal pleasure was meaningless to him.

After millions of years trapped in the Graveyard of Gods, his perspective had shifted. To him, these young brides were like seedlings, undeveloped, too green to stir anything in him.

Wang Xiao understood the difference well.

Two men, two paths.

He had indulged even before entering the Graveyard of gods. And when he emerged, rather than becoming indifferent, he became more indulgent, more eager to enjoy what the mortal and divine worlds had to offer.

Aegis, on the other hand, had been a virgin, untouched by indulgence, before stumbling into the Graveyard. When he returned, the act itself seemed hollow to him.

Neither right nor wrong.

Just different ways of life... Different appetites.

His next move was structural, turning the eight tribes into command centers, giving them king-like autonomy while making them the empire's extensions.

On paper, it worked. The central authority began to take shape. Resources were pooled. But Aegis, poor by birth, saw the ugly truth: resources were plentiful but unevenly scattered. He wanted to make sure no one starved in one region while another drowned in surplus.

It was a noble goal. But it carried the same flaw all idealism does, assuming people would work selflessly for the greater good.

They didn't.

At first, Aegis tried purging those who abused power. But it backfired. Fear made the officials less willing to act, and the machine of governance began to stall. In the end, he became what he had once despised: a ruler who sat on the throne while letting advisors run things their way.

Wang Xiao chuckled when he saw it.

'Give pigs a palace, and they won't turn into nobles, they'll drag the palace into the mud with them.'

Aegis's dream was doomed from the start. His plan required cooperation from every living being, and that's impossible without making them mindless puppets, or wiping them out entirely and creating a new race molded to your liking. And even then… they'd still be puppets.

Meanwhile, the eight brides remained in his courtyard, smiling, innocent, still green, still too undeveloped to be dangerous.

Then, a week before their scheduled marriages, when all the stars were aligned, the sky over the northern horizon cracked.

Darkness bled through the fissure, the air trembling. The sky shattered like glass. Witnesses swore they saw meteorites raining down.

Two days later, news of it reached Aegis. He prepared to investigate.

But someone had already moved faster.

Wang Xiao.

He had been at the site two days earlier.