Chapter 4

The cellar door crashed open again.

Ethan stumbled in and threw himself at me, gripping my arm with both hands.

"You have to save me this time!"

"It's not just Seraphine — Vyx and Thalara have both lost it too!"

I calmly removed his hands and studied his ashen face.

"How? Their cycles have never overlapped before."

Ethan was shaking so hard he could barely get the words out.

"The Blood Moon — the hundred-year Blood Moon came early! All three of them are caught in the lunar tide. They're in the main hall, out of their minds, tearing each other apart. If no one calms them down, the whole beast realm will collapse into chaos!"

As he said it, real terror moved through his eyes.

Three apex beast queens.

If he — a fragile, delicate rabbit shifter — walked into that hall, he'd be torn to shreds in under ten minutes. They wouldn't leave enough of him to bury.

The comments erupted, full of sympathy:

[Oh no! A Blood Moon night?! That's the most terrifying event in the beast world!]

[Send the thick-skinned toad! He's built for punishment!]

[Exactly! Ugly's life is worthless anyway. If he dies for the male lead, at least it's a death with meaning!]

I read those words and laughed to myself.

Honorable death?

You're so welcome to it.

But I didn't refuse.

Because the golden toad bloodline excels at absorbing the vital energy of heaven and earth. The raging power pouring off three apex beast queens wasn't poison to me.

It was a feast.

"Fine. I'll go."

The moment I pushed open the doors to the main hall, a wave of violent, scorching pressure slammed into me.

The hall was in ruins.

From the darkness, three pairs of crimson beast eyes locked onto me.

Seraphine, the Golden Flame Lion Queen, stood at the center. Vyx, the great obsidian serpent, coiled on the left. Thalara, the deep-sea siren, churned the water on the right, restless and thrashing.

"ROAR!"

Seraphine struck first. A claw wreathed in fire launched straight at my face.

In the past, all I could have done was close my eyes and wait to die.

But now the golden toad bloodline was surging inside me.

"Perfect timing."

I didn't dodge. I opened my arms and walked into the flames.

The pain I expected never came.

The moment that raging fire-energy touched my skin, it poured through my pores and flooded into every corner of my body.

[WHAT?! Is the game glitching?!]

[Why did the Lion Queen's fire go out?! Does this toad have some kind of fireproof coating?!]

[Wait — look at his skin!]

Agony — and then a pleasure so intense it bordered on transcendence.

Eighteen years of Bone-Corrosion poison, shattered apart in an instant by the wave of beast queen energy flooding through me.

The festering sores that had caked my skin like rotting mud shriveled and fell away.

The power that would kill an ordinary shifter on contact was, for me, the richest medicine imaginable.

"What is that scent?"

I looked coldly at the three beast queens.

A scent?

Of course there was a scent.

The golden toad lineage was a sacred creature — a bringer of fortune and prosperity. We carried a natural fragrance in our bodies from birth.

All these years, the poison had buried it under the smell of decay. Now that the toxin had been scoured clean, the fragrance had nowhere left to hide.

The comments had shifted from [waiting to collect the body] to wall-to-wall [???].

In the last moment before dawn broke, I caught my reflection in a shard of broken mirror.

The creature covered in sores was gone.

In its place stood a man with skin like white jade.

The transformation wasn't complete yet — but even half-restored, the difference between me and Ethan's merely-pretty face was the distance between the earth and the sky.

I curved the corner of my mouth, wrapped my clothes around myself, and slipped quietly out of the main hall.

The real show was only just beginning.

When I got back to the cellar entrance, I found Ethan pacing in frantic circles outside.

He had the vial of desire-inducing perfume clenched tight in his fist. When he saw me returning with my clothes in disarray, a flash of distaste crossed his eyes — but underneath it was unmistakable relief.

"You're not dead?!"