“Then Ling Yue tightened her grip.”
Feng Ling felt her consciousness thinning bit by bit.
It wasn’t to the point of dying… It was that strange, slight dizziness… like being force-fed a huge amount of alcohol.
Ling Yue’s figure in her vision grew blurry, the sounds in her ears seemed muffled as if through a layer of water, but her physical sensations became exceptionally clear.
She could distinctly feel the temperature of Ling Yue’s fingers, the gentle pulse of the blood vessels under the skin of her neck, and the trembling of the muscle fibers being squeezed… and each sensation was magnified several times, including the sharp, stinging pain when Ling Yue’s nail tips pressed into her skin.
“See, even though it hurts, your body is starting to react…”
Ling Yue’s other hand reached in again.
“Then what about here? Here, and here?”
“Sister Ling Yue…”
Feng Ling said in a hoarse voice.
“Mm, I’m here. How does Xiao Fengling feel?”
“It’s like… kind of…”
She didn’t know how to say it.
When her neck was being squeezed, besides suffocation and pain, there was indeed a feeling rising from deep within her body.
That feeling was similar to when Ling Yue touched a certain place… but softer and longer, like someone injecting warm water into her veins.
“Mm… to put it simply, when you’re about to suffocate, the body secretes a substance that produces pleasure. Humans are like that, and our kind secretes dozens of times more~”
After Ling Yue explained, she finally let go, allowing blood to surge back into Feng Ling’s brain.
Her vision suddenly brightened.
But after the dizziness faded, that subtle feeling in her body still lingered.
She couldn’t even analyze whether Sister Ling Yue’s explanation just now was the truth or some warped reasoning.
“Feeling better?”
Ling Yue touched her face and asked.
“Mm…”
Feng Ling subconsciously shrank her neck again.
The mixture of pain and pleasure left her at a loss.
She didn’t like having her neck squeezed, but her body honestly responded.
And that contradiction made her feel very embarrassed.
“Your face is red again. Xiao Fengling really can’t hide anything~”
…
Over the next few days, Feng Ling gradually got used to what Ling Yue called “games.”
Sometimes, Ling Yue would suddenly hug her from behind and slowly drag her nails across her back.
The force wasn’t heavy, but each stroke left a red mark.
Her self-healing ability immediately repaired those marks, but they left behind faint reddish traces and a burning sting.
Before the sting faded, Ling Yue would lower her head and press her lips against those marks, licking them one by one… The moment her tongue touched the wounds felt even more unbearable than the scratches.
Other times, Ling Yue would directly bite her ear.
She would hold her earlobe in her mouth and pierce the cartilage with her fangs.
Her ears were one of the most sensitive places on her whole body.
Every time Ling Yue bit, she would go limp, collapsing powerlessly in Ling Yue’s arms.
And Ling Yue would take advantage of that to turn her over, then bite all the way from her shoulder to her wrist… even the distance between each fang hole was very precise.
As for the neck-squeezing, its frequency increased too.
Like this time, Feng Ling was eagerly preparing to finish off a boss that had stumped her for a whole week…
Just as she was about to defeat it, Ling Yue suddenly grabbed the back of her neck and lifted it, causing her hand to twitch at the critical moment and press the wrong button, killing her character.
So she glared at the “GAME OVER” on the screen, so angry she almost smashed the controller…
She turned her head and shouted at Ling Yue, “Sister Ling Yue! What do you mean by that! I was about to win!”
“Is the game more important than me?”
Ling Yue asked from behind.
“It’s not about importance, it’s a matter of principle! Do you know how long I’ve been fighting this guy? A whole week! So did you deliberately pick this moment to squeeze my neck…”
Before she could finish, Ling Yue suddenly tightened her fingers, cutting off all the sound in her throat, while the arteries on both sides of her neck throbbed violently.
Ling Yue’s thumb pressed on her trachea, just enough pressure to make the back of her eyeballs swell but not let her speak.
“Is the game more important than Sister?”
Ling Yue asked softly again.
“No… important…”
Feng Ling barely forced out a few words.
“Mm.”
Then Ling Yue let go and casually pinched Feng Ling’s chin.
“It’s fine, keep playing. If you really can’t beat it, Sister can help you fight it.”
“No need… I’ll do it myself.”
Feng Ling rubbed her neck and picked up the controller again.
On the screen, her character was lying on the ground?
And the nearby trash mobs were still relentlessly beating the corpse…
So she had to reload and start running the long mountain road to the boss room all over again.
While running, she suddenly realized something…
When Ling Yue squeezed her neck just now, although she was angry, her body didn’t resist at all.
Maybe her body had already learned to relax in a state of suffocation…
During this time, Ling Yue squeezed her neck at least three times a day, and her subconscious no longer treated “being squeezed” as a danger signal.
Just like Pavlov’s dog, she had been fully conditioned.
“Habits really are terrifying…” she muttered while fighting monsters.
…
In the afternoon, Feng Ling lay on the desk in the study, flipping through a book on European medieval history.
Actually, she was just using the flipping motion to keep herself occupied…
As for Ling Yue, she sat on a chair by the window with an ancient book thicker than a brick spread across her knees, her fingers slowly moving along the curves of the text.
“Sister Ling Yue, what are you reading?”
Feng Ling asked softly.
“A historical record of our kind, about a large-scale civil war about two thousand years ago. It started because one bloodline lord stole the spouse of another lord.”
“A war over stealing a spouse? How long did it last?”
“About seventy years.”
“Wait… just because of one person?” Feng Ling’s eyes went wide.
“Not just one. That guy stole three in total, but later, the three he stole joined forces and killed him, and the civil war ended.”
“Uh… the stolen spouses killed the thief?”
“Mm. The first one he stole spent thirty years gaining his trust, then cut off his head while he was sleeping at night. So she won, and the other two were free as well.”
“What happened to her afterward?”
“She inherited the lord’s territory and all his property and became a new lord. And because she was so strong in battle, no one around dared to provoke her… So it’s a very interesting story, isn’t it?”
Ling Yue said with a smile.
“Why is the history of your kind all about killing and fighting?”
Feng Ling rested her chin on the table and rolled her eyes.
“Isn’t there any peaceful story?”
“Who would read a peaceful story~ When bored, of course you want to read about rivers of blood to keep it interesting. Besides, the Twenty-Four Histories of you humans are all about wars, usurpations, and conspiracies, aren’t they?”
At that moment, Feng Ling found she couldn’t refute her.
But just as she was about to continue flipping through the medieval history book, she suddenly felt a piercing pain from her back… Alright, here it comes again.
Ling Yue’s nails slowly moved down along her spine, the tips already penetrating the surface of the skin, dragging a burning trench through the dermis as they moved…
And it wasn’t just a single scratch; it was a slow movement, each inch lifting new tissue…
The blood from the old wounds hadn’t even flowed out yet when new pain piled on top of the old.
Layer upon layer, the pain shot up and down along the nerves—upward to the back of her head, making her scalp tingle, and downward to her lower back, stiffening her tailbone.
“Sister Ling Yue! Can you at least warn me before you scratch me!”
Feng Ling finally couldn’t take it anymore and protested loudly.
“It wouldn’t be fun if I warned you~”
Ling Yue withdrew her fingers and then directly lowered her head, starting from Feng Ling’s lumbar spine, licking upward against the direction of the scratch, taking away every bead of blood one by one.
The moment the tongue touched the wound, Feng Ling crumpled the pages she was holding and left scratch marks on the desk.
“You’ve dirtied my book again.”
Ling Yue glanced at it and said softly.
“Ha? What does that have to do with me? It’s all your fault, isn’t it?”
“Hehe, Xiao Fengling is just too cute~ Besides, you felt good too, didn’t you?”
Ling Yue replied with a grin.
Then Feng Ling buried her face in the pages and pretended to be dead.
To be honest, she really didn’t know when she had become someone who could be casually scratched a few times and only verbally protest a little.
But Sister Ling Yue has been getting more and more excessive lately…
She’s basically done everything except kill her…
Could it be that she’s been too obedient recently?
But if she didn’t follow Ling Yue’s lead, and Ling Yue had a darkening episode and used the Flame of End again, what would she do?
“Xiao Fengling, are you starting to get used to all this?”
Ling Yue suddenly asked.
“Used to what? Used to being used as a canvas for your scratches?”
Then Ling Yue’s lips approached the area below Feng Ling’s ear and whispered, “You hardly even dodge anymore~”
As she spoke, her hand brushed past Feng Ling’s collarbone, then her fingertip hooked the edge of her collar and pulled it down slightly, exposing the two fang holes completely to the air.
The edges of the holes still had faint bruises, and the surrounding skin was darker than other areas from repeated punctures.
Ling Yue blew a cool breath at those two fang holes.
“Ah!”
Feng Ling’s shoulder blades tightened sharply, and a fine layer of goosebumps instantly rose on her skin.
“Before, whenever I touched your neck, you would curl up… Now you just tremble a little and obediently let me touch.”
“… That’s because I’ve learned that struggling is useless.”
“Have you learned, or have you grown to like this feeling?”
Feng Ling didn’t answer her.
Because she wasn’t sure which answer was correct.
Maybe both.
“Xiao Fengling, you’ve been very well-behaved lately… So well-behaved that Sister doesn’t even know how to reward you… So I’ve decided to give you something special today.”
Then Ling Yue rubbed Feng Ling’s soft cheeks with both hands and said.
“What’s the special thing?”
“Come with me.”