[Scene:] Thorne Estate, a dimly lit private study.
1.1 The Ultimate Contract
The air was tinged with a faint scent of blood. Alistair sat in the shadows, holding the secret scroll he had obtained from Father Rafferty. The script on the parchment wasn't ink; it was a dark-red, pulsating substance.
"Tutor, are you certain you wish to do this?" Lydon stood three paces away, head bowed low. "The priest said this is the most ancient blood curse. Once activated, your life and Miss Eleanor's will be inextricably bound. If she dies, you die. This 'Life Sharing' is the only price to break the Reverse Seal."
Alistair opened his eyes, his pupils flickering with a frantic, cold light. "She wants to use death to threaten me, to buy her freedom. Then I will give her a shackle of 'Inability to Die.' I want her to know she doesn't even have the right to take her own life, because every breath she takes consumes mine."
This was an extreme, morbid kind of tenderness. He wasn't saving her; he was stripping away her final possibility of escape.
1.2 The Bedroom Showdown
He pushed open Eleanor's door. She was standing on the balcony, gazing at the distant coastline, her silhouette as fragile as a leaf ready to be swept away by the wind.
"Is this your counterattack?" Alistair walked up behind her, his voice low like a whisper in a lover's ear, yet carrying a bone-chilling coldness. "Making the priest betray me and leaving a dead-end trap?"
Eleanor turned, looking at him coldly. "That was my dignity, Alistair."
Alistair suddenly seized her wrist, pinning her against the balcony railing. His movements were crude and urgent. In that instant, the residual algorithm in his body issued a violent warning, but he ignored it.
"Dignity?" Alistair pulled out a slender silver needle, its tip glowing with an eerie red light. "The priest told me the Reverse Seal is unbreakable because it's based on your unilateral sacrifice. But what if that sacrifice becomes a mutual symbiosis?"
Before she could react, he plunged the needle into his own palm, then drove the blood-stained tip deep into the skin above Eleanor's collarbone!
1.3 The Curse of Symbiosis
"Ah!" Eleanor cried out in pain as a warm, searing energy instantly coursed through her body.
She watched as a tiny, dark-red thorn pattern appeared at her collarbone. Simultaneously, the same mark manifested on the back of Alistair's hand.
"What have you done?" Eleanor recoiled in horror, sensing the dormant Eye of Samos energy within her begin to merge frantically with Alistair's aura.
"This is the solution." Alistair looked at the mark on his hand, a cruel and satisfied smile curving his lips. "From now on, your heartbeat is my heartbeat; your pain is my pain. You want to end it? Fine. That means you will kill me with your own hands."
He leaned in, his breath fanning her nose. "Eleanor, didn't you always want to sacrifice yourself for me? Now, I give you my life. Do you dare to kill me?"
1.4 The Final Hook
Eleanor collapsed onto the floor. Her entire plan, her self-sacrifice, had become a massive irony. She had wanted to find liberation through death, but now she had become the cage for Alistair and her own eternal prison.
"You're a madman…" she wept.
"I'm the madman you trained." Alistair knelt, gently wiping away her tears, his tone as cold as ice. "Tonight, the Baglio Family will deliver the true vessel of the Eye of Samos. Since our lives are hanging by a thread, let's see together what kind of 'love' is sealed inside, and if it will burn us both to ashes."
Author's Note:
Thank you for your continued readership! 1.5k viewers prove we are on the right track. This chapter pushes the melodrama and angst to an irreversible point through the "Blood Symbiosis." Alistair giving his life to Eleanor is both a profound devotion and the ultimate form of twisted possession. In the next chapter, the Baglio Family's secret will explode. Stay tuned!
BY : KHChing