A Step into the Past - Volume 23 Chapter 4

One day, I woke up only find out that I’d become a Demon Lord, an individual responsible for protecting a dungeon. The world I’d been spirited away to was one filled with violence. Gigantic monsters wandered through it and competed with each other each and every day for the right to survive. I had no choice but to strengthen my dungeon’s defenses in hopes of living another day—or at least that was what I’d thought. For some odd reason, I instead ended up spending my days in relaxation and bliss.

He, since childhood, had followed the Foreigner to practice the Defying Heaven Art, entering the most secretive special forces and becoming a fearsome assassin that made others tremble at the mere mention of his name. After a single failure, he took early retirement, but he ended up as the personal bodyguard for a rich heiress, a school beauty. Accidentally provoking some mysterious Cultivators, he gradually unveiled a hidden world of Cultivation beyond the mortal realm...

After seeking pleasure in the nightclub and a night of romance, he discovered there’s a seed in his stomach;

After being torn from the only life she knew, 16-year-old Margo is forced into a new home with strangers who call themselves her parents. Haunted by memories of her past and consumed by feelings of isolation, she struggles to adapt to her unfamiliar surroundings. School offers little relief—until she meets Lucien, a mysterious boy who appears just when she needs a friend the most.Gabriel is everything Margo needs: kind, attentive, and always ready to whisk her away from her troubles. Each night, he invites her to secret places—an abandoned playground, a fog-choked garden, a crumbling train station at the edge of town—each more unsettling than the last. Yet with every chilling rendezvous, Margo feels more alive... more seen.But something isn’t right. Gabriel never comes to school during the day. Her adoptive parents never see him. And when they catch her talking to thin air, their concern deepens into fear. They say Gabriel isn't real—that he’s a figment of her imagination. Margo wants to believe them, but Gabriel feels real. More real than anything else in her life.As the nights grow colder and more twisted, Gabriel’s true nature begins to surface. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Time warps in his presence. And the places they visit seem to echo with whispers from another world. Margo is forced to ask herself: Who—or what—is Gabriel? Why does he only want her? And what will happen on the final night he asks her to come with him?As the line between reality and delusion begins to crumble, Margo must make an impossible choice: stay in a world where she feels loved, or return to one that barely feels real.But one thing is certain—some friendships never let go.