The Rise of the Sacred Toad Consort

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After helping my brother's beast queens carry his children, I decided to cut off his manhood.

The comments suddenly exploded:

[What's going on? Has he lost his mind? If he actually does it, how is the male lead supposed to use him to win favor with the beast queens?!]

[Relax. This ugly freak is covered head to toe in festering sores. His gender is barely his one saving grace there's no way he'd actually go through with it!]

[Am I the only one who feels a little sorry for Ugly? Every day he gets used half to death by the beast queens, then gets tossed back in the cellar with nothing. Not even a warm bowl of soup. And he has to watch the male lead collect all the rewards.]

[Shut up with that bleeding-heart crap! The reality is that Ugly is disgusting, covered in rotting tumors. If the male lead had any feelings for the beast queens if he was willing to sacrifice himself do you think any of this would've fallen to someone like him?]

I stared at those words, and a chill ran through my entire body.

The cellar door was kicked open.

Light flooded in. My brother, Ethan, stepped inside, his face full of concern.

"You're awake?"

He set a bowl of black, murky medicine down gently beside me.

"I know this is hard on you. But you know your condition is well. Everything I do is for your own good."

"The Lion Queen wants you again tonight. Clean yourself up properly. Don't let her feel those sores on your skin."

Ethan let out a long sigh, his gaze dropping to my abdomen, which was still seeping blood. His expression carried three parts disgust and seven parts pity.

"You know what she's like. Obsessed with cleanliness. Can't stand a single thing out of place."

"Last time one of your pustules burst and stained the fur mat she raged for an hour outside. Nearly threw us both out."

"If I hadn't knelt on the ground begging, swearing it was my fault, we'd both be vulture food by now."

If this had been the old me, I would have already hung my head in shame by now.

I would've hidden my knobbed, gnarled hands behind my back like a child who'd done something wrong.

Then I would've stumbled over an apology swearing I'd be more careful next time, that I'd sand my skin smooth before I went to her again.

Honestly.

More than once, I'd sensed that Ethan's kindness toward me carried a suffocating coldness underneath it.

Whenever the beast queens had wrung me out to the point of near-death, he would sigh and say he wished he could help that his heart belonged to someone else and he simply couldn't make himself go to them. It was such a burden on me, he'd say.

When I was starving and chewing on bark, he'd be up in the main house. Right in front of the beast queens, he'd throw his leftover bones down to me and announce loudly, "Ugly loves these says the texture is the best part."

But I always managed to push those thoughts away.

Ethan was the rarest lop-eared rabbit shifter in the whole tribe. The pride of our entire bloodline.

How could someone like him have any ill will toward an ugly wretch like me?

Until now.

I watched the comments light up.

[LOL, the male lead's manipulation game is next level. The Lion Queen rejected him because he was bad in bed but he turned it around and blamed Ugly for dirtying the mat.]

[I think the male lead is deliberately keeping Ugly from getting treatment. The worse those sores get, the more ashamed Ugly feels. Too embarrassed to show his face anywhere. Keeps him a shadow forever.]

[That's just how our clever little bunny operates! Honestly, even if Ugly got cured, he'd never be half as good-looking as the male lead but you can never be too careful, right?]

[Don't worry, he already slipped Sterilization Weed into that medicine. It'll help the beast queen conceive, but it accelerates aging in the drinker. This freak doesn't have many doses left. Once the Lion Queen delivers, he'll be done.]

I couldn't stop myself from clenching my fist tighter around the straw beneath me.

Meeting Ethan's wide, innocent eyes, I found for the first time that I couldn't make myself crawl over like a dog and drink that medicine.

I didn't know what I was feeling.

I pressed my cracked lips together, my voice rough and low, and said something I'd never said before.

"My body I think something's wrong with it."

"Tonight I want to rest."

The air in the cellar went still.

The saintly, long-suffering expression on Ethan's face froze solid.

A second later, the comments went into a frenzy.

[Oh my God, is this lowlife trying to start something? He doesn't actually think that because the beast queen might be carrying his child, he gets to be the tribe's treasured consort does he?]

[Every scheming side character who tries to climb the social ladder through a pregnancy ends up the same way. This won't end well.]

[Is he trying to make the male lead grovel? This feels like a threat.]

[Unbelievable. Does every tool character have zero self-awareness? If he won't do it, there are plenty of slaves who will.]

The comments were running hot.

It was only now that I fully understood what I was.

I was a side character in a beast-world romance novel a tool. The ugly foil to the irresistible male lead.

My true form was a toad shifter. Despised by everyone. While Ethan's true form was a lop-eared rabbit beloved wherever he went.

Ethan had lost the one person he ever loved, and he couldn't bring himself to feel anything for any of the beast queens.

But he still needed to survive in this world.

So he made me his stand-in.

Every night, when the beast queens were sedated by desire-inducing incense, he pushed me into their chambers.

He stood outside the door collecting praise and affection. I was inside, enduring whatever the beast queens chose to do to me.

When morning came, he'd spray himself with a specially crafted imitation scent, then slip into bed beside them to receive their tenderness as they woke.

And I would be discarded like a used-up piece of trash, dragged back to the dark cellar below.

I would even rot in that dark cellar when I died.

I knew I was ugly.

But did being ugly mean I deserved to be deceived and used like this and then discarded as a stepping stone for his comfort and status?

After I spoke my refusal out loud

A flicker of disbelief crossed Ethan's eyes. Then they went cold.

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't curse me.

He simply crouched down slowly, pinched my chin with two fingers like I was something distasteful, and forced me to look at him.

"What are you babbling about?"

"The Lion Queen is in her frenzy tonight. If you rest, who's going to calm her down? Are you going to sit there and watch her tear me apart?"

He tilted his head and gave me a look that was almost a smile his voice gentle, his words like blades.

"Besides, I'm not forcing you. If you don't want to drink this medicine if you don't want to serve the beast queens that's fine."

"I'll just go tell them it was you who poisoned the cubs out of jealousy. Let's see who they believe the father of their children, or the monster who lives in the cellar."

He stood up and straightened his clothes.

"Drink the medicine before it gets cold. It won't work once it cools. Don't do something stupid, Ugly. I'm doing this so we both survive."

Then the cellar door slammed shut.

His footsteps faded away.

I did not drink the medicine.

I tilted my wrist and poured every drop onto the ground.

A soft hiss rose from the dirt where it landed.

I watched it eat into the ground, and the cold feeling in my chest sank deeper.

This was what Ethan called a tonic he made for my own good.

The comments rolled across my vision again, faster than ever.

[Oh my God he poured out the Bone-Corrosion compound?! The male lead specifically exchanged for that to suppress his golden toad bloodline!]

[Doesn't matter. Eighteen years of that stuff the toad skin has been fused to him for ages. Pouring it out changes nothing.]

[Am I the only one worried about the Lion Queen tonight? Without that rotting smell from the medicine to mask it what if she catches a whiff of his actual scent that strange fragrance and figures out the switch?]

[No chance. She's completely out of her mind during a frenzy.]

I stared hard at the two words: golden toad.

So that was it.

All these years the festering sores, the stench it wasn't a curse from heaven.

It was man-made.

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?!"

He rushed over and looked me up and down. I'd wrapped myself from head to toe even covering my face and he assumed I was too badly used up to let anyone see me. Too ashamed to show myself.

"Thank God. I always knew you were hard to kill."

Ethan had no time to ask how badly I was hurt. He pressed forward, urgent.

"What about them? Are they calm?"

I dropped my voice and mimicked the weak, hollow tone I used to use.

"Yeah they're all asleep."

Ethan shoved me toward the back of the cellar, then grabbed the vial of perfume and sprayed himself down like it was going out of style.

"Calming three apex beast queens on a Blood Moon night that's a feat no one in history has pulled off. That's my achievement."

A smile of absolute certainty spread across his face.

"When they wake up and find me beside them, they'll be more devoted to me than ever."

He straightened his clothes and sprinted toward the main hall.

The cellar door closed.

I pulled the wrappings off my face and looked at my skin reborn.

The old poison-stains on my arms had sloughed away, revealing new flesh with a faint golden sheen underneath.

The comments in front of me were still arguing at full volume.

[Something's off! When the queens wake up, they're going to know something isn't right!]

[You're overthinking it. The male lead has his system buffs and the perfume it's always worked before. Beast shifters can't tell faces apart. They go by scent.]

[But I thought I saw Ugly change in the main hall? I couldn't see clearly the feed was all blurred out.]

[Who cares? The male lead is the male lead. Ugly is a stand-in prop. That's just how it works. That's the law.]

I let out a quiet laugh and settled cross-legged on the ground, circulating the beast queen energy through my body.

Meanwhile, in the main hall

Ethan gazed at the three women sleeping in breathtaking beauty even mid-slumber, and swallowed.

He lay down on the bed and arranged himself into a pose of someone just waking up.

A moment later, Seraphine's gold slit-pupils snapped open.

Ethan pulled her into a hug. "Sera, you scared me to death last night. I pushed through everything to calm you down I'm completely exhausted."

In the past, Seraphine would've melted with guilt.

But this time, she frowned. Her nose twitched.

"What is that smell? It's overpowering."

Beside her, Vyx and Thalara were waking up too.

Vyx's ice-cold serpent tail lashed out and sent Ethan flying ten feet across the room.

"Get away from me. You reek."

Ethan hit the floor, completely stunned.

The comments were stunned too.

[WAIT it's backfiring?!]

[How is that possible?! The male lead's charm stat is maxed out!]

[What is Vyx talking about?! What does she mean he REEKS?!]

Thalara murmured under her breath, "The person last night I couldn't see his face clearly. But the texture of his skin it didn't feel like rabbit."

"It felt more like warm jade."

The plan was unraveling.

Ethan panicked. He scrambled to his knees and started crying, holding up his wrist to show a red scratch mark.

"That was me last night! I came in to save you that scratch is from you. As for the smell I was worried about bothering you, so I scrubbed myself down so thoroughly I washed away my own scent"

It was a reasonable story. The suspicion in Seraphine's eyes began to ease. She reached out and helped him to his feet.

"I see I'm sorry. We misjudged you."

Thalara still looked uncertain, but when she saw Seraphine accept the explanation, she let her killing intent recede.

"Stop crying. If you really did save us, you can ask for whatever reward you want."

Ethan's heart leapt with triumph. He'd gambled right.

He was just about to name his price

A faint breeze drifted in through the great hall doors.

Carried on it: a scent. Barely there, understated and yet completely, overwhelmingly dominant.

The hand Seraphine had been running through Ethan's hair went rigid.

Thalara's pupils contracted to pinpoints, her gaze locked onto the direction the wind had come from.

That scent it was identical to the memory that had been carved into her bones last night.

"It's coming from outside."

The smile on Ethan's face turned to stone.

The direction the scent was drifting from was the cellar.