Lustbound: The System Of Temptation

Deep in the mountains, in a remote village with only one road in and out of it, a young man was staring dazedly at a line of ants crawling on a wall beside the bed he was lying on. His brain was currently mired in trying to explain something that no logic or science could account for. Every time he closed his eyes, he could see the headlights of the truck that had T-boned the small saloon car that he'd been driving. He could feel the force with which most of his organs had been turned to paste and his bones forced out of his body.

Greg had heard of people that had gone through near-death experiences, saying that time seemed to slow down in those moments. He knew that this was the result of adrenaline pushing the body into overdrive. For one to be able to react to a potentially lethal situation, the body was pushed beyond its usual limits and allowed to step into a state that it would otherwise not be able to maintain. Greg's body had been pushed into this state when he first saw the headlights of the truck. His brain had immediately become aware of the fact that something bad was about to happen. However, barely a second later, the truck hit the car he was in. The last conscious thought Greg could remember having was that he was about to die.

This memory was part of why Greg was in a daze as he watched the ants crawling on the wall beside his bed. He should have been dead, he was certain of it. But for whatever reason, here he was. After his death, Greg found himself in what he could only call a black void. How long he stayed there, he couldn't tell. Whether it was a thousand years or just a moment, he didn't know. Space and time somehow seemed to lose meaning in that place. After an indeterminate amount of time in that void, however, Greg felt himself being pulled. With no sense of space or direction, it's hard to say how one could feel the sensation of being pulled. However, that's the closest that Greg could come to describing it. Seeing no need to fight it, Greg allowed it to happen. Next thing he knew, Greg found himself looking up at the roof of a hut.

As he stared dazedly at the roof, unfamiliar memories had been flooding into his mind. It took some time for him to realize that these were the memories of the body he had taken over. It took him three days of slowly going through them for his mind to fully understand who he was and where he was. Luckily for Greg, and unluckily for the previous owner of this body, the hunting party he'd been part of had been attacked by a beast while they had been on a hunting trip with his fellow tribemates. Greg suspected that this attack was the reason the previous owner of this body had died. Had Greg not somehow taken over, then the death of this body would have been final.

Normally, Greg wasn't the kind of person to take pleasure in the misery of others. And he wasn't exactly happy about what had befallen the previous owner of this body. However, the injuries the previous owner had suffered, had given him an excuse that allowed him not to interact with others for a few days as he sorted out his memories. Otherwise, Greg was almost certain that he'd be figured out if he'd been immediately forced to interact with others. And given that this was a world of magic where spirits and possession were not foreign concepts, he wasn't sure what would happen to him if he was suspected of being possessed.

Greg turned his head with difficulty when he heard the door to the small hut he was in open. Given how weak he felt, his lips twitching slightly was the only hint of his attempt at smiling. His eyes quietly followed the voluptuous figure of the woman who walked in. Greg had been eighteen years of age when he died in his previous life. Coincidentally, the young man whose body he'd taken over was also eighteen years of age. As such, Greg could be forgiven for being unable to ignore the sex appeal that was almost literally dripping off the woman that was approaching his bed.

The woman had raven black hair and a face that would have had famous magazines fighting to have her on their cover page. Her massive bust quite prominently pushed against her dress almost as if they were fighting to be free. Her petite waist flared out into wide hips that could tempt the most ardent monks out there. From the few times that Greg had managed to watch her leave his room, he knew that she had an ass that could be the fall of kingdoms. Part of him was glad that he was bedridden otherwise he couldn't trust himself not to reach out and grab it. Just one touch and he'd die the second time around a happy man.

Watching her as she came to a stop by his bedside, Greg couldn't help but feel a strange sense of contradiction as he looked at the woman. On the woman's face was a stern expression. Both in the way she moved and how she carried herself, Greg got the distinct impression that she was a straight-laced person that would brook no nonsense from anyone. Yet, somehow, the scandalously licentious outfit she had on stood in stark contrast to this impression of her. The dress she wore wasn't at all short, the way it clung to her form, however, made it a feat of will for any man not to visually devour her. The deep V of its neckline framed her ample cleavage in such a way that Greg was certain that her tits were breaking some law of physics by not spilling out.

The woman reached forward and pulled off the blanket covering his body. Greg's naked body was exposed to the woman. She, however, barely even reacted. She had the neutral, detached look of a physician looking at a patient as opposed to a woman to a man. To her, his body was a broken specimen that she had to put back together and nothing more. And no wonder. As Greg looked down at himself, he could see several ghastly wounds all across his torso down to his limbs. It was clear that whatever animal he'd fallen victim to, it had done quite a number on him. In a bid to protect itself, probably, his mind couldn't quite clearly recall what animal it was or how exactly he ended up at its mercy. The most he could remember was that he'd been on a hunting trip at the time.

Greg had struggled with believing the memories he'd inherited on taking over this body, especially when it came to the more mystical aspects of this world. This woman, however, was part of the reason Greg had been forced to believe that they weren't hallucinations but actual reality. Greg's eyes dropped to the woman's hands as she started moving them in strange patterns before her. While her hand movements may have seemed random, Greg could quite clearly see that they were anything but. It was almost like a luminescent green ink was flowing out of the tips of the woman's fingers. Greg, however, knew that there was no way that it could have been actual ink as the patterns that she was drawing remained floating in mid-air almost as if there was some invisible canvas there that she was drawing on. Given that the woman had been visiting him three times a day for the past three days, Greg had already memorized the strange pattern that she usually drew in the air.

Greg's eyes followed her hands and fingers, watching as she fluidly completed the rather complex pattern. The completed pattern was a complex sigil composed of about ten different runic symbols all crammed in a circle and yet somehow not touching each other. The moment the pattern was completed, the circle shrunk down to about a tenth of its original size and landed on the woman's right palm. Extending her hand towards him, Greg watched as a green light gushed out of the symbols and spread out over his body.

The effect was immediate. It felt like a thick viscous liquid was covering every inch of his skin leaving him with a cool feeling all over. It wasn't anything dramatic like immediate healing, Greg, however, could feel his wounds slowly getting better. The pain was no longer as sharp, and his torso looked just a bit better than before. From the small beads of sweat that formed on her forehead and the way her right hand shook slightly even as the healer held it towards him, Greg could see that it took quite a bit of effort for her to keep the spell going. Still, the woman's serious air didn't break. Her face remained placid as a lake as she watched the results of her ministrations.

Things remained as such for about three minutes. Despite the struggle of maintaining the output of healing magic, the woman remained stoic even as she continued to administer the treatment. After the third minute, however, the magic that had been flowing out of her began to falter. Like a flickering bulb, the magic started to become intermittent. In the state he was in, Greg couldn't move about much, as such, he could only stay still and watch his healer. This allowed him to note the fact that towards the end, her expression morphed from one who was struggling to one who was in pain. To her credit, the woman had a pretty good poker face. She wasn't grimacing or anything, but the subtle way her jaw clenched and left eye twitched told it all.