Chapter 460: Miracle at Ten Thousand Meters
At the last moment of her life, Ye Liyou didn't think of her martial sisters or her own life or death, but of that person.
The world outside the window was a blur of spinning sky and sea. Inside the cabin, the shriek of tearing metal was a constant, deafening scream that drowned out the prayers and cries of the other passengers. Gravity was a brutal force, first leaving her weightless, then slamming her back into her seat with crushing pressure. Yet, through this storm of chaos and impending death, her mind was strangely, terrifyingly clear. All the noise faded into a dull hum, and a single image burned behind her eyelids: Shen Anyu.
A wave of deep regret flashed in Ye Liyou's beautiful eyes. It was a regret so sharp it felt like a shard of glass in her heart. She remembered their time in Sakura Country, the tension between them so thick she could have cut it with one of her blades. The unspoken words, the meaningful glances, the moments she could have closed the distance between them but held back, bound by a lifetime of caution and an assassin's ingrained emotional discipline. She had been a fool. What did pride matter now? What did her identity as the Blood Shadow Rose matter when she was just seconds away from becoming a smear of red against the ocean?
If only she had been bolder. If only she had reached out and taken his hand, pulled him close, and told him everything. If Heaven, in some cruel twist of irony, were to grant her another chance, she swore she would burn the world down to be with him. She wouldn't care about factions, about destiny, about the shadows she lived in. She would cast it all aside for one more moment in his presence.
But there were no second chances. The roaring in her ears grew louder, the vibrations more violent. Ye Liyou slowly closed her eyes, a single, perfect tear tracing a path down her cold cheek.
'No fate in this life… If there is a next…'
[Ding! Detected Destined Heroine Ye Liyou's favorability +1, plundering +3000 destiny value!]
[Ding! Detected Destined Heroine Ye Liyou's total favorability 90, extra plundering +50000 destiny value!]
…
The plane was plummeting like a stone, a metal coffin on a death dive.
Seven thousand meters! The pressure change made ears pop and sinuses ache. Loose items—laptops, purses, service carts—became deadly projectiles, slamming against the ceiling and walls with sickening thuds.
Five thousand meters! The friction of the air was superheating the fuselage. A faint smell of burning electronics filled the cabin, a toxic smell, a grim premonition of their end.
Three thousand meters! The ocean was no longer an abstract blue canvas but a terrifyingly detailed, churning maw waiting to swallow them whole. Whitecaps looked like teeth.
Two thousand meters!
One thousand meters!
In the span of just three or four minutes, an eternity of terror, the aircraft had fallen from the heavens. Despair hung heavy in the cabin, a cold, smothering blanket. Everyone, including the peerless assassin Ye Liyou, had accepted their end.
But the next moment, just as the plane's nose was about to kiss the waves and shatter into a million pieces…
Suddenly, the plane stopped.
It didn't slow down. It didn't pull up. It simply ceased its terminal velocity in an instant. One moment, it was an object of terrifying momentum, hurtling towards oblivion. The next, it hung suspended, dozens of meters in the air, as if a divine hand had reached out and plucked it from its tragic trajectory. Then, with an impossible, gentle grace, it began to slowly, smoothly descend.
Silence.
The screaming had stopped. The alarms had died. The roar of the wind was gone. The only sound was the collective, disbelieving gasp of over a hundred people. For a long, stunned moment, nobody moved. They were frozen, their minds utterly unable to process the impossible defiance of every law of physics they knew.
The sheer inertial force from such an abrupt stop should have been catastrophic. The kinetic energy of a passenger jet falling from ten thousand meters is staggering; even a skyscraper would have been sheared in two. The plane itself, a marvel of steel and engineering, should have been compressed into a mangled ball of scrap metal. The passengers should have been turned into little more than red paste against the forward bulkheads.
But they weren't. The plane was intact. They were alive.
As the aircraft settled onto a sandy beach with a soft, final bump, the spell of shock shattered. Reality, or a new, miraculous version of it, came rushing back in.
It wasn't an illusion.
A devoutly religious man, his face streaked with tears, stumbled into the aisle and fell to his knees. He shakily drew a small cross on his forehead, lips, and chest with his thumb, his voice a choked, fervent whisper.
"God… It must be God! God has saved us!"
His cry broke the dam. The cabin erupted into a pandemonium of joyous, hysterical relief. People were weeping, laughing, and shouting all at once.
"Buddha's mercy! The Jade Emperor's protection! Thank God, thank Mazu! We survived! We actually survived! This is incredible!"
"It must have been Guanyin Bodhisattva!" a woman cried, her hands pressed together in prayer. "The South Sea is her domain! It was her! She heard our prayers!"
The younger passengers, while equally stunned, processed the miracle through a different lens.
"Holy crap… Was that Superman?" one young man breathed, eyes wide.
"Keep your comic book heroes out of this, this is real!" another retorted immediately. "Superman is fiction. It had to be the Great Sage, Sun Wukong, who saved us!"
"Bro, you also play Black Myth?" a third chimed in, the adrenaline making him giddy. "I beat Tiger Vanguard on my first try!"
In the aftermath of cheating death, the passengers were a whirlwind of agitated, incoherent emotion. Their minds, unable to grasp the scientific impossibility of what had just occurred, latched onto the only explanation that made sense: divine intervention. Gods, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas—they attributed their survival to every deity they could name. Besides a divine being, who else could possibly strip a falling jet of its destructive force and set it down as gently as a feather?
The sheer, exhilarating miracle of it all washed away the terror of the preceding moments. This wasn't a story of a near-death experience; this was a story of salvation they would tell for the rest of their lives.
Even Ye Liyou, whose life had been spent dealing in death and shadow, felt a genuine, pure joy bloom on her cold, beautiful face.
She had survived. She was alive.
'I don't know which god or Buddha saved me,' she thought, her heart swelling with a gratitude so intense it was almost painful. 'But Ye Liyou is eternally in your debt!'
Unseen and unheard, Shen Anyu stood nearby on the beach, his form hidden by a subtle distortion of light. Seeing the rare, radiant smile on Ye Liyou's face, he let out a quiet sigh of relief. That was close. He had been monitoring the situation, but he had waited, gambling on her emotions. He needed that final surge of feeling, that last push of desperation and love, to tip her favorability over the tipping point.
Fortunately, at the very last second, it had worked. Her favorability broke through ninety, and the System rewards flooded in. Shen Anyu had instantly triggered his Supernatural Skill, Love Infinite Teleportation, crossing thousands of miles in the blink of an eye to intervene. If he had been a second later, the famed Blood Shadow Rose, a gold-medal assassin on the Dark List, would have been reduced to nothing more than a tragic, bloody paste.
He had arrived just in time.
With his current power—a hard base at the Heavenly Human level, his Qi Cultivation at the seventh layer, and his dual mastery of immortal and martial paths—his God-level Telekinesis had evolved into something immense. To catch a civilian aircraft weighing hundreds of tons and falling at terminal velocity was, for him, a simple matter of focus. The raw power required was immense, a telekinetic grip that could crush mountains, but the true difficulty lay in the precision—to negate the devastating momentum without ripping the plane apart.
It was a feat that, in the martial arts world, an ordinary Heavenly Human realm expert would die attempting. Even a fabled Land Immortal would likely find it a strenuous, overt display of power, unable to accomplish it with such silent, traceless elegance.
'Wait a minute… something's not right,' Shen Anyu thought, his brow furrowing slightly.
A flicker of suspicion cooled his relief. He re-examined the situation with a cold, analytical eye.
Ye Liyou was a Destined Heroine. According to the established conventions of this world, a character like her shouldn't die so easily or so randomly. When a heroine faced mortal danger, it was almost always a narrative device, a carefully constructed stage for the protagonist to perform a heroic rescue, thereby winning her heart and gaining favor. If she simply died in a plane crash, what was the point? The protagonist, Ye Linyuan, wouldn't suddenly embark on a quest to resurrect her, would he? Did that kid even possess such an impossible power?
On the other side of the world, in a luxurious villa in Jiangjing Manor, Ye Linyuan sneezed. He stared at the mountain of homework stacked on his desk, his face a mask of pure gloom. He muttered under his breath, his voice filled with venom.
'That bastard Shen Anyu… As soon as I break this damn curse and get my strength back, I'll make you pay for this humiliation. Just you wait.'
Smack!
A ruler slammed down hard on the desk, inches from his fingers, making him jump. A stern-faced female teacher, whose severe demeanor and aura of absolute authority were reminiscent of a certain infamous abbess, glared at him over her black-framed glasses.
"Ye Linyuan, do not let your mind wander!" she scolded, her voice sharp and devoid of warmth. "Young Master Shen has hired me to tutor you, and I intend to see his investment bear fruit. We will cultivate you into a model student, well-rounded in morality, intelligence, physical education, aesthetics, and labor. You are forbidden from slacking off!"
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