Li Fei drew back the curtains, and the gentle evening breeze stirred the ends of her hair, carrying away the smell of instant noodles that lingered in the room.
Young Miss Wang fussed with her hair before the mirror while stealing glances at Li Fei, fidgeting restlessly—clearly she was looking forward to the night's entertainment.
Qiao'er, meanwhile, sat upright in her chair, taking in every detail of Wang Yutong's newlywed-bride demeanor. Her face was calm as still water as she quietly held a scroll, yet she had spent the better part of a tea's brewing on a single, sparsely-worded page without ever turning it.
A sour, bitter taste spread through her mouth.
Wang Yutong waited and waited, but Li Fei showed no intention of heading to the bedroom. Instead she leaned by the window, unhurriedly changing her gear, even slipping on a pair of red high heels.
Finally she couldn't stay quiet. "When... when are we going to bed?"
"No rush. Let's wait a bit."
Li Fei's voice carried a lazy drawl, a cigarette held lightly between her fingers, her eyes more intoxicating than wine.
In a decidedly unladylike manner, she propped one leg up, heel resting on the windowsill, the long, shapely lines of her leg scissoring the air with soul-snatching allure. Drawn by gravity, the hem of her dress slid down her smooth thigh to settle at just the right spot, bathing a broad expanse of skin in the moonlight until it seemed to glow—lovely, yet never crude.
"Wait... wait for what?"
Those vivid, alluring legs filled her vision, and Wang Yutong stumbled over her words.
"We might have guests tonight."
Seeing that even Qiao'er's gaze had been dazzled by those legs, a flicker of dizzy fascination crossing her face, Li Fei's lips curved—like a fox spirit who had just bewitched a respectable maiden, sly and pleased with herself.
Wang Yutong, however, shuddered, unease written across her face.
"Out here in these desolate hills, in the dead of night—who could possibly come visiting...?"
"Lord Li made quite a commotion earlier. The demons nearby, and the Demon Suppression Bureau's people too, may all come to pay a visit."
Qiao'er sighed, abandoning the pretense, and closed the book in her hands.
At these words, Wang Yutong's face went pale.
Only now did she remember that she was not in the city but out in the wilds, where demons and monsters roamed freely... The comfortable house, the soft lighting, the steaming food, and Li Fei had, for a time, made the young miss forget her situation.
It took Qiao'er's reminder to snap Wang Yutong back to her senses. They hadn't come here for a holiday—they were here to wrest the elixir of immortality from the demons, in competition with the Demon Suppression Bureau!
"Huh? Then—won't that be dangerous?"
Every trace of anticipation and delight vanished from Wang Yutong's face; her voice trembled.
—Of course not. Wasn't the demoness being so ostentatious precisely to bait a catch? If she weren't confident, how would she dare to so brazenly conjure such a conspicuous house?
Qiao'er had her answer, yet she didn't offer Wang Yutong the gentle comfort she once would have. Instead, she watched coldly as the girl trembled.
The young miss who had always lorded over her and ordered her about—the object of her long, bitter, unrequited love, who had twice tried to have her killed—now, stripped of her identity as the Wang family's heiress, seemed so utterly pathetic... And a person like this still hoped to spend a night of bliss with the demoness?
Qiao'er covered her mouth as a twisted pleasure surged up through her.
The resentment amassed from years of beatings and abuse; the humble, submissive, bone-deep love she had endured; the thrill of revenge fulfilled; the jealousy that the demoness had inexplicably cast her aside to share a bed with this girl instead—all of it congealed at last into a thick, slick silt that bubbled up within her, and Qiao'er found she couldn't stop.
Yet even as she watched her, someone was watching them both.
—This is exactly what I wanted to see: the stage of fate.
—Little Qiao'er, let me see just how far you'll go.
Li Fei's grip tightened around the glowing green True Sight Gem in her palm, her eyes crinkling, even the swaying tips of her hair exuding a bewitching charm—like the serpent in the Garden of Eden that tempted Eva to eat the forbidden fruit.
A spiritual euphoria rivaling the sensation of swallowing Lady Annie's wedding ring surged through Li Fei's skull like a roaring sea. She parted her lips slightly, her pitch-black eyes almost dripping.
…
Wang Wu was a hulking man, his jaw covered in a somewhat unkempt beard, his features quite ferocious.
Yet no one would have guessed that this towering, brawny fellow—who looked every bit the ruthless bandit—possessed astonishingly supple bones and nimble skill.
He moved through the night, each step landing within the shadows, his footfalls utterly silent. His body folded into eerie arcs and bent ceaselessly, ensuring his figure stayed cloaked in darkness at all times. The True Qi within him circulated along a specific pattern, masking his body heat and breath; even the light in his eyes dimmed. Like a leopard stalking prey through the dark, he all but merged with the night.
"Let's see what tricks this new mountain king has up her sleeve."
A crafty, twisted smile on his face, Wang Wu crept toward the hilltop like a specter.
He loved the dark. Under cover of night, he could come and go freely through the lairs of Heaven Realm great demons, and he had once taken the head of a Heaven Realm master in his sleep. On every dull night, he would slip into other people's homes, spying on all manner of secrets that could never see the light of day, and crafting one nightmare after another from which there was no waking.
Soon the distinctive, sprawling residence came into view, and the exquisite building that had appeared out of nowhere made Wang Wu's steps falter.
"Heh heh..."
Wang Wu's lips split into a grin as he closed in on the house at a quicker pace.
The more mysterious a thing was, the more thrilled Wang Wu felt while exploring and defiling it—and the higher his excitement climbed, the slower his heartbeat grew, faint and soundless, erasing every trace of his own presence.
"When a friend comes from afar—give him a few dozen lashes and drive him off to the side courtyard."
A woman's voice, clear as an oriole rising from the valley, suddenly came from above, and Wang Wu's pupils shuddered violently—his True Qi nearly slipped out of control.
Discovered?
Impossible!
My night-prowling skills earned the praise of Nine Thousand Years himself. Unless it were one of those few Innate powerhouses, or a demon king, no one could see through them!
Though shaken to the core, Wang Wu instinctively burrowed into a deep patch of shadow. With the light spilling from the windows, there were far too many shadows here for him to hide in.
After a few seconds, Wang Wu quietly poked his head out and spotted a woman of indescribable beauty leaning against a third-floor window, chin resting in her hand as she gazed at the moon.
With his extraordinarily keen perception, Wang Wu could sense that two forces dwelled within the woman—one pure and vast, the other scorching and savage. A powerful sense of danger pricked at his back like thorns, making his eyelid twitch.
"A human? Cultivating both Daoist arts and True Qi at once? What technique is she practicing, that her foundation is so formidable?"
A string of doubts surfaced in his mind. Wang Wu licked his lips, and the voyeuristic urge welling ceaselessly within him drove him to move once more, closer to the residence.
Instinct told him this woman was far more terrifying than an ordinary Heaven Realm cultivator—but so what?
Wang Wu firmly believed that so long as he didn't provoke those few Innate great powers revered as Earthly Immortals, no Heaven Realm master, however strong, could ever detect his trail!
And even if one did notice him, they'd never manage to hold him.
Wang Wu slipped soundlessly to the corner of the residence's wall and glanced up again. The woman was still staring blankly out the window, oblivious to the uninvited guest.
So that line just now had to have been her talking to herself...
Wang Wu's grin widened, and he soon noticed that a window on the second floor hadn't been shut all the way.
Like a gecko, he crawled flush against the wall, the True Qi wreathing his fingertips generating a powerful suction that fixed his tall, burly frame firmly to the surface as he scaled nimbly and swiftly up to the window.
Peering in through the gap, he saw furniture inside that was elegant and lovely; a tiny creature with butterfly wings slept soundly on the bed, utterly unaware that danger was steadily descending.
With a hook of his finger, Wang Wu silently drew the window open and slipped his body inside. As he approached the sprite, he drew out an exquisite willow-leaf blade.
The weapon left much to be desired in a head-on fight, but for interrogation it was perfectly suited.
As a professional, he had a hundred ways to torment a subject's mind to the breaking point without letting a single sound escape, until they spilled everything they knew.
Grinning, Wang Wu reached out with a hand broad as a palm-leaf fan toward the yellow-haired sprite.
Suddenly, he realized something was wrong.
The wind... why had it stopped?
Wang Wu whipped his head around, and in the next instant cold sweat drenched the shirt on his back.
A dense swarm of little sprites hovered outside the window, butterfly wings fluttering, blocking the very opening he had pried apart.
Dozens of pairs of hollow, lifeless eyes stared at him as one, cold and merciless as lowly rotting corpses.
He'd been discovered!
Wang Wu's heart clenched.
"Good evening."
Along with the cheerful greeting, the tightly shut door burst open.
The woman who had just been staring vacantly out the window now stood beyond the door, beaming, the very picture of a warm and gracious host.
Every hair on Wang Wu's body stood on end. He seized the yellow-haired sprite by the neck, pressed the small blade to the center of its brow, and backed away carefully with his hostage, his glare boring into the woman as he said in a low voice, "How did you find me?"
"iseedeadpeople."[1]
Li Fei's answer was a string of gibberish, and she edged closer to him as she spoke.
"Don't come any closer!"
Wang Wu's expression darkened, and he pricked the skin of the sprite's forehead with the blade's edge. "We of the Demon Suppression Bureau have no wish to cross you. I'm only here on routine business. Let me leave, and from now on we'll each keep to our own—well water and river water, neither disturbing the other."
"Now how could I allow that?"
Li Fei said with a smiling squint, "There's an old saying that goes: when a friend comes from afar, no matter how far, he must be slain."
"You, Mister Wang, come calling unannounced in the dead of night—if I let you walk out of here standing upright, wouldn't I lose all my face?"
"You—how do you know—"
Seeing Li Fei speak his surname, Wang Wu's expression changed abruptly.
But soon he thought of Lü Zhengchun, waiting alone in Luyuan County to receive them, and cried out in shock and fury, "What did you do to Lü Zhengchun?!"
"Take a guess."
Li Fei said, a half-smile on her lips.
Wang Wu narrowed his eyes. Even as he marveled that this brazen woman dared to offend the Demon Suppression Bureau to the death, his mind raced.
That bastard Lü Zhengchun was surely done for... Even Nine Thousand Years' adopted son had died at her hands—invoking the Demon Suppression Bureau clearly wouldn't cow her... And knowing that man's character, the intelligence on his whole party had no doubt been sold out down to the last detail...
After a long, brooding pause, Wang Wu sighed.
"Lü Zhengchun must have already told you everything—what he should and shouldn't have. So let's lay our cards on the table."
"You know my surname, so you must know what I'm capable of. If I want to leave, you can't hold me. But I don't want to get hurt—it would hamper the operations still to come... Besides, I can't stand that Lü Zhengchun either."
"So let me go. In exchange, I won't say a word when I get back, and you can take the chance to flee for your life. But if you insist on having your way, on trying to lay your hands on the Longevity Fruit—I'll still be able to escape, at most paying some small price. It's just that..."
Wang Wu paused, his hand tightening around the sprite's neck, the threat unmistakable.
"This butterfly sprite of yours probably won't survive either... I've never seen a creature like it—and one so beautiful must be quite rare, no? If you don't want us both to come out the worse for it—"
In the face of Wang Wu's threat, Li Fei gave a brilliant smile, then lashed out without the slightest warning. Her lithe waist twisted, and her long, straight right leg whipped out with a howl.
Her shin was like a blade, cleaving through with unstoppable force, trailing a shrill whistle of rent air. Wang Wu instinctively thrust out his arm, shoving the sprite in front of himself, hoping to make Li Fei hesitate for fear of harming her hostage.
But Wang Wu had miscalculated.
The leg-blade struck out without mercy. The captive sprite burst into motes of light in an instant, and then Wang Wu's arm bones shattered joint by joint under the ferocious, colossal force.
Of all the martial arts—this was the Russian Rescue Method!
"You—!"
Amid Wang Wu's cry of pain, Li Fei's eyes flashed like cold lightning—like a Russian counter-terror operative, utterly indifferent to whether the hostage lived or died.
Having landed her strike, her body spun lightly and her other leg swept out in the same motion, like a viper darting from its den—sharp and cold—the keen heel of Heartshatter aimed straight at Wang Wu's heart.
At the last possible moment, Wang Wu guarded his vitals at the cost of his other arm being pierced clean through, and, riding the powerful impact, kicked off with both legs to hurl himself hard toward the window.
With a shattering crash—
Glass burst apart. The Summon Sprites packed layer upon layer before the window were decimated in an instant, and along the falling path of the blood-stained figure they winked out one after another into motes of light, forming a dazzling, brilliant trail.
Yet the summoned units, walling him in with their bodies, had after all slowed the enemy by a single beat.
Pft—
Wang Wu crashed to the ground in a sorry heap and spat a mouthful of blood, a sharp pain lancing through his organs—clearly he'd taken internal injuries from Li Fei's attack.
But he paid his wounds no mind at all, instead churning his True Qi with all his might, meaning to flee into the darkness.
Li Fei gave him no such chance.
The instant Wang Wu exerted himself, before he could take even a single step, he felt a howling wind bearing down from above.
—It's over.
The despairing thought had barely surfaced when a slender, jade-like hand pressed down on the crown of his skull.
With a hair-raising crunch, his fine head was crushed bodily down into his chest cavity. Before he even had time to beg for mercy or scream, Wang Wu's consciousness sank into eternal slumber.
"You brought this on yourself."
The headless corpse slowly slumped over, and Li Fei looked down with a cold sneer.
Had he taken Eva or Sasha hostage, that would have been one thing—but this bastard had dared to threaten her with a sprite that could be conjured up on a mere trickle of magic power...
As for intelligence, Li Fei had no need of it at all—she'd already learned the Demon Suppression Bureau's plans from Lü Zhengchun the day before.
That Tree Demon had been born at the very dawn of the age of demonic chaos, growing quietly for a thousand years, scraping its way up to the demon king tier.
However, its aptitude was poor. Breaking through to the demon king realm had already exhausted its potential, and it could advance no further after that. Seeing its lifespan nearing its end, it was forced to venture out to slaughter, ravaging the Nine Provinces, feeding on the blood of living beings to sustain itself in hopes of taking one more step forward and prolonging its life. Later it happened upon the emergence of the Longevity Fruit, and did great battle with the Corpse King.
By the Demon Suppression Bureau's reckoning, whether or not the Tree Demon had seized the Longevity Fruit, it would make a desperate bid to assault a higher tier—and a demon's ascension would inevitably invite heavenly tribulation, kicking up an enormous commotion.
And so the Bureau's forces were in no hurry to scour the area for the Tree Demon's whereabouts. Instead they had stationed themselves here, lying in wait like a hunter beside a tree stump, biding their time until the Tree Demon was weakened during its tribulation before moving in to surround and destroy it.
Following this strategy, it was only natural for the Bureau's members to send someone to scout her out. But if even Wang Wu—skilled in reconnaissance and stealth, with first-rate survival instincts—had fallen, then the Demon Suppression Bureau's people would most likely swallow their anger, rather than pour too much energy into dealing with her and jeopardize their seizure of the Longevity Fruit.
"Sister, you really are impressive—killing a Demon Suppression Bureau lackey just like that."
Suddenly, a sweet, delicate laugh drifted over.
Li Fei followed the sound and saw a female ghost—black-haired, white-robed, and bewitchingly lovely—giggling as she floated toward her.
"A trifling matter, hardly worth mentioning."
Li Fei returned a sweet, harmless smile. "We demons should be the sworn enemies of the Demon Suppression Bureau, never to live under the same sky."
"Oh? So Sister bears a blood feud against those Demon Suppression Bureau folk?"
The female ghost smiled charmingly, drifting closer to Li Fei through the moonlight—and beneath her, astonishingly, there was no shadow.
"We demons are born in accordance with the will of Heaven, yet the Demon Suppression Bureau commits such perverse, backward deeds, slaughtering demons without cause. Their crimes merit ten thousand deaths."
Li Fei declared righteously, "To raze the Demon Suppression Bureau and restore the glory of demonkind—this is a duty we cannot shirk."
[1] A cheat code from Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne that reveals the entire map.
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