“My car!!” Huang Quan stared for a long moment, then let out a strange howl and ran at it without a thought for anything else. His family had money, but they were not the sort of business family that treats cars as toys. Wrecking that car of his was very nearly the same as taking half his life.

The airflow a helicopter’s blades throw off is enormous. In a few seconds it had dust flying in every direction, and a man walking into it would have been shoved aside. The sunglasses man hauled him back and swore at him under his breath. “That’s a helicopter… You want to go over there and die? Damn it… Whose rich family does that thing belong to, and what’s it doing landing here? Has the thing broken down?”

The helicopter was not large, and it looked somewhat old… but if a single person here had been able to recognize the insignia on it, he would have gone the color of dirt and run for his life that same second. Unluckily, not one of them recognized it. They were not entitled to recognize it… and that included the squad captain from the Public Security Bureau.

“Se… Second Brother, are you sure this is the place? Cough… cough… I came down too fast, I think I flattened a car… Huh? Second Brother?”

He looked back and found that Ye Tianxie was already gone. Murong Qiushui had his nose clamped shut and was swinging his arm wildly to drive off the dust that would defile his skin.

With Ye Tianxie urging him on the whole way, the helicopter had run its speed straight up to six hundred and gone like wind and lightning, crossing the north of Jinghua in a few minutes and carrying them all the way to the slum Liu Qiyue had named for him… She had even told him the exact position of the little house, how big it was, what to look for. Every bit of it, perfectly clear.

The helicopter hung above the slum for a moment while Ye Tianxie swept his eyes over the ground below like an eagle, and he saw at once the little house and the men taking an electric saw and an electric drill to the door. A savage anger blazed up in him, and it came out very nearly as a roar. “Land! Land, now!!”

At that shout Zuo Pojun scrambled to get down in the shortest possible time, and in that much of a hurry he did not manage his landing spot at all. He put the helicopter straight down on Huang Quan’s car and flattened it.

Ye Tianxie came out of the dust at a run, straight to the door of that little house, without one glance at the men standing there staring. There are more people with helicopters now than there used to be, but every last one of them is rich among the rich, and a helicopter coming down is still a spectacle.

Ye Tianxie was moving too hard to stop. Huang Quan, blocking the doorway, was struck by his body and knocked flat on the ground.

That little house, run-down and narrow, seemed to let even the light in grudgingly. In front of the door were scattered splinters and the fallen security door. Inside, on the one bed in the room, a girl with tears all over her face held a younger girl wrapped in a blanket tightly against her… and what was in her eyes was an ashen despair.

A savage anger shot from the soles of his feet to the top of his head… He could imagine what she had borne before he got here, and what a torment of pain and despair together it must have been.

He let out a breath of foul air and went calm all at once. He took a step forward, and that step gave Ran Chenxin an enormous fright. Holding her sister, she worked her body backward with everything she had.

“Chenxin. It’s me.” He stood by the bed and said it gently.

She had never seen his face, but after all these days together, how could she not know his voice?

Like the moon coming out from behind cloud, those ashen eyes turned brilliant all at once. The tears she had been holding down came pouring out of her in that moment, and for an instant she felt herself falling into a dream…

“Big Brother Tianxie?” she said, carefully, softly, making sure of it, her wet eyes looking dumbly at him… What an astonishing face this boy had. His shape, his features, the air about him — all of it carried a pull very nearly demonic. Ordinarily she could see only half of his face, and she had drawn the rest of it for herself countless times in secret, working from the half she could see… And now that she saw it for the first time… he was more perfect than the most perfect version she had imagined.

“What’s this? I’ve been gone a few minutes and you don’t know me any more? My very own little handmaid?” The corner of Ye Tianxie’s mouth curved, and he gave her a light laugh.

Every scrap of the tension and terror and despair that had been piling up in Ran Chenxin came down at once with a crash. She let go of Chenxue, threw herself into his arms, and held him tight with all her strength, and out of her came a sound of weeping she no longer had any reason to hold in. She wept until she was wrung out with it, grieving the way the cuckoo weeps blood, enough to break a heart to pieces…

The dream she had imagined for herself had come true in front of her… The one man she wanted most had truly come down out of the sky at the moment she was most helpless… Her feelings went entirely out of her control, and she held on to him and cried her heart out and let all of it go…

Chenxue opened her eyes slowly and looked at her weeping sister, and then at the man her sister was holding on to so tightly… She lifted her head and met his eyes, and he was looking at her too. The corners of her mouth curved slowly up, and she gave him a very sweet, very lovely smile.

Ye Tianxie looked the frail little girl over carefully. From the first glance his eyes were held fast, and something in him shook at that exquisite, almost unreal face. It was as if he were seeing a small princess who had walked out of a painting — her eyes, her cheeks, her body, all of it so pure and so beautiful that she seemed not to belong to this world, because the air of this world could only sully her.

The smile she gave him set the sea of his heart moving, and he smiled back at her… Only, that exquisite, unreal face had almost no color of blood in it, and the sight of it put a stab of pain through him. In that instant he understood that this little girl had conquered him. With her eyes, and with her smile.

“All right, Chenxin. No more crying. It’s over. Nobody is going to bully you again.” Ye Tianxie patted her back as he said it. Against his chest he could feel the damp where her tears had soaked through. Chenxin’s body was slight and soft, and she carried a faint scent that belonged to her alone and went to a man’s head, and he could not help enjoying how close she was.

When he had finished saying it, a light came up in Chenxue’s eyes as brilliant as the stars at the edge of the sky.

“Brother. What road are you on?” The sunglasses man’s voice came from behind him. Not having taken Ye Tianxie’s measure, he was still reasonably polite about it. And by the look of things… he and the woman they had come to take were not distantly connected.

His car was smashed and the taking of the girl had been fouled up, so how was he supposed to be pleased? A beauty of that grade with nobody to protect her — he would probably not run into another one as long as he lived. And Ye Tianxie had not so much as looked at any of them from beginning to end. That alone was enough to bring his temper up.

Ye Tianxie put his hand on Ran Chenxin’s waist, turned slowly, swept his eyes over the five men and their various expressions, and said flatly, “Which of you is Huang Quan?”

The man he had knocked over a minute before took a step forward and said, beside himself, “Me! You—”

The hard words never got out. They stuck in his throat. Ye Tianxie let go of Ran Chenxin, and his body moved forward like a phantom… Not one of them saw how he had moved at all. There was only a blur across their vision, and then Ye Tianxie was out of the house and standing in front of them, and Huang Quan was hoisted up by the collar, held out the way you hold a chicken.

“Huang Quan? Not a bad name… You’ve provoked someone you should not have provoked, so go to the real Yellow Springs!!”

While the other four stood there gaping, Ye Tianxie kept his grip and snapped his arm out. That arm was not thick, and yet the strength that came out of it was terrible. Amid a shrill scream of terror, Huang Quan’s body flew like a bundle of straw… no, like an arrow shot from a bow, hurled hard and far, and it slammed into a wall of laid stone twenty meters away.

Splat!!

“Ah!!” Ran Chenxin let out a cry of horror, turned away, and covered her eyes.

Blood sprayed out in every direction and printed the shape of a man on the wall in red. Huang Quan’s body stayed against the wall a moment, then slid down it, trailing blood. In that one blow, eight or nine bones in every ten in his body were broken or crushed, and there was hardly anywhere left on him that could still be called whole. He was dead. There was no doubt about it.

Zuo Pojun finally got the helicopter steady and jumped down, just in time to see that bloody scene, and turned his head away in a hurry, muttering to himself as he did, “Bloody hell. Does it have to be this gory?”

“Gory?” Murong Qiushui looked straight at the smear of blood on the wall as if he were savoring it in detail, and said with regret, “A pity… If his body had burst open into a flower of blood, with the pieces of him and the fine spray of it weaving through the air, that would have been such a beautiful, such a bewitching picture. I have always held that there is no color in this world more bewitching or more beautiful than blood.”

“You’re a lunatic. Don’t say things like that to me!!” Zuo Pojun beat people up when his temper went, which was as ordinary as eating dinner — but never the sort of beating that draws blood. He looked strong, and inside he was nowhere near as strong as Murong Qiushui. That little speech set his stomach heaving.

Chenxue’s eyes went through the doorway and watched Huang Quan seized, thrown, killed… A scene that should have torn a horrified scream out of a girl her age moved her not at all. Death held nothing frightening for her. What she did instead was smile. Her gaze left the dead Huang Quan and settled on Ye Tianxie… He not only had a face that held a person spellbound, he was so very strong too. If he could protect her sister…

The four men Huang Quan had brought had gone the color of dirt, and their feet were carrying them backward without their knowing it. To let a man die that horribly without hesitating — what a vicious and pitiless heart that takes. Huang Quan had done plenty of bad things, but nothing that deserved death… And to throw a man the way you toss a pebble — what a terrifying strength that takes!

This man… is a devil!

The sunglasses man had already backed up several steps. The gun in his hand was pointed at Ye Tianxie’s forehead, and his whole hand was shaking beyond his control. He had always taken a warped pride in belonging to the underworld, because the underworld can do the wicked things other men dare not do, can throw its weight around wherever it likes, can bully the weak and be sure the other side will not dare make a sound in reply… But killing, he had never dared. And now a killing this naked, this bloody, this frightful had been done in front of him, and it very nearly frightened the heart out of his chest. His face could no longer hold up the cold, overbearing look it had worn before.

(End of Chapter 271)