“You… you stay back. You come any closer and I’ll shoot.” The sunglasses man’s shaking hands could hardly keep hold of the pistol. Cold sweat stood all over his head as he delivered the line that has been repeated countless times in situations like this one.

“Oh… poor child. If he would only be good and run away, Second Brother’s soft heart would certainly let them off… But this poor child with who knows what inside his head has actually pointed a gun at Second Brother… He has actually pointed a gun at Second Brother!! His life can be counted down now.” Murong Qiushui pursed his lips and muttered it in a voice only Zuo Pojun could hear. And thinking of the first time he had met Ye Tianxie all those years ago, and of what had come of pointing a gun at him then, Murong Qiushui gave an involuntary shiver, and the wrist Ye Tianxie had snapped in two began to ache faintly again…

Ye Tianxie’s eyes darkened, and he took a step forward.

The sunglasses man backed a step away in a panic. The sight of Huang Quan being thrown came back to him, and the hand holding the gun shook harder still. Put any man alive into that scene and it would frighten him out of his wits. He shouted the first thing that came into his head. “My… my old man runs the Black Blade Gang. You lay a hand on me and my old man will never let it go…” He got hold of himself by force and said, in a voice close to pleading, “Brother… brother, we’ve only just met, no grudge from far back and none from near. We aren’t well acquainted with that Huang Quan either… How about we make friends? If you think me worth anything, then any time you need help, you have only to say the word.”

He had a gun in his hand, and still, facing Ye Tianxie, he had not the smallest certainty that anything was in his control. He was shaking from head to foot instead. He had never seen a man whose eyes and whose presence were this frightening… and there was what he had watched a minute ago, Huang Quan thrown away like that. Is that strength a human being can have?

“One, die. Two, become an idiot. Choose for yourself.” Ye Tianxie said it with no expression at all. It was not that he had any quarrel with these men. What they had been doing had raised a savage anger in him, but the reason they had to die was a different one: they had seen something they should not have seen.

“Then go and die!!” The sunglasses man’s eyes went vicious all at once, and he wrenched the trigger back.

Bang!!

The gun went off, and the sound was far louder than it should have been, because it was not one report but two laid over each other… and something else on top of them, a collision louder still.

The sunglasses man’s pistol dropped out of his hand and fell to the ground. His pupils swelled and shrank and swelled again, and the three men behind him had their eyes wide with terror and their bodies drawn in, as if they were watching the most impossible thing in the world.

Ting!

Ting!

To their left, two bullets, both of them already deformed, came off the stone wall one after the other and landed on the rough floor of broken marble underfoot, and struck two clear notes that shook the soul.

The bullet had not hit Ye Tianxie. He was still standing exactly where he had been, without a hair out of place.

Murong Qiushui raised his right hand and blew, elegantly, across the muzzle. At some point a pistol had appeared in that hand — a very small one, no bigger than his palm, throwing back the pure silver sheen of metal. It was small enough to be gripped entirely inside a closed hand.

With those two bullets driven into the wall, every one of them understood at once what had just happened… and thin cold air came in through every pore in them and soaked all the way through to the heart.

The bullet fired from the sunglasses man’s gun had been struck in flight by another bullet… and worse than that, the bullet that was hit had not been knocked off course or blasted aside by that enormous shock. It had simply been carried along to the wall by the other bullet, and nailed there.

To hit a bullet in flight, and one that had only just left the barrel — what a terrifying eye that takes, what judgment, what aim… An ability at that level has no business appearing in a human being at all. It belongs in myth, or in a world of fantasy.

For two bullets to collide, and for one of them not to be knocked away but carried along by the other, is essentially impossible. The odds of it are small enough to be discounted entirely. Put into the terms of physics, you would have to run an exceedingly strict calculation from the two bullets’ speeds, their directions, and the angle formed between them, and arrive at a point of impact where the collision would send them both off the same way… and if that point were off by even the smallest distance, two bullets traveling at that speed could never overlap.

A face beautiful to the point of the uncanny, wearing an expression so idle it looked too lazy even to open its eyes… and in their sight, at this moment, that face had become the most frightening devil there was. His look and his movements told them that what had just happened — a bullet fresh out of the barrel carried off in flight — was not false, and was not a fluke…

Is this a human being, or a monster?!

Ye Tianxie glanced into the little house, at Ran Chenxin shielding her sister’s body, at the shock and the unreality showing in her eyes. He half turned. “Qiushui. They’re yours.”

“BINGO!” Murong Qiushui snapped his fingers, licked the corner of his mouth without meaning to, and let a smile open across his face like a hundred flowers coming out at once. He tossed his hair back. The four men were plainly frightened out of their senses and looked ready to go down in a heap where they stood, and he said to them, lazily, “Children, you may go.”

The four were still shaking, and yet they stood where they were, dazed… A moment ago that terrifying man had said he wanted their lives, and now they were being told to go… They were half wondering whether there was something wrong with their ears.

That absurdly small silver pistol turned toward the four of them. Murong Qiushui shut one eye, took up the pose of a man taking aim, and said, bored, “Five seconds, and they’re your last… Run. Run for all you’re worth. Run from this hell that is calling you…”

The four came out of it like men waking from a dream, let out strange cries, and went scrambling and stumbling back the way they had come. In the face of the true fear of death, nearly every man will have all the terror in him drawn out at once, and will use every scrap of strength he has to run…

Five seconds went by. Murong Qiushui turned around, putting his back to the four men, who had run a long way off by now, shut his eyes, and pronounced it elegantly. “GO TO HELL!”

Bang bang bang bang!

The four shots ran almost into one, and all four of those men, far off as they were, shuddered. Blood fountained out of their necks, and then the four of them, still holding the staggering posture of men running, went down on their faces at the same instant.

Can a pistol fire four rounds inside one second, the way a machine gun does? The pressing of the trigger and its return alone take a certain amount of time. To do it four times running inside a second is difficult past reckoning… And this was done with his back turned, on four scattered, moving targets. Four bullets, not one of them wasted, every one landing on a spot that kills at a stroke.

With a gun, he is a genius who can fairly be described as a monster. His eye, his judgment, his precision, and the feel for a weapon that comes only after a very long time have all gone endlessly beyond the category of “human.”

Among human beings, those born with an esper ability or who come by one later are as rare as phoenix feathers. And of those who hold two, there are not thirty in the whole world.

Murong Qiushui is one of them. And one of his two is the most frightening kind of all, a mental esper ability… The direction his takes is not mental attack, though. It is an esper ability called “Instant Sense.” Turned on a gun, it made the Murong Qiushui of today.

Ye Tianxie had handed these four to him because he plainly did not want Chenxin and Chenxue to see them die anywhere nearby. He did not so much as watch it done. He went into Chenxin’s little house instead… What he ought to be thinking about now was where to put the two of them. They could not go on living in this little house, at least, which might come down at any moment.

“Hey. Aren’t you the one who loves the sight of a flower of blood? What did you turn around for? Playing it cool?” Zuo Pojun murmured his contempt into Murong Qiushui’s ear.

“Their blood is too filthy. It would defile my pure eyes.” Murong Qiushui moved a finger and the little pistol vanished out of his hand, hidden away somewhere nobody could see.

“Tch!” Zuo Pojun snorted at him, and the two of them stood guard outside. On the way here, Ye Tianxie had already explained to them why he was in such a hurry to come. And it was true — what Liu Qiyue had said was happening. And that Ran Chenxin, her father turned out to be…

They could not help marveling. Affinity really is a strange and wonderful thing. Ye Tianxie had done nothing more than help someone by chance, and the person he had helped was the one person he most owed help to. Cause and effect, and what each is repaid with. In that moment they understood what the words truly meant.

A good deed done more than ten years ago had finally been repaid today. And with Ye Tianxie’s temperament, for the saving of a life he would do everything in his power to repay it. Which is why, with these men — who had not in fact got what they came for, and whose crimes did not warrant death — he had not held back by so much as a hair. He had settled them with death and nothing else. If killing could put out his anger, he would do it without hesitating.

“Big Brother Xietian, they…” Ran Chenxin’s face had gone rather white, and she had plainly had an enormous fright. This was a woman who could not bring herself to kill a cockroach. How was she supposed to face butchery and death played out in front of her with any composure?

“Mm. They’re all dead.” Ye Tianxie said it with a smile.

“But… they… won’t this…”

“You’re afraid it will make trouble for me?”

Ran Chenxin nodded faintly and looked at him in concern… Her sight was blurred, and so was he in front of her. He had appeared out of nowhere, and just like that every one of the wicked men who had brought her to despair was gone… She had still not woken from the dream.

“Don’t worry. They haven’t earned the right to make trouble for me.” He paused, and then said, “Chenxin, your heart is too soft… You may well be thinking their crimes did not warrant death, that this was too cruel to them… Chenxin, think it over properly. If I had not come today, and you and your sister had fallen into their hands — what would have come of it?”

“I…” She thought of the outcome that had made her despair, and her face went white and her hands gripped one another tight.

“To kill a person, and to ruin a person’s whole life — the second is the more unforgivable sin. They had done the same thing many times before today. With them gone, this world can carry a few less parts of filth.” Ye Tianxie said it gently, wiping away the unease in her heart, and then looked at the frail girl who had been watching her the whole time, and put on the gentlest smile he was capable of. “You’re called Chenxue, aren’t you?”

(End of Chapter 272)