The blue wolf came to a soundless halt behind him. After a long, long silence, its head lifted, and from those slightly parted jaws came a human voice, speaking human words. “Master… you returned from hell for the sake of seeing him, didn’t you? So why, now that you’ve finally seen him, will you not acknowledge him…?”
“And what if I did? And what if I didn’t…? I am only a wandering ghost who should have ceased to exist long ago. What right do I have to throw his life into disorder? I only want to watch him, quietly… waiting for the day he defeats me. And then I can close my eyes, satisfied, and return to the place I ought to return to. The only thing I can do for him is give him a reason to grow stronger, and something to aim at.” The blue-haired man’s voice was light and level, dispersing slowly on the wind.
Give him a reason to grow stronger, and something to aim at… This was the only reason he was alive.
The wolf fell silent, hesitated briefly, then spoke again. “…Master, haven’t you noticed? He seems to have already recognized you.”
The blue-haired man slowly closed his eyes, and when they opened again the light in them was that same dead water. “The man I am now is not the man I was. Apart from a broken soul, my life and my body are no longer the life and body I once had… Even I no longer recognize myself. He won’t either…”
“But—”
“Blue Soul. Let’s go.” He spoke coldly, lifted his feet, and walked on toward a road that led to nowhere he knew.
A broken heart…
A broken life…
A broken soul…
He was only a wandering ghost who had clawed his way back from hell…
The lone wolf. The wolf who walks alone… Wuming!
…
…
From light, to dim, and then to unbroken dark.
Guoguo was shouting and shrieking — whether in panic or delight, it was impossible to say. The wind at his ears grew faster and faster, fast enough to slice like knives across his face, his body…
Fall into a pitch-black chasm ten thousand zhang deep and the instinctive reaction, in anyone, would be to squeeze the eyes shut and howl in terror and despair while thrashing. But Ye Tianxie didn’t move an inch, as though he’d gone dumb. No surprise, no terror, no panic. In his eyes there was only a blank, hollowed-out daze.
In the sea of his heart, that departing silhouette echoed and echoed… that silhouette…
He shook his head violently, arguing bitterly with himself… It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. He was dead, dead for many years… And besides, he didn’t look like that, and he didn’t have blue hair… and he certainly couldn’t be an NPC of this world. Two people with no possible point of intersection!
But then why did those eyes feel so familiar — familiar enough to drive a spike through his heart? The instant he saw that receding back clearly, he had finally realized where the familiarity came from.
That year — his silhouette, that final silhouette — Ye Tianxie would never forget it. Because that was the last time he ever saw him… the man who had always protected him, and who had used his own life to shield him.
And another voice was telling him: a person’s face can change, their body can change, their voice can change, their hair color can change… but what can never change is the gaze that soaks all the way through the soul, and a silhouette that belongs to him and no one else.
Two worlds, two people who were entirely different and could never intersect — this was plainly impossible. So why was his heart hammering itself hysterically to pieces…? If a string buried in the deepest part of him had not been struck, why would he be reacting like this? And if the touch had not been the most direct, the most real, the most overpowering touch imaginable, how could that string ever have been struck at all?
“Waah, waah, waaah… Master… master… aaah!! So high… so dark… so scary…”
Guoguo’s yelling finally shook Ye Tianxie out of his daze. She was crying “scary,” but nobody could have heard a single note of actual fear in her voice. What was in it, mostly, was the excitement of a very strong thrill.
An abyss… where was this?
The wind had been screaming past his ears for a long while now, the darkness around him complete and unseeable, and still he hadn’t hit bottom. This black chasm was terrifyingly deep!
At a height like this, it would be more than enough to smash Ye Tianxie to death several dozen times over.
Why had the man brought him here, and deliberately pushed him off?
“Wooooow… master, master, so scary!”
Guoguo’s body was weightless, and she could fly under normal circumstances, so free fall was not something she was subject to at all. She was only descending because she was clinging on to Ye Tianxie’s hair. She was yanking on it hard enough to genuinely hurt. It very nearly brought tears to his eyes.
Listening to her, Ye Tianxie could picture perfectly the shape of her right now — mouth wide open, hollering, arms and legs flailing with glee. Little girls loved a thrill, and Guoguo was the very finest of them… A girl who could fly, afraid of falling? Tell a ghost that story and even the ghost wouldn’t buy it!
“What is this place?” Ye Tianxie’s brow furrowed. In a hopeless situation that would have shattered anyone’s psychological defenses in an instant, what he displayed was startling calm… At a time like this, the more you panicked and lost control, the closer you came to death; whereas calm might yet let you catch hold of that one thread of light in the despair.
His voice came out somewhat unsteady from the sheer speed of the fall, but Guoguo clearly heard it perfectly. She chirped back, “No ideaaa! Master, where is this place?”
“…” I’m asking because I don’t know!
Ye Tianxie’s brow drew tighter and tighter. Where this was wasn’t the thing he most urgently needed to know right now, and why the man had brought him here and pushed him off no longer mattered either. What he had to face first was — how to survive! Even the deepest chasm had a bottom, and from a height like this, the moment he landed would be the moment he died!
That fierce wind, cutting at his face like a blade, all but drowned his hearing, and settling one’s mind completely under such conditions was a nearly impossible thing to do. Feeling himself falling, Ye Tianxie looked around… and everywhere his gaze reached was nothing but black. And at that moment, a flash of inspiration shot through his mind. He pulled a scroll out of his pack and crushed it immediately.
“Ding… You have used the Skill Scroll — Netherfog and obtained the skill ‘Netherfog.’ When cast, it summons a mist-form power condensed from the force of death to buoy the body, slowing the user’s rate of descent. Costs 20 MP. Maximum duration 5 seconds; may be interrupted at any time. Cooldown 30 seconds.”
Netherfog… a skill that slows your rate of descent. This seemingly useless scrap of a skill, dropped by a juvenile Undead Sovereign, had now become the sole thing Ye Tianxie could rely on to save his life.
He didn’t cast it immediately to slow himself. Instead he gathered his mind, shutting out his own sense of touch, the wind in his ears, Guoguo’s yelling — and quietly felt the air around him, especially the movement of the air currents beneath his feet. Because if he got excited and used Netherfog too early, the deceleration would wear off — and if he happened to hit the ground during the window when the cooldown hadn’t reset… the result would be tragic indeed.
So the timing that gave him the best chance of surviving was this: to land at the exact instant the five seconds of Netherfog ran out!
But he was in freefall, in total darkness, unable to see the ground beneath him or anything around him… And even with light, who could possibly control the timing to a degree of perfection that would take nothing less than the favor of the goddess of fortune to achieve?
Ye Tianxie closed his eyes, concentrating all of his mind and will on his own perception, silently counting time, feeling the flow of the air currents beneath his feet.
An object falling from a great height drives a downward current of air beneath it, and when that current strikes the surface of the ground, it rebounds — turning from downward to upward, canceling out part of the descending flow and producing a minute change in the movement of the air… And the closer to the ground, the more pronounced the change; the farther away, the fainter it is.
One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes… Three minutes passed, and Ye Tianxie was still falling. The horrifying depth of this black chasm was entirely beyond anything he had imagined. But from beginning to end he kept his eyes shut, and never let his focus scatter by even a fraction… Because this was a moment on which his life depended. Yes, this was only a game world — but wherever he was, he would never accept his own “death.”
The wind went on screaming past his ears. When the fall had lasted five full minutes, the faintest anomaly in the air currents registered against his nerves. His brow twitched slightly; his eyes stayed closed, but the slow tightening of his brows made his inner tension plain…
Half a second… one second… two seconds…
Ye Tianxie’s eyes snapped open, and his lips parted slightly. “Netherfog!“
A patch of gray mist, so faint it was nearly invisible, formed instantly beneath his feet, and his freefalling body slowed at once under its buoyancy — still descending, but visibly, steadily slower…
“Huh?” Guoguo, feeling the sudden change of pace, made a startled noise and then looked at Ye Tianxie with a face full of confusion.
His falling body felt as though it were being held up by an unbelievably resilient mass of cotton. The degree of deceleration eased Ye Tianxie’s mind slightly, and he looked down at his feet, his heart still hanging by a thread…
The speed of the fall dropped, and dropped further, and the seconds ticked past one by one… He had been falling far too fast, and Netherfog’s buoyancy was limited; five seconds could not possibly bring his rate of descent to zero.
Three seconds. Four seconds. Five seconds—
WHAM!!
Ye Tianxie’s whole body convulsed, and for that instant he genuinely felt as though his entire frame had come apart at the joints… His feet had finally touched the ground. He forced down the violent churning of his organs as his body slammed into the earth — and instead, the corner of his mouth curved into a faint smile.
There was no system chime in his ears, and no sign whatsoever of his consciousness fading… At the precise instant the Netherfog effect ended, his body had reached the ground. The shock of the impact had been enough to make him think, for a moment, that he’d died.
He glanced at his HP. The full health bar was now very nearly a total blank… with 12 points of HP remaining.
The goddess of fortune’s favor once again? Ye Tianxie dragged his aching, still-unrecovered body upright with visible effort. Survive a great calamity and fortune is sure to follow. Now it was time to work out where this place was — and why the man had brought him here.
(End of Chapter 107)