The little boy nearly cried out — but he clamped his hands over his own mouth and forced the sound back down. Because he had heard the footsteps of the men chasing them… closer and closer.

Perhaps his strength was spent, or perhaps he knew there was no longer any escaping them. The older boy clutched the thing in his arms tightly — and in the cover of night, with the coat’s hem fluttering, he looked for all the world like a man holding a four- or five-year-old child. Hearing the footsteps almost upon him, he did not turn around. He stood at the cliff’s edge, facing that seemingly bottomless abyss ahead of him, and said in a voice that raised the hair on the neck, one word at a time: “Whoever you are… if I survive this day, I will repay today’s blood debt… ten thousand times over!!!!”

And with that he leapt, hurling himself forward off the edge as the little boy’s pupils snapped tight…

Two black figures emerged from the darkness. Watching the boy jump with the child in his arms, one of them let out a shrill, contemptuous jeer. “Heh. Trying to escape off a cliff, right in front of us… Nice bravado. Shame you won’t get the chance.”

The black figure raised something that stank of gunpowder. There was a crack like thunder, and a streak of fire tore across the night sky, shooting straight at the boy who had just gone over the edge…

BOOM!!

A direct hit. In the wide bloom of the explosion, the boy’s body and the thing in his arms disintegrated into fragments scattering across the sky, accompanied by two low, scornful laughs.

The little boy clamped his hands over his mouth with everything he had, refusing to let out the smallest sound, his desperately widened eyes flooding into a blur of tears. The hand that gripped his own leg so hard, the one keeping him conscious… had crimson blood seeping between its fingers.

Can’t cry. Can’t make a sound… He couldn’t die. He couldn’t let the life his brother had bought with his own die too… If he died, who would avenge his parents? Who would avenge his brother?

“Ha. Human weapons really aren’t bad. Interesting little thing — might be worth taking one back to play with.”

“The job’s done. Let’s get back and report early. This isn’t a place we should linger.”

Those were the last two sentences the little boy heard that night. At the time, he only carved the two voices deep into his memory. It was only when he was older that he began to catch on to that one word: human. Only a creature that was not human would refer to people as “humans” so naturally.

That night, a four-year-old boy grew up all at once. With no family and no home, the one thing he told himself every single day was this: Survive. Whatever it takes, survive.

Only — five years, ten years, fifteen years… until he had grown up, until his power grew greater by the day, until he reached twenty — he still had not found the enemies he had to find. To this day he did not even know who they were, or why they had done what they did.

…

…

Brother, I know it can’t possibly be you… because you died protecting me. Watching you blown apart with my own eyes, unable to leave a bone behind, and having to hide off to one side not daring to make a sound — that was truly too cruel a thing for me to see. And yet, why did his silhouette make me think of you at once…

If heaven really does exist, then… Brother, are you watching me from there, quietly?

A long sigh. He sat up on the bed, stared blankly into space for a while, then rose and left the room.

It was noon — roughly lunchtime. Su Feifei was busy as ever. She had spent these past days devoting herself entirely to cleaning Ye Tianxie’s house, and the diligence and doggedness of it made her seem less like the young mistress of an enormously wealthy family and more like a cleaner who genuinely loved her job. Under her efforts, his whole house had taken on a new face — and when Ye Tianxie looked at her now, there was something more in his eyes than there had been.

“Tianxie, come here!” Su Feifei, standing upstairs, called out the moment she saw him emerge. However many times he stressed that his surname was Ye, she went right on calling him Tianxie without a second thought — and the more she said it, the more natural it got, until in the end he simply had to yield.

Ye Tianxie looked up, saw where she was standing, and his brow twitched. He took the stairs quickly.

“Tianxie, look, this door won’t open. This is the only room left that hasn’t been cleaned.” Su Feifei wiped the fine sweat from her forehead and casually pushed back the hair that had fallen loose across it. Unable to find any protective clothing, she’d been cleaning in an apron — and right now her apron, her face, and her hair were all coated in dust. But the satisfied smile on her face made her look lovely, and stirred something in him.

“That room doesn’t need cleaning.” Ye Tianxie’s expression was a seriousness she couldn’t see. “You may do as you like with every other room in this house. But that room — you absolutely must not go inside. Do you understand?”

Su Feifei looked astonished, and a little put out. “Why not? Is there… oh. There isn’t something in there you don’t want people to see, is there?”

“You can think of it that way. Regardless — you absolutely must not go in,” Ye Tianxie said gravely.

Only, his understanding of women wasn’t quite as thorough as all that. A woman’s curiosity is fierce and inborn, especially in a place she has already begun to think of as home — and the more you don’t want her to know something, the more desperately she wants to.

“Fine, fine.” Su Feifei pouted, then tilted her face up. “Lunch is ready, so go and eat… Ugh, actually, go take a shower first. You smell a bit sweaty, and it’s docking points from your manly charm. All right, go on, go wash!”

She said it while giving Ye Tianxie a light push toward the stairs. He sniffed at himself… Fair enough. It was hot out; a cold shower at midday didn’t sound bad at all.

Having laid out the finished dishes on the table like a little housekeeper, Su Feifei stretched, then sat at the dining table with her chin propped in her hand, her pale fingers tapping absently at the wood. Her expression shifted between calm and a very faint smile. The distant rush of running water reached her ears. By now she’d more or less gotten used to living under one roof with a man, and the sound of him bathing no longer scattered her thoughts. And besides… cooking a meal like this and sitting quietly at the table waiting — that was a scene she’d only ever seen on television or read in novels. She had never imagined it would arrive in her own life so soon. And yet she found that she, who genuinely hated waiting, was strangely enjoying the sensation of waiting now. At moments like this she would wonder whether she had accidentally fallen for him. Because otherwise, why would she have not a shred of wariness around him, why would she be so willing to cook for him and to wait for him?

It probably was fondness — or perhaps a kind of dependence and gratitude. Only, she let out a small breath, even if it were fondness, it seemed to be a one-sided infatuation of her own making. Because she understood that although his eyes often carried a note of appreciation when they fell on her, in truth he seemed to be deliberately keeping his distance, and rarely spoke to her first.

She glanced toward the direction of Ye Tianxie’s room, then rose, opened the door, and went in. The bed was, sure enough, still a mess. She smoothed it out carefully, and her gaze happened to sweep across the small cabinet at the head of the bed. She hesitated — and then couldn’t quite quash the pounding in her chest, the curiosity that wanted to know more of him. She walked over and eased open the topmost drawer.

The drawer was empty. All it held was a single key, lying quietly in the far corner.

Su Feifei picked the key up, puzzled — and then something occurred to her. She shut the drawer without even looking at what the drawers beneath might hold, and hurried upstairs. Instinct told her this was, very likely, the key to that locked room.

Curiosity can kill a cat. It can kill eight hundred women.

She slid the key into the lock and gave it a gentle turn. The mechanism clicked, and the sealed door swung open. A careful, excited look came over her face… and with it, the smugness of someone about to uncover his little secret. She snuck a thief’s glance toward the bathroom, pushed the door, and stepped inside.

An intoxicating fragrance rolled over her. Familiar as she was with the world’s most luxurious and precious perfumes, this scent — one she had never encountered before — struck straight through to her soul. What does it mean, to be drunk on a fragrance? Now, at last, she knew: there really could be a scent so clear and sweet that you wanted to lose yourself in it.

And when she saw what was in the room, she simply froze where she stood, at a loss.

Pale purple curtains covered the gauze windows, filtering the sunlight that fell into the room into a soft violet. Purple is a color of nobility; in Huaxia culture, purple vapor signifies the presence of an immortal. And before her was a room whose entire register was a warm, gentle purple…

A shallow purple carpet lay over the bamboo flooring, spotless — not a speck of dust or a single discordant color anywhere the eye could reach. Walls papered in purple stars made the space soft and warm. A pale wooden wardrobe and a dressing table gave off an elegant charm, and one glance was enough to tell they were extremely valuable. And there was a small pale-purple fabric sofa, colored cushions scattered beside the bed, lace-trimmed bed skirts and drapes…

It was a girl’s room. Warm and tender as a dream. Su Feifei was certain she had never been inside this room, and certainly never cleaned it. And yet compared to the filth and disorder of the house outside, stepping in here was like stepping out of one world and into another.

She stood there dumbly, staring, and did not take another step forward — some part of her deeply afraid of defiling a room that held not a mote of worldly dust.

A girl’s room… Why is there a girl’s room in his house? And one this pure, this elegant, this warm… Does he clean it carefully every single day? Then what about the girl who lives here… Who is she? And where is she…?

A deliberately heavy footstep sounded behind her, pulling her out of that unreal world. She turned — and saw a face of terrible coldness. In all these days together, however she teased him, however she needled him about the lollipops, whatever small pranks she pulled, he had never truly gotten angry… This was the first time she had ever seen him wear an expression this frightening, and it put fear in her, and set her heart hammering with it.

(End of Chapter 124)