The City of Stars, Mercenary Guild.

Ye Tianxie stood before a counter much like a shop’s and said to the stiff-faced middle-aged man behind it, “I’m applying to found a mercenary corps.”

“Let me see your Renown… Oh, your Renown is sufficient…” His voice and his expression stalled where they were before the sentence was finished, his eyes falling flat on Ye Tianxie.

Renown: 1,800!

This man actually had Renown past a thousand!

Something visibly different entered the middle-aged man’s face. He straightened up and said, “Young man, please tell me the name of the mercenary corps you wish to found.”

“Heaven Soul.”

As the words came out, Ye Tianxie took a golden badge from his chest and set it down in front of him.

The golden light drew the Mercenary Guild master’s gaze at once, and when he saw the badge clearly he shot up out of his chair as though electrocuted.

“Heavens… what am I seeing! What am I seeing… This is — this is the Badge of Glory of that legendary hero corps, the Heaven Soul mercenary corps!” The guild master’s hands shook with excitement and his words came out in disorder. People at different levels, of different classes, in different positions and circumstances all hold different faiths. And what this Mercenary Guild master revered above all was precisely that illustrious hero corps — the Heaven Soul mercenary corps.

Because they were the pride of every mercenary corps there was, and above all their leader, the man called the Mercenary King, who was the model and the exemplar of every mercenary on the Lost Continent.

“Brave young man, the Heaven Soul mercenary corps carries the highest faith of countless mercenary corps. I hope that in your hands the Heaven Soul corps can carry its glory onward once more…”

Half a minute later, a System prompt rang out across the Huaxia battle region.

“Ding… The Huaxia battle region’s first mercenary corps — the Heaven Soul mercenary corps — has been founded. Leader: Xietian.”

Su Feifei, apron on and slippers on her feet, bustled in and out without a pause. When the last small plate of cool, crisp green vegetables was set on the table she finally let out a small breath and sat down on the sofa for a short rest… After a busy half a morning, lunch was ready at last.

She glanced toward Ye Tianxie’s room; through the gap in the open door she could see him lying straight out on the bed. She smiled without meaning to, then checked the time and pouted. “Hmph. Game addict.”

So as not to disturb him, she wouldn’t force him out or drag him out while he was in the game world; she simply waited quietly, and if he didn’t come out she wouldn’t eat first either. Over this past stretch of time it had become a habit of hers, and a small tactic for pushing Ye Tianxie to eat on schedule.

You don’t eat, I don’t eat… let’s see how you have the nerve not to come out sooner.

Bored, she propped her cheek on her right hand and let her gaze wander over the four dishes and one soup she had made, turning her own thoughts over. Time slipped past without her noticing. After a moment she got up and went back to the kitchen. She decided to add one more dish — a court dish demanding in both seasoning and technique — as a reward for him today. The moment when Ye Tianxie had thrown himself in the way of the little Immortal Spirit Beast’s attack to save her had lodged itself in her mind, leaving her by turns blank-faced and grinning at nothing.

Because it meant that he had come to care about her in earnest.

She opened the cupboard and picked up a small dish… and then, all at once, she sensed something, turned instinctively, and found that someone had appeared behind her… a white figure.

This was her and Ye Tianxie’s home, the door locked tight; it was simply not possible for anyone else to get in. Someone appearing behind her without a sound was the kind of fright that would have any girl screaming in terror… The terror Su Feifei felt on glimpsing the white figure lasted only an instant before her expression went abruptly blank.

What she faced was a girl — a girl who seemed both older than her and younger than her at once. And when she saw that face and those eyes… she stopped breathing on the spot. In that moment the whole world seemed to lose its sound and its color, even her heartbeat seemed to stop entirely, and all her spirit and all her thought gathered onto that face…

What kind of girl was this? What kind of beauty…

Exquisite? Peerless? City-toppling? Beauty beyond the mortal world… no, none of it was enough. Looking at this face, Su Feifei suddenly understood what “not of this world” meant, what “an immortal descended to earth” meant… because this was a beauty that simply should not exist in the human world, and the human world held no word qualified to describe it…

She was a very beautiful girl herself, a beauty among beauties, and only that morning she had witnessed the city-toppling looks of Liu Qiyue, “the most alluring woman in Huaxia.” Her strongest impression at the time had been that Liu Qiyue’s beauty had reached a summit at which a single frown or smile was enough to topple all living things — unsurpassable, past even comparison…

But looking at this one, she found that even Liu Qiyue, set beside her, would be dimmed into insignificance.

Her features were exquisite past all comparison: the most delicate jade lips, the most delicate carved-jade nose, eyes more beautiful than the stars, skin like congealed cream and snow without so much as a flaw… From any angle, at any distance however close, one would be deeply shaken by a perfection that should not exist among human beings. What her beauty brought was no longer merely a visual impact but a wild trembling of the heart… enough to leave the heart infatuated and drunk, believing in its depths that this was the most beautiful thing it had seen in all its life… that no girl more beautiful than her could ever appear again.

Su Feifei was a woman herself, but she felt her own heart shaking violently. That perfect jade face before her was like an abyss ten thousand fathoms deep and irresistibly magnetic, drawing her consciousness and her thoughts down into it beyond any hope of climbing back out…

“Mo’er…”

She looked at the utterly dazed Su Feifei, her lips parting to give a soft call. The gaze she turned on Su Feifei was so gentle… as though she feared that even her own gaze might startle her.

That murmured call woke the consciousness that had nearly left Su Feifei’s body. She came back to herself and asked blankly, “You… who are you? Why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to see you… Mo’er. It’s been… a long time.” She smiled, a warm smile that could have melted a thousand years of snow off the Tianshan range, and the radiance of that instant robbed heaven and earth and everything in the world of color.

“See me? But… I’m not this Mo’er you mean… This is my home, I… I’ve never met you. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” Su Feifei’s voice came in fragments. Facing a girl so beautiful as to be almost unreal, her mind had gone as hazy as if she were dreaming.

She wore gauze robes white as snow that stirred lightly about her, ethereal as an immortal’s… no, she simply was an immortal, an immortal who should not exist in the human world. She didn’t answer Su Feifei’s confusion. She looked at her and said softly, “Heaven and earth turn through their cycles, and vast changes come. You are her, and yet you are no longer her…”

Su Feifei: “……”

“For him you shed countless tears. For him you were willing to turn your back on your own kin and your own faith. For him you knelt eighty full years beneath the Sala Goddess’s Sala Mountain. For him you were willing to leap into an abyss ten thousand fathoms deep and forget him and everything of yourself… For him, how utterly you threw everything aside… And now at last the two of us meet again. What am I to repay you with?”

A single drop of water slid from her eye and fell to the floor, splashing into scattered brightness.

Looking at Su Feifei she was smiling, and within that smile weeping without a sound.

What was she to repay her with…

“You… what are you saying? I don’t understand… Who are you, really, and why are you here?” Su Feifei shook her head in bewilderment. Facing that indescribably beautiful face, she began to feel something unfamiliar stirring in the depths of her heart.

“Even across the cycles of rebirth, you and he have come together in the end… This is the bond you tied with him using your own heart, and though a thousand years or ten thousand should separate you, though endless space should lie between, though the two of you should become blades of grass, or even duckweed adrift between heaven and earth, in the end that bond will draw you together… and it can never be broken.”

Su Feifei: “……”

In her haze it was as if she were in a dream, listening to some insubstantial fairy tale.

“The you of now can see him every day, can stay beside him. You already have everything I most long for… If the future is not what I hope it will be… Mo’er, please… in my place… take care of him… for this whole life and the next…”

Once, she had been willing to give up her life, her faith, even her memories for him… So would the her of now be willing to throw everything aside for him too?

She knew she would. She hadn’t come to like him because he could protect her… Even if he were a thief now, a murderer, a beggar, the moment she saw him she would still want, above everything else, to be at his side.

Just as he, who had always shut outsiders out, had somehow been moved to let her live in his home… That agreement with Su Luo had really only been a reason he found for himself, so that he could answer her.

Mo’er, please… in my place… take care of him… for this whole life and the next…

The faint immortal voice echoed through Su Feifei’s mind. All at once the world before her eyes spun, and gradually went blank…

(End of Chapter 179)