This was a virtual game world called Fate. Its chief developer was a man from off-world named Alpha; its deputy was a man of Meili named Prometheus.
And on the day the world of Fate opened, Alpha went back to his homeland… He had been on Earth for better than ten years, and not one person had ever known which star system he came from. His appearance and his disappearance were both a riddle. Prometheus, for his part, killed himself that same day — a riddle with no answer to be found at all…
But none of that strangeness did anything to hold down people’s extreme enthusiasm for the world of Fate. In less than a week, the terrifying number of players online was proving it to everyone… that the world of Fate was going to turn, at enormous speed, into humankind’s second world — and a second world on equal footing with the real one. Because their currencies were interchangeable, because a great deal that could not be done in the real world could be done and finished in this one, and because most things in it were far better than they were outside…
And that was how it turned out. At the same time, an increasing number of people were spending more hours inside the world of Fate than outside it.
It was a trend nothing could stop. And if the world of Fate were to vanish suddenly, the consequences would be beyond all control… it would set off rioting worldwide. Because it would be like cutting half their lives away.
From his first day in the world of Fate, Ye Tianxie had noticed just how out of the ordinary it was, and how strange, in ways that were hard to believe…
The world of Fate was not simply a virtual game world… to put it more precisely, it and the real world had points of intersection that should not have been possible.
The first intersection he had seen was his Hour of Fate.
The second was Guoguo.
The third, and the one that shook him most, was Xiaoxi.
And now…
From an NPC — an NPC who had already shaken him to his depths — he had heard the name “Li Xian’er.”
Those three characters were so familiar, so bound up with his soul that they followed him into sleep — and when they reached his ears, it was no different from hearing three deafening claps of thunder.
He turned back around very slowly, and his eyes, gone out of focus in the shock of it, went to the blue-haired man’s calm and unmoving gaze. He got it out one word at a time. “How do you know her name!”
“Beat me and you will know everything you want to know. The weak are not qualified to have answers.” The blue-haired man’s reply was cold.
A terrible violence came into Ye Tianxie’s face. He took several steps forward and said, viciously, “Why can’t you tell me now!! You can’t be the one who means me harm, so why can’t you let me know now… what is it you actually want… do you have any idea what torture this is for me!! If you really want to help me… then tell me all of it.”
Those eyes had filled in an instant with everything dark in Ye Tianxie, and the blue-haired man’s pupils stirred slightly… In that moment he seemed to be looking at himself as he had once been.
“There are some things you would not believe just because I told you.”
“Say it, and I will believe it!” Ye Tianxie said heavily.
“You would not…”
“What makes you think I would not!”
“Because when I heard the truth back then, I would sooner have died than believe it! You have no idea what that feels like!!” The blue-haired man half closed his eyes and said evenly, “And besides… even if you did believe it, knowing too early would do you nothing but harm. It would not help you; it would throw your nature into disorder and make it that much harder for you to advance another inch.”
“I don’t need a reason.” Ye Tianxie shook his head slowly, his eyes fixed dead on him. “I only want to know… all of it! How do you know about Xian’er? Who exactly are you? Why did you turn up here… and where is Xian’er now, and what is she doing?”
From Ye Tianxie’s voice the blue-haired man could hear well enough that he was already holding himself down with an effort… his feelings were tending toward the edge of control, and it showed plainly… how much the name “Xian’er” meant to him.
The blue-haired man was silent. Then he raised his eyes, sighed once, and said, “Since you insist on this, I can tell you…”
Ye Tianxie said nothing. His eyes stared straight at the man.
“But I have to warn you: the one consequence of your knowing the truth today… will be that you never see Li Xian’er again, and possibly that she is destroyed. Do you still insist?” The blue-haired man said it in a tone neither warm nor cold, and it made Ye Tianxie’s pupils shrink all at once.
Never seeing Li Xian’er again, and possibly her destruction…
Ye Tianxie’s mouth moved, and then he suddenly gave a small laugh. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
The blue-haired man looked steadily at him, nodded, and said quietly, “Tianxie, you don’t need to grieve. Li Xian’er loves you above everything, and she left you entirely for your sake and for the future the two of you would have… She told me that the greatest wrong she did in this life was that ten years ago she could not stop herself from finding you, and stayed at your side for seven years. If she had not done it, she would never have drawn you into a whirlpool like this one; all of it was hers alone to bear. But… I understand. Her feeling for you runs deeper than you could ever imagine, and she simply could not hold down the longing to find you and be with you…”
“I understand… if even you can understand it, how could I not, after seven years at her side day and night? I always knew there had to be some enormous reason behind her leaving me. She would ache for a long while over so little as my choking on a mouthful of water — how could she have borne to hurt me… How could I not understand.” Memory, a smile, wistfulness, bewilderment… every kind of feeling crossed and mixed on his face. Then his expression suddenly went calm, and there was a small, quiet smile in it.
He believed absolutely that Xian’er’s feeling for him would never change… never. And that right now she must be putting everything she had into the future they would share. And what about him? She was working at it; what right did he have to be pessimistic, to complain, to lose his way, to fall apart… What he ought to be doing was exactly what she was doing — putting his effort into the direction she had deliberately pointed him in.
She had left him the Hour of Fate, so he would spend every effort he had gathering the Fate Cores.
She had left him Guoguo and Xiaoxi, so they were the family he treasured most, and he would look after them properly, never letting them be put upon… however unreasonably odd and willful Guoguo could be sometimes.
As he thought of all that, the knot in his chest and the violent air that had just risen in him vanished together in a moment. The blue-haired man’s offhand words had touched the softest string in him. In memory, her face, her gentleness, the smallest change in her expression, were like soft threads of warm light stroking at his heart… Every minute and every second with her was a memory as precious as memory can get.
And so, to be with her forever, he was willing to put in every effort there was.
“You tell me why raising my ability needs the baptism of the Seven Deadly Sins. I want the reason.” Ye Tianxie let out a light breath and changed the subject. He had never heard of raising power through evil. Even if it truly worked, he would not have been willing to try it… but for Xian’er he would, however unforgivable it made him.
The blue-haired man did not answer at once. Instead he glanced at Ye Tianxie and said, in a voice with a thread of mystery in it, “Do you know why Li Xian’er gave you the name ‘Tianxie’?”
“Why?” Something moved in Ye Tianxie.
“From now on your name will be ‘Ye Tianxie,’ all right…”
The year he was ten, their first meeting on ground covered in snow. Her voice still hung at his ear. On the first day they met, she — who almost never asked him for anything — made a strange request of him… and after that day, the boy whose name had been “Ye Tian” was named “Ye Tianxie.” (The 邪 she added is the same character rendered “Evil” in Evil Dragon — a link the pinyin of his name hides.)
Over the years he had asked her now and then why she had wanted him to have that name, and she had always smiled and said, “Because I like it so much…”
Could there really have been some particular reason in it after all?
“Because she knew long ago that a day would come when you had to accept the baptism of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is one you have to pass through in order to grow.”
“And what does that have to do with my name?” Ye Tianxie asked.
The blue-haired man nodded slightly and said evenly, “Your Dragon Soul is the soul of the Evil Dragon. Do you know what ‘evil’ means in it?”
Ye Tianxie: “……”
“That one word is not good, and it is not wicked either. If you had to place it somewhere, it holds both good and wickedness — or you could say it stands between them. In truth, evil is nothing like either. A good man must have a good heart; a wicked man must have a wicked heart. And most living things have both a good heart and a wicked one, but you could never place them as evil. The nature of evil is a disposition tied to good and wickedness, and yet unconnected to either. That disposition cannot be cultivated after birth the way good and wickedness can. It is there from birth, and next to impossible to bring into being later.”
Ye Tianxie listened with his head in a tangle, and cut in. “Just tell me straight out why I have to go through the Seven Deadly Sins before my Dragon Soul can wake any further.”
The blue-haired man nodded and said, “A Dragon Soul carrying the light property has to be guided by a good heart, or the dragon’s power will lie quiet forever. A Dragon Soul carrying the dark property has to be guided by a disposition leaning a little toward wickedness. And your Dragon Soul carries both light and dark, so what it needs is guidance from the disposition of evil. And… all your life, whether it was your family in the old days or Li Xian’er, being with them has steered your nature toward the good side, and the evil you were born with has done no more than make some of your habits different from other people’s. But real evil is disregarding good and wickedness and doing only what you yourself believe is right — for your own sake, and to guard the people beside you that you care about, being able to set aside everything, trample everything, and be held by nothing called ‘good’ or ‘wicked’… Evil like that, the man you are today cannot manage… because the baptism of the life you have lived means you will never truly touch real wickedness. So you need the baptism, and after it he will live only for himself and the people beside him, and be free of the scruple he does not need at all. That way your dragon power will wake quickly, because your evil nature will have come into being… Now do you understand?”
(End of Chapter 248)