When Xue Wuxia woke.

The first thing she wanted to see was that bad boy, the one who had haunted her even in the depths of the sleep. She knew he had missed her. He had stood in front of her and called to her over and over, a hundred times and a thousand, hoping she would wake, and she had wanted from the bottom of her heart to open her eyes on the spot and glare at him and tell him not to be so revoltingly sentimental. Times beyond counting she had wanted to give him some small answer, even the smallest hint of one, and she had never once managed it.

There was no telling how long she had slept in that chaos. Perhaps a thousand years had gone by. Either way it had been a long, long stretch of time.

If she had not known he was there beside her the whole while, the waiting would have driven her frantic.

In a stillness so deep it came close to eternity, Xue Wuxia felt she had in fact gained a great deal. She could not talk and laugh at his side, but she had grown patient, comprehended silence, and passed beyond longing…

The ice-cold divine power that had fused into her from nowhere, and her divine sense, converted a particle at a time and condensed. No act of will was needed to drive it; the process formed of itself, whole and complete — or was born, rather — a divine power and a divine sense entirely her own and entirely new. Some of it was knowledge and states of realm she had caught narrow glimpses of while he was rising. Some of it was new knowledge and new realms she had never encountered and could not have imagined. And some of it was so mysterious and so profound that she could not have understood or grasped it if she had spent every scrap of wisdom she possessed. At some point all of it had simply settled quietly in the depths of her mind, waiting for her to come and explore it, take it in, make it hers and fuse with it.

Some of those realms Xue Wuxia felt she had already comprehended.

Then she discovered it was only the beginning.

What she had found her way to was the tip of the iceberg.

And there were others she had thought herself a long way from, only to find she had already mastered them without noticing, and was short of nothing but a chance to try them out and prove it.

How she wanted to share what she had gained, and the joy of it, with that bad boy. He would be happy for her. He might complain — she had slept so long — but mostly he would be happy… And that haughty princess would drink three whole bowls of vinegar over it. It had been a good long while since she had seen Qianqian angry. Just thinking about it made her look forward to it.

But when she had profited once again from the level he had risen to, when she had struggled out of that chaos too impatient to wait any longer —

When she opened her eyes and looked for him first of all —

Xue Wuxia found something else.

She had arrived, with no explanation at all, in another time and space.

Everything in it felt somehow familiar, as though she had seen it at some point. But Xue Wuxia could be certain that every last thing in it was strange to her and that she had never laid eyes on any of it. The familiarity was only a strange feeling, not a fact.

No flowers or grass, no trees, no mountains or rivers or lakes or seas. Nothing at all from the real world.

Only a haze of cloud and mist more chaotic than chaos itself.

If Xue Wuxia had not been certain she was fully awake, she would have suspected she was still in the sleep, still inside the dream world.

“Maybe the Book of Truth will have the answer.” Xue Wuxia turned it over and over and could not arrive at any reasonable explanation, so she pinned her hopes on the Book of Truth, which had grown into one body with her and risen to the rank of a top-grade divine artifact.

She turned the page lightly with one pale finger.

To her surprise, the Book of Truth, which can lay bare every truth in the world, gave no response at all.

She even tried to summon her life-guardian war beast, the Storm Valkyrie.

That failed completely too.

“What is going on?” Xue Wuxia was lost. Was there anywhere in the world where a person could not summon her own life-guardian war beast? What kind of place would that be? Some supreme secret realm where the ancient gods lived? Impossible. She had plainly been sleeping in his Grimoire World — so how could she suddenly turn up in some supreme secret realm of the ancient gods? Something had to be wrong somewhere.

She was still turning it over without getting anywhere when she noticed something that startled her.

Behind her, at some point, two little lolis had appeared, as soft and pink and lovely as anything could be, watching her out of great dark eyes that blinked and blinked.

Xue Wuxia had seen a great many little lolis, at home and abroad, whole crowds of them, and especially since that bad boy was a lolicon and collected big and small ones wherever he went… Greedy Shuang’er, obedient Niuniu, hardworking Bing’er, mischievous Bao’er — every one of them adorable past bearing — and then the princesses of the various nations and the little ones of the various clans, and the elite classes at the Ivy Academy that Elder Wuteng taught with such care, which alone held a great many lolis large and small, each more likable than the last.

But Xue Wuxia could be certain of this.

She had never seen these two before, and she had never seen any small person as soft and pink and lovely as they were.

She was no lolicon herself, and she took to the pair of them at once anyway.

Because.

They were simply too adorable.

“You—” Xue Wuxia had the illusion that she knew these two small creatures well. She could be certain she had never met them before. As for why the feeling was there at all, she was thoroughly confused and could not have said.

She was bending down to gather the two soft, pink, lovely little lolis into her arms when they both stepped back at the same moment, in perfect accord.

Dodging the hug perfectly.

Then glanced at each other, and it was almost too much.

Their laughter came, clearer than silver bells, ringing through the soul like the music of heaven itself.

The two lovely little lolis took each other’s hands and set their small bare feet moving together, and in an instant they were far away.

Xue Wuxia’s arms closed on nothing. She discovered that moving her own feet even half a meter in this place took what felt like every scrap of strength she had, and that catching two little lolis running lightly away was out of the question. All she could do was watch their backs shrink into the distance, with an incredulous, rueful smile on her face. Whose children were those two? Why were they here?

And why did they give her that sense of familiarity?

Question after question.

They rose up in her, and she thought about every one of them and solved none.

Xue Wuxia set off slowly in the direction the two little lolis had vanished. Every step forward in this place seemed to cost ten days or half a month. The movement was desperately slow. It was fortunate that only walking was restricted; if speech and gesture had been the same, the frustration would have killed a person.

With the endless patience she had gained in the sleep, Xue Wuxia could do anything at all without hurrying. She was in no rush. She would arrive one day regardless.

If it had been the impatient Princess Qianqian standing here instead.

She would have made herself ill.

There was no telling how long the walk took.

Xue Wuxia’s still-water composure was very close to giving out when she noticed somebody up ahead, practicing.

This one was a loli too, though a big one, older than Shuang’er and Niuniu but a good deal younger than Bing’er and Bao’er. There was something about her face that felt familiar in a way she could not explain, as though Xue Wuxia had seen this big loli quite recently. She felt as familiar as family — close and reassuring at once.

“Little sister, who are you?” Xue Wuxia knew this could not possibly be family of hers. She did strongly suspect the girl was family of that bad boy’s, though — a younger sister of his, perhaps. Strictly speaking his sisters were Bing’er and Shuang’er and there ought to be nobody else. But the moment this big loli appeared in front of her, Xue Wuxia found she did not want to rule out another possibility: that she might be another bud, another fruit borne by the Divine Wish Flower Tree of life all those years ago, out of another of Yue Yang’s mother’s wishes.

Or it might be something else entirely.

But there could be no doubt at all that this little sister was family of his.

The girl was wearing marvelous clothing of a kind Xue Wuxia had never seen. The moment she saw Xue Wuxia she broke off her practice, came over quickly, tilted her small head a little to one side, and blinked her great eyes, watching Xue Wuxia exactly the way those two soft pink lolis had.

“My face isn’t very dirty, is it?” Being looked at like that left Xue Wuxia a little unsure of herself, and she touched her own face without meaning to.

“…” The little sister smiled and said nothing.

She put out her hand.

Xue Wuxia did not quite understand, and guessed it was a gesture of friendliness — that the girl might want to hold hands. She tried putting out her own pale hand, and closed it gently around the girl’s small soft one.

The feel of it was safe and warm, and something in Xue Wuxia settled at once.

This was family. There was no mistaking it.

The next second.

She found, in complete astonishment, that this little sister in front of her had condensed a golden dragon-shaped sword-qi as casually as breathing, then drifted up into the air, set her foot on the dragon’s head, drew Xue Wuxia after her and rode the dragon away at speed. In the space of a blink there was no telling how far they had gone. Back in the mortal world it would have been a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers behind them.

“Where are we going?” Xue Wuxia wondered whether the girl meant to take her out of this strange world and deliver her back to that bad boy.

“…” The big loli turned her small face to her, gave her a sweet smile, and explained nothing.

The enormous golden dragon condensed out of sword-qi seemed to pass through endless time and space.

Xue Wuxia’s eyes could not keep up with any of it on the way.

There was no chance to feel it out in any detail.

Then, suddenly, her body went light.

The great golden dragon was gone, and she found herself in a world of extraordinary brightness, divine energy wrapping her body, spiritual force overflowing everywhere. Set against this heaven of a world — ten thousand colors and a thousand shades, endlessly various, dreamlike, perfect in every particular — Xue Wuxia found that even the most beautiful place she had ever walked through was a joke by comparison, not worth mentioning at all.

That bad boy’s Grimoire World had been created by will and then built up by everyone together, and it was extremely beautiful.

But it did not compare with this.

The feeling was the gulf between an ugly duckling and a swan.

Here, at last, Xue Wuxia’s divine power could show itself — and amplified a hundred times over, a thousand… Hanging in the sky and looking down over everything in front of her, she found there was not one part of this world that fell short of marvelous. And the most striking thing of all was a rainbow of divine light at the very top of the heavens.

It ran clean through the whole sky.

There was no telling how much time and how much divine energy it would take to condense a thing like that.

Under the divine-light rainbow, very far off, there was also a slender column of scarlet running from the foot of a mountain straight up into the sky, disappearing into the heavens at a height nobody could have measured. Xue Wuxia’s mind moved, and her divine power carried her to the foot of that scarlet column, where she discovered with a shock that it was not some other thing at all. It was the pillar of Nirvana fire that only that bad boy possessed, the one thing of its kind in the world… And she could say for certain that he could not possibly have condensed a Nirvana pillar on this scale, let alone stood it between heaven and earth forever.

That pillar of Nirvana fire was perhaps ten kilometers across, and perhaps more.

It went up into the vault of the sky.

Where it ended, at what height, there was no telling.

“Big sister? What are you doing here?” A voice came out of the pillar of Nirvana fire, sweet and artless and impossibly young, and before Xue Wuxia could react a small head had already slammed into her chest. A second later the force behind that small head sent her flying, and if she had not had a whole body’s worth of ice and snow divine power fused into her she might well have had the wind knocked clean out of her by the reckless little creature.

“It’s Bingyin!” Xue Wuxia was overjoyed. A familiar face at last. The girl was a bit reckless, but with her here the stone that had been sitting on Xue Wuxia’s chest could finally come off.

“Big sister Wuxia, how did you get here?” The small head against her chest tipped up, showing a face that was lovely whether she was cross or pleased. It was Qilin Girl Bingyin, no question.

“Ah — I don’t know either!” Xue Wuxia had no answer to give. She had woken from a sleep to find herself in cloud and haze like chaos itself, met two soft pink lovely little lolis, then been taken up by a little sister who felt like family, on a dragon made of sword-qi, and ridden it all the way here. It was stranger than any dream. Never mind anybody else — she did not dare believe it herself.

Xue Wuxia looked up at the sky. At the top of the heavens the great golden dragon was long gone.

The little sister who felt like family was gone too.

What there was instead was a scattering of stars.

Blinking.

The way those bright eyes of hers had.

Xue Wuxia had the illusion that she could see her — that the little sister was up there at the very top of the sky, smiling sweetly down at her, and waving goodbye…

(End of Chapter 1214)