“Tell me the reason. I don’t like doing things without a reason.” Ye Tianxie’s breathing had gone ragged, and his heart was hammering in a disordered rhythm, driven by something he couldn’t name.

“A reason…” The blue-haired man closed his eyes slightly, that flawless face tilting up, half-raised toward the sky, and he spoke in a voice that was almost ethereal. “If you can defeat me — even kill me — I will use everything I have to thank you… And you, you can have the Blue Soul. Otherwise, I can destroy the Blue Soul at any moment. Is that reason enough?”

Ye Tianxie: “!!”

Ye Tianxie shook his head and said coldly, “That isn’t a reason.”

“There are some things that neither you nor I can ever escape — not in this life, not across the cycles of rebirth, not even beyond time and space… This is fate, decided. A fate that cannot be fled from no matter how you run. I have no choice. And neither… do you.” The blue-haired man gazed vacantly at the sky, saying words Ye Tianxie could make no sense of whatsoever. And in that moment, the desolation and grief pouring off him reached their peak, and the air around them turned crushingly heavy.

“Heh. In that case, I accept.” A few seconds of silence, and then Ye Tianxie suddenly raised his head, giving his answer without the slightest hesitation or reluctance.

The blue-haired man lowered his head to look at him.

“You’re strong. Before I came into this world, I never even imagined the living things here could be strong to such a degree. But since you dare to say that to me — whoever you are, I won’t refuse… Right now I couldn’t take a single blow from you. But in ten years, or in a few decades, one day I will defeat you… Do you know what oath I swore in the year I turned ten?”

Blue-haired man: “??”

Ye Tianxie’s eyes burned, as though two fires were lit inside them. “That in all the world, there would be people who could not defeat me — but no one I could not defeat… And in this world, it will be the same!”

However mysterious and however powerful the blue-haired man had shown himself to be, and however much he had pulled him out of danger, Ye Tianxie had not once, from beginning to end, let his own presence weaken by so much as an inch before him. In this world he was standing only on the first step past the starting line. Among players there was perhaps no one who could match him — but against the true powers that existed in this world, his strength fell hopelessly short. His pride, though, would not lose to anyone.

A player would not normally overreach so far as to compare his own strength against an NPC deliberately designed to be beyond a player’s tier at all. And if there had to be one exception, it was Ye Tianxie. That thing buried deep in his heart had set him far apart from ordinary people from a very young age. That pride, which would not permit itself to be surpassed, was not something he was born with. It came from a transformation written in blood and in the heart.

The blue-haired man’s eyes fixed on his face, meeting Ye Tianxie’s stare directly. And then, after a moment, he suddenly began to smile… It was a very faint smile, and a very gentle one, and paired with that flawless face it carried a devastating power that could drown a person. But he was smiling… and facing that smiling face, Ye Tianxie’s heart ached without any reason he could name.

That smile… why did it feel so achingly familiar…

“I’ll wait for you… for the day you can defeat me.” He said it smiling. Only now did he actually look like a person — a living person with normal expressions and normal light in his eyes. “I… will help you one more time. After that, everything is up to you alone… Tianxie.”

Ye Tianxie: “…”

Tianxie… He called him… Tianxie!?

Tianxie — his name in the real world, the name she had given him all those years ago. Only she had ever called him that, with that kind of intimacy… And in the game world his name was, plainly, Xietian!

Coincidence, or…

“You—”

The word had barely left his mouth when the blue-haired man’s hand shot out and closed on his arm, and the scene around them instantly went blank.

Spatial transfer… The thought had only just risen in Ye Tianxie’s mind when color returned to the white world. But the colors that came back were completely different from those of a few seconds ago.

“Tianxie, farewell. When the time comes for us to meet, we will meet.”

Before Ye Tianxie could even take in his surroundings, the blue-haired man’s cold, emotionless voice reached his ears. He spun around at once. “Wait. You haven’t told me where this is… and tell me — have we met before!?”

An NPC of a game world, and a player from the real world: two people whose paths could never have crossed. To any ordinary person the question would have been absurd. But the repeated lurching of his own heart made him ask it anyway, and hunger for an answer.

“Where this is, you will soon find out… The answers to many questions must be sought with your own strength, seen with your own eyes, felt with your own heart. Otherwise, even if you receive an answer from someone else’s mouth, you will not believe it, and it will not set your heart at ease… Farewell.”

Ye Tianxie: “…”

His voice was as vague and insubstantial as a cloud drifting in a cold wind — there was no way to grasp whether his words were true or false, real or illusory. The blue-haired man turned and walked slowly away, and the blue wolf gave Ye Tianxie one silent look before following soundlessly at his heels.

Ye Tianxie instinctively took a step after him, about to call out again — and then something registered, and his head snapped around to look behind him. Only now did he discover, to his shock, that what filled his vision was a vast expanse where blackness met deep blue. The place he was standing was the edge of a chasm ten thousand zhang deep.

A chasm ten thousand zhang deep — and “ten thousand” was, for once, no exaggeration at all. Looking straight ahead, the area the abyss covered was so enormous that its far edge could not be seen; there was only that distant line where blackness and blue sky crossed. And looking down, there was nothing but a yawning dark, with no bottom in sight at all.

This place was…

Snapping out of his shock, Ye Tianxie had no time to wonder where he was or why the man had brought him here. He whipped his head back toward the blue-haired man, already departing, leaving nothing but a receding silhouette. He had appeared out of nowhere, and now, having brought him to this strange place, he was leaving just as abruptly. In their brief encounter, the man had seemed wrapped head to toe in a thick fog — unseeable, unreadable, ungraspable.

An utterly mysterious man, and an utterly compelling one. His expression, his eyes, both told Ye Tianxie the same thing: this was a man who was half dead already… A man like that, even with a perfect face and unmatched power, could never be happy… And more than that — Ye Tianxie had seen the will to die buried deep in his eyes.

He wanted very much to die. But there was one thing he had to do, and it had become the final tie holding him to this life, and so he had not chosen to end himself. He simply went on existing, lost, for the sake of that one goal.

That was the only thing Ye Tianxie could read from him… and those things — another man’s emotions, a stranger’s — pressed down on his own heart with a strange, deep weight.

Who was he… who was he… and what had he been through…

Why did his eyes…

Wait!!

That blue-haired, desolate silhouette grew smaller and smaller in Ye Tianxie’s pupils — and Ye Tianxie’s whole body suddenly convulsed, as though struck head-on by lightning falling from the sky. And then he, whose emotions had rarely shown even the slightest swing in years, began to shake violently from head to foot…

The silhouette… that silhouette…

“Wait… wait… you STOP RIGHT THERE!!” A cry that was very nearly hysterical tore out of Ye Tianxie’s throat, and he took off after that receding figure like a man gone mad. Wind screamed past his ears; something churned violently in his chest as though it were about to explode… In that instant he forgot everything, forgot to breathe, and in the blank white of his world nothing remained but that figure, overlapping perfectly with the silhouette that had never once faded from his memory… Every ounce of strength, every scrap of will he had drove him sprinting after that departing back, and his throat roared out, at the greatest volume he could produce, calling for him to stop.

The blue-haired man’s body checked, going rigid at the sudden shout. The wolf halted and watched its master quietly. The man raised his head to look at a sky that held no color for him and slowly closed his eyes — eyes that in that one instant were full of solace, of remembrance, and of grief. One hand waved gently backward.

A gale surged up and struck the sprinting Ye Tianxie, and instantly — with his shouting still unbroken — his body was swept high into the air and hurled backward, tracing a ragged arc as it fell… falling into the chasm ten thousand zhang deep, sinking into that bottomless black world with the cry still on his lips.

The blue-haired man turned around, his cold and lightless gaze fixed blankly on the place where Ye Tianxie had stood. His lips moved slightly, and a murmur slipped out that even he himself could barely hear…

“Little Tian…”

He closed his eyes, turned slowly, and walked on ahead.

He had no destination and no direction. He did not know where the road in front of him could lead, or where he ought to go in the next moment.

A bleak, clear wind; falling leaves dancing. Sparse leaves came drifting down in twos and threes, carried from somewhere unknown, trailing threads of desolation and silence.

One man, one wolf. He was not truly alone; there was always a companion at his side who never left him. And yet his presence, his expression, his receding back were still so solitary, so forlorn. He was clearly walking, and yet he stirred not the faintest trace of life. Even the withered leaves landing at his feet had more presence than he did.

His steps were even and silent, and wherever he passed, even the air seemed to turn bleak.

Without noticing, when he found there was no more road in front of him, he realized he was standing at the summit of a barren hill.

He stood there blankly, the dead-water surface of his gaze staring straight ahead — seeing no color, and no way home. A cold wind blew past, lifting his blue hair into a light dance, but it could not lift the faintest ripple in his heart. In that moment he was like a walking corpse: a man who had kept his life but lost his soul.

(End of Chapter 106)