He put away the two gold items whose destinations he’d already decided on, and drew out his last two — the Tiger Soul Shield and the Tiger Fang Blade, both dropped by the Amethyst Battle Tiger. When yet another pair of gold items appeared before her, he saw plain disbelief cross the girl’s face.
“These are the last two. Sorry to trouble you.”
“No… it’s no trouble.”
Appraising equipment earned her gold and appraisal experience. If anyone ought to be saying thank you, it was her.
Her luck today was genuinely good. She took the two gold items, and in a short while had appraised both successfully. Ye Tianxie glanced over their stats and put them back in his pack. Those two appraisals had cost him 120 gold, and together with everything before it, the day’s total came to 350 gold.
And yet he didn’t feel a twinge of regret. Some mysterious emotion, some hazy stirring, was driving him to do all this.
He didn’t linger. He gave the girl one last look, then turned to leave. He was confident he would see her again.
“…May I add you as a friend?” The girl called after him, asking in a timid, uncertain tone.
“Sure.” Ye Tianxie turned back and added the name “Broken Heart of the Stars” to his friend list himself — making her the first friend he had to date. When the confirmation chimed, he said to her with a smile, “That’ll make it easier to find you. If I have anything else that needs appraising, I’ll be troubling you again.”
Perhaps because he had glimpsed the wounds she’d once taken, he spoke to her without a shred of his habitual cold arrogance — as gently as he was able.
That said, he raised a hand in farewell and set off toward his residence. Only then did the girl get a chance to learn his name. She pulled up her friend panel and looked at the single name in it — and her eyes and her mouth fell open together in astonishment…
Xietian… That person… was the Xietian everyone was talking about, the one they spoke of like a legend!
Back at his new residence, the first thing Ye Tianxie did was equip the Undead Cloak. He was just deliberating whether to go grind some levels when a chime cut across his thoughts.
“Ding… You have an incoming call from outside. Answer?”
He checked the time and chose not to take it in the game world, logging out instead.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling he knew better than he knew anything, his phone ringing cheerfully beside him. The people who had this number could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
He reached out, took the phone, and without even looking at the number, hit answer and put it to his ear.
“Second Brother, don’t know if you’ve heard the news?” A rough male voice came through immediately.
“Oh? What news?” Ye Tianxie asked. The man didn’t generally call him without reason.
“Tomorrow — noon tomorrow, to be precise — the World of Fate is officially opening exchange between game currency and real currency. The initial rate is set at one to one. The news is already out, and some of the bigger guilds have started making preparations.”
Ye Tianxie frowned and sat up on the bed, his brow low. “Didn’t you tell me last time it’d be roughly another month? Why is it opening tomorrow?”
What did opening currency exchange mean? To an ordinary player, perhaps nothing more than the ability to convert money back and forth. But Ye Tianxie knew that the day currency exchange opened was the day the World of Fate truly began to churn — the day the great guilds, gangs, and powers would bare their fangs in earnest on every front and start seizing their territory.
“It was set for a month out. But Second Brother… the players’ clamor for currency exchange has been overwhelming, especially on the international forums. Threads about it flood the boards every day, badly enough that not just Skyward Group but the governments of multiple countries started feeling the pressure. You’d understand the reasons behind all that better than I would. Then Alpha — who vanished, and who they say went back to his own star system — sent word ahead to Skyward Group and the major banks announcing that currency exchange opens at noon tomorrow. Second Brother, get ready.”
Ye Tianxie was silent a moment, then nodded. “Understood… And Big Sister?”
“Big Sister has been preparing for a long time. Now that currency exchange is opening, it’s her moment to move. Uh… that is, Second Brother…” The voice on the other end suddenly turned sly, and asked with great care, “I hear Su Luo’s only daughter Su Feifei is living at your place now, and has been for quite a few days. You two aren’t… you haven’t…?”
“Get your filthy mind out of the gutter. Nothing has happened between us. I’m just collecting a little protection money,” Ye Tianxie said sourly.
“Uh… well, Second Brother, you’ve never lied to anyone, so hearing you say that puts my mind right at ease. Phew… a lot more at ease.” There came the sound of a chest being patted and a breath let out.
“At ease? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Huh? Uh? Nothing, nothing… Oh, right, Second Brother, that dead ladyboy and I have both been dying to meet up with you. Could you let us know…?”
“Ten a.m. tomorrow. Middle of the back street behind the City of Stars commercial district,” Ye Tianxie said crisply.
“Ah! Right!” The voice on the other end burst into exaggerated excitement. “I’ll go tell that dead ladyboy right now. God, I feel fantastic — finally I get to go conquer the world with Number Two and Number Four again, hahahaha—”
A row of black lines appeared on Ye Tianxie’s forehead, and his voice went positively sinister. “Call me Number Two one more time and see whether I don’t cut you up and feed you to the turtles.”
“Slip of the tongue, slip of the tongue, absolutely a slip of the tongue, Second Brother, please, calm down. Right then, that’s settled, I’ll hang up, heh heh heh heh—”
The call ended. Ye Tianxie tossed the phone aside and lay back down, staring straight up at the ceiling, his thoughts drifting from the news of the currency exchange and gradually descending into chaos.
That blue-haired man. Those eyes… that receding silhouette…
Without meaning to, as his gaze went hazier and hazier, his thoughts drifted back to a past he had no wish to revisit.
The sky was dark, the wind hurried, and even the broken moon showed only a sliver from behind the clouds, doling out a wretched scrap of light to the earth below.
“Wuu… wuu-wuu-wuu… Brother, are Mama and Papa really dead…? I don’t want it… I don’t want it…”
The boy’s grief-hoarse sobbing stained the dim night with a heavy desolation. And then a tall shape came running toward them out of the distance, his stride hurried and disordered. He looked no older than fourteen or fifteen, but he already had the build of a grown man and a pair of fierce, cutting eyes. Only now those eyes held a hatred like fire — and the scattered vacancy of a body run past its limits.
Tucked under one arm was a little boy, no more than four or five years old, weeping helplessly into the cold wind…
“Don’t cry… We’re men. Men may shed blood, but never tears. Never, ever tears.” He ran with everything he had, his breathing long since ragged, his stride stumbling again and again, his exhalations coming coarse and heavy. His strength had been spent long ago; he was running now on nothing but obsession and will, holding himself together by force.
“But they killed Mama, they killed Papa…” The little boy raised eyes gone gray and empty. That night had overturned his entire world like a nightmare. He had never known what evil was — and tonight he had watched, with his own eyes, his mother and his father die at those people’s hands… And in that moment he had gone blank, his head utterly empty, and only his brother had carried him away, running… running for their lives…
“Papa and Mama aren’t dead. They’ve gone to heaven. They’re watching us from heaven…”
“Heaven…” The little boy lifted his head in his brother’s arms and looked up at the night sky, scattered with its few stars, a heartbreaking despair on his face. “Brother, then can I go to heaven too…? I miss Mama and Papa so much…”
The boy’s footsteps stopped. His body all but gave out, and he finally dropped to his knees on the ground, gasping violently, his whole body soaked through with sweat. Ahead of them… was a cliff. A sheer drop with no bottom in sight, cutting off their last road out.
He clenched his teeth so hard that blood began to seep between them. Far off to his right, a small black mound caught his attention. Drawing strength from somewhere he couldn’t name, he pushed himself upright and ran for it with everything he had left.
It was a heap of irregular, bar-shaped stones. He set the little boy down and, gasping, wringing the last of the strength out of his body, began frantically hauling the stones aside — until he had opened a gap that satisfied him. Then he turned, stripped off the little boy’s outer coat, and wrapped it around a long stone about the same length as the child’s body. He lifted the boy into the gap he had cleared and quickly hauled the stones back into place in front of him, hiding him away inside the stack.
“Brother…” The little boy was cold all over. He curled himself into a ball and called out to the only person he had left to lean on.
The older boy crouched down, gathered the stone dressed in his brother’s clothes into his arms, forced the corner of his mouth into a smile, and said softly, “Little Tian. A man never speaks lightly of dying. Do you understand? Our Papa and Mama are dead, our home is destroyed… but we still have you. You have to live well. You have to go on living, no matter what — that’s the only way Papa and Mama will be happy up in heaven… and the only way you can avenge them. Little Tian, be good. Don’t make a sound. You have to survive… Survive, and there’ll be a day we see each other again.”
“Brother!”
He looked at his younger brother one last time, then turned and ran hard in the opposite direction. The little boy stared, dazed, as that receding back grew smaller and smaller in his sight. And in that moment, that silhouette was branded into his heart — because a feeling had welled up in his small, young soul that terrified him…
This was the last time he would ever watch his brother walk away.
(End of Chapter 123)