“Hee.” Su Feifei snorted with laughter. “Since when does a girl call herself rén bǐ? Sister Autumn Waters, are you — huh?” Something seemed to occur to her mid-sentence. Her voice stopped, and her expression froze… Murong Qiushui… Murong Qiushui… Why is that name so familiar…

“Ah!! You… you’re Murong Qiushui. You’re the — the—” Su Feifei retreated a small step, planting herself beside a rather peculiar-looking Ye Tianxie, and stammered, “You’re a — a man!”

“Bingo! Correct, beautiful lady. You have not only an angel’s beauty and an angel’s voice, but an angel’s heart and an angel’s wisdom.” Murong Qiushui executed a textbook gentleman’s bow, that bewitching smile opening across his face like a spring blossom, set off by those peach-blossom eyes with their rippling autumn light… Beautiful beyond all reason.

Murong Qiushui. Not many people knew that name, because it circulated only among the very highest tier of society. And anyone who knew what Murong Qiushui truly was would inevitably know a forbidden name too: the Holy Domain.

When the Holy Domain was founded, nobody could say for certain. It gathered up every esper who appeared anywhere in Huaxia — innate or acquired, it made no difference. Once the Holy Domain found you, it would find some way to bring you in. As people possessing what ordinary eyes would call “superpowers,” espers were exceedingly few; across the whole of Huaxia there were perhaps a hundred, less than one ten-millionth of the population. And as beings essentially superhuman, their numbers naturally could not be allowed to grow too large, or the balance of ordinary life would inevitably break.

The Holy Domain existed partly to gather espers together and preserve that balance, and partly to concentrate their power into a supremely strong protective force unknown to ordinary people — a force safeguarding the stability of Huaxia’s highest authority, which is to say the Zuo family. In other words, the Holy Domain was the Zuo family’s own guardian force, and the strongest guardian force in all of Huaxia.

And the Holy Domain had an adversary. A formidable one: the Hall of Mara.

The Hall of Mara existed for precisely the opposite purpose — to destroy the Zuo family and throw Huaxia’s government into chaos. Its true origins and its founder remain unknown to this day, but what is certain is that its ranks hold Eastern faces and Western faces alike. And the Hall of Mara, too, is composed entirely of espers, that rarest of breeds. The Holy Domain and the Hall of Mara waged a shadow war for years, and their confrontation only came to an end five years ago… In that brutal, unrecorded battle, more than half of the Holy Domain died, and the Hall of Mara vanished utterly. It has not been seen since — whether wiped out entirely or gone to ground to recover its strength, nobody knows. Very few people know of that battle, which took place beyond the human tier altogether; and even those who know would not dare speak of it, and if they spoke of it nobody would believe them. As for what actually happened in it — no one knows but the participants themselves, and not a word has ever leaked. Every Holy Domain member who fought there keeps their mouth sealed, as though it were a forbidden subject that must never be touched.

The current master of the Holy Domain is named Murong Hongyi, and he has one son: Murong Qiushui. And until Murong Qiushui was thirteen, everyone believed him to be a girl — even Zuo Pojun, who had grown up playing with him, believed it. Perhaps Murong Qiushui believed it himself. After thirteen, word finally got out that he was male, but everything about how he presented himself remained indistinguishable from a perfectly ordinary woman. So anyone meeting him for the first time concluded without hesitation that he was a woman. And upon learning his gender was male… the psychological free-fall was enough to keep a man awake for nights on end — especially those men who had been stunned by his beauty at first sight and formed intentions, or fallen in love outright.

He was a kind of demon. Without doing anything at all, he had ruined more men than any nation-toppling beauty, and ruined them far more cruelly.

Murong Qiushui’s eyes, his nose, his lips, his ears — every feature was finer than a woman’s, and even his figure was slender enough to make women jealous… And what really made a man want to vomit blood was that his gaze and his expressions produced, without any effort at all, a charm that unsettled the mind. Setting all that aside, his manner of speech was in a category of its own, leaving people either speechless or covered in gooseflesh. But if you judged from his appearance that here was a man more womanly than a woman, frivolous, harmless, and of no account — you would be making a terrible mistake. This was equally a man you did not provoke. And one of his taboos concerned what people called him.

Three years ago, at an aristocratic banquet, the second son of the Guo family, emboldened by drink, laughingly called him a ladyboy. Murong Qiushui, who had been all smiles a moment before, changed utterly — and in that instant the entire hall went from high summer to deep winter, cold enough to make the heart stutter, the boisterous room falling as silent as if it had been sealed in ice. And Murong Qiushui, in front of countless nobles, in front of the Guo second son’s own parents and family, using a hand more beautiful than any woman’s, tore him into a dozen-odd pieces in the space of three seconds with some peculiar power — then drew the gun he carried and put a bullet into each and every severed piece. And every gunshot landed like a shot into the heart of every person in that room. At the end, wearing an elegant and merciless smile, he walked slowly out, leaving behind a heap of flesh and blood that broke the nerve of everyone who saw it…

In that moment, they learned what a devil was.

And from that day, apart from a very small handful, nobody ever dared call him a ladyboy again… The only son of the master of the Holy Domain was hardly an ordinary man. He was, himself, a terrifying esper.

So when Su Feifei realized that the person in front of her was that elegant devil who looked so exactly like a woman, shock and fear were inevitable. Shock, because he really did look far too much like a woman — she’d heard people speak of it before and thought little of it, assuming at most an effeminate manner and a passing resemblance. She had never imagined it went this far. And fear, naturally, because of the things she’d heard he had done.

“Second Brother, I hadn’t realized you now have at your side an angel so beautiful, so graceful, and so clever. What a marvelous thing. I wonder what Big Sister will say when she hears—”

“That’s enough, Qiushui.” Ye Tianxie’s scalp prickled and he cut him off. For reasons he couldn’t name, he was rather afraid of hearing the words Big Sister just now. He cast about for a subject. “Qiushui, you went Archer?”

Murong Qiushui’s eyes shone, water seeming to move in them. “Second Brother, at last you have lifted your gaze from that view-obstructing fat oaf and remembered this pitiful soul who would gladly live and die at your side. Ah, life is bitter and short — and bitterer still that it has been so long since we sighed together at the moon and breathed the cool night air—”

Ye Tianxie, Zuo Pojun, and Su Feifei all acquired a full set of black lines.

He raised a steel-colored bow in one hand and waggled it. “This bow is my answer.”

“Second Brother, you needn’t have asked. This dead ladyboy would pick Archer under any circumstances. It’d be strange if he didn’t,” Zuo Pojun said, mouth twisting.

Dead ladyboy!? Su Feifei’s nerves jumped. In everything she’d heard about Murong Qiushui, anyone who dared call him a ladyboy would—

“To take a life from a hundred paces, and watch those elegant blossoms of blood open one after another in the far distance — there is nothing more exquisite in all the world.” Murong Qiushui put the bow away, smiling with easy contentment. Not the slightest reaction to Zuo Pojun’s “dead ladyboy,” which quietly astonished Su Feifei. Were the rumors false? Or… were the four of them close enough that nothing was off limits?

Zuo Pojun simply ignored him. He marshalled his words and said, with some care, “Second Brother, this Xietian — do you know anything about him? The man irritates me no end, riding over Second Brother’s head like that — but I have to admit he must be extraordinarily strong, and he may well turn out to be the greatest rival you’ve ever had. Topping both the Level Ranking and the Renown Ranking is one thing, but he cleared the Abyss Trial alone… The dead ladyboy and I attempted the Abyss Trial ourselves, and the best the two of us managed was the third stage. And he did it alone—”

Two people reaching the third stage of the Abyss Trial — had any other player heard that, they’d have been staggered.

A peculiar look crossed Su Feifei’s face, and she ventured, “Huh? Don’t you know…? Tianxie is Xietian.”

“Uh?” Zuo Pojun and Murong Qiushui went blank in perfect unison.

Ye Tianxie gave a small shrug and made his name public — and two clear characters appeared above his head: Xietian.

“These days, I’m called Xietian.”

“This — er — hahahaha! So Xietian is Second Brother! I knew nobody could ride over Second Brother’s head. I knew there couldn’t possibly be anyone stronger than Second Brother. Honestly, though, changing your name and not telling us sooner — you had us jumping at shadows. Even my father’s been probing around trying to find out who Xietian really is. If he knew it was you—” Zuo Pojun stared for a moment, then burst into relieved laughter. That the name Tian Moxie had been pushed down the rankings had genuinely galled him. He could be surpassed. Ye Tianxie could not.

Murong Qiushui’s brows came down, and something cold flickered through his eyes. “If Second Brother is Xietian — then who is the Tian Moxie on the rankings now?”

Zuo Pojun’s laughter stopped dead. He stood there… Yes. If Ye Tianxie had changed his name to Xietian, then the Tian Moxie currently sitting at second place on the Level Ranking was—

“Just a man courting death.” Ye Tianxie smiled contemptuously.

And at that answer, the air around them turned suddenly, viciously cold — cold enough that Su Feifei shivered. And that horrifying chill did not come from Ye Tianxie. It came from Zuo Pojun and Murong Qiushui. Both their faces had gone still, and terribly dark.

“To dare steal a name that belongs to Second Brother alone. He is indeed a man courting death.” Zuo Pojun spat and snorted.

“Oh dear. Why must this world keep producing pitiful creatures who struggle so hard to hurl themselves into the abyss? Do they not know that the moment they make the wrong choice, the devil is already beckoning to them…? Bleh. Pray, pray hard — pray that you are revealed to us as late as possible, so you needn’t regret being born quite so soon.”

(End of Chapter 142)