So when he realized that this man was actually Cloud-Piercing Sword of the Level Ranking, Thunderstorm’s heart gave a lurch, and the regret set in. After all, even Thunderbolt — the boss of his own Battle Soul Hall — had never managed to squeeze into the Level Ranking’s top ten… hadn’t even made the top thirty.

And the instant those humiliating words of his were out, he felt it plainly: the two beams of that gaze turned on him now carried a killing intent so terrible it made his scalp prickle and his insides run cold. Eyes that had already been cold turned colder still — frighteningly cold, cold enough to set his heart hammering in his chest. A few seconds under that stare was all it took, and cold sweat was already beading across his forehead, drop after drop.

Anyone with a look like that in his eyes was an extremely dangerous man… In that moment, he was deeply, absolutely certain of it.

“Forget it, forget it. I’m in a decent enough mood today, so I won’t stoop to your level. Crawl back to whatever hole you came out of!” Thunderstorm waved a hand, forcing himself to look calm. His tone was still hard, but anyone could hear that something was off underneath it.

Cloud-Piercing Sword didn’t move. Both hands on his greatsword, that frigid aura locked onto Thunderstorm, a cold light flickering in his eyes that no ordinary person could ever have produced. That look alone was enough to mark him as no ordinary man… because only someone who had truly killed, someone who held life itself in contempt, ever looked at another person that way.

His eyes looked exactly the way Ye Tianxie’s did in a rage.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to strike. It was that… PK was forbidden inside the city. If he made a move, he wouldn’t manage to finish Thunderstorm off; he would be stopped and seized by the City of Stars’ city guards and hit with a mandatory penalty. But if he didn’t strike… how was he supposed to swallow the insult?

Anyone pinned under a stare like that would have squirmed in his own skin. To Thunderstorm it felt like a blade held to his throat. After a short while he couldn’t take it any longer. He threw aside every last shred of caution and bellowed, “You turtle-spawn little bastard! Are you deaf? Are you mute? I told you to piss off, do you hear me?! Get lost! And if you won’t get lost then fucking come and attack your granddaddy, then!!”

The killing intent swelled violently, enough to set hearts trembling. Cloud-Piercing Sword’s blade leveled forward, and he lunged for Thunderstorm.

In truth, Thunderstorm wasn’t the least bit afraid of Cloud-Piercing Sword’s attack. Inside a city, no matter who was in the right, whoever struck first was guaranteed to be stopped and hauled away by the guards immediately. Cloud-Piercing Sword sat seventh on the Level Ranking — not the sort of man anyone should provoke. But with a temperament as habitually arrogant as Thunderstorm’s, when had he ever yielded to anyone? And with Battle Soul Hall at his back, he had always leaned on the sheer weight of that organization and looked down on every person he met.

Cloud-Piercing Sword was fast. Startlingly fast. A Warrior by class, and what he showed was an Assassin’s speed. He was barely halfway through his charge when a violent gust of wind, tangled with an equally violent shriek of torn air, howled past him — and a figure appeared in front of him… arriving there as though it had teleported.

He forced his own motion to a dead stop and fixed those terrible, cold eyes on the man before him. The speed the man had just displayed was startling. He began to study him more carefully — and the longer he looked, the more it unsettled him.

The one blocking Cloud-Piercing Sword was, of course, Ye Tianxie. Not out of any kindly worry that striking would get the man arrested by the City of Stars’ guards — no. It was that when it came to this Thunderstorm, it wasn’t his turn.

“We meet again.” Ye Tianxie let out a cold laugh and walked slowly toward Thunderstorm.

By now Ye Tianxie had changed into the Demon Dragon’s Fang and the Holy Dragon’s Fang, with the Hero’s Headguard on his brow and the Undead Cloak hanging from his shoulders. The full outfit set off a wide ripple of whispering the instant he stepped into view.

Gauntlets, headguard, cloak — any one of the three would have been enough on its own to turn heads and draw awed stares. The gauntlets, set with dragon heads, went without saying. The headguard was something nobody there had ever laid eyes on. And the cloak… given how peculiar cloak-type equipment was, simply owning one was already something to be envied for; add to that the grey light drifting endlessly across the Undead Cloak and the faint, dim gold beneath it, and the piece took on several more layers of astonishing mystery.

And this Thunderstorm was precisely the man who, back when Ye Tianxie first returned to the City of Stars, had tried in an extremely rude tone to lay claim to his Light-and-Dark gauntlets. Ye Tianxie had muttered to himself at the time: don’t ever let me run into you out in the wild… But now, it seemed there was no need to wait for the wild at all.

Thunderstorm recognized him at once — his equipment was unmistakably one of a kind. Surprise gave way to a wrinkle of the nose and a cold sneer. “It’s y—”

The word wasn’t even out of his mouth before an enormous pressure came bearing down from in front of him.

BAM!!

-1340!

Amid a crowd caught entirely off guard, staring in astonishment, a huge pitch-black shape manifested in Ye Tianxie’s hand and came down on Thunderstorm in one abrupt swing.

A clean hit! But at the point where weapon met flesh, what rang out was an unbelievable bursting crack, like two lumps of solid stone slammed together with everything behind them.

There had been no hesitation in the strike, no scruple, not even time enough to let the other man get out one more word. It went far beyond anything the onlookers had been braced for.

And that strange weapon with its staggering shape, and the damage number that had blown straight past a thousand — every pupil in the crowd contracted sharply in shock.

What was that thing… some odd kind of sword? Or some special blunt weapon?

And that damage number… he had actually put out over a thousand damage!

Who was this man? Could he be an NPC? Yes — he had to be an NPC. How could any player at this stage of the game possibly have attack power that absurd?

Thunderstorm’s HP was emptied by that single strike from Ye Tianxie. His body toppled over stiff as a board, and right up to the moment he died — right up to the moment the prompt You have died sounded in his ear — his nerves still hadn’t caught up.

“Whew. Second Brother never changes. With a man who’s already as good as dead, he’s never once bothered to waste an extra word on him — can’t even be bothered to ask who the guy is… Mm. That one seemed to be the Lei family’s third son.” Zuo Pojun, somewhere in the crowd, said it with his chin propped in one hand.

“Yo! What a happy, lucky Third Lei. In this world all he’s lost is one illusory level — he ought to be giving thanks with everything he has that this didn’t happen in the real one… Oh! Of course, if that pitiful brain of his refuses to learn, then we’ll have another tragic little story playing out right in front of us.”

And just as Thunderstorm went down, two white shapes flickered into being in front of Ye Tianxie. Two imposing broad-saber city guards appeared before him at the same moment and came straight to the point: “Xietian. You have violated the ordinances of the City of Stars and instigated combat within the city. By the ordinances of the City of Stars, we must place you under arrest. Please come with us. If you resist unreasonably, your penalty will be multiplied several times over!”

Xietian?!

He was Xietian?!

The moment the name Xietian left the guards’ mouths, the noise of the crowd doubled in an instant. Every eye went as wide as it could go, fixed on this man whose legend had been retold until it barely sounded human, and who remained an utter mystery. More than half the players there, some openly and some not, were taking photos or recording video with the wristbands on their arms.

Back in the novice stage, the name Xietian had rung out across the World of Fate for clearing the Abyss trial alone, and his meteoric climb up the Level Ranking had built a second legend on top of the first. By now there was hardly a soul who didn’t know the name — and yet nobody had ever heard of anyone who had actually seen this powerful, deeply mysterious man, the number one figure of Huaxia in the World of Fate… And today was, without question, his first appearance in public. How could they not be worked up?

His attack was terrifying — terrifying past anything they had imagined. Damage over a thousand: at this stage of the game not even the hardest-hitting fire and lightning Mages could crack a thousand, and Xietian had done it. He had done what no other player could currently do, and every piece of gear on his body proclaimed how far outside the ordinary he was. His character was just as startling — he said he would strike and he struck, without a shred of hesitation, scruple, or delay, even here, inside a city.

He was like a bug in the World of Fate, a freak that had no business existing… Nobody knew what he had leaned on to do all this, from the same starting line, in the same world as everyone else.

And right now, what they were watching was Xietian caught in an enormous bind… the penalty that inevitably followed initiating PK inside a city. Anyone who started a fight within the walls was stopped on the spot by guards descending out of thin air and locked in prison for three hours. And if they resisted… that made it simpler still: the guards would bring a blade down without a moment’s pause, and on top of not escaping the prison sentence, the offender would take the far crueler penalty of losing levels and losing equipment.

Would Xietian comply, or resist? Comply? Killing a man in front of every eye on the street and then being hauled away in front of those same eyes seemed to do his Renown harm and no good at all. Resist? What player could possibly stand against guards that strong?

And then came the scene that made the whole crowd’s eyes all but fall out of their heads.

Unhurried, Ye Tianxie produced a bronze-colored token and waved it once in front of the two guards. It was a token no other player had ever seen, and no one could make out the writing on it. The guards’ eyes rested on it for a moment; their stern bearing loosened at once. The two of them bowed slightly to Ye Tianxie in unison, then vanished into two blooms of white light exactly as suddenly as they had come.

Even after Ye Tianxie had put the City of Stars Pardon Token away, the people around him still hadn’t come back to themselves.

Ye Tianxie walked over to Shattered Star-Heart, looked into her eyes — brimming as they were with a thin veil of mist — and smiled. “There. It’s over. If anything like this happens again, just call for me, any time.”

Shattered Star-Heart nodded gently, and then nodded hard. All at once she felt the urge to cry… to bawl her eyes out.

She was used to holding everything up on soft shoulders and a soft heart, used to being alone and without help, and this long-absent warmth, this feeling of having something to lean on, warmed her right through. They were strangers, complete strangers — and he had given her help when she longed for it, and given her hope in her heart… and now, at her most helpless, he had appeared at her side for no reason at all. The feeling of that single instant was enough to carve itself into her for the rest of her life.

(End of Chapter 161)