The letter-carrying task the City Lord had handed him was like the quest Ye Tianxie had once taken to investigate where the city guards had gone: simple on the face of it, and in fact thick with danger. Along that road, the leveling time lost to hard travel was the lesser problem. The frightening part was that the maps he would have to cross would grow more perilous one after another, and over half the journey lay through the territory of monsters above level 40 — even level 50, 60… 80, 90. Any one of them, taken at random, could one-shot any player at the game’s current stage.

So this was emphatically not a task just anyone had the strength to take on.

Ye Tianxie had no choice but to go and buy a Blood-Sweating Steed, the mount with the highest speed bonus, and to stock up on enough potions… and because of Yaoyao, he had to lay in rather more mana potions than usual. Then he went home, sat in the main room tapping at the table, and quietly planned out how the next several days would run.

Ten days… counting it up, that collided rather badly with a number of things he had to do.

The Ten Thousand Bone Ruins, for one.

Last time’s failure meant he could not enter the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins again until the day after tomorrow. That was already too long for him. Two of the three System Quests had been completed first in the world, and his name was on both of them — but that was absolutely no reason to be certain he was the only person capable of finishing them at this stage.

So he had to finish the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins quest in the shortest time possible. Every day he let slip raised the odds of another country claiming the guild quest first.

From the moment he heard the three great System Quests announced, he had decided to be the first to complete all three of them… Otherwise his attributes and talents, so far beyond an ordinary player’s, would have been wasted for nothing.

There was one other thing, too: Liu Qiyue’s July Chamber of Commerce. Liu Qiyue had already said that the Chamber’s formal opening would take the form of an auction, with the timing chosen for when the average player level was hovering at the edge of fifteen — and that really was a moment that could not have been better.

“Tianxie, can I come with you?” Su Feifei asked quietly, sitting beside him.

“Better not. It’s more dangerous than you’re imagining… and this trip isn’t about killing monsters, it’s mostly about running away. The fewer people the better,” Ye Tianxie said truthfully.

“Oh!” Su Feifei answered, thought for a moment, and said, “It’s nearly noon, so I’ll go and make lunch. Remember to log off and eat on time… Sister Chenxin, you remember to eat on time too.”

“Mm. Goodbye, Sister Feifei.” Shattered Star-Heart took her leave of Su Feifei very politely.

After Su Feifei had gone, Ye Tianxie said to Shattered Star-Heart, “Chenxin, you log off as well… Your sister will be waiting for you.”

“I— mm. Big Brother Xietian, I’ll be back very soon,” Shattered Star-Heart said, and then added, a little carefully, “I promise I won’t slack off.”

Shattered Star-Heart spent far more time online now than she used to, but at noon she was always gone, because she had to care for her gravely ill sister — and sometimes, hearing something outside, she would leave in a great hurry. Ye Tianxie could dimly guess at some of it, but he had no intention of digging into it. This was probably all the help he could give her. The rest she would have to manage herself.

Knock, knock…

Knock, knock, knock, knock…

Shattered Star-Heart had only just left when a knocking started at the door outside — and the sound gave Ye Tianxie a small internal jolt.

No prompt… why is there no prompt?

In the World of Fate, when someone wanted to come in through a player’s front door, a prompt sounded at once: “XXX requests entry.” And what he was hearing now was only knocking, exactly the way it sounds in the real world, with no prompt behind it at all.

An NPC, then? Do NPCs have that sort of privilege? All Ye Tianxie could come up with was the City Lord of the City of Stars sending someone round to press him about the letter, since the City Lord knew perfectly well where he lived.

He walked out of the main room to the front door, touched a hand to it, and the door swung open.

One look out showed him only the buildings and the foot traffic of West Street in the City of Stars. Nobody was standing in front of the door at all… He blanked for a moment, and then dropped his head sharply — and in that instant his pupils contracted to the size of pinholes.

“Xiaoxi!” He crouched down and took the girl by the shoulders. Silent and still, her eyes closed… exactly as she had looked when he first saw her.

She was like some uncanny spirit walked out of a dream world. The shock of that rainy night had not yet worn off, and today she had appeared in front of him again by a means he found hard to believe and harder still to accept, shaking his mind and his nerves both.

He had changed Xiaoxi’s clothes for her, and he knew perfectly well what she did and did not have on her… Xiaoxi was carrying no game equipment whatsoever.

How did she get here?

“Bro… ther…”

The girl raised her face and called to him softly, and Ye Tianxie caught weakness and exhaustion in her voice. His eyes went to her, and only then did he see that her color had turned a sickly white… as though she had just come through a severe illness.

Something lurched in Ye Tianxie’s chest. He had no leisure to wonder why she was here at all, and said, with some urgency, “Xiaoxi, what’s wrong?”

“Bro… ther…”

She called to him softly again, and then her small body swayed and she folded limply onto Ye Tianxie’s shoulder… and after that her body began to thin, from solid to half-transparent, and then vanished without a trace like mist off water.

Ye Tianxie stayed exactly as he was, and it was a long time before he came back to himself. Not when he had seen the Hour of Fate follow him in the World of Fate, not when he had seen Guoguo appear in the real world, had he ever been as shaken or as lost as he was now… It was a tremor that overturned even the things he knew for certain, and with it a sense of the unreal, of something not actually happening.

The Hour of Fate…

Guoguo…

Xiaoxi…

Xian’er, why is everything you bring me so impossible to believe?

From the day we first met — and we had plainly never met before — you held me tight and named my birthday exactly, and told me we had been born in the same year, the same month, the same day, the same hour… Our meeting was already like some hazy, dreamlike fairy tale, only, over all those years together, I had been slowly forgetting it… and now your leaving is leading the fairy tale I had forgotten toward something more unreal still, toward a myth…

Xian’er, who on earth are you… and why have you brought them to me?

But at the very least, I can be certain of this now: you truly are not a woman of the mortal world. You have shown me that in this world there really must be heavenly maidens, and immortal maidens (xian — the same word that makes Xian’er’s name)… When I was very small I used to say all the time that you were an immortal maiden out of heaven. It seems that was not only praise from the deepest part of me…

You must have had reasons too great and too many for leaving me… I understand. I truly do understand. Your heart is so soft, and you doted on me as though I were a newborn — if I so much as pricked myself carelessly on a needle, or choked a little on a mouthful of water, it would hurt you for a long, long time… How could someone like that ever bear to see me miserable? How could you ever bear to leave… and make me miserable?

Even though we are not together, my heart tells me that you left so that we could truly be together, and that for our sake you took the whole of it on yourself… Xian’er, I will not grieve any more. I will wait quietly for you to come back. As long as you can come back, I am willing to do anything at all. Everything you have entrusted to me will be the most cherished thing in my life… Guoguo, Xiaoxi, the Hour of Fate, all of it.

How long he stayed blank he did not know. Ye Tianxie got up off the ground, shut the front door, and logged off in a hurry.

He opened his eyes and looked immediately to the side. Xiaoxi was asleep beside him, curled up, quiet and motionless. He sat up, and it drew no reaction from her at all.

Seeing Xiaoxi there, the heart that had risen slightly in Ye Tianxie’s chest came back down. He bent down and called quietly, “Xiaoxi? Xiaoxi?”

No answer. Xiaoxi’s breathing was light and even, and her color was exactly as it had been in the game world a moment ago, filmed over with that sickly white.

“Oh la la, master, don’t call her. She needs to sleep now, she needs to sleep for a very, very long time.” Guoguo popped out and said it at Ye Tianxie’s ear.

“What did Xiaoxi just do? Guoguo, do you know?” Ye Tianxie turned his head to look at her.

Guoguo had been brought to him by Xian’er, and Xiaoxi had been entrusted to him by Xian’er too… and thinking back to Guoguo’s strange behavior the other night… Could these two girls have known each other all along?

“Yee-yaa! Guoguo is such a good girl, Guoguo is always with master and never ever leaves master. Of course Guoguo doesn’t know.” Guoguo said it with her lips pushed out.

“Then how do you know Xiaoxi is going to sleep for a long time?”

“Because she’s very tired… so it’ll take a long time to get better?”

“Tired? How long?”

“Don’t know. Maybe a month, or maybe a year…” Guoguo thought about it and said it in a distinctly uncertain tone.

A month… a year?

Why would it take that long… What in the world happened to Xiaoxi? And why did she turn up inside the game at all, and vanish the way she did…

Can she move freely between the two worlds, the way Guoguo can?

“…Guoguo, tell me honestly. Have you met Xiaoxi before?” Ye Tianxie said it in earnest.

“Yaa! Of course not! Guoguo has never met Xiaoxi before… Wuu! Master, your eyes look really strange. Don’t you believe Guoguo… Yaa! Guoguo is the very most honest and never ever tells lies, and if Guoguo had ever met Xiaoxi before, then let Guoguo never get to eat a lollipop again as long as she lives!” Guoguo said it with her lips pouted and every appearance of solemn conviction, and then, in a very small voice, “Wuu, what a terrifying oath. I really haven’t met Xiaoxi.”

Ye Tianxie watched Guoguo with a strange look in his eyes for a while, then carefully drew the blanket over Xiaoxi, walked quietly out of the room and pulled the door to behind him.

After a long stretch of work, Su Feifei finally had lunch ready — four dishes and a soup, very finely done, and the sight of it set Guoguo drooling in a stream she could not stop. There was an extra small bowl and a spoon on the table today, prepared for Xiaoxi. Why a spoon? Because Xiaoxi could not use chopsticks.

“Tianxie, where’s Xiaoxi?” Su Feifei untied her apron and sat down at the table. For many women, cooking is torture; for a small number of exceptional women, cooking is a pleasure. Su Feifei leaned rather more toward the latter — and the thing that turns that feeling one way or the other is, in the end, who you are cooking for.

“She’s asleep. Let’s eat first. I’ll feed her afterward,” Ye Tianxie said, his mind full of other things.

“Mm, let’s eat, then. Hm? The soup looks like there’s less of it… Tianxie, have you been sneaking it again?”

Looking at Guoguo, who was standing on his knee licking the corner of her mouth in deep satisfaction, Ye Tianxie put on a face of pure innocence.

After lunch, Su Feifei pushed the portion set aside for Xiaoxi across to Ye Tianxie. “Tianxie, go and feed Xiaoxi. Children are growing, and she can’t go without food just because she wants to sleep… Go on, I want to clear the table.”

Ye Tianxie gave an easy smile, picked up the small bowl, and went back to his own room.

The door opened, and Ye Tianxie was startled to find that the Xiaoxi who was going to sleep for “a very long time,” in Guoguo’s account, was no longer lying down but sitting propped up in the bed. Hearing the door open, she turned her small, dulled face toward him and said softly, “Brother… I’m hungry…”

Ye Tianxie stared for a moment, then hurried to the bedside and sat down next to her, and said gently, “Here. This is the lunch your Sister Feifei made, it’s very good… Xiaoxi, open your mouth. Have a little soup first.”

Xiaoxi obediently opened her small mouth. Ye Tianxie brought up a spoonful of meat soup and fed it to her, watched her swallow it lightly, and then open her mouth again…

Xiaoxi finished both small bowls of food, then leaned limply against Ye Tianxie and fell asleep once more. She really was very tired. And Guoguo had not been exaggerating either: for a considerable stretch of time to come, Xiaoxi spent nearly all of it asleep, waking only at mealtimes to be fed by Ye Tianxie mouthful by mouthful, exactly as one feeds an infant. Even when she did wake, she was always heavy-lidded and on the edge of sleep again.

(End of Chapter 210)