“City Lord, you want to catch Red Goat?” Ye Tianxie turned and came back, an odd look on his face as he spoke to the City Lord of Heaven’s Sun.

“Oh? What, you’ve heard of Red Goat’s great name too, lad?” The City Lord said it in that coarse bellow of his.

Ye Tianxie nodded, then shook his head. “I’m not too clear on Red Goat. But I’ve met Grey Goat. There ought to be some connection between the two of them?”

The City Lord’s eyes bulged. “What? You’ve met Grey Goat?”

His expression was so exaggerated you would have thought meeting Grey Goat was something remarkable, something hard to believe.

“Not only met her, I finished her off while I was at it. City Lord, where do these two goats come from?” Ye Tianxie asked curiously.

“Oh? You finished off Grey Goat?” The City Lord started out doubtful, and then the muscles of his face began to twitch along with his beard… There is no limit at all to this lad’s bragging… First he says he drove off the Dark Nether Ghost King, now he says he finished off Grey Goat… Bah! If you could finish off Grey Goat I’d write my own damn name backwards.

“You don’t believe me?” Ye Tianxie pressed at his nose, took in the City Lord’s expression and sneered privately, then unhurriedly drew a greyish sheepskin out of his pack and set it in front of the man’s eyes. “This is Grey Goat’s hide. That can’t be a fake, can it?”

The City Lord glanced at the hide with half an eye and was about to speak when his pupils suddenly went wide and he let out a cry. “Holy shit… this, this, this…”

Grey Goat had been appearing on the Lost Continent for years, and never mind running into her — even those who did had never once been able to catch her… But the attributes on the hide in front of him said plainly: Grey Goat’s Hide.

Property descriptions cannot be faked. After that startled cry the City Lord was struck dumb for a moment, staring at Ye Tianxie a little blankly — he had assumed the claim to have finished off Grey Goat was so much bull, and he had never imagined…

“Do you believe me now?” Ye Tianxie waved Grey Goat’s hide about, then put it away again while the City Lord was still staring.

“Uh! Uh!” The City Lord nodded dumbly, and then that one-track, half-a-beat-behind brain of his finally caught up. His face went through several changes, and settled at last on a smile. “Haha… haha… hahaha… little brother, not bad, not bad at all. No wonder you could drive off an old pervert like the Dark Nether Ghost King, and no wonder that idiot boy in the City of Stars felt safe sending you here with a letter this important. Heroes really do come out of the young — even Grey Goat went down in your hands… Ah! If word gets out that Grey Goat has been killed, there’s no telling how many people will… Ahem. Young man, right from the start I felt the two of us were fated to get on, and now, heh, I find I like you more and more. There’s no hurry about wiping out the Fire Spirits. How about we sit down first, drink some tea, chat a while, and talk about our ambitions?”

The smile on the City Lord’s face was so plainly false that even a fool could have seen through it, and an idiot could have sniffed out what he was after, striking a pose like that out of nowhere. Ye Tianxie’s words went straight to the point and dragged the little scheme out of his heart. “City Lord, is it that you’d like to borrow that hide of mine?”

Grey Goat’s greatest ability was running away, and her speed was extreme and her alertness extreme with it. If Xiaobei had not been hiding a thoroughly violent set of attributes under that harmless-looking exterior, a hundred Ye Tianxies could not have handled Grey Goat.

If Grey Goat was like that, then presumably Red Goat’s attributes were the same. For one thing she had no fixed dwelling; for another… after all the trouble of finding her, she would take one look at a stranger and be gone in a blur, leaving people like a tiger trying to eat the sky, with nowhere to sink a tooth. That running speed left even the strongest of the strong with nothing to do but stare.

But with Grey Goat’s hide, everything changed.

Because it could turn a person into Grey Goat anywhere, at any time… and faced with Grey Goat’s shape, would Red Goat still run? Would she? No — an obvious answer. So… change back suddenly at the right moment, and catching Red Goat would be as easy as reaching out a hand.

That was why the City Lord’s name for Ye Tianxie had gone from “lad” to “young man,” and now to “little brother.”

The smile froze on the City Lord’s face for a moment. Then he gave an embarrassed laugh and said, as pleasantly as he could manage, “Heh, little brother, you really are quick. It’s a pleasure talking to a clever man like you… You see, your old… your big brother here is in a hurry to catch Red Goat, and things would be a great deal easier with that hide of Grey Goat’s. Do you think you could possibly…”

Ye Tianxie said, eyes crinkling in a smile, “City Lord, what a thing to say. It would be an honor to help you… Only, I’m a little curious. What sort of monsters are this Grey Goat and Red Goat, exactly? From the way you talk about them, it sounds as if a lot of people want to catch them.”

“Mm… a lot of people, nothing. The number of people who want to catch them would scare you to death, and every one of them an expert. But Grey Goat and Red Goat are simply too cunning, and they run far too fast, and nobody knows where they’ll turn up next. Finding them is entirely a matter of luck, and catching them… nobody has managed it to this day… Oh no, wait — you’ve wiped that Grey Goat out now… Mm, little brother, you’ve done something enormous there.”

Ye Tianxie: “……”

“As for where these two goats come from…” Having something to ask of a man, and something extremely important at that, the City Lord had no choice but to be patient and explain. “Little brother, I don’t know whether you’ve heard of the Leaf of Luck?”

The Leaf of Luck?

Ye Tianxie nodded. “I have… A marvelous leaf with three colors. It doesn’t grow on any particular plant; it can appear anywhere, on any plant at all. They say that whoever sees one will have good luck.”

This Leaf of Luck was precisely the outrageous item he had seen in Yuan Que’s keeping back in the novice village — the one that permanently raises Luck by 1 point each time one is used. Even now he was still working hard at how he might get back there and buy those piles of heaven-defying items off Yuan Que.

“Then… have you heard of the Wishing Lake and the Wishing Tree?” the City Lord went on.

“I know of them… The Wishing Lake is a lake that moves, and nobody ever knows where it will appear next. If you can find the Wishing Lake, and water the Wishing Tree with water from it, and then hold the Wishing Glaze and make a wish with the sincerest heart you have… then that wish will come true,” Ye Tianxie said.

Ever since he had completed an impossible event at the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins and obtained the Wishing Glaze, this was the first time he had heard anyone speak of the Wishing Lake. Even now he still could not quite believe the legend was true. After all, unreal things of that sort — granting a wish — usually only exist in myths.

But hearing it brought up now, he suddenly noticed something… Nobody knows where a Leaf of Luck will grow, and only the lucky ever see one. Nobody knows where the Wishing Lake will appear either… and Grey Goat and Red Goat… nobody knows where they will turn up next.

Strangely alike!

The City Lord gave Ye Tianxie a rather startled look, surprised by how widely read he was, and then said something that took him aback considerably in turn. “Mm… at most ten Leaves of Luck come into being in a year, and if nobody picks them the day they appear they wither and fall. Of the Wishing Lake and the Wishing Tree there is only one each… and the chance of one of those extremely rare Leaves of Luck happening to grow on the Wishing Tree is so small it essentially does not exist… And they say that Grey Goat and Red Goat were two Leaves of Luck that grew on the Wishing Tree at the same time, a thousand years ago.”

Ye Tianxie: “……”

“The Wishing Tree can grant a living creature’s wish, but it has to hear that wish through the legendary Wishing Glaze. And the Leaves of Luck grew on the Wishing Tree, joined to it — so it could naturally hear the voice of their hearts directly — that they did not want to wither away after a single day of existing. And so it granted them new life, and made them into two goats… Their names ought properly to have been the ‘Wishing Luck Goats,’ but because one was grey and one was red, the people of the Lost Continent who saw them named them ‘Grey Goat’ and ‘Red Goat.’ Inside a few decades word that they were abroad on the Lost Continent had spread far and wide, and countless people began wanting to find them. Because they were born of the power of the Leaves of Luck and the Wishing Tree combined, they carry the traits of both. To see them is a lucky thing; and to catch or beat one is certain to bring luck the size of heaven…”

Having heard the story of the two goats, Ye Tianxie was staggered…

What it means to say the world is wide and holds every strange thing — Ye Tianxie could fairly claim he understood it completely now.

Two strange goats, and what they had been before was two strange leaves.

To see them is luck; to catch or beat one brings luck the size of heaven. He had wiped out Grey Goat on a whim… so what would this heaven-sized luck of his turn out to be? Those items, each stranger than the last?

Was the main reason he had been able to run into Grey Goat his own higher-than-ordinary Luck?

Now that he knew where Grey Goat came from, Ye Tianxie badly wanted to know what exactly was inside that toolbox she had dropped… whether it might be a divine artifact or something…

“So why do you want to catch Red Goat, City Lord? Could it be there’s some treasure on her that even you can’t resist?” Ye Tianxie asked.

The City Lord hesitated, then told him honestly, “You’re not wrong to put it that way. There really is something on her that I have to have… a thing called the Seven-Star Lotus.”

“The Seven-Star Lotus?”

“The Seven-Star Lotus is a Divine Mystery flower that grows in the Lake of Luck. It’s simply not something an ordinary person ever sees, and even seeing it, getting hold of it is next to impossible… because picking a Seven-Star Lotus takes a Heaven-Severing-grade herb-gathering skill at the least. They say it blooms once a century, and the power inside it can completely restore the power of any item below Holy Annihilation grade. And they say that back when that Leaf of Luck became Red Goat, she helped herself to the Seven-Star Lotus that was in bloom at the time, and put it in a Seven-Star Gourd to keep it from ever withering… Now the Tower of Fate has danger lying in wait on every side, and the agitation of the Fire Spirits south of my City of Heaven’s Sun is an enormous calamity in itself. I have to use the Seven-Star Lotus to repair the guardian artifact of the City of Heaven’s Sun, the ‘Seven-Colored Dusk,’ before there’s any hope of resolving this crisis.”

That said, the City Lord stopped holding anything back. He reached into his robe and brought out a chain… flashing with colored light.

The instant the chain appeared, that gorgeous, absolute blaze of color left Ye Tianxie dazzled… Seven colors of light — but not the Hour of Fate’s red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue and purple. These were blue, red, green, purple, yellow, white and black…

The colors that stand for the seven basic natural elements: water, fire, wind, lightning, earth, light and darkness!

The chain was made of clear, flawless crystal, and what gave off the colored light were the two things set at its ends… a sun, and a moon.

The moon was a crescent; the sun was full; both were only about the size of a thumb. Small as they were, the light they gave off was dreamlike enough to steal the wits away.

“This is the ‘Seven-Colored Dusk’ — but a damaged one. On an undamaged Seven-Colored Dusk, the sun and the moon overlap. The stretch of time when sun and moon change places is dusk, and that is where the name comes from. I’ve used no end of methods over the years and never managed to repair it, and as it happens… some time ago people found traces of Red Goat in the country around the City of Heaven’s Sun, so I’ve pinned this last hope on the Seven-Star Lotus… The Seven-Colored Dusk matters far too much to my City of Heaven’s Sun. I have to repair it.”

That dreamlike shape, that hazy colored light… if the sun and the moon came together, they plainly made a necklace. And a thing honored as the City of Heaven’s Sun’s guardian treasure could hardly be simple.

“This necklace — what can it do?” Ye Tianxie quietly swallowed a mouthful of saliva and asked, almost beyond his own control. A shape like that raised the urge to snatch it and stuff it into his shirt even in a man like him; if it had been a woman… she would have been one-shot beyond any question.

The Seven-Star Gourd that held the Seven-Star Lotus… that gourd he had picked up underground in the Phantom Beast Ruins, the one the Dark Nether Ghost King had judged could “only hatch a decorative pet called a ‘Golden-Ass Circle-Jerk Boy'” — didn’t it have exactly seven stars on it…

And that gourd was exactly the one Red Goat had lost…

Could it be…

Ye Tianxie’s eyes on the “Seven-Colored Dusk” turned visibly hungry, and the notion of helping the City Lord out to pick up some usable favorability vanished without a trace.

He was… still short a necklace, it seemed.

His neck was so empty. How uncomfortable.

(End of Chapter 258)