“Oh la la, Master, are you wondering how Master got back here when nobody’s supposed to be able to portal in?” Guoguo had been eavesdropping on Ye Tianxie and Zuo Pojun the whole time, and when she saw him sink into thought she finally could not hold it in. She popped out and said it right in his ear, out of nowhere.

Ye Tianxie lifted his head. “Guoguo, you know?”

“Yee-yaa! Of course Guoguo knows! Now let the very cleverest Guoguo answer Master…” She was plainly pleased with herself again, starlight glittering in a pair of bright crystal eyes. “It’s because Master has Orange Fang’s power now. What Orange Fang does is force-devour magic power, so of course it can swallow a magic barrier easily too. A town’s portal is actually worked by a magic teleportation array hidden underground at the center of the town, and shutting the portal off just means putting a tiny sealing barrier around that array. But Master has Orange Fang’s power on him, so a little magic barrier like that can’t affect Master at all. Master, did Guoguo explain it well enough for you?”

“…More or less.” Ye Tianxie rubbed at his somewhat muddled head. “So what you’re saying is, with Orange Fang I can pass through any barrier I like from now on?”

“Yah! Master is so dumb. Of course not.” Guoguo shook her head. “Magic barriers! Barriers made out of any other kind of power, Orange Fang can’t swallow those… Mm, Master, Guoguo has been explaining for ages and now she’s thirsty. Are there any Crystal Apples left to eat?”

Ye Tianxie had seen it coming… Any time Guoguo did something she considered helpful, or considered impressive, the very next thing she did was demand a reward for it. Face blank, he took a Crystal Apple out of his backpack and handed it over… and a moment later the sound of Guoguo eating it started up beside his ear — crunch, crunch.

For an item hoarder like him, with all his gear and his clutter of odd possessions, two hundred backpack slots had never been close to enough — and out of those two hundred, ten had to be kept clear to stock all the different things Guoguo ate…

Ye Tianxie set off toward the edge of town. There was not one player in sight. With an enemy force that size coming, the Pact had evidently emptied its nest and turned out every last man it had. Even the NPCs only showed themselves here and there.

He had not gone far when he stopped short… Ahead of him, on a low, flat mound of earth, sat a little girl with her hair up in pigtails. She had her chin propped in her hand and her eyes closed. And her expression was quiet, with something deeply devout running underneath the quiet… a look no little girl her age should have had.

Ye Tianxie knew her at a glance… Shasha, the little girl who had given him the Lamp of Light back when a random quest first brought him here.

That lamp had come to his rescue twice over, which had fixed her firmly in his memory. He gave up hurrying for the edge of town, turned, and walked over. He had just opened his mouth when Shasha, hearing the footsteps, opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her face lit, and her fine eyebrows curved into two lovely crescent moons. “Big brother, it’s you! We’ve met again… Does big brother still remember me?”

“Of course I do. Your name is Shasha.” Ye Tianxie smiled, and reached out and tapped her lightly on the nose… He could not have said himself why he had made so warm a gesture without thinking about it. Perhaps she was simply that adorable, that easy to feel tender toward. Perhaps there was a little gratitude at the bottom of it…

Hearing him say her name made Shasha’s smile happier still, and she did not mind the gesture in the least. “Big brother, do you think the two of us have a lot of… mm! A lot of fate between us? It used to be that the only people here were people I knew, and then starting that day, all these people I don’t know began coming, and looking at them makes me a little afraid, so most days I hide in the house and don’t dare go out, and I take care of Mama… But that day, when I saw big brother, you felt so close to me. And today, seeing big brother again, I’m so happy.”

There was no falseness in the girl’s words and nothing mixed in with them, and hearing them put a warmth in Ye Tianxie’s chest and brought him closer to her. He sat down beside her. “Shasha, when you were sitting here just now with your eyes shut — were you thinking about something?”

“No. I had my eyes shut because I was praying to the clouds over the horizon… asking them to watch over my mama and make her well soon.” Shasha turned her head to look at him, her eyes as bright as the stars at the edge of the sky.

“Praying?” Ye Tianxie looked up at the few scattered clouds overhead. He remembered, dimly, that the first time he met Shasha she had mentioned in passing that her mama was in poor health — that the doctors called it an illness with no cure…

“Mm-hm. I pray every day. I pray to the sky, and the clouds, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the wind, and the big trees, and the little grass… I pray to everything I can see, and I ask them all to watch over my mama. The doctor uncles all say my mama’s sickness can’t ever be cured, but I believe that if I pray to them every day, they’ll hear my voice for certain, and they’ll watch over my mama, and my mama will get better.”

There was no sorrow in Shasha’s eyes while she said it. There was a smile in them, and a hope with not one speck of anything on it.

In that moment something in Ye Tianxie was struck hard, and a feeling he could not have put a name to wrapped itself around his heart… This girl did not only have eyes like crystal. She had a heart like crystal too, clear the whole way through.

“Shasha, a girl as good as you — heaven is going to hear you. Your mama will get better.” He smiled, and he said it very gently.

“Mm-hm, mm-hm!” Shasha was laughing with delight. “Big brother, you’re so nice. None of them believe Mama will get better. Big brother is the only one who thinks the same as Shasha. My mama is the gentlest, most beautiful mama in the whole world, and she loves me so much that she’d never have the heart to leave me.”

Ye Tianxie: “…”

To tell the girl at a moment like this that hoping for a thing is not the same as getting it — how cruel and heartless that would be. He could not stand to imagine it… the day this girl’s dream and her heart were broken and that clear smile went out.

“Big brother, I’ll tell you a secret.” Shasha smiled a small, mysterious smile, then opened the right hand she had been holding shut all this time. The instant her palm came open, a point of blue light, dreamlike, flashed across Ye Tianxie’s eyes.

Lying in Shasha’s palm was a little kernel, giving off a light that was faint but thick with that dreamlike blue. It was no bigger than the nail of her little finger, and what it looked like, in fact, was a seed.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a really pretty seed I picked up outside. Mama told me once that a seed is hope — that if you plant a seed and water it every day and look after it and watch it sprout, then once it’s grown, the hope comes true.” Shasha closed her hand around the seed and shut her eyes, saying it in that same devout way, with a smile on her face.

The shape of the seed was enough for Ye Tianxie to be certain, at one look, that it was no ordinary thing. “Shasha, where did you pick this seed up?”

Shasha opened her eyes. “Mm… I found it by a little lake west of the village, a really clear, really pretty one. Except I keep thinking it’s so strange, because I go and play there all the time and there was never any little lake there before, and… what’s stranger still is that when I went back to play the next day, the little lake was gone again. I told other people about it and none of them believed me. Big brother, do you believe what Shasha says?”

“Of course I do. Shasha isn’t the kind of child who tells lies…” Halfway through it his expression stopped, and his voice came a little quicker. “Shasha, that little lake you’re talking about — was there a big tree beside it?”

The girl’s clear voice and clear eyes were proof enough that she had not lied. So that lake… a lake that appeared out of nowhere and vanished out of nowhere… could it be… could it be… the Wishing Lake? Wasn’t the Wishing Lake exactly the thing that appeared where nobody knew and vanished where nobody knew?

“A big tree?” Shasha thought it over carefully. “No, there wasn’t. Just a really clear little lake, no big tree… Why does big brother ask?”

No tree?

So it wasn’t the Wishing Lake? Then what was that lake?

“I was only asking. Usually there are trees beside a pretty lake. Shasha, could you let me have a look at that seed?”

“Of course!” Shasha laid the seed gently into Ye Tianxie’s hand.

Holding the seed with its faint blue glow, Ye Tianxie fixed his eyes on it:

？？？？：？？？？

What came back left him stunned.

His Eye of the Evil Dragon saw on a level the Detection every player shared could not be measured against. Yesterday, in the Phantom Beast Ruins, the Eye of the Evil Dragon had somehow taken in every bit of the Dark Nether Ghost King’s information — a being whose strength was greater than his own by who knew how many times over. Even the blue-haired man, whose name he had never once managed to detect before, had given his name up to the Eye of the Evil Dragon yesterday. Wuming.

The strongest man on the Lost Continent, in the words of Kong Xiu, the greatest Magus of the City of Stars — Wuming the Lone Wolf.

At that moment, when the name surfaced, what he had felt was less shock than surprise.

And now the Eye of the Evil Dragon was fixed on this seed, and the information it returned was one unbroken run of “？？？？”.

For the Eye of the Evil Dragon to be rendered completely useless, the thing in front of it had to be far above him in strength or in grade… and this seed — was the thing inside it stronger even than Wuming?

“Is it pretty, big brother? I’m going to plant it, and then watch it grow every day, and when it’s grown, Mama will be well again for certain.”

Shasha’s clear voice rang beside him. “Mm. Very pretty.” Ye Tianxie gave the seed back to her. A lake that came and went; attributes that could not be read. There was no question about it — this seed had some enormous secret hidden inside it. But it was also the purest, most beautiful hope in this girl’s heart. He could not bring himself, for the sake of a moment’s greed and a wish to get at a secret, to take away this girl’s seed of hope. That would be far too cruel a thing to do.

“Ah! I think I hear Mama calling me. Big brother, I have to go and take care of her now.” Shasha closed her hand around the seed, and her small, slight body rose from the mound.

“Mm. Go on.”

“Big brother, will we be able to see each other again?” Shasha’s eyes were shining, and the look in them was full of deep hope.

“Of course we will. I’ll be coming around often from now on.” Ye Tianxie smiled as he said it.

“Mm… Bye-bye, big brother.” Shasha ran off happily, waving back at him as she went, sweet as could be.

Ye Tianxie watched her the whole way, until she had gone back inside her own little house… and he committed the position of that house to memory.

He stood there in silence for a long, long while before he turned around and looked toward the north of the village, and the softness went out of his eyes all at once and left them cold — Wings That Shroud the Sky. From this day on, I, Xietian, will see to it that you grow up in the shadows, until… you don’t exist at all!

(End of Chapter 262)