“Tell me first how to make her wake up.” Ye Tianxie drove the wicked images out of his head by force and said it to Guoguo very seriously.

“… No. Master has to promise Guoguo first.” When did Guoguo ever do business at a loss? She had held Ye Tianxie to ransom many times, and she had never once failed.

“All right… I’ll give you some tonight, then.” Ye Tianxie said it helplessly.

“Waa-oh… Master is the best…” Guoguo laughed at last, happy and pleased with herself, then chewed on her finger and set to thinking seriously again. “Dragon blood and dragon essence can make a person’s life force recover very, very quickly, because there’s a really strong power inside dragon blood and dragon crystal, and even a human’s damaged vitality can be filled back in very quickly…”

Dragon blood, dragon essence… dragon…

Ye Tianxie’s mind was in confusion. But the man he was now could not allow himself to run off into wild thoughts. This was the last thread of hope Guoguo had brought him, and however unreal it sounded — however laughable, however absurd — he had to take hold of it and hold on. “Then how do I bring her back… do I feed it to her to drink?”

“Mm, that’s how it works… But big sister also said Master’s dragon power is too weak right now, so the effect won’t be very obvious… If you want to bring back somebody who’s about to die, you’d need lots and lots of blood. With essence fluid, just a tiny bit would do it,” Guoguo said.

“All right. I understand.”

Ye Tianxie quickly set Chenxue down out of his arms and laid her flat on the grass. Her skin was snow-white, exactly like her name, and in among the white was a pallor like paper. Her body still held the last of its warmth… which was the last thread of life force in it too, and it carried Ye Tianxie’s last hope.

Very carefully he parted Chenxue’s lips and her small white teeth. Then he pulled up a blade of grass from the ground and slashed it hard across his own arm…

“Ah!!” Guoguo was frightened enough to clap both hands over her eyes at once, and it was quite a while before she timidly let them show again.

The wound was deep, and the blood ran down and dripped between Chenxue’s lips. It was falling too slowly for him, and he squeezed hard with his other hand… If it could bring Xue’er back, what did pain matter? What did blood matter?

“Master… does it hurt?” Guoguo asked, a little frightened.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Why doesn’t Master use essence fluid… just a tiny bit would do, and it wouldn’t hurt at all,” Guoguo asked, and then her eyes lit up, those big jewel eyes glittering and shining. “Is it because there’s not much essence fluid, so Master wants to save it for Guoguo to drink… wuu, Master is so good to Guoguo… Master is the best.”

Ye Tianxie: “…”

They were words wicked to the last degree, and the voice and the face that delivered them could not have been more innocent… If Ye Tianxie’s mind had not been fixed elsewhere just then, a gap that wide could easily have made him lose control entirely.

Ye Tianxie’s constitution is not like other people’s, and the wound closed over quickly. He pulled up another blade of grass and cut a fresh one… and as the new blood dripped down, he saw that what had already gone into Chenxue’s mouth was slowly running back out at the corner of her lips.

With no consciousness in her, she could not swallow on her own at all.

Every minute, every second, could decide whether Chenxue lived or died. Ye Tianxie sat down on the grass and gathered her into his arms, then bit down on the wound he had just cut, brows drawn tight, and sucked hard…

Before this, he had never once imagined there would come a day when he could not wait to make his own blood flow faster.

He drew half a mouthful, and the wound closed again. He bent over her, parted her lips gently with his hand, lowered his head and passed it to her a little at a time, then breathed softly after it so that his blood ran down into her body…

Then he pulled up more grass and cut another wound in his arm, and immediately bent to her again, unwilling to lose so much as a single drop of the blood that could save Chenxue’s life.

One cut, two, three… six, seven…

Guoguo finally began to cry, unable to bear it.

“Wuu… Master, don’t… don’t hurt yourself any more, it’ll hurt you to death, you’re losing so much blood… you’ll die, you’ll die!”

Guoguo cried out several times, and still Ye Tianxie did not stop. If anything he cut his arm faster…

Because he had discovered, in an enormous rush of joy… that at the seventh wound, he had felt it — that faint beating in Chenxue’s chest…

It had worked… it had actually worked!

This method, come from a pocket-sized girl who did not belong to this world, had actually produced an effect like a miracle. Why it should be so, he had no attention left to spare for wondering. Everything in his head and his heart was flooded with joy. When she died in his arms, what he had felt was a pain like his heart being torn out. Now this was the joy of drifting all at once from hell up into heaven.

Since his blood truly could give her life back, then what was there for him to be sparing about?

That pain, nearly numb now, could do nothing at all to drive the deep, hopeful smile off his face. Along his left arm, apart from the vital places he could not cut, there were now nine wounds of the same length. After the left arm came the right…

Ten, eleven, twelve… thirteen…

Chenxue’s heartbeat grew steadily clearer, and the body in his arms began to give off a clear warmth. In that moment, exactly as he had said he would, he was deeply grateful to heaven… grateful that heaven had left them one last thread of hope, even if that thread was his own blood.

In the end Ye Tianxie is not a god… Just as he was about to cut the fourteenth wound, the loss of so much blood sent a wave of dizziness through his head. He shook it off, and the sharp blade of grass drew across his arm… but the strength had gone out of him, and it did not cut.

The dizziness came down heavily, his consciousness began to go blank, and Ye Tianxie could no longer hold off that irresistible weight. He passed out.

“Wuu… Master? Master can’t leave Guoguo behind… yee-yaa? Has Master already died?”

……

……

His body was very heavy, very heavy, as if it were pinned under a boulder weighing a thousand pounds. It had been far too long since he had last felt this kind of exhaustion.

His mouth and tongue were dry, and he badly wanted water…

“Feifei, I want some water…” Still half asleep, he murmured it without meaning to.

“Yee-yaa! Master, you’re finally awake, Guoguo cried for such a long time over you… You mustn’t forget what you said to Guoguo, lots of chocolate, lots of lollipops, and…”

Mm. Guoguo’s voice.

At his chest came a warm sensation, as if something were pressed close against him. And something there was moving — a finger, it seemed, drawing circles. That presence made him think of Chenxue.

Xue’er…

Ye Tianxie woke with a start and opened his eyes.

In that instant he saw a pair of eyes clearer and more beautiful than any jewel in the world, more dazzling than any star in a night sky. His body had no strength in it. The pain in his arms told him that none of it had been a dream. He looked into those eyes and smiled, at ease. “Xue’er…”

Chenxue was awake, still lying against his chest, gazing at him with unfocused eyes. There was no telling how long she had been watching him quietly like this. Blood that Ye Tianxie had passed to her still clung at the corner of her mouth, and it did not spoil that tender face with its spirit-like beauty in the slightest.

“Big brother, I won’t leave you. Not ever.” Chenxue held him tight and said it in a very small voice. The voice was faint, but… it no longer had that weakness in it that a breath of wind could scatter.

Her eyes were clear and bright, with none of that dimmed, scattered color left in them. Her tender face was as snow-white as before, but almost none of the pallor was left in it, and that face, with its deep childlike softness, looked like snow-jade freshly carved — flawless and unreal as a dream… but this was certainly no dream.

She had been given a new life… a new life far away from death. She knew what her new life had been bought with, and it was a debt she could only repay by never leaving his side for as long as she lived.

“Mm…” Ye Tianxie answered her softly. He was very tired, tired enough to want to shut his eyes and sleep again. But his heart felt light and glad. To watch her go with his own eyes had been an endless pain and helplessness. Now, with her awake, the joy was that many times greater… the gap between hell and heaven.

“Just now, I had a dream, a very strange dream… I was about to go, and I would never come back… I didn’t want to go, I hadn’t said goodbye to my sister yet… I didn’t want to see my sister and big brother sad… I still wanted to stay by big brother’s side, and have big brother hold me…”

“Only… I couldn’t get back…”

“But then… big brother suddenly appeared in front of me, and he called me, and told me to wait for him to bring me back… And then he hurt himself, hurt himself so many times… and gave his blood to me a little at a time, into my body… and fed me so much of it… And that was when I began to feel death going away, and I could smell the green grass, and when I had the strength to open my eyes, big brother was already so tired, so tired… so tired he had fallen asleep.”

With every sentence Chenxue spoke, a tear fell. She put out one small pale hand and pressed her slender fingers very, very lightly against the row of shocking wounds along his arm, and asked in a trembling voice with weeping in it, “Does it hurt…”

“It doesn’t hurt at all.” Ye Tianxie laughed, and turned his hand to take Chenxue’s small one in it. “Xue’er, since you could wake up, then even if it really did hurt, I wouldn’t feel it at all… Xue’er, this is a little secret that belongs to us. All right?”

Xue’er’s life force was so strong now… His blood had truly brought her back from the edge of death… back to consciousness, and even back to her vitality.

Dragon blood…

There was no explaining it by any ordinary reasoning.

In the world of Fate, he had changed class, without knowing why, into the Rebel-Boned Evil Dragon… and everyone there said the power he had was dragon power. If that could still be put down to some setting inside the game world, then… what about the “dragon blood” out of Guoguo’s mouth?

“Mm… this is a little secret between big brother and me. Only the two of us will ever know.” Chenxue nodded hard, tears and a smile together.

(End of Chapter 280)