“Would you say I’ve proven my ability?” Ye Tianxie said with an easy smile.
“You’re an esper?” Su Luo blurted out, almost on instinct.
“No!” Ye Tianxie’s answer was even more direct and clean-cut. From the look in his eyes, Su Luo saw nothing unnatural.
“Then you…” If not an esper, then what was this ability that couldn’t be described by any ordinary reasoning?
“You don’t need to know.” Ye Tianxie sealed off his words without the least courtesy. Espers? He had no regard for such a thing. But what was the ability he possessed? He didn’t know either.
Su Luo fell silent. When he had first investigated Ye Tianxie, what he’d found was one riddle after another, riddles that no amount of digging could solve. And now, in meeting him, he saw only more riddles still. It was the first time he had been so utterly unable to see through a man, to get a grasp of him… and a man a full generation younger than himself, at that. And at this moment, his experience told him that if he insisted on investigating further, it might well prove a very dangerous thing to do.
“What you’ve demonstrated is your counter-surveillance ability. What I want to see is your ability to protect her.” Su Luo said, then stepped aside and indicated the two bodyguards who had followed him throughout. “These two took first and second place in Huaxia’s special forces competition ten years ago. Even now, there isn’t a soldier in Huaxia who doesn’t know the names ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Crimson Wolf.’ It’s thanks to their protection that I’ve come through these years unharmed. If you can defeat them, then I’ll feel entirely at ease letting Feifei live here with you.”
The two bodyguards understood Su Luo’s meaning and stepped forward together. Before coming here, they had already learned that this man had once saved Su Feifei. But with their strength, facing a young man like Ye Tianxie, contempt came instinctively. Yet the strange ability he had just displayed had scattered that contempt without a trace. Both men wore grave expressions, waiting for Ye Tianxie to engage them.
And Ye Tianxie’s next words turned both their faces black.
“Beaten to death, or beaten to a cripple?” Ye Tianxie glanced at Black Panther and Crimson Wolf, his voice offhand, as casual and simple as eating or sleeping.
That answer left Su Luo utterly at a loss as well, unable for a moment to say anything in reply… because he could hardly answer “to a cripple,” and still less “to death”…
Ye Tianxie shrugged and raised his right hand. Black Panther and Crimson Wolf both tensed, brows furrowing, preparing their stances. They may have been the strongest of special forces soldiers once, but they knew well that Huaxia was a land where crouching tigers and hidden dragons abounded, and that one should never take anyone lightly. Though Ye Tianxie was only around twenty, he gave them a sense of pressure, faint and hard to place — a man without real skill would hardly dare be this arrogant.
But having raised his hand, Ye Tianxie didn’t attack. He merely crooked a finger and flicked it at the empty air.
With a crisp sound, the closed glass window on the balcony suddenly swung open. Black Panther and Crimson Wolf instinctively glanced back — and in the very next instant, they both felt a light breeze approaching. They had barely turned back around when Ye Tianxie had already seized each of them by the throat, one in each hand. “Distraction in the face of an enemy is a cardinal sin. Whether you’re a soldier or a bodyguard, that’s a rule you should never forget.”
With that, he flung both hands out, and the two men were tossed one after the other out the open window like a pair of chickens. Then the window swung eerily shut of its own accord.
The contest between Ye Tianxie and the two bodyguards had ended before it began. Su Luo’s shock was magnified several times over in that instant. Even a fool could now have judged clearly that his two protective talismans and the young man before him were simply not on the same plane of strength.
“There. Boss Su, now that there are no outsiders, let’s discuss what we ought to discuss.” Ye Tianxie clapped his hands together and turned around, his expression as casual as ever, without a ripple of disturbance and without any trace of smugness — as though what he’d just thrown out the window were nothing more than two grasshoppers. “Now, do you think I have the ability to protect your daughter? And you may rest entirely assured — I won’t be entertaining any improper notions about her. I can’t be bothered. Your daughter is certainly noble and beautiful, but she doesn’t yet catch my eye. Though…” The corner of Ye Tianxie’s mouth quirked up. “If your daughter should make the first move, then as a normal man, I might well end up doing some things you’d rather not see.”
Su Luo’s expression shifted, darkening and clouding by turns, the tremor in his gaze plainly unsettled — the look of a man struggling to reach a decision. Su Feifei’s words had left him aching with self-reproach, and he now understood why his daughter had made a choice he had found so incomprehensible. Given all this, he could no longer stop her — nor was he able to.
But this man before him, and everything he had revealed, sent a shiver through even one as weathered as he was. And yet he knew, one might say, nothing at all about him. Everything his investigation had turned up was purely surface; whatever he truly wanted to know, no amount of effort could uncover.
A Ye Tianxie like this — how could he possibly feel at ease leaving his daughter with him?
“Tell me your reason. Or your purpose.” Su Luo said at last, after a long silence.
“Very simple.” Ye Tianxie’s smile grew markedly brighter. “I’ve been a little short on money lately… and you’re the richest man in Asia. It’s as simple as that. And since I’d be protecting your daughter, I imagine you’d be paying me a rather substantial protection fee.”
Stated so bluntly from Ye Tianxie’s mouth, the reason actually eased Su Luo’s churning mind somewhat. Indeed, from the very beginning, he had seen nothing about Ye Tianxie that had anything to do with hypocrisy. That feeling made him quietly believe, deep down, every word the man said — and drew him, without his noticing, toward something close to trust.
He had seen and experienced more of the business world’s deceit and intrigue than anyone, and was himself a master of that art, donning a different mask each day to face crowds of people in masks of their own. He never believed anyone easily; caution had long since become instinct with him. Otherwise, he could never have come this far.
And yet Ye Tianxie — in his words, his bearing, his manner — seemed to give off some strange magic, one that made him want to believe him in spite of himself… though this was only the first time they had met.
Ye Tianxie had said it plainly: he was accepting Su Feifei because he wanted money. A substantial protection fee.
Recalling his daughter’s words, each one lancing into his heart, and those tears he hadn’t seen in who knew how many years, Su Luo cast off the last of his lingering hesitation. He sighed lightly and said, “Only today have I learned that Feifei hasn’t been the least bit happy. On the contrary — because of me, she has lived every day in shadow and fear. And to set my mind at ease, whenever she faced me, she showed me only her happy face… And I never noticed. Ten years, and I never noticed…”
His voice grew lower and lower, and across his brow spread a desolation like withered leaves in an autumn wind.
(End of Chapter 75)