Chapter 162#
The Hunt 13#
In the nearby streets, people raised their heads toward the strange scene above the circus and began to voice their doubts again.
There were people with a fondness for tightrope walking; there were people whose profession was acrobatics — that was nothing unusual. But ordinary things happening in the City of Mist somehow seemed all the more out of place.
“What’s going on up there — prey appreciation hour?”
“It’s definitely a trap. Luring us in to hunt, drawing us into Gatling gun range.”
“Terrifying. I’m out.”
“Bait’s too obvious. Not falling for it.”
“Let’s go. People are devious — the blackboard was absolutely right. The circus is dangerous.”
“Acri, truly a great benefactor.”
The two streets nearest the circus emptied in an instant.
Inside the circus, the crowd’s burning gazes remained fixed on Anfei.
Anfei: “Are they implying something?”
Yu Feichen: “Yes.”
The hatred drawn by those three lures was insufficient — not enough to complete the Main God’s task.
But the moment all three criteria appeared together, it became plain as day who the City of Mist truly hated.
Anfei looked down at everything below, his voice thin and cold.
“To be capable of venting hatred only through superficial similarities, owing to one’s own incompetence and weakness — that is indeed a kind of pity.”
From a distance, Anfei gave the Goddess of Fate a slight nod.
The Goddess of Fate lifted the brilliant crystal ball once more. Within it, vast points of starlight were scattered, connected by barely-there threads of silk, symbolizing the threads of fate.
She murmured quietly: “His eyes are the color of ice-green, like a deep winter lake.”
Inside the crystal ball, the intertwined threads of fate slowly shifted and transformed with her words. On the other side, in the space of a blink, Anfei’s eyes changed from frost-blue to a pure, pale ice-green.
There was no jarring abruptness of a sudden switch. Under the Goddess of Fate’s calm, measured tone, it felt as though this had always been the truth, and what came before had merely been an illusion.
“His hair is golden, like the light of early morning.”
The familiar pale gold replaced the original silver.
“He appears to be about the same age as me.”
Looking at Anfei’s appearance now, the Goddess of Fate considered for a moment, then added one more line.
“He is dressed in a snow-white ceremonial robe.”
Yu Feichen reached out and removed the hair tie from Anfei’s hair. Golden hair fell loose across the divine being’s shoulders.
The golden-haired, white-robed young man stood quietly on the high platform in the wind — entirely at odds with the gaudy, absurd architecture surrounding him, yet possessing a strange harmony all his own.
A feeling of familiarity.
They must have met before, Yu Feichen thought.
— In some distant, forgotten time.
Windsor patted the Gatling gun: “Off you go, Bishop. I’ll hold down the circus here.”
Anfei looked toward Yu Feichen with a mild gaze. The meaning was unmistakable.
Did he simply assume that this possession of his ought to come equipped with every imaginable function? Yu Feichen thought, expressionless.
The next second, he used an intermediate-level item.
Item: Demon Wings — brought into the City of Mist by some unknown visitor.
Function: Upon use, a pair of black membranous wings capable of flight appear on the user’s back, retractable at will.
Note: Duration three hours; after three hours, severe pain will emerge in the back.
Grade: Intermediate.
The great wings suddenly unfurled. Yu Feichen swept Anfei up sideways into his arms and took to the air.
“……” Sheena glared furiously in their direction: “He has so many items — why didn’t he take me just now?! I even had my doubts at one point about how any one person could possibly rack up that many complaints. Turns out people like that genuinely exist!”
The Goddess of Fate gave a slight nod, endorsing her grievance.
Both goddesses turned to look at Bai Song, waiting for him to join the chorus.
Bai Song was perfectly composed.
After all, he had long grown accustomed to this particular kind of wound.
High in the air.
Amid the howling wind, the hand that Anfei had closed around the collar of Yu Feichen’s coat tightened slowly.
Yu Feichen registered the change. He reasoned this was circumstantially compelled — it couldn’t be counted as “unseemly conduct.”
Then he heard Anfei say coldly: “You’re flying too high.”
Yu Feichen looked down at the gradually shrinking circus structure below.
There was clearly a reason a simple pair of flight wings had earned an intermediate-grade rating.
“It’s the wings,” he said.
Anfei made no comment.
It was afternoon. The sun had shifted westward, but its brilliance remained fierce, gilding the edges of buildings with a soft, diffused halo of light and shadow. The circus’s multicolored spires pointed straight up at the sky.
On stage, the topmost performer in the act had already climbed to the tenth level of hell.
The tenth level blazed with roaring flames, their bases shot through with a seductive, vivid red. The moment a performer’s fingers brushed the fire, they were burned down to charred black bone.
He let out a sharp, inhuman shriek — screaming in agony, yet still hurling himself upward without a second thought.
The screams pulled the audience’s attention away from the three lures on the tightrope. Their eyes returned to the performance on stage, and they erupted in excited cheers at the hellish scene.
Just then.
The great black wings carried the two of them slowly down from the sky of the inverted clock-face. The outermost edges of the wings bore sharp bone-spurs; a pair of jet-black shackles had been driven through the right wing’s root and tip, joined by a heavy chain. The chain was no decoration but a restraint — with every beat of the wings it rang out, asserting its presence.
In short, it looked like nothing good.
And by association, the wings’ owner appeared sinister and ominous — like a demon or undead creature from ancient legend.
— Not to mention Yu Feichen was already dressed head to toe in an emotionless black.
Sensing something strange in the sky, the audience members standing in the seats did what any person of sound mind would do: they looked up in unison, made out the dark silhouette in the central sky, and prepared to look away and turn their attention back to the performance on stage.
Then they saw the golden-haired young man being held in the demon’s black wings.
The entire venue fell silent at once. Even the performers on stage raised their heads to look skyward.
The next moment, the pale-gold-haired young man turned his head from within the black-winged demon’s arms, his pair of ice-green eyes gazing down at them with cool indifference. His snow-white, dignified robe seemed suffused with streaming daylight.
It was as though time itself stood still.
The flames still burned. But the screams from the tenth level of hell cut off abruptly.
The floodgates shattered under the force of the torrent. Silent frenzy crashed over the entire circus all at once.
Every single person — without exception — had the muscles of their face twitching in convulsions. Hatred and savagery crawled up into their eyes, every last vein of red visible. They thrust out hands drawn taut with bulging veins, grasping upward at the sky, but only closed helplessly around handfuls of empty air, letting out furious, ragged gasps.
The row of audience members nearest the stage broke into a run toward the center of the stage first. Then the rapid thunder of footsteps shook the very ground of the circus. They shoved and surged toward the center — some running ahead, others straining desperately to catch up from behind. Some were knocked down by those rushing from behind, swallowed into the crush, trampled across the chest and abdomen by countless feet. Their chests caved in, blood coughed from their mouths, only to be stamped into the footprints of the masses.
High above, a faint trace of gentle compassion at last resurfaced in Anfei’s eyes.
Yu Feichen said: “Let me give you something fun to eat.”
Anfei: “?”
Yu Feichen withdrew his right hand from beneath Anfei’s knees and held him with one arm. An orange mushroom appeared in his right hand — a product of the White Rabbit’s mushroom field outside the City of Mist. The White Rabbit had long since been torn to pieces, but the mushrooms had remained as fresh as the day they were picked.
He brought the orange mushroom to Anfei’s lips. Anfei’s brow furrowed slightly, but he parted his lips and swallowed it anyway.
Watching him swallow it, Yu Feichen slowly loosened his hold.
When you are being held and suspended mid-air, you have in effect entrusted your life entirely to another person — if they were to suddenly release their grip at that moment, anyone would fall into a panic.
Anfei had absolutely none of that. Yu Feichen let go, and he simply watched calmly as the hold was released, as though entirely certain he would not be harmed in any way by this person.
And that was exactly right.
After Yu Feichen let go, Anfei did not fall. He simply drifted to a gentle stop, suspended above the apex of hell.
The orange mushroom granted the ability to float.
Yu Feichen half-folded his wings and hovered at a slight distance.
This movement only stoked the crowd’s frenzy further.
The first performer to reach the tenth level of hell had already been burned to a lump of charcoal by the flames, yet the other performers on the ninth level threw themselves upward with a hundred times the drive of before, charging through the fire toward the next tier.
The performers below surged upward with equal recklessness. Where moments ago they had been mechanical actors with empty, unfocused eyes, they now stared with absolute fixation at the god-like young man floating in the center above them.
Further out, audience members had already vaulted the barriers, climbed up onto the stage, and scaled the first level of hell, throwing themselves into furious combat with the human-eyed monkeys.
Their sheer numbers immediately overwhelmed the monkeys like a dark flood, and they pushed up onto the spike-covered second tier. The first to arrive were pierced through and sank down onto the spikes, and as more and more climbed on top, bodies piled layer upon layer until the spikes were entirely covered — the second tier became a flat passage of accumulated corpses.
On the third tier, the blades of the guillotines flashed their cold light, falling one after another in rotation.
Nothing could halt their ascent. Even those who died mid-climb on the way through hell kept their heads raised high.
Extreme hatred and extreme devotion turned out to be astonishingly alike.
More and more people surged up onto the high platform. The audience seating below was now completely empty. The massive iron-framed structure, ordinarily more than strong enough, was now groaning and creaking under the strain.
Bai Song looked at the scene below, then back at Anfei hovering directly above hell — the one who had ignited this terrifying riot — and stared in stupefied disbelief: “…I have genuinely never seen anything like this.”
“S-small… small fry,” Sheena said, pressing a hand to her chest and weakly trying to steady her breathing.
Even the points of starlight in the Goddess of Fate’s crystal ball seemed to have grown unstable.
On the platform nearby, Windsor had pressed himself against the Gatling gun for comfort in the same way Sheena had earlier, muttering to himself: “I kept telling myself — keep a clear head, don’t get too fixated on Bishop Tangpo, or you’ll lose your life…”
Murphy murmured: “I think I feel inspired.”
“Don’t!” Windsor said in alarm. “Say it in words — please, whatever you do, don’t pick up a brush.”
Time passed. When the last of the audience had surged onto the overloaded platform, the first performer finally reached the very top of hell — the seventeenth tier.
But the real hell seemed to lie still higher.
He was only a few steps away from Anfei’s height, his whole body trembling with bloodthirsty excitement.
Then came the second, the third…
One person standing on another’s shoulders, bodies stacked to gain height, gradually closing in on that snow-white silhouette —
A pale blue lens flashed across Yu Feichen’s vision.
Assessment result: This resident appears to be in a state of mental derangement. Prolonged hatred truly can drive a person to madness. Every single moment, he must live inside the desire to destroy everything with his own hands.
Healing recommendation: Since the wish for vengeance exists, naturally it should be fulfilled.
The City of Mist seemed to treat its own residents with a touch more candor than it extended to its visitors.
At the very summit of the mountain of massed bodies, a pale hand reached upward toward Anfei, far above.
At that moment, everyone froze. Frenzied gazes locked onto that hand. Trembling with anticipation over what was about to happen, their expressions went beyond madness into something further still — labored, staggered breathing rising and falling all around.
To drag that prey down from the clouds, drag him to the deepest pit of hell, and then—
A shadow fell over them without warning.
The great black wings snapped open directly overhead, cutting off all upward sightlines.
An arm moved unhurriedly across the man’s shoulder and drew him back and away. Shadow shifted; in the space of a blink, the golden-haired prey had soared away into the distance, taken under the shelter of the wings.
The outstretched hand at the summit could only close, once more, around empty air.
Holding Anfei, Yu Feichen looked down at everything below.
Since the wish for vengeance exists — naturally, it should come to nothing.