Chapter 163#
The Hunt 14#
The most exhilarating moment of all is that single second when you’re about to seize what you desire.
And if it slips away at precisely that moment — that is the most desperate, maddening instant of all.
Fingers closing on nothing, the actor’s eyes flooded crimson as he reached again toward the sky.
But all he got was another handful of air.
A semi-transparent bottle appeared in Windsor’s hand — roughly the size of a household oil jug. He held the bottle in one hand and waved toward the others with the other.
Baisong recognized the thing immediately. Back at the department store, Windsor had used this absurd “fire-extinguishing liquid” to single-handedly burn down an entire building.
Sheena: “What is he doing?”
Baisong explained the effects of the “fire-extinguishing liquid.” An expression of gleeful anticipation spread across Sheena’s face.
The Goddess of Fate murmured softly: “What he holds is in my hands.”
In the next instant, the bottle in Windsor’s hand vanished into thin air and materialized in the Goddess of Fate’s grasp.
Staring at the glaring characters on the label — Fire-Extinguishing Liquid — even the perpetually composed Goddess of Fate couldn’t help but let a faintly bewildered look flicker across her eyes.
Then she unscrewed the cap, preparing to pour the clear liquid downward.
Windsor watched the Goddess of Fate’s movements and muttered to himself: “Poured like that, the coverage area seems a bit too small.”
His gaze drifted to the Gatling gun beside him, and a reckless idea took hold.
He maneuvered the heavy machine gun to aim at a single point in midair.
“But can this actually work?” He smiled lazily. “With this many people around, there’s still a tiny margin for error, right?”
The Goddess of Wisdom, the Goddess of Fate, the God of Time — practically all of the Tower of Creation’s most formidable divine officials had gathered here.
And beyond them, the being who had the God of Time fussing with concern, who made the Goddess of Wisdom duck for cover before daring to talk back, and whom the Goddess of Fate addressed as “you” — that existence was here too.
Not to mention his Brother Yu.
In short: safety.
Everything was so perfectly natural, Windsor thought.
If he could be born as the heir to the Windsor family, then of course he could enter the paradise and immediately have gods and Brother Yu as teammates.
He’d always just been very good at being born into the right place.
At the exact moment the Goddess of Fate emptied all the fire-extinguishing liquid, the Gatling gun blazed blue light, its barrels spinning furiously, firing streams of bullets toward the path of the falling liquid.
With enough bullets, nothing is impossible to hit.
Finally, one bullet struck dead center of the liquid mass, the impact scattering it instantly into countless droplets that sprayed outward in every direction.
“What kind of disaster child is this?!” Sheena immediately conjured a tool, and a semi-transparent barrier of protection enveloped them all.
The Goddess of Fate intoned quietly. The scattered fire-extinguishing liquid fell like rain, drifting downward, settling evenly across the masses below.
The Goddess of Wisdom gave Baisong a shove with her foot: “Go.”
“Aaaaah——”
Baisong plummeted, wailing like a ghost, deploying a defensive tool he’d confiscated at the department store the moment before he hit the ground. The landing was cushioned slightly — he still ended up sprawled out on his back, but without injury.
He looked at the rings of fire standing upright around the platform and understood what Sheena meant. He raised his foot and kicked one over.
The ring toppled toward the platform. The instant the flames touched human bodies, fire erupted across them in an overwhelming blaze, racing wildly upward.
Clothing, hair, circus decorations, the scaffolding’s shell — everything was flammable. And the tenth layer of hell already burned with fires capable of reducing a person to charcoal. With the fire-extinguishing liquid fanning the flames, dense smoke and raging fire surged up in an instant.
Baisong knocked over the rings one by one. The blaze grew fiercer with each one. By the fifth ring, the entire platform had been swallowed by the inferno. Sensing how badly things were escalating, he immediately abandoned his fire-stoking work and sprinted away from the stage at the fastest speed of his life.
In the sky, Yu Feichen looked down at the flames below.
Even wreathed in fire, the people continued to surge upward, converging toward Anfi.
He held Anfi in his arms and hovered there, occasionally descending — lingering just within their reach — then pulling away at the last moment before Anfi could be touched.
The anguish of reaching and never grasping fueled their madness further, while the agony of the flames burning them stripped away whatever remained of their minds — if they’d ever had such things.
Again and again.
Yu Feichen did not let them touch Anfi by even a fraction.
There in the seemingly close midair, their quarry from heaven was held horizontally in the demon’s arms, the demon’s embrace locked around his shoulders and back — yet Anfi showed no sign of struggle. Instead, he reached out his fingers to touch the chain fastened around the demon’s wings.
At his fiddling, the chain let out soft, rustling chimes.
Far from being displeased, the demon folded his wings forward, offering the chain that bound him into Anfi’s hands.
Holding that jet-black chain, Anfi looked down upon everything below.
He was precious. He was pure.
He was also the source of hatred, the master of the demon.
Heaven and hell — the two poles of good and evil in this mortal world.
A scream that seemed to tear from the very depths of the soul burst from the opera singer’s throat, then spread like a contagion across the entire platform.
Amidst the flames, a mountain of bodies all extended their arms toward the sky simultaneously. With each failed reach, they let out cries of furious despair, and blood wept from their eyes.
— Like a scene from a hell panel in a religious oil painting.
He watched in silence as grey mist surged up within the NPCs’ eyes, their irises shifting from bloodshot red to a deathly white, their postures morphing from frenzied to contorted. Beneath their flesh, it was as though there were no blood or bone — only dense, ash-grey fog.
As if they would shatter in the next moment.
The fire grew larger. Smoke billowed toward him on the wind. The thoroughly charred NPCs let out piercing shrieks and suddenly launched from the ground in unison, leaping upward at inhuman speed.
The demon wings folded shut, completely concealing Anfi’s form.
The final straw fell.
In the extremity of hatred and unresigned desperation, the very structure of their lives could no longer sustain such violent upheaval. Ear-splitting screams rang out across half the city — and within those screams, their bodies abruptly collapsed, dissolving into countless masses of grotesque mist that burned away to nothing in the raging fire.
In an instant, everyone was gone. The fire was gone too.
The platform collapsed with a tremendous crash, sending black ash billowing in all directions.
When the sound of collapse faded, all that remained was dead silence.
Sheena stiffly tugged the corner of her mouth.
For some reason, she suddenly felt a surge of sympathy for the NPCs.
Well. It didn’t matter. They would never suffer again.
Thousands of NPCs literally dying of rage on the spot — who would believe it, if anyone ever told that story?
Through the smoke, the Goddess of Wisdom coughed a few times and began directing the situation: “Clean this up. At the very least it needs to be livable.”
Baisong voluntarily got to work. Windsor hesitated a moment, then joined the cleanup effort.
Mofi surveyed the wreckage below without moving.
Sheena stepped down from the tightrope, her olive-green eyes settling on Mofi with a languid gaze: “Don’t you feel like you were particularly superfluous in that entire battle?”
Mofi: “Weren’t you?”
Sheena: “…Perhaps this is what it means to be a theoretical god.”
They exchanged a silent glance, then went down to clean up as well.
By now it was nearly evening. The western horizon blazed with fiery orange-red — yet the flames that had risen within the circus burned even brighter than the setting sun. The entire City of Mist was bathed in firelight as a result.
The wave upon wave of screams that had poured out from that direction spread outward like an ocean, enough to make anyone’s spine go cold — and then they stopped abruptly, making it all the more uncanny.
This fire had been far larger, far more terrifying than the one at the department store.
What defied explanation was not only the bizarre flames and screams, but also the three conspicuous figures on the tightrope, the demon hovering silently in midair, and the person in his arms whose features no one could quite make out.
When the firelight died together with the screams, people across half the City of Mist turned to look in that direction, their gazes filled with wariness.
The smoke dispersed. Yu Feichen’s wings were nearing their time limit. He descended onto the ruins of the platform and set Anfi down.
To conform to the rules of the City of Mist, the change in fate’s thread brought by the crystal ball was subject to time and conditions. Anfi had already reverted to his silver hair and blue eyes.
One of Yu Feichen’s wings had caught a bit of ash; as he folded them away, it brushed against Anfi’s face. He reached out to wipe the smudge away, the pad of his finger grazing across Anfi’s cheek — the casual naturalness of the gesture made it all the more intimate.
Anfi’s expression shifted faintly, as though he were about to reprimand him for another “improper conduct” in the very next moment.
But at that exact instant, the demon membrane wings behind Yu Feichen suddenly disappeared. The moment they vanished, Yu Feichen’s brows furrowed ever so slightly.
Anfi: “What’s wrong?”
“Side effects,” Yu Feichen said.
When the wings disappeared, the back would experience intense pain.
Frost-blue eyes assessed Yu Feichen with a searching look, as though confirming whether he was all right.
Half a minute passed. Anfi said: “Does it hurt?”
Yu Feichen didn’t answer at first.
His threshold for pain was exceptionally high — far beyond that of most people. The item description had said “intense pain,” but for him it amounted to something negligible, something that didn’t impede him in the slightest.
And so Yu Feichen slowly nodded once.
“Where?”
Yu Feichen: “My back.”
Where the wings had grown.
Anfi’s brow furrowed slightly. Those habitually cold, frost-blue eyes — softened, somehow, by that small motion, as though a little of their ice had begun to thaw.
He reached out his hand, as though meaning to touch the place that was hurting.
This person had always disliked unnecessary movement; extending one hand already seemed like a considerable concession. By habit and convention, Yu Feichen should have cooperated automatically — turned around, offered his back to him.
But Yu Feichen, as it happened, stood exactly where he was. Without moving at all.
Naturally, Anfi didn’t move either. Given the situation, the only option left to him was to loop his arm around Yu Feichen’s waist and raise it higher, letting his fingers rest gently against Yu Feichen’s back.
— It looked rather like he had pulled the man into an embrace of his own accord.
Through a single layer of fabric, a faint touch came through — one could imagine just how that hand tentatively pressed against the reverse side of a heartbeat, and somehow that sensation was more vivid than the side effects themselves.
Yu Feichen looked down. Silver hair filled his view.
He said: “It hurts a lot.”
Anfi raised his face. He had never encountered anything like this before; a faint bewilderment drifted through his gaze. For once, he did not speak in declarative or imperative sentences. He asked: “Then what should we do about it?”
Yu Feichen said: “I don’t know.”
Their eyes met. They were very close.
That proximity made Anfi think of what had happened those several times this person had overstepped.
After each such transgression, this person had seemed subtly, unmistakably pleased.
In the silence, Anfi said lightly: “Lower your head.”
The chief god had spoken. Yu Feichen, naturally, obeyed.
He tilted slightly toward Anfi.
There on the ruins — a light kiss, hovering like a whisper, landing softly at the corner of his right eye.