Smoke and Fire [GL] - Chapter 23

Hearing this, Qing Qiuze’s expression changed slightly. After a long moment, she said, “Young Master, why must you interfere in this matter?”

Lingshuang, however, smiled slightly: “Oh, your mother remarried, so you’re sitting happily on the side, is that it?”

Qing Qiuze’s face looked very unpleasant.

“A fox spirit like you, have you even cultivated for three hundred years, to dare provoke my Madam?” Lingshuang smiled and raised her hand, the blade of her scythe instantly resting against the collar of Qing Qiuze’s qipao. “Get past me before you start barking.”

Bu Ye (Never Night) immediately understood and announced loudly: “The arena reopens! Champion Lingshuang, Challenger Qing Qiuze!”

The gong sounded with a “Dong—”.

Lingshuang twirled the scythe into a silver flower. As she passed by Luo Yao, she whispered: “This time is for my Madam, not for you. You remember that.”

With that, she flipped over and leaped down from the high platform.

Inside the restaurant, Jun Xuan watched the figures of Lingshuang and Qing Qiuze, slightly relieved: “Don’t watch. Lingshuang is definitely going to win this round.”

Yi An curiously asked: “How do you know?”

“You don’t know?” He seemed a bit surprised, then explained, “A few hundred years ago, Lingshuang had just acquired her destined artifact, the God-Slaying Scythe, and was eager to test it out. But she couldn’t exactly go around hacking people in the Demon Palace, so she ran all the way to the Monster Realm. The local fox clan didn’t recognize her, and perhaps they were slightly disrespectful… You know Lingshuang’s temperament, and then she, um…”

“Then what?”

“Then, she wiped out the clan.” He rubbed his temples, seemingly quite pained by having such a tyrannical niece.

Yi An: “T-that’s… that’s wiped out the clan?!”

“Absolutely true. From then on, the Fox Demon Clan lost its royalty and declined for several hundred years, until last year when Qing Qiuze united the fox demons and declared herself queen,” Jun Xuan continued. “So the Fox Demon Clan is very afraid of the God-Slaying Scythe. In their culture, the scythe even symbolizes the most inauspicious thing. Did you see the one in Lingshuang’s hand? That’s it.”

Yi An squinted her eyes to look. The scythe was pure black, the handle streamlined and about two meters long, and the blade seemed frosted, looking like the eye of a poisonous snake in the light.

Yi An estimated that a scythe like this would conservatively weigh seventy or eighty jin (approx. 35-40 kg), yet it was twirled effortlessly around Lingshuang’s slender, fair fingers, like a child playing with a stick.

Thinking this way, it made sense when Luo Yao said Lingshuang was just playing in the cave back in Yunshan Village! Oh my god, she didn’t even take out the scythe then, which means she was just symbolically fighting a bit!

Yi An cried out, “Oh my god!”

Too terrifying. Luo Yao’s whole family is too terrifying.

Qing Qiuze probably shared Yi An’s feeling. Her face grew increasingly pale as she looked at the scythe, completely losing her previous imposing demeanor.

Yi An pretty much understood: “So for Qing Qiuze, seeing the God-Slaying Scythe, which has been stained with her people’s bl00d, gives her PTSD. Forget fighting back, she can barely stand steady.”

“Spot on,” Jun Xuan nodded to her.

Next, the gongs rang three times, and the battle began.

Qing Qiuze adjusted her breathing, but it was useless. The blue smoke blown from her destined artifact, the cigarette holder, came out crookedly.

Lingshuang stood nonchalantly in the center of the arena and only performed three actions: Lift, Swing, Chop.

The blade stopped barely a centimeter away from Qing Qiuze’s temple.

She smiled: “Surrender now, and you still have time to crawl back to your fox clan.”

“I will kill you in the future.”

“I’ll be waiting.” Lingshuang lowered her gaze. “Now, tell me why you want to marry my mother.”

Qing Qiuze said: “I surrender, but this has nothing to do with you.”

“Meaning, you’re serious about it?” Lingshuang looked quite surprised, her delicate eyebrows slightly furrowed. “Let me tell you right now, it’s impossible, even without my Madam.”

Qing Qiuze stopped responding.

So Lingshuang stopped asking, raised her hand to retrieve the God-Slaying Scythe, and signaled outside the arena.

“Arena match concluded! Qing Qiuze surrenders! Lingshuang successfully defends the title!!”

The demons then started repeating Lingshuang’s name in unison, like robots.

Lingshuang was still at an age where she enjoyed showing off. Hearing such fanatical cheers, she felt no discomfort. Instead, she stood on her tiptoes and lightly landed on the arena’s horizontal beam.

The young girl, dressed in a gorgeous, complex, floor-length silk dress, stood barefoot. Her faintly visible legs were slender and fair. If she were just smiling like this, she would seem as beautiful as an angel.

But thinking about the murderous scythe in her hand, a very strong sense of dissonance arose.

She was like a blooming poppy.

Beautiful, deadly.

Untouchable, hard to approach.

She returned to the high platform, meeting people’s astonished gazes, and smiled at Shang Mian: “I won back your face for you, Madam. Can you let me go out and play for a while now?”

“Ask your mother,” Shang Mian gestured beside her.

Lingshuang paused slightly, then turned to Luo Yao, smiling flawlessly: “May I, Mother?”

Having reached this point, how could Luo Yao possibly refuse? She nodded: “Be back within a week. Don’t go wiping out other clans, and don’t fight, do you hear me? …This child.”

It turned out Lingshuang had simply waved her hand and left after hearing “Be back within a week,” completely ignoring her subsequent words.

After returning to the Demon Palace from the restaurant, Si Yin finally appeared. The poor child had run a bit too far and had been tricked into the deep mountains and old forests by some shape-shifting demons. She barely managed to find her way back.

“I told you you wouldn’t be that smart! It makes me so angry. Impersonating you and Luo Yao is bad enough, but there was even that Shang Mian person!” Supreme Deity Si Yin angrily lamented. “By the way, I saw it was quite lively today. Did anything happen?”

Yi An: “…”

Yi An smiled: “No, nothing happened. You didn’t miss anything.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“……………”

In the end, to fully accommodate Si Yin’s feelings, Yi An decided not to tell her about these “nothing happened” events for the time being.

That night, perhaps because she had drunk too much oblivion water, Yi An had a strange dream.

In the dream, she was among layers of red silk curtains, her perspective floating in mid-air. Many candles burned quietly. A woman’s back was kneeling on a lotus pedestal. Although her face was unseen, Yi An felt that the person should be very, very gentle.

“Go tell her that the worst case scenario may be about to happen.”

The woman’s voice was soft and ethereal.

“If that day truly comes… do not tell Lingshuang the truth. She cannot bear it.”

Yi An abruptly sat up on the bed.

No curtains, no woman. A wisp of sandalwood smoke slowly rose from the censer. Silence reigned all around.

Lingshuang?

The truth?

What the heck???

Yi An seriously considered it and figured she was likely just overly imaginative.

Lie down. Go back to sleep.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Thirty minutes.

Yi An, whose eyes were wide open like brass bells: “…”

Damn it, it’s just sleep. Who’s afraid of you!

I’m not sleeping!!

Yi An decisively flipped out of bed, casually put on some clothes, and began aimlessly wandering through the sprawling palace complex.

She passed several patrolling guards or maids carrying palace lanterns, but they all ignored her.

Bored, Yi An first went to check on Tan Tan. Tan Tan was sleeping peacefully. Because her makeup was gone, the petal tattoo on her cheekbone was particularly obvious.

Yi An stared in a trance for a while, thinking, Such a beautiful girl, why does she have to be so distraught over a scumbag?

Besides, although that Veda looks okay, he’s not as handsome as Jun Xuan! Jun Xuan is a god, too, with a higher status!

Sigh, I must properly advise her when she wakes up.

Thinking this, Yi An left Tan Tan’s room. Just as she was about to return, her peripheral vision caught a faint candlelight.

Hmm?

She stopped, realizing it was Luo Yao’s room. She leaned close to the carved door to listen carefully. She vaguely heard a few strange sounds, neither speaking nor footsteps.

Yi An knocked on the door: “Luo Yao? Are you awake?”

The sound inside abruptly stopped.

“Luo Yao?”

After a long pause, the pure black door opened just a crack. Luo Yao’s voice sounded, subtly different from usual: “What is it?”

Yi An looked at her closely. Her dark hair reached her waist, and translucent white silk robes trailed on the floor. Her collar was overlapped very high; she looked quite normal. But for some reason, her lips appeared unusually red.

Yi An was about to ask why her lip was broken when she suddenly caught a glimpse of a dark red color through the door crack. She was startled: “Is there someone in your room?!”

Luo Yao was expressionless: “No.”

Yi An was almost jumping: “There really is! I just saw it!”

Luo Yao was expressionless: “It’s a ghost.”

A very soft laugh came from inside the room.

Luo Yao finally couldn’t stand it anymore. She slipped out, closed the door with a bang, and quickly moved the utterly confused Yi An to the open-air corridor outside.

“Luo Yao, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” Yi An was an innocent child. Her mind couldn’t comprehend the situation, and she had no idea why Luo Yao was acting so unusual.

Luo Yao ran her fingers through her slightly messy long hair, then suddenly looked back and smiled at her, saying faintly: “I’m fine. I’m not the one with the problem.”

After saying this puzzling sentence, she pointed to the sky: “The Cliff Moon is beautiful tonight. Want to look at it together?”

“Coming, coming!”

So Yi An forgot what just happened, happily ran over to Luo Yao, and mimicked her by leaning halfway on the corridor railing, chin resting on her arms.

“So, what do you feel?” Luo Yao asked.

“I feel a bit of megalophobia,” Yi An answered seriously.

“…”

“I mean, um, on an impressionistic level.”

“Oh. That reminds me of a famous Rule-based Strange Tale. Does this count?”

“…”

Luo Yao asked very sincerely: “Yi An, what was your score on the Chinese portion of the college entrance exam?”

Yi An: “Ninety something. Haven’t I told you before?”

“Did you?”

“I did! That time I was drunk on my birthday, I was pulling you and saying that if I had scored 130, I wouldn’t have met you, and I cried and ruined the makeup you did for me. Si Yin recorded it, don’t you remember?”

“I remember. Of course, I remember.” Luo Yao looked back in the moonlight, her voice very gentle.

After a while, she asked again: “Why are you up in the middle of the night? Insomnia?”

“Yeah, I had a strange dream.” Yi An thought for a moment and said, “I just went to check on Tan Tan. When will she wake up?”

Luo Yao said: “Gods are not really suited for the Demon Realm, especially since she has damaged her Zhen Yuan (True Essence). It should take three or four more days.”

Yi An nodded, and a question was on the tip of her tongue.

“What exactly happened between Tan Tan and Veda…?” she asked cautiously. “Can I know?”

“You can.”

Luo Yao lowered her gaze and patiently stroked the top of Yi An’s head.

“—The name of this story is, ‘The Epiphyllum blooms briefly, only for Veda.'”