The blinding flash of fire expanded in her pupils. The heat wave left Li Fei's face dry and parched.
"Heh. Knew you'd pull that move."
Li Fei laughed coldly. She flicked her wrist as if swatting a fly — the sleeve of her mage's robe billowed outward, sweeping directly into the path of the oncoming Fireball.
In the next instant, the ferocious ball of flame vanished like a soap bubble.
Eddy: (⊙o⊙)
Hmph. Did you really think a measly Tier-1 Fireball was going to blow me to pieces? You're seriously underestimating the side hustle of being a star courtesan!
Li Fei lifted her chin with a smug little tilt.
[Guardian's Mage Robe]
Equipment Rating: Full Moon
Attributes: After charging, blocks up to three instances of Rank IV or lower damage. Self-recharging; charge time: 24 hours.
Wearing the mage's robe Lady Nicole had gifted her, Li Fei could take a Fireball straight to the face — three times over.
After all, this thing ran on its own stored mana to absorb damage. Even areas the robe didn't physically cover — like her face — were protected by its field.
Setting aside the slack-jawed Eddy, Li Fei shifted her attention to the muscle-bound man charging straight at her. She began backing away steadily, lips moving through an incantation:
"Corpus lapis."
When barely five meters separated them, Li Fei extended one finger and tapped lightly. A dull grey surge of mana flowed toward… Blackstone Tasha's ankle.
Stone Skin (Lv1)
Spell Effect: Increases the target's Defense by 25%, while reducing Agility by 10%.
Duration: 30 minutes
Cooldown: 1 minute
Mana Cost: 8
EXP to next level: 10/100
A berserker lost in Frenzy had only one thought left in his skull: tear Li Fei apart. He was sprinting at full speed — every last shred of focus poured into closing the distance.
In a moment like that, what happens when your ankle suddenly stops cooperating?
The Sequence 9 Berserker pitched forward in a stumble, momentum carrying him rolling and tumbling across the ground, body caked in dirt and shredded weeds.
Proof positive: a buff spell with significant side effects, applied at precisely the right moment, worked perfectly well as a curse — and the results spoke for themselves.
"GRAAAH!"
Frenzy dulled pain. The battered, dirt-smeared Berserker shook his head and dragged himself upward almost immediately, his bloodshot eyes burning with killing intent. He wasn't stopping until Li Fei was ground to paste.
Crack.
In a single muffled crunch, a hard leather boot sole came down hard on the back of his skull. The impact drove the unsuspecting Blackstone Tasha face-first back into the earth. His nose bridge shattered. Warm blood flooded his mouth and nostrils in an instant.
The piercing pain brought a flicker of clarity. The Berserker who had been seconds from launching himself at Li Fei strained to look upward with what little peripheral vision he had — and met a pair of cold, impassive eyes looking down at him from above.
"A moment ago," Li Fei said, "you were very loud."
"I seem to recall hearing that you enjoy dodging Fireballs."
"By all means. Show me what you've got."
A cruel, playful smile curled at the corner of Li Fei's mouth. She tore open a Fireball Spell Scroll she had just exchanged for fifteen Wealth points in the System Shop, and activated the dormant mana sealed within.
BOOM.
Roaring flames swallowed the Berserker's upper body in an instant. His legs kicked and thrashed wildly. His scorched vocal cords produced sounds from deep within the inferno that no longer resembled anything human. Li Fei didn't flinch. She kept her boot pressed firmly down on his head.
Shielded by the Guardian's Mage Robe, even the writhing tongues of fire gave Li Fei a wide berth. The orange-red glow lit up her wide, delighted smile — like a witch lashed to a burning pyre who laughed and laughed and blasphemed at the top of her lungs anyway, or like a succubus empress singing in a bath of hellfire: wicked, unhinged, and utterly captivating.
"Monster — you're a MONSTER!"
Eddy snapped back to himself, thoughts a screaming tangle of chaos. He howled it at the top of his lungs, completely unable to process what he was witnessing.
He had, in the span of about one second, worked it out. He had recognized the equipment on Li Fei's body — the Guardian's Mage Robe.
The Guardian Series robes. The pinnacle of elven craftsmanship. Every single piece was a generational treasure, a masterwork that had earned the admiration of even the Dwarven Royal Court.
The Mettis family owned one heirloom Guardian's robe — a "Dawn"-grade piece — enshrined like a sacred relic. Kenneth didn't even dare wear it out of the house on ordinary days.
Eddy swore on his life: if a single month's salary from the Golden Kumquat Tavern could buy a thing like that, he would castrate himself on the spot and fight tooth and nail for a job there.
Of course, raw purchasing power alone wasn't enough to reduce a Sequence 9 Arsonist to this state. But then Li Fei had gone ahead and chanted an incantation — and successfully cast Stone Skin — and that had demolished Eddy's entire understanding of the world. He had been halfway through chanting Magic Arrow when the words died in his throat.
Transcendents could sense one another's Sequence level — provided the gap between them wasn't too great, and neither was concealing themselves with stealth-type gear or skills.
And Li Fei was a "non-combat unit." Yet she had just cast a Tier-1 spell. What did that mean?
Grandmaster-tier Aptitude.
The kind where you waltz into the Magic Academy and they pay you a scholarship instead of the other way around.
Eddy had always been rather proud of his own talent. After crossing into Sequence 9, it had taken him a full year to comprehend Introductory Chaos Magic — and nearly another month after that before he managed to cast the very first spell of his life.
And a commoner barmaid had Grandmaster-tier Aptitude?
Even a bard spinning tall tales at the tavern wouldn't dare write something this absurd.
Yet here it was, happening right in front of his eyes.
Only one thought remained in Eddy's mind:
I'm worse than a hostess girl? Is the service industry really this cutthroat now…
And then Li Fei had activated the Fireball Scroll — and Eddy's brain crashed completely.
Everyone knew Spell Scrolls weren't something just anyone could pick up and use. The idea of a Sequence 9 nobody one-shotting a high-Sequence powerhouse with a Forbidden Spell Scroll was pure fantasy — because activating a scroll required mastery of the prerequisite knowledge first.
A down-on-his-luck mage finds a Chaos-type Forbidden Spell Scroll — "Final Judgment" — and wants to use it to settle a few scores? Fine. First, achieve Grandmaster-level Chaos Magic or Grandmaster-level Nobility Knowledge. Then your dream is within reach.
Which meant that Li Fei — who had just sequentially cast Stone Skin and a Fireball, two spells from entirely different schools — must necessarily have mastered Introductory Natural Magic plus Introductory Chaos Magic, or Introductory Natural Magic plus Introductory Nobility Knowledge. Even with the scroll as a crutch.
What did that make her?
Double Grandmaster-tier Aptitude?!
Eddy naturally had no way of knowing that Li Fei could grasp Introductory Chaos Magic with a single Potential Point on a whim. He stared at the dark-haired woman slowly, unhurriedly closing the distance on him while she reloaded her crossbow — and felt every last shred of his fighting spirit crumble to nothing.
Eddy stumbled backward, flailing his staff wildly, screaming with eyes about to pop from their sockets: "Stay back — STAY BACK FROM ME!"
Thud.
Still backpedaling, Eddy tripped and went down. He looked back instinctively — and found that what had felled him was his old friend Yarman's corpse.
The familiar, now-grotesque face scattered Eddy's panic and replaced it with something harder. He gritted his teeth and yanked out his last remaining Spell Scroll, ready to go down fighting — and then he heard a cheerful voice drifting toward him:
"Go ahead. Let's see which is faster — your spell, or my bolt. Feel free to try (die). Give it a shot (rest in peace)."
The motion in his hands froze. Eddy's head jerked up stiffly. The crossbow was practically kissing his forehead — the cold, dark channel of the bolt groove radiating a suffocating pressure and terror that seemed to compress the air from his lungs. Sweat poured down his face and blurred his vision.
Eddy closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, all he could see was his friend's face in its final, agonized moment. When he opened them again, his mind was made up.
He dropped neatly to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground three times — hard, rapid, earnest:
"Please — spare my worthless life… I'll do anything you ask, anything at all — just let me go, I'm begging you…"
"I'm quite satisfied with your current performance."
Li Fei gave a pleasant nod. "I've had my fun. You may die now."
At under a meter, there was no chance the bolt could miss. Li Fei squeezed the trigger gently, and pinned Eddy to the ground.
Li Fei understood perfectly well the principle that villains who talk too much die for it — but the fear and suffering on her enemy's face in those final moments had been just too enjoyable to cut short. She had let herself linger, just a little. Her Morality score, which had already plunged to -8 after killing the Berserker, had — without her quite noticing — begun to exert a greater and greater pull on who she was.
"So… using particularly brutal methods to kill a fellow person — even an enemy — causes Morality to drop, does it?"
Li Fei glanced at the changes in her System Panel and murmured thoughtfully.
Morality: -5 → -8
Charisma: 149 → 179
"Whatever. It doesn't matter."
Li Fei quickly shifted her gaze away from the Morality figure. She produced a cigarette from somewhere, lit it unhurriedly, and watched the EXP counter — which had leapt upward by a substantial amount — through the drifting curl of smoke, smiling softly to herself. "What a good harvest today has been."
[You have killed Medmarek. +135 EXP]
[You have killed Yarman Belikli. +240 EXP]
[You have killed Kad Brown. +30 EXP]
[You have killed Blackstone Tasha. +140 EXP]
[You have killed Eddy Smith. +360 EXP]
All of them Sequence 9 — yet a Moonlight Wolf, following the Bloodline Sequence, was worth only 11 EXP. These four Knowledge Sequence practitioners had collectively delivered her 875 experience points.
Oh, right — and then there was that embarrassing bald one. A whole 30 EXP. Call it a bonus.
Beyond that… Li Fei nudged a staff aside with the toe of her boot — the one that had rolled from Kenneth's palm — and stroked her chin. "Bodies dealt with. Time to loot."
This was, technically, her first time with blood on her hands. Yet Li Fei felt not the slightest discomfort. If anything, she was somewhat intoxicated — drunk on the elation of victory, on the sharp, clean satisfaction of settling a debt personally.
She took a casual drag from her cigarette, still more than half unfinished, and tossed it aside. With a mildly disdainful sweep of her eyes across the bodies sprawled at every angle, she muttered: "Going to need to start carrying gloves when I go out. This is genuinely inconvenient."
Whether to call it fortunate or unfortunate was hard to say — Li Fei, whose Morality had now fallen past a certain threshold, had just casually flicked a lit cigarette into the grass without a second thought about the wildfire risk. The System Panel logged zero change in Morality.
With a frown, she tore Kenneth's mage's robe off the nearest corpse and spread it flat on the ground, then piled everything she had found — potions, staves, blades — into the middle, tied it all up tight, and heaved the improvised bundle onto her back with a grunt. She set off toward home, freeing one hand to pull out her phone and send Bai Mengtian a message ping.
Warrior of Palpitations: ? Busy.
Life's Greatest Joy Is Converting Straight Women: I bought a bunch of Eastern Continent spices a few days ago. I've already figured out how to make a proper spicy hot pot. It's pretty good.
Warrior of Palpitations: Fei-babe~ hungwy~ want foooood~
Life's Greatest Joy Is Converting Straight Women: I've dealt with the people I mentioned. Tell the guards not to arrest me as a criminal on the way back in.
Life's Greatest Joy Is Converting Straight Women: [Tap to load image]
In a bedchamber of breathtaking opulence — where even the floor tiles were inlaid with mana crystals that radiated an air of sheer, shameless extravagance — sat an enormous round bed over ten meters across. Bai Mengtian, already living the life Li Fei had always dreamed of, lay with her head pillowed on a pair of plush, snow-white thighs. She brushed the ink-black hair plastered across her face to one side and tapped open the photo that had just come through the chat.
What filled her screen was a blood-red evening sky — and against it, a bewitchingly alluring dark-haired woman, hauling a suspicious bundle that was absolutely caked in blood stains. The sort of bundle that, if a guard spotted it, would earn its carrier an immediate invitation downtown for a very thorough conversation.
"Go. Give them a heads-up."
Bai Mengtian flicked her wrist. The assistant lady rose, composed herself, and slipped out the door. Bai Mengtian, meanwhile, pulled the elven beauty beside her closer and waved a hand at the row of sinuous dancers and musicians arranged before the bed. "Keep playing. Keep dancing!"
Amid the languid, honeyed music, the bedchamber settled back into its atmosphere of gilded decadence.
Bai Mengtian snapped her fingers. Through some baffling application of mana, the photo on her phone screen peeled free and expanded in midair — swelling into an enormous portrait that draped itself over the elaborately carved and painted ceiling above.
"Best friend, I'm doing you such a huge favor. Using your photo to set the mood seems perfectly reasonable, don't you think?"
Bai Mengtian lay back into the mattress — stuffed to perfection with angel feathers and phoenix down — her half-lidded, dewy eyes fixed unblinkingly on her best friend's selfie, as she continued to "stay busy."
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