You Can Play Like That at Level 1? Just a Pure Cheater, Huh?

"..." Chen Fan looked at Da Yu, who was gazing up at him, his brow furrowed. Raising a hand to signal Quehou and the others who were about to climb the wall to hold back, he looked Da Yu up and down for the first time. "You're a girl?" "Mm." Da Yu gave a slight nod. "Why does a girl talk so rough?" "Huh?" A flicker of confusion crossed Da Yu's eyes. "Didn't you, Stationmaster..." "I'm a guy." "Oh." "Wait a second. Let me wrap my head around this." ... A rainy night. Chen Fan stood on the wall, frowning deeply as he looked at Da Yu. Although he had lived alongside these people for quite a few days, he wasn't about to yank down everyone's trousers to check what was between their legs. How was he supposed to know there was a girl in the camp? And she didn't seem... entirely normal. "Nightwatcher." This was the first special cultivator he had ever encountered. He glanced out at the gray mist beyond the camp, which remained quiet for the moment, then turned his gaze back to Da Yu. He really could see some feminine traits now: a shorter frame, slender limbs, and somewhat feminine facial features. It was just that... She was rather flat, and looked quite young. She was nowhere close to being a beauty—just like some naive, innocent girl-next-door from a rural village. "I'm curious what kind of abilities a Nightwatcher has. Can you tell me?" "I can." For some reason, Da Yu seemed to place great trust in him right now. Taking a deep breath and forcing down the terror surging in her eyes again, she let her faint voice mingle with the sound of the rain atop the wall. "My father wasn't a fisherman in the past." "He was probably in your line of work, too." "What do you mean, our line of work..." Chen Fan frowned again. For some reason, he felt particularly uncomfortable tonight, as if he were right on the verge of understanding something, yet couldn't quite grasp it—like dropping a key into a tight crack and reaching down with two fingers, always falling just a hair short of pinching it out. That deeply irritating feeling. "Like, where no common folk come and go, with lots of arrow forts and buildings like that. Lots of people, very lively." "Was your father an architect?" "No. He was just a boss in that camp. The lord thought very highly of him. My memory is a bit blurry; that was when I was ninety-nine years old." "..." Chen Fan reached into his pocket with a blank expression. Right now, he needed a cigarette. Desperately. Only swirling smoke could suppress the "what the hell" feeling churning inside him. "So how old are you this year?" "I'm eighteen this year." "With you, do you grow younger as you age?" "Mm." Da Yu lowered her head, hiding the emotion in her eyes. Her voice grew softer and softer; if Chen Fan hadn't been listening intently and standing close enough, he wouldn't have heard what she was saying at all. "Nightwatchers are born, not made." "I was born a Nightwatcher. At birth, I was a hundred years old—the image of a decrepit, decaying old crone crawling out of my mother's belly." "My mother died in childbirth because of it. To keep the people around us from pointing fingers and whispering, my father took me away from our hometown and joined a camp. He told outsiders I was his mother, elderly and muddled in the head." "Back then, the lord of that camp thought highly of my father. My father thought his talents were finally recognized and worked himself to the bone. Only later did we learn that what the lord really valued was me." "The lord knew I was a Nightwatcher." "Once, when the camp faced an apocalyptic crisis—the ghost tide surging like a flood against the camp, walls falling one after another, arrow towers destroyed one by one, the camp on the brink of ruin—the lord activated me." "Before that," "neither my father nor I knew of my identity or my abilities." "After I was activated," "I wiped out the ghost tide, and I wiped out that camp." "..." With a faint, strange expression, Chen Fan stared at Da Yu, trying to discern whether she was talking nonsense. "How did that camp compare to mine?" "Much bigger." "Be specific." Da Yu glanced around and pointed at a Level 4 arrow fort mounted on the wall. "That camp had more than twenty of those stone arrow forts." "How strong was the ghost tide?" "..." After racking her memory carefully, Da Yu spoke again. "Just creatures on the level of that naked female ghost from that day—there were probably over a dozen of them." "And you wiped them all out by yourself?" "Mm." "What level cultivator were you at the time?" "At the time, I didn't know I was a cultivator, nor did I know I was a Nightwatcher." "In other words, Level 1." "I suppose so." "You can play like that at Level 1? Just a pure cheater, huh?" "What does 'cheater' mean?" "It's an expression of admiration. Tell me, how did he activate you? Do you have some kind of switch on you?" Chen Fan scrutinized Da Yu from top to bottom, trying to see if there was some button-like switch on her body. "No." Da Yu shook her head, choosing her words carefully. "A Nightwatcher's activation stems from their own conviction to protect. In the depth of despair, when I want to protect something, immense power erupts within me." "To eliminate the crisis before me." "The price is consuming my lifespan, and... not distinguishing friend from foe." "I saw my father climb the wall, about to die at the hands of ghost creatures. In my panic and despair, my vision went black, and I had no idea what happened. When I woke up again, it was dawn." "The camp was razed to the ground." "Corpses covered the earth." "Only my father sat beside me, saying he would take me home." "When I woke up, my body was no longer that of an old woman, but had turned into the body of a young woman. I also gained knowledge about Nightwatchers, and I clearly knew that I was twenty-seven years old at the time." "So after that, you returned to that coastal village north of the wasteland?" Guessing most of it, Chen Fan asked. "Yes." Da Yu lowered her head again. "I didn't know why I hadn't killed my father during that first activation. At the time, I even secretly rejoiced for a long time that I hadn't killed him." "Afterward, we lived in that village for several years." "Those years were very happy." "Free from strife." "Though there were worries during the rainy seasons, we always managed to survive them safely." "Until one rainy season, ghost creatures tumbled into the village from the surrounding cliffs. Countless villagers died because of it, and my father was in mortal danger. I was activated again." "At dawn, when I woke up, everyone was dead." "My father was dead too." "When I woke up, I was nineteen." "After that, I drifted around from place to place until I met Brother Wang and joined Jiangbei Chen family Outpost No. 36." "I wanted to protect the people around me." "Yet with my own hands, I killed them." "It was also after the second activation that more information surfaced in my mind, as if I had always known it: if I don't want to be forced into activation, I must keep ten ghost stones on me to suppress myself." "That night, I didn't hide the ghost stones on purpose." "It's just..." "If I hand over the ghost stones..." Da Yu did not finish the rest of her sentence. Yet the meaning was glaringly obvious. The entire camp he had painstakingly built would be instantly razed to the ground upon Da Yu's third activation.