Behind her, a lady had appeared at some unknown moment in the room whose doors and windows were shut tight.
She was a little shorter than Xialuote. Thick black hair fell to her shoulders, her brown eyes were bright, and her looks were vivid and striking. She wore a pale long dress with a high waist and no hoop, and she stood less than a meter away. Her right hand idly spun a sheathed dagger, her left hand rested on her waist, and she looked this way with keen interest.
That was the weapon I had taken from the Gusitafu residence after killing Aidian. She had actually taken it... Xialuote's expression froze. She immediately reached toward her waist and found that the dagger hidden against her body had vanished at some point. Her heart began to pound at once.
If the other party meant harm, she could perfectly well have killed her without a sound while making off with it. By the time the maid who had heated the bathwater knocked and opened the door, all she would see would be a cold corpse.
At that thought, Xialuote held her breath, quietly took a step back, and pressed her back tight against the floor-to-ceiling window, ready at any moment to flee the room by jumping from the building. Only then did she speak with caution:
"May I ask who you are?"
Snap. The dagger spinning at the black-haired lady's fingertips stopped short and was gripped in her palm.
The next second, the dagger's hilt was offered to Xialuote.
"Here. Remember to keep the weapon you wear on you safe, and don't let anyone take it again," she said with a smile. Her voice was soft and lilting, like a murmur sounding right against the ear. "But compared with how wary you are now, I still prefer how you looked just now, your face set with resolve as you gripped the dagger and stabbed at your enemy."
She followed me into Baron Gusitafu's home, saw the moment Aidian died, and then came back here with me? Xialuote's scalp tightened. She realized the lady before her had followed her all evening, and she had never sensed anything amiss.
If she were Aidian's accomplice, why hadn't she shown herself then to help him? With her ability to slip into a room without a sound, getting close to anyone present would not have been hard... Or was she in fact connected to tonight's murder case in the Old City, and Aidian only a pawn that could be discarded at any time?
Xialuote's right hand took the dagger without thinking. Thoughts spun rapidly in her mind, and countless questions pressed to be asked, yet in the end she only repeated the question from just now:
"Who are you?"
The black-haired lady did not go on turning the subject aside. She drew her arm back, smoothed the hair beside her ear in passing, and said:
"I am Hengli'aite. You may call me Hengli."
Hengli? The name sounded a little like a man's, yet she was not like me. From top to bottom, inside and out, she was a woman... Xialuote thought this over, her gaze moving back and forth over the figure the long dress outlined, the vivid, lovely face, and the red lips.
Hengli'aite, stared at so intently, paid it no mind. She even turned sideways, displaying the curves of her body beneath the dress fully before Xialuote, tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, and showed a faint smile, like a model on a stage.
Affected as the display was, it was not annoying. It had a beauty of its own, so that for a moment the latter could hardly bear to look away.
"As for you, there's no need to introduce yourself." Hengli's gentle voice startled Xialuote, who had nearly lost herself in that beauty. "I know your name. I know you turn eighteen in two months. I know you and your father have only each other..."
"...and I also know the threat of death you have been facing lately."
A threat of death? Xialuote started, and at once thought of everything that had happened tonight, especially the confused memories from when she woke in the alley and the blood on her. She quickly put away that ill-timed daze and asked:
"What kind of threat?"
Hengli raised her brows, dropped that deliberate pose, and said:
"You ought to know that yourself, or you would not have written to that cousin of yours in Telier. In fact, I came today at her request to help you deal with the trouble. Fortunately I was not too late. By certain means, I found you in time while that lawyer was tracking you."
A letter? A cousin? Xialuote, who had never yet been able to calm down and sort out her thoughts, nearly blurted out a question.
Fortunately, these memories belonged to the original body and lay further back, so they were easier to recall than the part lost this evening.
With those two key words to help, the once broken fragments of memory rapidly fused, as if they had become part of her own recollections.
It turned out that, beginning half a year ago, Xialuote Suolun, not long past her seventeenth birthday, had noticed that seemingly slight accidents which might threaten her life often happened around her. A flowerpot fell from above. A horse took fright and bolted out of control. They had never truly done her harm, but the girl had still fallen into worry and panic because of them.
Her mother and elder sister had both died in accidents. Her elder brother, though he had fallen four years ago in the war between Yindisi and the Luen Kingdom, was also said to have been connected with an accident, so Xialuote was very sensitive to events of that kind. She had wanted to tell her father, yet she feared that Baron Suolun, who had lost one loved one after another, might do something irrational.
Under that pressure, she remembered her playmate in Telier, her cousin Luoshali Suolun, a full nine years older than herself.
This ringleader among the younger generation of the Suolun family often bullied the other kin, yet she lavished care on Xialuote alone, who had lost her mother and elder sister in childhood, as if she had become a second elder sister to her.
Unfortunately, after coming of age, Luoshali left Telier for the Mist Sea Archipelago, the Kingdom of Yindisi's lands overseas, to build a career of her own. From then on she lost contact with Xialuote.
Hoping it might be worth a try, Xialuote, long tormented by all sorts of bad luck, had written a letter a month ago and sent it to Telier to ask this cousin for help. She had not expected Luoshali's reply to come so soon.
In the letter, the other soothed her and told her to go as often as she could to pray at the churches of the "Eternal Blazing Sun" Church, saying that might effectively lessen how often strange things happened around her. She also said that, being overseas, she could hardly come in person, but she would find an "expert" as soon as possible to resolve the matter.
Could this Hengli'aite before her be the expert Luoshali had spoken of...? On the very day she arrived, what the original body had worried over for so long truly happened. The original had very likely even lost her life, and that was why I transmigrated into and possessed this body? Wasn't this too much of a coincidence... Xialuote thought it over, let go of the last thread of wariness toward the beautiful woman before her, and asked instead:
"You said just now that you found me by some method? So when I woke in the alley, was found by Aidian, and fled to Baron Gusitafu's home, you were hiding in the dark and watching?"
Hengli nodded and said:
"Only a little trick of mysticism. As for the dark... why would I hide in the dark?"
As she spoke, her figure suddenly turned transparent and vanished without a trace, together with the shadow at her feet.
Xialuote blinked without thinking. Her mouth fell open of its own accord. She could hardly believe a living person had disappeared right before her.
Was the conversation just now all my hallucination? Did Hengli'aite not exist at all? She gripped the dagger she had lost and regained, not knowing whether to raise the weapon and look all around, or simply push open the floor-to-ceiling window behind her and flee.
Just then, an extremely faint sound of breathing came beside her ear. A warm, moist breath brushed past her cheek, light as a feather, yet it made every fine hair on her body stand on end.
Hengli'aite's figure appeared beside Xialuote with it, still holding the posture of leaning forward, lips slightly parted, having just breathed out that warm air, as if she had been standing there all along.
Xialuote instinctively almost raised the dagger to stab, but once she saw that lovely face so extremely close, she gave up the idea. She retreated two steps, away from this woman who came and went like a ghost, and asked, unable to hide her fright and excitement:
"Is this the 'mysticism' you spoke of?"
This backward world actually possessed a power like magic, and it let her see a little hope of solving the problem of "transmigration."
"A little trick." Hengli stressed the words. She put away her radiant expression and movements, and also stepped back two paces, opening the distance again. "In essence it is no different from what Aidian Ma'ersuo did to you. Only the form it takes is different."
A little trick like this probably could not be managed even with twenty-first-century technology, unless it was a conjuring act with the stage set in advance... Wait. Aidian?
Xialuote seized on the point at once and pressed:
"You said Aidian was the same?"
"Heh, of course." Hengli gave a light laugh, her gaze sweeping the dagger gripped tight in Xialuote's hand. "Aidian, whom you killed just now—I mean, whom you killed in lawful counterattack—was, like me, an Extraordinary who had mastered Extraordinary power."
Chapter 7