The Foolish Younger Brother, the Happy Elder Brother

"Hey!" The Major took a long, deep look at the dark green cloud-mist jade pendant hanging at the other's neck. "If not for this, I wouldn't dare believe it. So you really are my second brother." His tone was mocking, and complicated. "One of the Four Great Inspectors of the Statute Hall, Lord White Horse Star... Look across all of Tinghai, and there aren't many 'great figures' greater than you." "Who could have thought that you, always wearing a mask... were actually surnamed Luo?" The Major shrugged. "After all, for so many years, everyone thought the second son of the Tinghai Luo family had gone to study in the Western Federation." The man in the smiling-face mask let out a gloomy voice, like a venomous snake hissing in the depths of shadow. "Otherwise, did you truly think that all these years, your affairs had been that seamless?" "Especially these past few years, after the rotation fell to me... hasn't it all been me stepping in to bury things for you?" He said, "I don't want to bother with a piece of trash like you... but I cannot let you implicate the Zijing Group." "Then I suppose I ought to thank you?" The Major's brows lifted, his expression calm to an abnormal degree. "Don't force me to bring up what happened before." White Horse Star's gaze flickered twice. "You told me to give you one last chance. I already did." "But it seems the pythons have already failed. You didn't catch that person as you wished... Now, what means do you have left?" At these words, the Major stood silent where he was. Though his expression was calm, his chest had not stopped heaving violently, and his face was faintly pale. Controlling those several colossal pythons had not been an easy thing for him—and the shattering of the pythons, one after another, had subjected his nerves to a pain like death by a thousand cuts. "Hum..." The joss paper circling White Horse Star suddenly gave off a faint vibration, sending ripples through the air around them. White Horse Star's expression changed. "Someone from outside the Statute Hall is coming." He turned his head for a glance at the sky behind him, thick with torrential rain. The tall hat on his head grew even paler. "Your subordinates, those deformed freaks and those pitch-black bioweapons, are blocking the newcomers, but they shouldn't hold for long." White Horse Star looked at the Major and said in a low voice, "I think, now, you ought to have come to your senses?" "What?" The Major looked over. "If your affairs are exposed, the whole world will hunt you down. The Zijing Group does not have the foundation to make an enemy of the entire world, and it will never make an enemy of the entire world for your sake." White Horse Star said coldly, "I cannot let everything of yours implicate the Zijing Group—but rest assured, afterward, I will avenge you." "Bai Zhou, Senior Zhou, the mysterious person at the Reflected Ruin Realm auction, and a Gem Witch, correct?" White Horse Star seemed exceedingly familiar with these names, familiar enough to recite them backward. "Rest assured. I will find them." "And then, I'll have them go keep you company." "You mean..." Faced with the way White Horse Star listed them off like family treasures, the Major's gaze flickered twice. "Yes." White Horse Star nodded solemnly. Great swaths of joss paper fluttered around the man in the pale white robe, setting off his figure like the White Impermanence escorting the dead. "I have no choice but to kill you, foolish younger brother." He said, "In the name of 'enforcing justice.'" "Enforcing... justice?" The Major chewed over the words, and his stomach suddenly churned. Nausea, and... amusement. Then the Major really did laugh. "Ha, hahahaha..." A mocking laugh, and yet it seemed unusually free and delighted. "Hu..." On Zhenlu Mountain, howling wind and rain were thick with the heavy smell of blood. Bai Zhou stood with his blade, chest heaving in light pants, the shattered corpses of colossal pythons covering the ground at his feet. These remains were not like flesh and blood. They were more like chunks of volcanic rock, colors of magma flowing over them, the smell of sulfur especially piercing. "If anyone saw these rocks, Zhenlu Mountain would surely gain a few more unsolved mysteries," Bai Zhou said jokingly. "Maybe there'd even be an urban legend like the Tinghai Dragonfall." It was fifteen minutes past midnight. A bone-piercing mountain wind swept cinders and beat them against Bai Zhou's face. They were "cinders" Bai Zhou knew very well. This let him understand. He more or less knew, from this, what the Major had relied on to produce these pythons, comparable to a Titled Extraordinary. He did not understand the specific principle, but the material that had built these pythons... was undoubtedly "cinders." Hard currency of the mysterious world, more truly gold and silver than gold and silver itself, naturally had many marvelous uses in mysticism. It only depended on whether one had grasped the corresponding method. That Luo Da, the Major—a man who knew the special method of using the Tears of the Moon Goddess, and was versed alike in demon summoning and spider totems—should understand certain special ways of using cinders did not surprise Bai Zhou. Only... "He really was willing to spend it. This was his whole stake!" Bai Zhou clicked his tongue. Each of these pythons was more than ten meters long, and the core inside each had been cast from cinders. Each great lump of a core, at a first look, was at least a thousand cinders. It was hard to imagine how long the Major had hoarded for this. No wonder he had been short of money at the auction back then, and had the Tears of the Moon Goddess snatched clean out from under him. And now these giant snakes, piled up from real gold and silver, had been chopped utterly clean by Bai Zhou. "The Major has really risen. He grew in the silent shadows to this point today. No one knows how deep or shallow his strength is. He can even summon pythons like these..." Crow's gaze flickered, and the thoughts in her heart turned swiftly. "But he met Bai Zhou, and all his painstaking blood and toil suddenly seems not worth a single coin." This made Crow's expression odd. He had spared no effort weaving a vast net behind the scenes, hoarding enormous wealth, methods emerging in an endless stream. First the Human Material industrial chain, then the Hongzi Group, then the underground base beneath Longluo Private High School... The Major had staked his life, his family fortune, and everything he had. The blueprint of ambition he had bought with them, looking at it now, was truly not entirely a fool's dream. There was some real possibility of it coming true. But of all people, the one he met was Bai Zhou. The Major, unfathomable and daunting in the eyes of others, had his schemes smashed to pieces by Bai Zhou, a green and reckless newcomer charging straight through. Like a precious antique of cold green jade, jabbed to bits at random by a manure fork out of a haystack. Crow could even easily imagine the Major's feelings at this moment, in the sea of infernal fire at distant Longluo Private High School. It was like... "Nemesis!" Crow turned the word over again in her heart. She kept feeling that in meeting Bai Zhou, the Major had met the nemesis fated for his life. Crow had never believed in such a thing as a nemesis. Myths were always mentioning nemeses, fate, and the like. Crow disliked that sort of talk. She believed only in the blade in her hand. Like Achilles in the myths, invulnerable to sword and spear. The prophecy said he would die to a hidden arrow on the battlefield. No one believed it. Then the ever-victorious great hero took an arrow in the heel and hastily ended a ridiculous life... Wasn't that absurd? But looking at Bai Zhou, and then thinking of the Major, who at this moment was probably feeling quite lost and angry, Crow felt she had to believe, just a little, in the power of certain occult things. Years of plotting in the dark, and then, in the half month when success was near, problems had suddenly come one after another... All of it had to be traced back to the day the Major led his troops into Wancheng. Perhaps from the day the Major personally recruited Bai Zhou into Base 36, his fate had already been destined to tangle with Bai Zhou's. "Thinking of it this way, the Major actually seems a little pitiful and laughable—but he deserves it." Crow's eyes flickered. She stood silent where she was, thinking this. Whoever recalled all that had passed between the Major and Bai Zhou over this half month would probably be unable to help sighing that they were truly a star-crossed pair. But... Crow also felt that calling them nemeses might not be quite so fitting. After all, a nemesis had to be an enemy for a lifetime, while Bai Zhou—the Major was destined to be only a piece of scenery on the road of Bai Zhou's life. How could a mere man surnamed Luo be worthy of blocking Bai Zhou for long? Tonight, everything ought to end. Thinking this, Crow tilted her head up slightly and turned to look at Bai Zhou. As the temporary victor of this battle fought from afar, Bai Zhou was... Bai Zhou was stamping his foot in pained regret. "......" Crow's eyes blinked oddly twice. "What a waste." There was not the slightest pride in Bai Zhou's tone. He only looked at the remains covering the ground, grieved as if cut to the heart. "So many cinders. If only they could be recovered!" The dim cinders had already lost all supernatural quality. Every bit of mystical power contained in them had been exhausted. According to Crow, cinders like these no longer had any value as currency. "This is all money! That damned Major actually squandered my property like this!" Bai Zhou spoke through gritted teeth. Crow: "......?" Although he was not short of cinders in hand, Bai Zhou was as thrifty as ever. Seeing something wasted, he could not help but ache. He looked at the cinder remains on the ground, and in his heart he was turning over whether the Major had any other means of using cinders. Even if it was only this one kind, if it could be obtained by him, a rich landlord who did not lack for cinders... Later, when he met a great enemy, he would strike out with one palm, and eighteen colossal pythons, fangs bared and claws brandished, would fly out at the sound. What a sight that would be. Titled Extraordinary or above Level 6, whatever you are, take it up with my cinders! "Bai Zhou, would you believe that all of Tinghai, right now, is probably guessing who the man swinging a blade on Egret Mountain is?" Crow's voice brought Bai Zhou back to himself. "But they definitely can't imagine you're aching over this bit of cinders like a miser... when the money isn't even yours." As she spoke, Crow could not help rolling her eyes. In fact, Crow was right. D-1237, Golden Millet Dream, covered all of Tinghai, but what it affected was ordinary people. The sight of these pythons sweeping over the sky of Tinghai, fangs bared and claws brandished, unrivaled in their arrogance, and at last breaking and falling on Egret Mountain, had already been seen clearly by who knew how many Extraordinaries. Especially the low-level Extraordinaries. On this spectacular rainy night they shivered, and who knew how many cruel futures they had imagined in their heads. The limit of what ordinary people could imagine was an immortal undergoing tribulation on a rainy night, or a monster transforming into a dragon and ascending from a mountaintop. But the Extraordinaries knew that although the real world had no immortals, that did not mean there could not be an apocalyptic calamity capable of destroying an entire city... For example, tonight, something enormous had clearly happened in Tinghai. Golden Millet Dream let all the ordinary people of Tinghai have a good dream tonight. But for these low-level Extraordinaries, tonight was destined to be a sleepless night they would never forget for the rest of their lives. This included the Explorer trio from before. Bai Zhou's heart stirred. He did not know why, but he thought of the mysterious connection between the Explorer trio and his own pathway. He did not know whether there would be a chance to meet again... At that moment. A sharp whoosh. A light sound of air tearing split the curtain of rain, giving Bai Zhou a start, and his attention was drawn over. A broom-shaped grappling hook shot in. With a click, it latched firmly onto the mountain rock above Bai Zhou's head. "It's... Big Sister Witch!" Fang Xiaoxia saw the shape of the grappling hook clearly and cried out in delight. The hook split the rock. In the gap of spraying stone, a fiery figure in a long formal gown whooshed through the wind and rain filling the sky, flew straight in along the hook's chain, and landed in splendor. "My god... the moment I got up the mountain I saw you killing fish!" The person had not yet arrived. The voice came first. A splendid dark-red formal gown, its hem like petals opening and then closing. The masked Gem Witch arrived with airy grace. Looking at Bai Zhou standing bathed in blood, the shock in her eyes was beyond words. "So many big loaches... how do you look like nothing's wrong?" The piercing smell of sulfur spilling from the shattered python corpses all over the ground made the Gem Witch wrinkle her nose. She raised a hand and fanned lightly twice in front of her face. "I hurried the whole way. I thought you'd already come to harm. At the very least, you ought to have been locked in a bitter fight." "Before I came up the mountain, I was thinking that by the time I climbed up with my heart in my throat, I'd most likely see a peak battle fit to be written into an epic." "Man and pythons dancing on the summit, the protagonist of the story fighting a bloody, bitter battle, fighting until Tinghai itself trembled and the whole of Egret Mountain was ground away..." The witch looked at Bai Zhou standing with his blade, and smacked her lips twice with an unreadable meaning. "And yet reality isn't only lacking that tragic grandeur. It's... worlds apart from what I imagined?" "You seem very disappointed by that?" Bai Zhou turned his head to look over, blinking twice. The Gem Witch's expression immediately turned solemn. "No. I'm glad." "Glad you aren't dead." "All right," Bai Zhou answered from the heart as well. "Actually, I'm also glad to hear you rambling on again." Though it was a bit noisy to the ear, this nagging set a person at ease. After all, along the way, Bai Zhou had in fact been very worried about the Gem Witch. "That is really very rude." The Gem Witch rolled her eyes. "But don't worry. Good people live a thousand years. I'm famously hard to kill." "—Believe in the miracles brought by gems and magic!" Believe in the miracles brought by gems and magic? Bai Zhou blinked. "So, those two Master Painters..." Michelangelo! Da Vinci! And the painter lackeys under them, who loved riding surfboards. Super killers from the Fine Arts Society. Titled Master Painters who had come slowly by carriage through the rainy night. Their entrance had been extremely oppressive, unforgettable to Bai Zhou at a glance. Even with his strength now, he still felt this lot was quite hard to deal with. "Originally, they really weren't easy to handle." At the mention of this, the Gem Witch's expression turned odd. "But from who knows where, an armed helicopter kindly happened by, and incidentally treated the two of them to one missile each." A kindly passing armed helicopter? One missile apiece, as a treat? Bai Zhou's expression turned odd as well. In his heart, he already had an answer. "But if it had only been that, it actually still wouldn't have been enough." The Gem Witch went on. "But I also called over an old man I know from the Special Control Bureau." "He may be an old man, but his word definitely carries in the Special Control Bureau—the Master Painters took one look at him and ran until not one was left. They even left the carriage where it stood." At these words, Bai Zhou's heart went cold. To make two Level 6 Titled killers abandon their carriage and flee, this "old man" in the Gem Witch's mouth... was absolutely a great figure above Level 6! The Gem Witch said, "And then, as you instructed, I told him to be especially careful and attentive toward the place where a huge commotion was about to happen, and described the general situation to him." "—And then Longluo Private High School exploded." "I figure he's more or less reached the school by now." The Gem Witch said, weighing her words, "I think he can speak for us." "Who is he?" Bai Zhou asked. "Song Yidong. But it seems hardly anyone remembers that name anymore... Now everyone calls him Old Song, Director Song." The Gem Witch answered without hesitation. "He is currently the acting director-general of the Black Box Special Administration, the one who holds real power, the top seat." Acting... director-general? Bai Zhou's eyes went wide. He had asked the Gem Witch to help find someone high up in the Special Control Bureau... and the witch had gone straight to the highest one? "If even he had been secretly subverted by the Major..." The Gem Witch shook her head and went on, "then the Major probably wouldn't need to hide things so carefully." Off to the side, for some reason— Crow, who had been standing silently beside them all along, heard this name and abruptly turned her head. A sharp light bloomed, faint, in her gaze. "Crack!" Longluo High School. The underground inferno. Gray smoke surged to the heavens. Lightning and flame scorched everything. The Major's unrestrained laughter echoed above the altar. "How interesting is this? My good second brother, unseen for ten years, evaporated from the world, wants to kill me the moment we meet." "And under the fine name of... justice?" "Disgusting!" The Major spat on the ground. "And what good thing are you supposed to be!" Faced with the Major's mockery, White Horse Star, suspended high in the air, was unmoved. "Nothing you say will help anymore." "I gave you a last chance. But when those pythons collapsed... you can only pay the price for your sins." White Horse Star's voice paused briefly here. "But this is not because you did something wrong. It is because you were stupid, and even more because you did not succeed." At these words, the Major smiled and shook his head. "Mm. The victor is king, the loser a bandit. Very much the thinking of the Tinghai Luo family." "However... my arrogant second brother, it seems you still don't understand." "What?" "What you say is so grand and so matter-of-course, as if you held the power of life and death." The Major's eyeballs rolled twice. "But have you thought about it—that you actually can't kill me?" "Hm? With that pitiful trash strength of yours, which isn't even Level 5?" White Horse Star sneered. He looked down in disdain, and his right hand lifted slightly. A rustling. Joss paper fluttered across the whole sky. The mysterious runes carved upon it bloomed one after another with a pale glimmer. A dreadful, heavy field locked without hesitation onto the Major's figure from afar. "Before the dust settles, dispose of you, then find a scapegoat to stand in your place, and erase the traces of the Zijing Group..." "It's all over." He said calmly, "My foolish younger brother, this is your pathetic ending." The dangerous white joss paper moved with no wind, drifting straight toward the Major. Killing intent overflowed it, and yet it was airy, without a wisp of worldly smoke. Joss paper lands, the head is forfeit. This was the nickname by which White Horse Star was known in Tinghai's mysterious world. At that critical instant, the Major said not a word. His expression was frighteningly calm, as if he still had something more to rely on. Seeing this, the expression hidden beneath White Horse Star's black metal mask grew thoughtful. "This thing you rely on... what is it?" He soon knew. In the form of personal experience. A wet squelch. Before the joss paper could land on the Major's head, a hand reached straight out from behind and pierced through White Horse Star's chest. An aged cough came from behind White Horse Star. "...Who!" Beneath a gaze of disbelieving horror, he turned his head and saw a bald old man cradling a turbid crystal ball. "What he relies on might be me." The newcomer spoke, low and unhurried. Just so, the old man floated in silence behind White Horse Star. No one knew when he had appeared. His figure was semi-transparent, and his movements had been soundless throughout. On the back of the hand that held the crystal ball, a purple mark was corroding his flesh, hissing as it gave off foul smoke. At this moment, the Major's voice drifted lightly to White Horse Star's ear. "Second Brother, let me introduce you." "This is Wu Lao." "Former first deputy director-general of the Armory, a founding elder who created the Armory, Tinghai's famous ritual master, magic-pattern master..." "—and my firmest, most reliable ally!" At these words, White Horse Star drew a deep breath. Even as blood surged up in a pillar, his life force withered rapidly. "So it really is you, Elder Wu!" Facing Inspector White Horse Star, whose eyes were splitting with rage and whose face was deathly pale, the old man squeezed White Horse Star's heart twice and showed the smile of a man seeing an old acquaintance. "Long time no see... why is your complexion so pale, Inspector?" "Not at all," the Major said, waving a hand. "This brother of mine is perfectly happy!" Elder Wu, who had been about to draw his arm back out of White Horse Star's chest, could not help but pause. Mm. Happy. Happy—in the sense that his heart had been opened. "Riiip..." Then, as if stimulated by the thick reek of blood, the mutation came alive again. From the hissing purple wound on the back of Elder Wu's hand, an extremely large, vividly colored dark-red insect suddenly crawled out. "Boom!" As the insect crawled out of the wound, the evil, blasphemous, maddened reek of blood on Elder Wu could no longer be suppressed, and erupted. Filthy blood-mist circled Elder Wu, setting off his form, suspended in midair, like an ancient and uncanny demon god. "A Gu..." Seeing the insect, White Horse Star shuddered all over and spoke with difficulty, his voice hoarse. His heart was clenched in Elder Wu's hand. Violent pain spread through his whole body, but this pain could not catch up to the horror in his mind. Because the hidden thing Elder Wu had concealed, using the purple wound as cover, was plainly a forbidden Gu insect, extremely bloody and evil! Or rather, a Gu King filled with wicked strangeness! A single glance was enough to know that raising this Gu insect had cost the blood-qi of who knew how many living people! White Horse Star remembered that the reason Elder Wu had been called "Elder Wu" back then was said to be that his inheritance as a ritualist already contained a portion of the ancient wu. And wu, in all kinds of ancient legends, were often inseparable from the rearing of Gu insects... "Ss—ss—" A peculiar sound came. This evil, blasphemous scarlet Gu insect, like a spider and like a scorpion, its nine compound eyes rolling, its two eerie-red pincers swaying, crawled nimbly over the back of Elder Wu's hand. The faintly gleaming points of its pincers pointed from afar straight at White Horse Star's eyes, shocked and furious. The next instant. A whoosh. The Gu insect spat a thread of silk toward White Horse Star! The thread was thin as nothing and hard as steel. Just so, it pierced straight into White Horse Star's widened eye socket and drilled raw into his brain. "Ghh—ah!!" Amid White Horse Star's suppressed roar of rage, a scarlet, oppressive light flowed. "Glug, glug..." Like spider silk forcibly stirring in a man's brain, and like the rustling of a spider gnawing on a brain, the sound came. A living Red Spider mark... began to be outlined at the center of White Horse Star's brow, fading in and out. Gleaming!