Chapter 300: The Architect of a Romance

More accurately than a butterfly, it resembled a complete upper-right wing. Blue-violet, extraordinarily beautiful, it rose and fell faintly with Wei Xun’s breathing and heartbeat, as though it had come alive, impossible to look away from.

An Xuefeng had never seen anything like it. His expression grew more serious still.

He noticed more of those soft white threads drifting around it, winding and coiling, as though a spider’s web had caught there. When Wei Xun had bathed earlier, those threads had clearly been washed away.

And yet here they were again.

An Xuefeng took a clean cloth, dampened it with lake water, and pressed it carefully, steadily against the threads. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The water was cool; Wei Xun shifted back slightly, which only drew An Xuefeng a step closer, closing the distance between them further. The butterfly tattoo was in a sensitive spot; An Xuefeng’s movements were light, and Wei Xun found the whole thing ticklish more than anything.

It was genuinely maddening.

“Just use some force.”

Wei Xun couldn’t help straightening up. An Xuefeng gave him a glance and continued at the same unhurried pace, his hand impossibly steady. Once the threads had softened in the water, he produced a pair of specialized tweezers and removed them with care.

The smooth metal tips replaced the cold damp cloth, and the skin there, sensitized by the cold water, reacted to the contact in a rather conspicuous way. An Xuefeng remained thoroughly grave; not a trace of anything else in his expression, his full concentration on the task, attentive and precise, the way you’d treat a comrade’s wound.

Wei Xun smiled quietly to himself and decided not to tease him.

“So, touching someone else’s butterfly fragment is dangerous,” he asked with genuine curiosity, “but touching your own is fine?”

What An Xuefeng had said earlier was reaching out to grab someone else’s butterfly fragment with your bare hand — that word someone else’s had caught Wei Xun’s attention.

Was that why the Puppet Master could keep her butterfly fragment embedded in her flesh without harm?

“It’s not quite that simple.”

An Xuefeng spoke carefully. He lifted a thread with the tweezers and placed it into a small gold casket with an exotic look to it, unquestionably another object connected to Latitude 30 Degrees. The threads themselves, and the lake water Wei Xun had soaked in, had all been collected and sealed by An Xuefeng.

“The Maria Butterfly fragment is dangerous. More dangerous for Tour Guides than for Tourists.”

An Xuefeng spoke slowly, as though sorting through his thoughts. He had never mentioned this to Wei Xun before, having planned to explain it properly with concrete examples once they were inside the pyramid. But now…

“You’ve probably looked it up yourself.” An Xuefeng said.

“The Maria Abyssal Morpho, the symbol of the Thriller Global Agency. The most mysterious and beautiful of inexplicable things; everyone seeks it, and everyone counts possession of the Maria as an honor. That’s what the Agency told you, isn’t it?”

If Wei Xun had arrived with the butterfly tattoo already and known about the Maria Butterfly, he would have investigated the moment he entered the Agency.

“Yes.”

Wei Xun confirmed it. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] An Xuefeng’s words matched exactly what the Agency had told him at the time. Beyond that single sentence, there had been no further information about the Maria Butterfly fragment.

“It carries a pure and powerful Abyss aura, and a powerful contaminating force. Whatever it contaminates feels no pain, only pleasure.”

“In theory, it represents an absolutely pure form of Abyss contamination, which actually repels and alleviates other forms of contamination. Return holds one-fifth of the butterfly fragment. Before you appeared, it helped ease certain kinds of suffering.”

An Xuefeng’s tone was even. Wei Xun understood what he meant. *** could, in a sense, be considered an Abyss creature; An Xuefeng’s own fragment had mutated for unknown reasons. Which meant, in some capacity, the butterfly fragment could suppress a Principal?

“Of course, this only works for your butterfly fragment. Someone else’s butterfly fragment would be lethal, the most terrifying kind of contamination.”

“How is yours determined?” Wei Xun asked.

“In a Latitude 30 Degrees journey, at the Year-End Celebration, on a battlefield; whoever touches a Maria Butterfly fragment first, it belongs to them.”

An Xuefeng smiled slightly, though the smile was a cold one.

“Or you kill the person who holds it, and it passes to the victor.”

“Then what if you’re in a desperate situation and pull the fragment out and throw it at an enemy?”

Wei Xun’s mind moved fast; it was already full of devious applications.

“Whoever abandons a butterfly fragment loses all favor from it,” An Xuefeng said.

“Every last piece of it.”

Touch it first, or kill whoever holds it. Abandon it and you can never possess any butterfly fragment again.

There was a strange, particular power about it; something that drove people to madness over it.

“There are also rumors,” An Xuefeng continued, “that once someone holds enough butterfly fragments, they can actively attract more, causing other fragments to abandon their current holders and seek out the one who holds the most.”

An Xuefeng had never witnessed it before, one-fifth of the butterfly was already a substantial share, and he had never encountered that scenario.

Today, he had.

The butterfly fragment that had flown free of the Puppet Master’s flesh had landed directly on Wei Xun’s fingertip, sticking as though glued, refusing to release. And the contamination it had emitted was almost negligible. Once they were inside the Poyang Lake safehouse, An Xuefeng had checked immediately; the glove was entirely undamaged, but the butterfly fragment had disappeared.

It had probably fused into Wei Xun’s body.

“For a Tour Guide, you will grow stronger at extraordinary speed. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The heavier the contamination, the more beautiful the butterfly appears in your eyes. It will drive you to seek more, and more, and more butterfly fragments, until you have assembled it in full.”

“Those who hold many butterfly fragments are drawn to each other; a series of coincidences brings them into contact.”

An Xuefeng now understood why *** had simply given Wei Xun a contract directly. But what existed between him and Wei Xun was not the mere pull of a butterfly fragment’s instinct.

“The Puppeteer had a great many butterfly fragments.” An Xuefeng said.

“But I was always hostile to him.”

“Tsk.”

Wei Xun raised an eyebrow and patted An Xuefeng on the head, the way you’d pat a large dog. The offending hand was immediately seized by An Xuefeng. He put the tweezers away and stood. With a few brisk motions he dried Wei Xun’s chest, then wrapped the blanket around him again.

“Done.”

Every last thread from the butterfly tattoo had been removed. And as the procedure ended, the blue-violet tattoo gradually faded, leaving behind only flawless white skin.

The fusion had probably completed.

An Xuefeng surmised.

Those threads on Wei Xun might not have been contamination at all, just the butterfly fragment’s reaction during the fusion process. But even accounting for that, this had been far, far too easy. Who went through fusing a butterfly fragment without half-dying, without going half-mad?

And when An Xuefeng said “done,” Wei Xun also became aware of the change in his butterfly tattoo.

There was no Agency notification; the safehouse blocked the Agency’s reach. But Wei Xun seemed to know it instinctively: what had been 1/4 was now 3/10. From one-quarter to three-tenths, the Puppet Master’s fragment had been one-twentieth.

“How many pieces does the Maria Butterfly fragment have in total?”

Wei Xun asked with curiosity. Return held one-fifth; he held three-tenths. Together that was already nearly half the Maria Butterfly.

Which meant the other half was in other hands?

“If you’re only counting the wing fragments, there are twenty pieces.” An Xuefeng said.

“But counting everything else; that’s a different matter.”

“Yin-Yang Butterfly has a demonic blade that drinks blood. Extremely thin and narrow, like a knitting needle, and flexible enough to coil around the waist when not in use. Once it pierces the body it drains every fluid in an instant. Malevolent and vicious, even the Return Journey Saber’s severing regenerated it immediately. It bears a strong resemblance to the Bloodthirst Shadow Blade the Puppeteer favored in the past.”

“It is the butterfly’s proboscis.”

“The butterfly’s proboscis…”

Wei Xun murmured. If that was the case, collecting all of the wing fragments still wouldn’t be enough to assemble a complete butterfly.

“So, there’s also the butterfly’s head, its antennae, its eyes, and things like that?”

“That’s right.”

“Then it really is difficult to put together.”

Wei Xun said with feeling. He also wanted to know what would actually happen if someone assembled the whole butterfly. His brother had collected so many Maria Butterfly fragments, there had to be a reason.

“Assemble it?”

An Xuefeng heard him and shook his head gently.

“It cannot be assembled.”

“Do you know why it’s called the Maria Abyssal Morpho?”

“Because it comes from the Abyss?”

This had also been a long-standing question for Wei Xun. A butterfly from the Abyss, why would that represent the Agency?

“No.”

But An Xuefeng denied it.

“The Maria Abyssal Morpho does not mean a butterfly from the Abyss.”

An Xuefeng said slowly.

“Where it exists, that place becomes the Abyss.”

Everyone who had lived through the battlefield of the previous decade knew this.

When the Maria Butterfly is assembled, the Abyss will appear.

Those words had been the only reward when the battlefield ended.

What did it mean, when the Maria Butterfly is assembled, the Abyss will appear?

If the Maria Butterfly fragments were assembled on Earth, would Earth become the Abyss?

Whatever the case…

“They collect it to keep it apart. To destroy it, even.”

That was why the Puppeteer had become the Agency’s public enemy. He had stopped at nothing to collect butterfly fragments, and many suspected the Maria Butterfly had already fallen under his control.

The towel bundle beside them shifted. A scruffily furred little cat head poked its way out. It wriggled for a moment, realized it was trapped in the towel, and looked at Wei Xun with a pitiful expression, letting out small plaintive meows asking to be rescued.

The Puppeteer’s fragment consciousness was dormant; Bingbing was a normal cat again. The meowing immediately softened Wei Xun’s heart past all resistance; he pointed at An Xuefeng and gestured for the cat to be brought over. An Xuefeng wasn’t letting him put his clothes back on yet, concerned about a relapse in the butterfly tattoo’s contamination, he wanted to observe for at least another half-day. Wei Xun called for the cat more to put his mind at ease.

But An Xuefeng’s expression had something difficult and heavy about it. After handing the cat over he kept watching Wei Xun, brow knitted, as though working through something.

“When a butterfly fragment is inside the body, is it always like the Puppet Master’s form?”

Wei Xun spoke first since An Xuefeng wasn’t saying anything.

“And it can just be flicked out that easily?”

“No.”

An Xuefeng shook his head.

“There’s the pull of attraction between fragments, but…”

But very few people hid a butterfly fragment inside their own body. The Puppet Master was a Demonic creature born of Abyss contamination; her abdomen was her true “self,” which was why she had done it.

Practically no ordinary Tour Guide would dare. Embedding a Maria Butterfly fragment, with its powerful contamination, into their own flesh? That was madness.

“I’ve always been curious about what a butterfly fragment looks like when it’s inside a body.”

When An Xuefeng handed him the cat, Wei Xun had taken the opportunity to close his hand around An Xuefeng’s. And now, An Xuefeng felt Wei Xun pressing something hard into his palm.

The Madman’s Blade.

“You want to take a look too, don’t you?”

Wei Xun’s eyes seemed to see straight through him; no thought could hide from that gaze. It was true; from the moment he had noticed the contamination issue on Wei Xun, An Xuefeng had been turning this over in his mind.

The butterfly fragment inside Wei Xun’s body, what state was it in?

The location of the heart was too critical.

He was worried the butterfly fragment had already taken root on Wei Xun’s heart; worried that… that worry was like a large hand squeezing An Xuefeng’s own heart.

Without looking, An Xuefeng would not be at ease. But he hesitated, and rarely did he hesitate, only because Wei Xun genuinely could not bear pain right now. Should he wait until after the end-of-period penalty was lifted? But the Sahara held a butterfly fragment being devoured by a monster, and An Xuefeng was worried another problem would surface by then.

And now Wei Xun had handed him the blade.

“…It will hurt.”

An Xuefeng looked at him steadily, his dark eyes deep as obsidian. So, he really was going to look. Wei Xun thought; he still remembered An Xuefeng’s quiet sigh in that earlier moment, how he had nevertheless extended his hand and held fast to the Puppeteer’s cloak alongside him, until the Puppeteer turned his face partway toward them.

Something had changed, Wei Xun thought. He couldn’t describe how he’d felt in that moment, couldn’t judge what he felt toward An Xuefeng right now. But he wanted to open more of himself to An Xuefeng. Show him more.

And of course, having seen what was inside the Puppet Master, Wei Xun also very much wanted to see what the butterfly fragment inside his own chest looked like. Cutting himself would drop his SAN, accelerate his alienation, and his hand would be unsteady, if he went too deep without control he could even zero out on the spot. An Xuefeng would not.

He trusted An Xuefeng completely with a blade. But An Xuefeng was clearly hesitating over something; Wei Xun could see the reluctance in his eyes.

“It will hurt, obviously.”

An Xuefeng’s expression made Wei Xun’s mood lighten further. He looped one arm around An Xuefeng’s neck, laughed softly, and said, “So, you know what to do… mm—”

Before the words were out, An Xuefeng had kissed him. The tip of his tongue pushed without hesitation through the gap in Wei Xun’s teeth and swept through his mouth, driving the breath nearly out of him. Like a predator with its prey locked in its jaws; that overwhelming, consuming force seized Wei Xun’s entire attention almost instantly.

He liked it when An Xuefeng took the initiative.

“Mew— mew—!”

The kitten wedged itself between the two of them and worked hard to push them apart, scrabbling and kicking at someone in a frenzy, but neither of them paid it any mind for the moment. A clean metallic sound rang out as the Madman’s Blade dropped to the floor. An Xuefeng hadn’t used it; he had drawn the Return Journey Saber instead. Adjusted short, it was more like a dagger now. An Xuefeng turned to the side, one hand pressing at the back of Wei Xun’s head, deepening the kiss.

And then—

A sharp hiss.

Wei Xun’s teeth bit hard into An Xuefeng’s tongue before he could stop himself, while at the same moment An Xuefeng drew a line across his chest.