Chapter 303: Bonus Chapter

“Awoo?” Who do you think I like more?

The blade was right there in front of him, and the wolf pup simply yawned lazily in the man’s arms. His fluffy tail swept back and forth; he lifted an eyelid, showing a flicker of interest.

*** could descend into An Xuefeng’s body? If that was possible, did the next step mean they were preparing for fusion?

‘If I said I preferred An Xuefeng, would he actually go through with it?’

Wei Xun thought this with some amusement, though he had no intention of actually testing it. Whether it was An Xuefeng or ***, at their core they were both the same kind of serious.

“Uwuu…” I of course like you…

The wolf pup made a coaxing sound and licked An Xuefeng’s throat.

“Mwuu…” Only you.

Are you An Xuefeng or ***? A fragment, or the beginning of fusion?

In Wei Xun’s eyes, the distinction didn’t amount to much. Whether it was An Xuefeng or ***, they were essentially the same person. Just as Wei Xun and Bing-1 were both him.

I only like you.

The emotions in ***’s eyes shifted and stirred. The blade tip moved slightly, pressing against the tip of the wolf pup’s ear, and then against his own mouth. Then the sound of the blade entering flesh rang out, and Wei Xun startled and looked up. He smelled blood.

An Xuefeng’s blood.

“That’s good. I like you too.”

*** gave a quiet laugh. The Return Journey Saber in his hand moved without hesitation, splitting open his own chest. Blood flew outward; a few drops landed on the snow-white fur of the wolf, and the pleasure in his eyes deepened. His voice was low and rough, a murmur of absolute certainty.

“We’ve seen yours. It’s only right that you see ours.”

Before, inside the Poyang Lake safehouse, when An Xuefeng had been drawn in by the Abyss’s pull, *** had been there with him.

Wei Xun had let An Xuefeng split open his chest and look at what was inside. How could they treat Wei Xun any differently?

Wei Xun ought to see what was inside them too and have their blood touch him.

Wei Xun went still. He watched An Xuefeng cut open his own chest in a leisurely, methodical way, the way you’d carve through the beef on a dinner plate. The red was blood; the white was bone; and the thing beating powerfully in the center, radiating intense heat, was his heart.

Not a normal heart. The heat coming off it could have cooked something raw. Around it drifted a ring of deep-orange light. And most importantly, the heart was only half there.

How could An Xuefeng’s heart be only half a heart? Was it a consequence of the fragmentation? And where had the other half gone?

“The title Eventide Homecoming, and the Agency’s hold over An Xuefeng; that belongs to him.”

*** spoke unhurriedly, the way someone tells someone else’s story, and not as though he were talking about his own bleeding, half-present heart. That deep-orange light was the Eventide Homecoming, the highest honor the Agency had bestowed upon the number one Tourist, and also a chain.

Wei Xun noticed sharply that he said that belongs to him.

Then the other half was it with ***?

*** was fundamentally something close to an Abyss creature.

Something clicked into place. Wei Xun produced a deep-red stone. This was the token his Abyss node had taken the form of after he bonded with ***; it was the outward expression of his claim on that node. The form of such a token was closely tied to the Abyss creature he had marked; if Wei Xun had marked a demonic hound, it might have looked like a dog’s tooth. He had never been able to understand why marking *** had resulted in a small, deep-red, half-circle of stone.

A half-circle. Deep red. He looked again at the half-heart beating in An Xuefeng’s chest.

It was difficult not to think…

“Heh…”

Wei Xun heard *** give a soft laugh.

“You’ve worked it out?”

“That’s right. This is my half.”

*** spoke slowly, and quietly. He rarely had the freedom to talk with Wei Xun so directly; after all, his very presence was a form of mental pollution to Wei Xun.

“His half is bound and constrained. My half is like a stone, soaked through with the stench of the Abyss.”

He pressed a light kiss to the tip of the wolf pup’s ear and murmured, “Now you’ve seen it all.”

An Xuefeng had always presented himself to Wei Xun as flawless and unshakeable, as someone for whom no difficulty or emotion was too much to bear. *** had simply torn through that surface without ceremony and laid the bloody interior bare.

What he did, An Xuefeng would not have done. The choices An Xuefeng made, he could not fully understand. They were fundamentally the same person, and yet the fragmentation had made them entirely different. The idea of fusion seemed fantastical, there was no record anywhere in the Agency of a fragment successfully reunifying with its origin.

And yet An Xuefeng wanted to take that risk. And ***, for his part, also wanted to try.

Separate, independently powerful, and yet unable to fully resist the Agency, unable to stand against its rules.

Only through fusion; perhaps that was the key.

An Xuefeng had been thinking about it for a long time, and seeing the butterfly tattoo on Wei Xun’s heart had made up his mind.

And it had to start with learning to accommodate each other, to grow familiar with each other.

He had given *** control of the body, and An Xuefeng tacitly accepted everything *** did with it. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Even cutting open his own chest, An Xuefeng had not driven *** out.

“Do you like it?”

*** asked. There was little emotion in his voice. He moved from a light kiss to biting gently at the tip of the wolf pup’s ear. A dense prickling of pain traveled from the ear tip inward, but Wei Xun didn’t feel it as pain. After a brief silence he stood up in ***’s arms, wolf paws resting on his shoulders, his gaze roughly level with An Xuefeng’s, his wolf eyes calm.

He didn’t say whether he liked it or not. Instead, he asked a question.

“Awoo?” Do you remember the very first adventure between us?

Wei Xun asked. He had been avoiding this topic for a long time, but now he brought it up himself. Whether it was ***’s love or An Xuefeng’s possessiveness, both of them traced back to that first adventure he had undertaken with them at the very beginning.

An adventure only tells you what you’ve gained. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] It never warns you when the effect will end. Wei Xun didn’t know whether the result of that adventure was still influencing An Xuefeng, but he needed to know now.

Wei Xun could easily let An Xuefeng see his own heart. But the moment he understood that the half-red stone he’d been carrying was ***’s half, something in Wei Xun became, unusually, solemn.

A heart was far too precious a thing.

It shouldn’t have anything else mixed into it.

“Are you asking about the adventure that made me fall in love with you?”

Hearing the question, *** was still for a second, and then he laughed. Not the elegant, soundless kind of laughter. He laughed aloud, genuinely and happily, and his voice carried a thread of something like fond recollection.

“That was a beautiful feeling. A pity it was so brief.”

Brief as one second, but one second of love had stayed with *** from that moment to this. He had never had it before, had never experienced it. That burning, obsessive feeling.

Could a monster love?

It had made him curious. It made him want to explore further and further.

So, it had worn off.

Wei Xun exhaled quietly inside and wasn’t particularly surprised. Both *** and An Xuefeng were figures of absolute peak strength. The Adventure was only a blue title, and that it had worked on them at all was already somewhat absurd, so how long could it really have lasted?

He had simply been rationalizing their behavior as the result of the adventure all this time, never stopping to ask whether the effect had already run out long ago.

Why had he never once considered that the adventure might have faded?

“So, everything we feel is real. It always has been.”

***’s voice sounded quietly in Wei Xun’s ear. Wei Xun didn’t move. He didn’t need to look into An Xuefeng’s eyes to know exactly what was there.

Real. Genuinely precious. He had only ever wanted stimulation, had only ever wanted adventure. It had never occurred to him before that any relationship could go deeper.

And yet, now, his thinking had quietly shifted.

The moment he recognized that half-red stone as ***’s, Wei Xun’s first instinct hadn’t been to return it. It was to keep it.

To take it entirely. To fuse it into himself. To make it his and only his. Just thinking about it for a moment sent a shiver of morbid, satisfied pleasure through him.

“Today you let us see. We’re both glad.”

In this moment ***’s voice sounded almost exactly like An Xuefeng’s. Only there was something dangerous underneath the calm, a near-obsessive intensity.

An Xuefeng was perceptive to an extraordinary degree. Today, inside the safehouse, Wei Xun’s attitude had been different from before, and An Xuefeng had felt it. The way a seasoned hunter never misses an opening, An Xuefeng would not miss any opportunity to go further.

His own feelings carried a certain absence in them, so he would do this together with ***.

“If you want it, take my half too.”

In this moment it was impossible to tell whether the voice belonged to *** or to An Xuefeng. The tone was unequivocal, firm and grounded, the way someone states a rule or a truth.

“Once you take it, you’re not allowed to let it go.”

“Mwuu?” If I take it, will you die?

The mood was just right, and Wei Xun asked his question out of genuine curiosity. He really did want to know. ***’s form being a half-red stone seemed normal enough. But An Xuefeng was still a person, as far as Wei Xun could tell; so, if Wei Xun took the half-heart beating in An Xuefeng’s chest, what would happen to An Xuefeng?

“Perhaps the Agency will give me a new one.”

An Xuefeng said it offhandedly, with a short, sardonic laugh.

“The Agency, after all, can do anything.”

If it could bring someone back even missing a heart, it would certainly be quietly working its own machinations into whatever new one it provided. They both understood this perfectly well.

The next moment, An Xuefeng’s train of thought was interrupted by a disgruntled whine from the wolf pup.

“Awoo…” Your blood is getting all over me.

The wolf pup complained. An Xuefeng still hadn’t dealt with the wound on his chest, and blood was flowing steadily from it; he looked frankly terrifying, more or less half soaked in red, the very picture of someone gravely injured. If certain enemies of An Xuefeng could have seen this, they would have celebrated.

After shifting into his animal form, Wei Xun’s sense of smell had become considerably sharper, and the smell of blood was making his head swim. It had even soaked into his snow-white wolf tail.

“Awoo…” I need a bath.

With a sharp smack, the blood-soaked tail slapped against An Xuefeng, then dragged across him deliberately. The wolf pup made it very clear: hurry up and deal with this so we can get going.

Though nothing more was said about what had just passed between them, a kind of quiet, unspoken understanding had settled over the two of them. An Xuefeng’s chest shook faintly, as though he were laughing. An exhale drifted from him, low and soft. But it was ***’s voice that sounded, with a light, easy promise.

“All right.”

*** dealt with the wound simply and efficiently, stopping the bleeding.

“It’ll be over soon.”

***’s methods were considerably more ruthless than An Xuefeng’s, and he was not concerned with fairness. Little Red had already drifted away from the Abyss node, situating himself in the corridor between Wei Xun’s node and Silverfish’s, where he was putting on a convincing performance of tangling with some of the Puppet Master’s Abyss creatures when a dark shape dropped out of nowhere, and then he simply received a thoroughly devastating beating and was left as a crumpled, trembling wreck.

Little Red had truly laid an excellent plan, and his methods were not without skill. He had even managed to steal the so-called “Puppeteer’s headstone” from the Puppet Master, and he had kept the valuables he had moved from Wei Xun’s residence safe and accounted for.

By any reckoning, even if Wei Xun didn’t appreciate how he had gone about things, he ought to at least feel grateful. And then Little Red could reason with him, appeal to his feelings…

*** didn’t let Little Red say a word. He simply inventoried the belongings that had been brought into the Abyss, confirmed that nothing was missing, and then picked Little Red up by the scruff and headed directly for the Puppet Master’s domain.

*****

After all her years in the Agency, the Puppet Master arrived, on this day of all days, at the realization that she had apparently always been a massive, catastrophic jinx.