Chapter 4
Chapter 4
The air was a suffocating sludge of silence, thick with the salt of sweat, the rust of leftover Shadowmare, the charred stub of Wei Wu’s cigarette, and the intangible stench of a worldview barbecued beyond recognition.
Wei Wu’s spine was welded to the bathroom door-frame, body rigid as fossilised stone. The eyes that once could spot a lie at a hundred paces now gaped like twin craters, fixed on me—on the molten-sun gold of my hair plastered to my cheek, on the crystal spiral dragon horns jutting from my forehead, on the sweat-slick, porcelain-white heap of limbs that was every inch a crash-course in “how to look spectacularly wrecked”.
His lips trembled around the last ember of a complaint: “So my CPU wasn’t fried enough for you...?” It guttered out between us like spent ash.
I sprawled on the tiles, lungs still racing. The after-shocks of the Space-Time Dragon bloodline and the Fate Judgement serum kept rolling through my veins. Gold strands tickled my eyes raw. I tried to speak—shout—demand what game Meng Yun Xi was playing now—but only a broken wheeze came. Humiliation, helplessness, and the cosmic absurdity of it all swamped me again. Meng Yun Xi, you’d better run. This score just got personal.
On my wrist, the Eternal Dream: Prime Abyss bracelet hosted two ghost-cats: Xing Dian’s indigo shadow and Yue Fei’s cherry-white glow. Their crystal eyes tracked invisible enemies, tails flicking in grim silence.
Then—
Hum...
A vibration no louder than dust dancing in light.
Wei Wu’s hollow stare snapped into focus. Predator reflexes flared; his good hand flashed toward the small of his back. Every line of his face screamed Not this shit again.
He froze.
In the centre of the bathroom, under the darkest minute before dawn, motes of crushed starlight began to condense out of nothing. They whirled, sketched, filled—until a girl hung mid-air: moon-white gown stitched with constellations, cherry-white hair, lake-clear blue eyes, and a face too perfect for the exhaustion and... pity?... softening it.
Meng Yun Xi. Take two.
My brain white-screened. Ancestor! Didn’t you say you were turning in? “Next time” is measured in seconds now? Even zombies get longer coffin breaks! Are you a power-bank? Five-minute fast-charge?
She ignored Wei Wu as if he were a draft. Her gaze drilled straight through my glittering wreckage into the quivering new soul beneath.
Her lips curved—relief, pride, calculation, and something heavier all layered into one complicated smile.
“Don’t be afraid, adorable ‘me’.” The voice was no longer the teasing purr from earlier; it slid through the room like ancient glacier wind, and straight into my skull. “We meet... again.”
Meet my foot! You literally just said “nap-time”! I raged inside, reduced to glaring through tear-blurred eyes.
She caught the glare, a flash of mischief zipping across her pupils. Hovering, robe billowing, she delivered the next line aloud only in my head: “Of course, even a dying candle needs its final flare—waste not, want not, mew~”
Mew your sister! And “dying candle” is NOT a cute pet-name!
The quip still hung in the air when a torrent of raw data slammed into me—no buffer, no warning, just a galaxy bursting its banks inside my head.
“Ngh—!”
Vision exploded into shrapnel of light and frost-kissed knowledge. The bracelet—Eternal Dream: Prime Abyss—ballooned across my mind. Its filigree weren’t ornaments but equations of dominion, keys to space-time. I saw her—Meng Yun Xi—forge it epochs ago from her own essence: a weapon meant to command... something vast. And it was still pad-locked under oceans of self-seals. With my newborn dragon blood and infant Fate Judgement force I couldn’t even brush those locks without becoming cosmic dandruff.
Second wave—colder, stickier. The Shadowmares. They weren’t “monsters” but clots of discarded regret: timeline dregs. Every choice, every regret, every forcibly corrected future leaves husks. Those husks crawl between real and unreal, and when they smell blood like mine—or an artefact waking—they coalesce into nightmares that hate the living world for replacing them. They are the road-kill of causality, and they want company.
When the mental tsunami withdrew, my head felt scraped hollow. I lay panting, gold strands dripping cold sweat, horns aching, fury simmering at the ancestor who drops textbooks instead of lifelines.
Meng Yun Xi’s outline was already flickering like bad reception, moon-glow dimming.
“Remember them,” she whispered. “Remember the weight of Eternal Dream, and the origin of the echoes. This is your battlefield... your fate.” A tired smile, almost tender. “I... really must... sleep... next time...”
“Wait!” I croaked, voice candy-sweet even when shredded. “What ARE you? Why me? And will you actually stay gone this time?”
Only her eyes stayed sharp, galaxies of apology and mischief. “I am Meng Yun Xi... and the part of you that you forgot.” The last words were barely breath, plus a playful lilt: “Sleeping Beauties need beauty-sleep, you know. Don’t miss me too much~”
She imploded to a needle-thin streak of moonlight and darted into the centre of my forehead.
A cool drop hit between my brows; the hollow inside me filled for a second, then yawned wider. Pain ebbed, rage ebbed, everything ebbed—except the certainty that the uninvited guest had finally used up her “final flare” and clocked out for real.
At the exact instant she vanished—
Fwoosh—!
A blade of dawn punched through the shattered window, pure gold and warm as life itself. It speared me centre-mass, stripped every shadow, every stink, every cringe from the tiles. Under its wash my horns melted back to skin; the liquid-sun hair dulled to cherry-white silk; the dragon roar in my veins folded itself into a faint pulse behind my ears. In ten heartbeats I was just Yun Xi again—if you ignored the silver-blue bracelet and the encyclopaedia of nightmares now squatting in my brain.
I sat there blinking, hair a pastel curtain, mind buffering.
Wei Wu hadn’t moved. When the light found him it carved exhaustion into every line of his face. At last he dragged in a breath so deep it sounded like he was borrowing oxygen for the whole week, then let it out slow and sour.
He scrubbed his face with his good hand—one brutal swipe that wiped shock, rage, and maybe a few neurons clean off. What climbed back into place was the flat calm of a man who had run out of disbelief.
“Fine.”
The syllable landed like a sandbag.
He ticked the points off on soot-black fingers. “Brother becomes girl. Girl throws magic, grows horns, swaps hair colour—” a nod at my wrist “—bags an artefact that won’t quit, plus a teleporting ancestor who treats promises like toilet paper.” His mouth twisted. “Novels wouldn’t dare.”
Another breath. Then, voice scraped clean of emotion, eyes locked on mine—strictly north of the collarbone:
“But old man... believes.”
He yanked off his scorched tactical jacket and pitched it over my head, plunging me into darkness that smelled of gun-oil, nicotine, and unvarnished male. The fabric landed heavy, like a gag order.
“Put it on.” Growl restored. “Then—”
A pause sharp enough to shave bone.
“—give me the director’s cut. From the moment you pinged me for a dungeon run to the second your undead ancestor dived into your skull. Not. One. Syllable. Missing.”
He stepped closer. Even through Kevlar the heatwave of his temper reached me.
I pulled the jacket tighter and, for the first time since the horns retracted, found my voice.
“...Where should I start?”