Blind Box World - SSS-Rank Eye of Truth

The room Xue Ji had prepared for them was small but clean, with a bed, a table, and most importantly, a bathroom with hot water.

To two people who had been rolling around out in the wild for so many days, that was more precious than energy crystals.

The door had barely closed, and Ethan hadn’t even had time to let out a breath, when Laira wrapped her arms around him from behind.

"Hey..." Ethan went rigid.

The dragon didn’t say anything. She only circled her arms around him, pulled him back against her, pressed his head against her full chest, then tucked her chin onto his hair and let out a satisfied sigh.

For all these past days, amid the puppets, amid the Harpy Queen, amid the running and fleeing, she hadn’t had a single moment alone with him. And now, when the door had finally closed, all her restraint collapsed along with it.

"Take a bath with me." She said.

"What?!"

"Take a bath with me." Laira repeated, her voice utterly level, as though inviting him to a meal. "Your back is filthy, I’ll scrub it for you."

"Absolutely not!"

"Why not?"

Ethan struggled free of her arms, his face flushed red, hurriedly backing up three steps, then leaned close to her ear and lowered his voice.

"Do you know where we are? This is Xue Ji’s ship. Who knows what might be installed in this room. Listening devices, recording devices, who knows! If it were our own home I wouldn’t mind, but here, absolutely not."

Hearing this, Laira stopped short for a moment.

Then she pouted, turned her face away, her whole body radiating a thick air of dissatisfaction.

"Troublesome."

"You just go bathe first."

"Hmph."

She walked off grumbling, the ends of her red hair swishing full of reluctance, and at the bathroom door she even glanced back to shoot him a glare before slamming the door shut.

....

Ethan flopped down onto the edge of the bed and let out a long breath.

In the room there was only the babble of running water echoing from behind the door.

And suddenly, he realized something.

He was feeling... at peace.

This feeling, he hadn’t had it for a very long time. Ever since the day he was framed, turned on by all of Safe Zone Number Seven, hunted across the Anomalous Coordinate, then thrown out beyond every wall, he hadn’t had a single night sitting in a warm room, his belly full, his body safe, listening to running water.

He leaned back, looking up at the wooden ceiling of the cabin.

But that peace lasted only a few breaths.

Because Ethan knew perfectly well, he had no right to let his guard down.

He sat up and began mapping things out in his head. Where to go after leaving this trial space. How to handle the purple halo calling to the Solar Flame Seal. Whether to accept or refuse Xue Ji’s invitation. When to come back for the pile of spoils buried in the ground.

And right at that moment, his eye grew faintly hot.

Not the fierce heat of when it warned him about the Bone Demon Serpent. This time it was only a very faint tingling, like someone lightly touching his shoulder from behind.

But that much was enough for Ethan to immediately go taut.

He closed his eyes, then opened them.

[Eye of Truth.]

The room before him immediately changed color, and he saw it.

From the gap beneath the door, a current of black smoke was slowly seeping in.

It was so thin that looking with the naked eye alone, it was completely undetectable, and it hugged the floor besides, threading along the gaps in the wood. But through his eye, that current of smoke showed up crystal clear, a murky, ugly black, and inside it were tiny particles of energy floating.

Ethan didn’t need to be a Herbalist to guess what this thing was.

Not smoke from a fire. Not mist. This was some kind of medicinal substance that had been burned, and the way it actively wormed into his room instead of spreading evenly through the corridor, clearly someone was deliberately fumigating it in.

The corner of Ethan’s mouth twitched.

’This is a City Lord’s ship...’

The bathroom door burst open.

Laira rushed out, only a white bath towel hastily wrapped around her, her hair still soaking wet and dripping onto the floor. That towel clearly hadn’t been designed for a figure like hers, so it only covered part of her, and the rest was simply left on display, forcing Ethan to hurriedly turn his face away.

"There’s a strange smell." She frowned, paying no attention at all to her own state of dress. "Ethan, someone’s—"

Ethan immediately raised a finger to his lips, signaling silence.

Laira shut her mouth at once.

He pointed down at the black smoke on the floor, then pointed toward the door, then quirked his lips faintly.

Then he reached into his pocket and took out the communication device Xue Ji had given him earlier.

He turned it over in his hand, found the recording button, and switched it on.

.....

Out in the corridor, two men were crouched before the door.

Both wore the black garments of Silver Moon City subordinates, around thirty years old. One held a small brass tube, its end aimed into the gap of the door, inside it some medicinal substance smoldering, giving off the black smoke.

The other stood watch, his face somewhat restless.

"Hey..." the lookout glanced around and lowered his voice. "Is this really all right?"

"What’s not all right about it?" The one holding the brass tube snorted. "It’s just putting them to sleep for a bit. This stuff doesn’t kill, it just knocks you out for about two hours. We go in, rifle through their things, and come out. By the time they wake up the ship will be somewhere else, who’d ever know."

"But still..." The lookout still wasn’t reassured. "Look at how ragged they are, what are the odds they’ve got anything worth taking? I think we’re wasting our effort."

"Idiot." The one with the brass tube spat a gob of spit. "Think about it, someone who dares roam this hellhole alone, how would they survive without carrying a treasure to protect themselves? The poorer they look the more suspicious it is. They might have a whole pile of crystals stashed on them."

"But this is Lord Xue Ji’s ship..."

"So what?" The other sneered. "It’s precisely because it’s the Lord’s ship that there’s nothing to worry about. They’re passengers riding along, who would they complain to if they lost something? They wouldn’t dare pin it on us, would they? And the Lord is busy with a hundred things, she’d hardly bother investigating a trifle like this."

He clapped his companion’s shoulder, his voice full of confidence.

"Relax, I’ve done this plenty of times, never once slipped up. Those passengers riding along, every one of them—"

"Is that so?"

Both of them went rigid.

That voice hadn’t come from the corridor. It had come from above their heads.

The two looked up at the same time.

And on the corridor ceiling, a dark figure was clinging upside down, his left eye glowing with a faint red halo in the darkness.

Then it dropped down.

What happened next was so fast that neither of them had time to understand it.

The one holding the brass tube only had time to see a hand of silver-gray metal seize his wrist, then a terrible pain shot through, and the brass tube clattered to the floor. The lookout had just opened his mouth to shout when a kick sent him flying into the wall, after which a hand clamped tight over his mouth.

In less than three breaths, both of them were pinned facedown on the floor, arms wrenched back behind them.

Ethan stood up, dusted off his hands, and looked down at the two thrashing under his feet.

He hadn’t used Disintegration. He hadn’t even needed to call Laira out.

To someone who had just wiped out two dozen Silver-tier puppets, catching two petty thieves was about on par with picking two potatoes up off the ground.

"Noisy." He muttered, then dragged them both off down the corridor.

Along the way, he glanced at the door of the room next door, where Lěng Ruò Yān was staying.

Her door was shut tight. But right in front of it, a two-meter wooden puppet stood there, one arm raised halfway, completely motionless, as though it had been about to pound on the door and gotten frozen partway through.

Ethan understood at once.

Puppets didn’t need to breathe, so it hadn’t been affected by the sleeping smoke. It had detected the current of smoke and meant to wake its master.

But Lěng Ruò Yān had already gone under.

And a puppet needs someone to control it. When its master fell unconscious, the thread of energy snapped, and the puppet was left standing frozen in place with its arm raised halfway.

Ethan sighed and pushed her door open.

Inside, Lěng Ruò Yān lay collapsed on the bed, her breathing steady, sleeping like the dead.

....

Half an hour later, on the deck.

Xue Ji stood there, holding Ethan’s communication device, watching the recording over and over.

In that recording, the voices of the two subordinates rang out crystal clear.

"It’s just putting them to sleep for a bit..."

"I’ve done this plenty of times, never once slipped up..."

Her expression grew colder by the moment.

When the recording ended, the whole deck was dead silent.

The two subordinates knelt on the floor, faces drained white, but still unwilling to give up.

"My lord!" The one with the brass tube cried out. "This is a fabrication! They spliced it together! They struck first, that dragon of theirs beat us and rifled through our things, we were only patrolling past!"

"That’s right, my lord!" The other immediately chimed in. "They’re outsiders, who knows what designs they have! They robbed us and then turned around and framed us!"

Ethan stood to one side, arms crossed, listening to the two of them turn white into black without saying a word.

He was far too used to this.

This feeling, he had tasted it once already in Safe Zone Number Seven, when Nolan Greaves stood before the lenses and told a story completely different from the truth.

The one who speaks first is always believed first.

Only this time, he was the one who had spoken first.

"Shut your mouths." Xue Ji tossed the device back to Ethan, her voice cold as ice. "This recording runs in one unbroken take, there’s no place where it’s been cut. And that brass tube of Soulmist Incense is lying right there at your feet. Are you going to tell me they stuffed it into your hands?"

She flicked her sleeve.

"Lock them up. Deal with them by the law once we’re back at base."

The two were immediately hauled off by the other subordinates, shouting protests of innocence as they went.

Xue Ji turned to Ethan, and for the first time genuine embarrassment appeared on that ever-lazy face.

"This is my fault." She said plainly, without any evasion. "My people, and I didn’t keep them in line. You were a guest on my ship and ran into something like this. I apologize."

"It’s fine." Ethan shook his head. "I didn’t lose anything."

But as he said that, his gaze swept across the deck.

And inside him, a cold feeling began to rise.

Because he realized the others were watching him.

There were about a dozen people on the deck at that moment, including the subordinates and the five surviving youths in black. They weren’t saying anything. They were only standing there, watching.

But in their gazes, not one of them looked at Ethan with gratitude or remorse.

All of them carried a resentment.

Ethan immediately understood the problem.

To these people, who was right and who was wrong didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that the two who had just been hauled off were their own, and he was an outsider. A stranger who had been aboard the ship for only a few hours had gotten two of their colleagues locked up.

That alone was enough to make him the guilty party in their eyes.

And from the way a few of them exchanged glances, Ethan realized one more thing. Those two who had been caught hadn’t been acting alone. This trick of rifling through passengers’ things, it had likely become a habit for a whole small group aboard this ship.

He had just kicked an ant nest.

And then, one of the five youths in black stepped forward.

He was a boy of about sixteen, his eyes still red from losing two friends. He looked at Ethan, and his voice trembled with an emotion held back far too long.

"You’re this strong..."

The whole deck went silent.

"You could wipe out two dozen puppets with a single move. You were up in the sky looking down, you saw everything, didn’t you?" His voice grew louder and louder, more and more choked. "So why didn’t you act sooner?"

Ethan didn’t answer.

"If you’d acted even a moment sooner, Rin and Tolan wouldn’t have died! They were only fifteen!" He screamed, tears spilling over. "You stood up there watching them die, then waited for the right moment to jump down and play the hero, didn’t you?!"

"That’s enough!" Xue Ji snapped.

The youth flinched, but still gritted his teeth, his bloodshot eyes staring hard at Ethan.

And the most terrible thing was that no one around them spoke up to contradict him.

They were only silent.

That silence was heavier than any accusation.

Ethan stood in the middle of the deck, beneath dozens of gazes.

And he suddenly found all of this familiar to the point of absurdity.

He remembered the courtyard of Aurora Academy. Remembered the lines of comments online. Remembered the feeling of standing in the middle of a crowd where every one of them had already decided what kind of person he was, before he could even open his mouth.

Today he had saved them.

But they had lost two people, and he had lost nothing. So in their hearts, someone had to bear responsibility for those two deaths, and that someone couldn’t be their City Lord, nor could it be themselves.

Which left only him.

Ethan slowly let out a breath.

He wasn’t angry. He didn’t even bother to argue. Because he had learned a lesson a very long time ago.

With a crowd that has already decided, every explanation is meaningless.

"I understand." He said, his voice strangely level.

Then he turned to Xue Ji and clasped his hands.

"My thanks for the meal and the place to rest. But I think it’s time we were going."

Xue Ji stopped short. "You—"

"My Partner has recovered a fair amount already." Ethan smiled, a polite and distant smile. "Besides, we still have things to do in here. Staying too long wouldn’t be convenient."

She looked at him for a long time.

She knew perfectly well what the real reason was. She also knew that if she spoke up to defend him now, the situation would only get worse.

In the end, she only let out a soft sigh.

"The communication device, keep it."

"I’ll keep it."

...

Half an hour later, three figures left the black wooden ship.

Laira held Lěng Ruò Yān, still unconscious, in her arms, beating her wings and flying down to the ground below, while Ethan stood on her back, turning his head to look back at the ship receding into the distance.

"You didn’t say anything to them?" Laira asked. "We did save them, after all."

"Say what?" Ethan shrugged. "Say that at the time I was weighing whether to throw away my entire cover to save a group of strangers? Say that in the end I jumped down anyway, and the price is that from now on this whole trial space might know who I am?"

He shook his head.

"They wouldn’t believe it. People only believe what they want to believe."

Laira was silent for a moment.

"I think it’s unfair to you."

"I’m used to it."

He said that very lightly, so lightly that Laira almost didn’t hear it. But precisely because of that, it stung her heart all the more.

She glanced over at him.

This man, from the moment an entire Safe Zone turned its back on him until now, seemed never once to have had anyone thank him properly.

"Hey," she said suddenly.

"Hm?"

"I thank you." Laira said, her red-orange eyes looking straight ahead. "For jumping down back there. Even if they won’t thank you, I will."

Ethan went still.

Then he burst out laughing and reached over to ruffle his dragon’s head.

"All right." He said. "Let’s go. That purple halo is still waiting for us."