Ten minutes earlier.
To the east of the streets and buildings, there was a contrast between light and darkness.
The darkness in the alley seemed even denser, and the early morning sunlight spilled over from the distant horizon, illuminating the wide street.
Gar squatted against the wall, dressed in coarse cloth, looking like a lazy idler with nothing to do.
Beneath the hood, shadows covered his face.
The white-haired old man stood nearby, gazing at the street, and spoke: “That Duchess has forbidden the maids from discussing him. She also won’t let any maid approach his quarters freely, and he doesn’t talk to the maids either. There’s no way to lure him out, and even Lin hasn’t had much of an opportunity.”
Gar responded with silence.
This wasn’t something he needed to discuss.
No opportunity meant he’d wait until one arose.
He had plenty of time, but his employer didn’t.
The old man continued talking to himself regardless.
“Fortunately, though, Lin went to find him on her own today. They plan to come out together. Otherwise, he might have stayed in the castle forever, and inside the castle, there would be no chance at all.”
“The coachman isn’t one of our people, but Lin’s usual route is fairly fixed. The horse pulling the carriage has already been tampered with. When the carriage gets close, it will drop dead.”
“The carriage will be forced to stop, and Lin certainly won’t want to waste time there. They’ll continue on foot, and I’ll have someone test the waters, enough to draw away the hidden guards.”
The old man stopped there, looking down at Gar by the wall.
Gar replied to him coldly.
“Not necessary.”
The old man frowned slightly and said, “There must be a Tier 3 guard hidden behind them.”
“I said, that’s not necessary.”
Gar’s gaze remained fixed on the street, his voice low and icy.
“Any complex plan fails because of information that wasn’t accounted for. A truly masterful assassination is simply lurking, striking, killing the target, and fleeing the scene. It doesn’t need all that setup, just the right moment. Simple and efficient.”
The old man didn’t respond.
After a moment of silence, he stepped out of the alley’s shadows, leaving Gar alone.
Gar glanced at the old man’s retreating figure.
He didn’t know who was behind this man, nor why they wanted to kill that boy named Liya White.
He didn’t need to know.
A lone wolf only needed to know that its purpose here was to kill that lamb.
Time returned to ten minutes later.
The shadow beneath the maid’s skirt stirred, and a cold gleam flashed from within.
The speed was too fast.
Shu Yue was also poisoned, her focus entirely on using Healing Spell to counteract the toxin.
That cold gleam pierced through the simple spell barrier without any hesitation.
The dagger pierced through Shu Yue’s abdomen.
The shattering of the spell barrier rang an alarm bell in her mind first, and by the time Shu Yue reacted, the sensation of being stabbed through the stomach followed.
Shu Yue realized she was under attack.
She raised her hand toward the maid’s direction and released a Wind Blade at the suddenly appearing shadow.
But that shadow’s speed was far too fast, surpassing Shu Yue’s casting speed.
Before the Wind Blade could even be released, Gar had already dodged.
This was what happened when a Mage was closed in on by an assassin.
While releasing the Wind Blade, Shu Yue also cast Storm Seed.
A meter-wide, cyan-colored, high-pressure wind mass formed within half a second.
Shu Yue swung the cyan wind mass backward.
She didn’t throw it directly, but used it as a weapon, sweeping a semicircular arc behind her.
The raging wind elements shredded the wooden floor, obliterated the chair she had been sitting on, and the entire room was thrown into chaos by the wind.
The maid collapsed to the ground, screaming in terror.
Lin was stunned for a moment.
By the time she reacted, she saw a sight that made her heart tighten.
“Beh—”
She didn’t have time to warn her.
Shu Yue had already turned back around.
The tall shadow stood on the table, producing a pitch-black, eerie dagger, and thrust it toward Shu Yue’s chest.
Too fast.
Too fast for Shu Yue to defend.
Her heart was pierced through.
No, to be precise, it was the heart of the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation.
Shu Yue had temporarily lost her sense of pain.
The originally frantic heartbeat vanished in that instant.
The Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation was about to die…
What she should do now was to immediately begin Bloodline Manifestation while the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation died.
As long as the Dragon Maiden Transformation completed, the defense of three layers of Dragon Scale would be enough to keep her safe.
However, she didn’t immediately abandon the Transformation.
Gar pulled the silver-white dagger from Shu Yue’s abdomen, then thrust another strike toward Shu Yue’s neck.
Shu Yue caught the dagger directly with her palm.
Relying on her formidable physical strength, she forcibly halted the strike, while also grabbing hold of the black dagger that was about to be pulled from her heart.
This startled Gar for a moment.
He hadn’t expected Shu Yue to still be able to move after her heart had been destroyed.
So, he stopped hiding his trump card.
Three seconds!
He only had three seconds total to act.
If he didn’t leave after three seconds…
He would die.
A crimson-black arm tore through the cloak over his shoulder blade, gripping a silver-white dagger.
A cold gleam flashed, and the dagger directly pierced through Shu Yue’s left temporal skull.
Shu Yue’s eyes flew wide open.
She stared intently at the assassin’s face before her and activated her eye technique.
[Penetrating Eye]!
Her gaze pierced through the shadow’s concealment, saw through the layer of bandages, and seared that face’s appearance firmly into her mind.
Shu Yue memorized the assassin’s hidden true face before her.
The Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation, having sustained this level of damage, began to crumble and disintegrate.
Gar froze for a fraction of a second.
In Shu Yue’s gaze, he felt an intense killing intent.
But a mere Tier 2, whose Core Circuit had been destroyed by a specially made dagger, whose heart had been destroyed by an abyssal creation, whose Soul had been corrupted, and whose brain had even been pierced through—why did that gaze still make his heart palpitate?
He had killed many people.
Some begged for mercy before dying, their eyes filled with a desperate desire to live; some went mad before death, struggling with all their might to drag him down with them; some were resigned, some were in agony, and the vast majority didn’t even know how they died.
In Shu Yue’s gaze, Gar saw her coldness, as if she were saying: I’ve memorized your face.
He felt heat at his back, and Gar snapped back to his senses from his daze.
The target was dealt with.
He needed to leave now.
The Tier 3 powerhouse hidden nearby would appear at any moment.
He couldn’t afford to tangle with Lin here; frontal combat wasn’t his strength.
He wanted to pull out the dagger, to avoid it being used for divination through star-gazing arts.
But when Gar yanked on the abyssal dagger, he found that Shu Yue’s hand was death-gripping the blade.
Gar made a split-second decision and released the abyssal dagger.
This thing wasn’t too deeply connected to him, and it wouldn’t be able to divine his location.
Without hesitation, the moment he let go, he performed a shadow leap, dodging Lin’s small hand radiating scorching light, and crashed through the window to flee.
To be safe, he didn’t plan on returning to that small courtyard for now.
Shu Yue had already collapsed to the ground, her consciousness gradually slipping away from the shell of the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation.
Lin, panicked, dispersed the power surging through her body and supported Shu Yue’s shoulder. 4
Even now, her mind was still blank.
Everything had happened too fast.
By the time she reacted and mobilized her power to attack Gar, a dagger was already embedded in Shu Yue’s head.
Her mind was completely empty at that moment.
She pressed her hands against the endlessly bleeding heart wound of the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation, her small lips slightly parted, not knowing what else she could do, tears welling up in her eyes.
“Miss Lin!”
A female shadow guard arrived belatedly, moving forward to support Lin.
Lin didn’t turn her head. The only response was a single suppressed, furious word.
“Scram!”
“Miss Lin, I…”
The shadow guard stepped back.
She knew she was in serious trouble now.
The one who truly needed protection wasn’t Lin, but Liya White, and all her attention had been on Lin.
Additionally, the shadow guard had previously been told by Lin to stay far away and not appear in her sight, so she had always watched from a distance.
In Frost City, no one would be foolish enough to make a move against Lin.
Those who dared had all failed.
They had personally experienced the foundation of a ducal family, and a power at the very top of the world that they couldn’t comprehend.
The shadow guard knew that chasing after Gar now would be futile, so she went to block those who came up to check on the situation, and also dragged the terrified, unconscious maid out of the room.
Other than the sticky and warm sensation, she could no longer feel the pulse of life.
Lin looked at the lifeless Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation, her small heart twitching.
Tears fell from the girl’s eyes, and her hands pressed against her heart couldn’t feel the rhythm of life.
She wasn’t an innocent little girl who knew nothing.
She understood that this was death.
But Lin couldn’t understand why she felt so miserable.
Wasn’t Shu Yue always irritating her? Wasn’t he a big jerk who had barged into her home? Wasn’t she supposed to hate him?
Yet now, she was so afraid of this guy she’d only known for a few days dying right in front of her.
Lin had been losing things her whole life.
Her loving elder brother had died.
Her tall father had been unconscious for a long time.
Her once-gentle mother had become stern and cold.
Her sister had been taken from her childhood by her teacher.
And the maids who cared for her were replaced one batch after another.
When she heard her sister was coming back, she was too excited to sleep.
But when she learned the reason for her sister’s return—to complete the Marriage Contract with Liya—she also couldn’t accept that her sister, who always indulged her willfulness, would leave with someone who was practically a stranger to Lin.
She had blended the fear of her sister leaving with her dislike for Liya into one feeling.
But after she got to know Shu Yue, Lin gradually found it harder and harder to hate this mischievous guy.
Shu Yue felt like a new friend she could play with and grow up with.
It had been such a long, long time since Lin had felt this way…
Crack~
The sound of shattering rang out.
Lin froze, slowly raising her head to look at the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation.
The lifeless body was cracking inch by inch, turning into shards of glass-like crystal, continuously breaking apart.
The fragments turned into specks of light, all dissipating into nothingness.
Ink-black long hair fell naturally over her shoulders and back, draped in a gray-black cloak.
Beneath the fragments was a beautiful, adorable little face.
The pitch-black, petite girl’s pupils stirred.
The collapse of the Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation took just over a second.
Not only the body, but even the spilled blood vanished completely.
Lin’s small hands hung frozen in midair.
Her mind, which had been churning moments before, suddenly crashed, stuck on the scene before her, unable to process any more information.
Shu Yue slowly opened her radiant golden eyes and muttered a single line to herself.
“So this is what death feels like?”
She looked at Lin, who was dazed before her.
A cold glint flashed in her eyes, and her jade-white hand emerged from beneath the cloak.
Shu Yue grabbed Lin by the neck.
Since she had lunged forward, she used the momentum to tackle Lin to the ground, straddling her.
Lin snapped out of her daze at that moment.
Shu Yue applied slight pressure to restrict Lin’s breathing, glaring hatefully into Lin’s ruby-red eyes.
“Stupid little sister, you actually poisoned me!”
If not for the poison in the cake, she would have been able to react and wouldn’t have ended up so humiliated.
The Mirror Flower Water Moon Transformation was destroyed.
Shu Yue could be said to have died once, and lost one of her lives.
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