Evening Snow, You Were True to Your Word

“Cough, cough, cough… Ugh… Gurgle… Ha-ah-ah…”

Captain Xianglan choked, her throat burning from the sheer volume of gum being forced down. She nearly vomited, but managed to painfully swallow it all in the end.

Her hands clutched the dirt, propping herself up as she gasped for air, tears stinging her eyes.

‘Xi Xue was too rough,’ she thought resentfully. ‘How could she just force it down like that?’

‘It was so painful…’

“What did you just make me eat? Chewing gum isn’t supposed to be swallowed, is it?”

She looked up, coughing as she questioned Xi Xue.

Xi Xue smiled, then gently patted Captain Xianglan’s back, soothing her until she felt a little better. “It’s nothing, just some highly concentrated nutritional supplements made from fierce beast cores,” she explained. “It’s for rapidly recovering your stamina, repairing tissue, and replenishing your magic.”

“What I just gave you was the last of that specific batch.”

As she finished speaking, Xi Xue flicked her hand, tossing the empty pink box into the air. With a snap of her fingers, the box was instantly engulfed by crimson flames.

Watching the pink box vanish, utterly incinerated without a trace in a fraction of a second, Captain Xianglan frowned.

“What kind of flame was that? Why did it leave me with such a lingering fear? And a strange joy, as if I had narrowly escaped disaster?”

The crimson flame had been terrifying; the moment it appeared, her instincts had been overcome with dread, a primal urge to retreat and flee. Only after it completely vanished did she feel a slight easing of her heart.

“Bloodflame, my unique fire… It can incinerate all things, burning ceaselessly. It’s quite dangerous.”

Xi Xue watched the ashes scatter, her voice calm.

In truth, it wasn’t her own unique flame, merely one she had borrowed—one that ‘She’ would eventually reclaim.

“Alright, I’ve finished eating. You should go chase the Bloodlust Sin King quickly! It’ll be a catastrophe if a criminal King escapes!”

Captain Xianglan didn’t sense the subtle shift in Xi Xue’s tone, focused entirely on her own urgency regarding the fleeing target.

“Heh.”

Xi Xue grinned, raising her right hand and reaching out lazily in the direction the Bloodlust Sin King had vanished.

“Don’t worry, he won’t get away.”

As she spoke, the Bloodlust Sin King’s desperate, fleeing figure materialized in her mind’s eye. Then, she exerted control over her five fingers, precisely gripping the very fabric of space around him from miles away.

High in the sky, the fleeing Bloodlust Sin King suddenly felt an immense, suffocating terror descending from behind him, his heart leaping into his throat.

‘What is that!?’

He dared not look back, extracting the last dregs of his life force to fuel his insane, continuous spatial jumps.

Yet, no matter how many miles he crossed, the overwhelming terror clung to him, refusing to be shaken off.

Moreover, he felt that terrifying presence rapidly approaching, gradually constricting, threatening to physically crush him.

The Bloodlust Sin King’s heart pounded with dread as he felt the space around him slowly distorting, collapsing, and squeezing inward.

The compressed space surged towards him relentlessly, filling and solidifying every inch of air around him, finally converging into a powerful, inescapable pressure that crushed his physical body.

Crackling and snapping!

His massive bat wings shrieked as they were twisted and crushed by invisible hands.

He endured the agonizing pain, forcefully retracting his wings in a desperate bid to reduce his surface area.

Crack, snap, hiss!

His flesh and bones screamed as they warped and shattered under the atmospheric pressure.

“Aaaahhhhhh—!”

An unbearable shriek tore from the Bloodlust Sin King’s throat. His limbs were crushed by the spatial lock, and his body felt as if it were about to be flattened into a pancake, then utterly burst.

“No!!!!!!!”

He roared in defiance, feeling death seep into every pore of his being.

The scenery before him rapidly receded, blurring into afterimages and specks of light as he was violently yanked backward through space, then abruptly vanished.

Finally, in a dizzying flash, the world shifted, and he reappeared exactly where he had started—on the ground before Xi Xue.

His limbs were twisted and shattered, his head bowed, and his arms hung limp, leaving him forced into a kneeling posture, exactly like a repentant sinner awaiting execution.

“Bloodlust Sin King.”

The Princess’s voice echoed from in front of him.

He gritted his teeth, blood oozing from his entire body, and trembled as he tried to lift his head.

However, with his spine fractured, he could no longer complete the movement. He could only rely on his fading senses to know the Princess was looking down at him, and on intuition to guess her current expression.

It must be one of absolute arrogance, a cold indifference that disdained all living beings.

“Bloodlust Sin King, you conspired with foreign powers, established illicit blood pools, massacred your own kind, and participated in biochemical experiments.”

“Your heinous crimes are beyond redemption.”

“As the captain of the Mythic Unit, I sentence you to annihilation. You are to be utterly wiped from existence, with no grave to call your own!”

His eyes suddenly widened. The Bloodlust Sin King was so terrified that his ruined heart seized, and he held his breath. The sensation of true death had finally arrived.

‘Mythic Unit?’

‘The assassination and black-ops squad secretly cultivated by the Ancient Huaxia Kingdom? The one exceptionally mysterious unit specializing in eliminating rogue Kings and high-risk threats that ordinary Guard Squads couldn’t handle…’

‘I thought they only existed in paranoid informant reports…’

‘I never imagined that Her Royal Highness, the Princess, would be a part of the Mythic Unit, let alone… their captain?’

His train of thought ended there. It was like a television screen going black—no, it was an indescribable feeling. In short, there was no feeling at all, nothing. Everything returned to nothingness.

He had simply ceased to be.

Xi Xue clenched her fist from afar, then loosened it, before gathering her fingers into her palm.

Following her graceful actions, the Bloodlust Sin King’s body imploded into a puddle of gore. Before it could even splatter across the grass, it gathered together, forming a compressed sphere of crimson liquid.

Snap!

With a flick of her fingers, the blood sphere instantly ignited, utterly consumed and vaporized by the ferocious Bloodflame.

Captain Xianglan stared blankly, her stomach churning violently. She had just witnessed a Tier 7 King effortlessly crushed into a puddle of blood—red, white, and yellow all gushing out and merging into a single mass before being erased.

Her stomach churned, her intestines twisting. The gum she had just swallowed threatened to come back up, but a delicate hand clamped firmly over her mouth.

“Swallow it.”

Xi Xue’s voice came from beside her. Captain Xianglan looked up at her, a tear-streaked face pleading silently. ‘This person must be a devil!’

“These supplements are made from high-grade beast cores, and they are not easy to make. They will rapidly heal your internal injuries and restore your stamina and magic. If you throw them up and waste them, there won’t be a second helping to save your life.”

Xi Xue patiently explained, her tone practical.

Upon hearing this, Captain Xianglan steeled her resolve, digging her fingers into the dirt. She forcefully suppressed her nausea, desperately swallowing the medicine that had risen to her throat.

Feeling that Captain Xianglan had successfully kept it down, Xi Xue nodded in satisfaction and withdrew her hand.

Captain Xianglan immediately collapsed onto the ground, gasping for air as if she had been holding her breath for hours. Tears streamed down her face, unwanted.

A bittersweet mix of awe, horror, and immense relief swirled within her.

She looked up at Xi Xue, her eyes full of lingering resentment and grievance.

“Why did you have to kill him like that?”

“Of course, to make him vanish into thin air, with no grave to call his own!” Xi Xue widened her beautiful ruby eyes, looking at her in confusion. “Didn’t I just say so?”

Captain Xianglan retorted weakly, “Then why did you have to crush him right in front of me?! You clearly caught him miles away, you could have killed him from afar, then you wouldn’t have—”

“If I had killed him from afar and just told you he was dead, would you have believed me? Wasn’t bringing him back so you could see justice served with your own eyes?”

Xi Xue’s beautiful eyes held a smile as she playfully winked at her.

Captain Xianglan’s remaining words were stuck in her chest, her emotions surging. Angered yet completely helpless against this terrifying entity, she swallowed everything back down.

‘What she said seemed to make logical sense, and covering my mouth to prevent me from throwing up the medicine also made sense. But why do I feel so bullied?!’

‘I just have a feeling Xi Xue did it on purpose to mess with me…’

‘Too bad there’s no proof…’

The chibi figure in her mind whimpered a few times, and Captain Xianglan slowly regained her composure. The medicine was already working rapidly.

There was no time for this now; checking on her teammates’ injuries was far more important.

She turned to look at her five fallen teammates, simultaneously realizing that her own stamina and magic had fully recovered, and her deep wounds had miraculously knitted closed. Xi Xue, truly, had not deceived her about the gum.

Moving her body, she felt fully restored to her peak, and she quickly reassumed her usual captain’s demeanor. She rushed to check on the critically injured team on the ground.