Chapter 19: The Botanist's Resurgence
The homeroom teacher pressed against the chamber's glacial marble, the principal's prescient declaration reverberating through his consciousness: *"Xu Ling shall eclipse all contemporaries."* The prophecy now manifested before him—the rustic prodigy commanding a conclave of elites while Yao Haodong's reputation decayed in ignominy.
His gaze alighted on the desiccated *Clivia nobilis* gracing the table—a botanical aristocrat reduced to ligneous ruin. Liu Tao, its custodian, caressed sere leaves with a mortician's solemnity.
Xu Ling's focus was honed like a scalpel. "A feral cultivar?"
Liu startled. "Verily, Master Xu. An alpine scion perishing under my stewardship."
Rising with feline fluidity, Xu Ling orbited the planet. "Recent acquisition?"
"A trinity of moons past," Liu lamented. "Its vitality ebbed swifter than winter solstice light."
Xu Ling's digits hovered above necrotic fronds. "Grant me leave to auscultate this noble sylph?"
Liu's incredulity duelled with despair. "You command both physiognomy *and* phytotherapy?" The unvoiced indictment lingered—*By what arcana was this polymath forged?*
Undaunted, Xu Ling mapped foliar vasculature. "Transplantation trauma exacerbated by nutritional surfeit. Alpine humus' opulence became its bane."
Qu Xiao's onyx eyes glimmered. "A common malady of wilding transplants. Yet remedies persist... inscrutable." Her fingers spasmed—a fissure in her mercenary carapace.
Xu Ling inclined closer, inhalations capturing decay's ferric whisper. 'An 'oil artisan' brevifoliate cultivar, no? Beyond valuation in vigour."
Liu erupted upright, the chair shrieking in protest. "You discern its pedigree?!"
"Octuple assurance of resuscitation", Xu Ling decreed, "though demanding bidental diurnal rites."
Liu's chortle fractured with catharsis. "Biennial clandestine hoarding procured this floral diadem! I'd bequeath half my coffers for its redemption!"
Qu Xiao's visage flickered with hierophantic revelation as Xu Ling cradled the moribund specimen—a healer embracing terminal charge. The chamber's geopolitics shifted subatomically, O₂ molecules reorchestrating around this agrarian thaumaturge who resurrected monarchs and flora with equivalent munificence. Even the homeroom teacher's acrimony dissolved into veneration—the principal's augury now consummated through chlorophyllous renaissance.
The Penitent's Plight
Liu Tao clutched Xu Ling's wrist with febrile intensity. "Preserve my Clivia, Master Xu, and my lineage shall venerate your name!"
Xu Ling disentangled himself with regal composure. "A sylvan trifle, Mr Liu, unworthy of such fervour."
As the witching hour draped its obsidian veil, Director Zhou slung alcohol-saturated limbs across Xu Ling's shoulders. "Address me as kin, Ling! Let blood-oaths bind us!" Xu Ling guided the inebriated potentate into his armoured limousine, the tableau meticulously archived by the homeroom teacher's covetous gaze.
Xu Long gaped at the moribund flora cradled against his chest. "By what augury did you discern *Clivia miniata* 'Oleaginous Artisan'?"
Xu Ling's index finger grazed the terracotta vessel's occult inscription. Xu Long's bark of laughter fractured the nocturne. "Falcon's perception, Ling-ge! I nearly mistook you for Linnaeus' scion!"
Solitary now, Xu Ling pivoted toward the hotel's aureate portal. "How protracted will you lurk, Professor?"
The pedagogue emerged from behind a gilded *Pachira aquatica*, unctuousness exuding from every pore. "Ling, who could have foreseen your ascension—"
"Dispense with panegyrics." Xu Ling's diction carried arctic finality.
The teacher's kneecaps impacted onyx marble with ballistic violence. "Clemenza, Ling! Intercede with Director Zhou!" Calloused palms detonated against weathered cheeks, a staccato of desperation reverberating through the neon-drenched gloaming.
Xu Ling surveyed the grotesque exhibition—a prostrate Iscariot at his boots, nasal effluvia and lacrimal secretions glittering beneath sodium-vapour glare. "Your 'benevolence' was but cruelty restrained. Shall I genuflect for unbroken limbs?"
The burgeoning crowd's smartphones erupted like digital fungi, Douyin livestreams eternalizing the pedagogue's disintegration. Xu Ling turned, his silhouette elongating across the supplicant's prone form—a titan striding from Lilliputian irrelevance.
"Let senescence's famine instruct what pedagogy failed," he murmured, dissolving into Boruimei's maw of gilt and shadow. The teacher's ululations swelled into a nocturne of disgrace, a cautionary canto for all who equate agrarian origins with impotence.
The Digital Inquisition
In this era where attention holds imperial sway, such scenes minted viral currency.
"You should have foreseen this reckoning when committing those acts," Xu Ling declared, his voice slicing through the cacophony as he strode past the smartphone-wielding horde. The homeroom teacher's grotesque prostration faded into irrelevance against his higher purpose—ascending to Boruimei's second-floor sanctum where Qu Xiao's healing awaited.
The streaming youths buzzed with manufactured indignation. "Uncle, did that arrogant youth oppress you?" A magenta-haired girl crouched, angling her lens for optimal victim narrative. "Unburden your truth! We'll orchestrate his digital downfall!"
"Modern youths lack fundamental decency," clucked a nose-ringed boy panning across tear-ravaged features. "Forcing elders to kneel? Barbaric!"
The teacher thrashed like netted quarry, entreaties drowned in shutter symphonies. "Expunge these recordings! I implore you!" Each desperate contortion birthed fresh footage—a macabre danse macabre curated for algorithmic appetites.
Recognition pierced the vape haze. "Gods—isn't this Second County High's pedagogical luminary?" A skateboarder's gasp ignited wildfire curiosity. "Liu Tanwu! The 'Distinguished Educator' who failed my thermodynamics!"
The mob's murmur swelled as Douyin alerts blossomed across screens. Digital condemnation outpaced the teacher's capillary flush—#DisgracedMentor trended before the BMW's ruby taillights dissolved into night's embrace.
In Qu Xiao's monochromatic office, Xu Ling lounged with bucolic nonchalance, masticating winter jujubes while scrolling through pixelated damnation. "Seeking visual diversion?" Qu Xiao materialized behind him, jasmine essence cutting through bergamot-purified air.
He inclined his screen toward her—an endless reel of pedagogical unravelling. "Require reputation remediation?"
Her laughter chimed like crystal meeting marble. "We traffic in gastronomic experiences, not image cultivation."
The nocturnal denouement unfolded as Lin Yutong emerged from an onyx BMW sedan, her cropped blazer and stiletto heels radiating corporate sovereignty. "Embarkation awaits," she decreed, commandeering the luxury vessel with boardroom precision.
Qu Xiao's façade crumbled in the cognac-leathered rear compartment. "Homeward," she breathed, the syllable cradling vulnerabilities daylight never witnessed. Xu Ling observed her waning consciousness—the Steel Magnolia of Nanjiang reduced to mortal frailty, her alabaster eyelids fluttering against streetlight strobes piercing tinted glass. Beyond the soundproofed sanctuary, the teacher's digital crucifixion proliferated unchecked, his disgrace achieving digital immortality long before dawn's reprieve.
Sanctuary Among Shadows
The sedan glided through night's obsidian embrace, its headlights carving luminous paths through rural darkness. Xu Ling observed Qu Xiao's slumbering profile—her porcelain features softened by fatigue—as Lin Yutong navigated a concealed driveway flanked by ancient cypress sentinels.
"Madam's residence approaches," Lin murmured, steering toward wrought-iron gates that parted with silent grandeur. The estate unfolded like a sleeping titan—a Palladian manor flanked by manicured topiary, its limestone façade glowing pearl-grey beneath security floods.
Lin guided the vehicle into an underground sanctum redolent of lavender wax and aged leather. "Homecoming, Madam," she announced, rousing Qu Xiao from her brief respite.
The Ice Queen of Nanjiang blinked owlishly, fingertips kneading her throbbing temples. "Prepare the east suite for our guest," she instructed, ascending a floating staircase that seemed carved from moonbeams.
Lin led Xu Ling through a gallery of treasures—Ming dynasty vases guarding Klimt reproductions, their gilt frames catching fire from crystal chandeliers. Through floor-to-ceiling glass, an infinity pool mirrored starlight in liquid mercury.
A silver spectre launched from shadows. "Misty!" Lin intercepted the British Shorthair mid-leap. "Her Majesty's sole vulnerability."
The east guest chamber materialized as a study in understated opulence—king bed draped in Belgian linen, walnut wainscoting framing Rothko-inspired abstracts. Xu Ling's work-roughened palms sank into the mattress as Lin hovered awkwardly near the threshold.
"Masculine toiletries..." she muttered, vanishing in a clatter of kitten heels.
Alone with the purring aristocat, Xu Ling discovered why empresses kept feline consorts. Misty's engine-like vibrations dissolved urban tensions until his phone pulsed with Liu Shuxiang's query:
[Do rural physicians keep city hours now?]
He captured Misty mid-biscuit-making—paws kneading a cashmere throw. The riposte arrived instantly:
A silver gradient Brit! That puffball's worth three harvest seasons!
As Xu Ling draughted reassurances, floorboards whispered secrets overhead. Qu Xiao's restless pacing etched patterns through third-floor silence—a nocturnal sonata of power and vulnerability. Misty's ear tufts pivoted upward, emerald eyes narrowing at disturbances invisible to mortal senses. Beyond leaded windows, the estate's security lights winked out sequentially, plunging manicured gardens into conspiratorial darkness.
The Alchemy of Vulnerability
The argent feline arched beneath Xu Ling's ministrations, its purrs weaving counterpoint to distant nightingale serenades. Liu Shuxiang's persistent missives glowed anew: [The Xu clan returns bearing porcine tribute at your threshold!] Xu Ling's chuckle rumbled through the purring creature until Qu Xiao's summons pierced the tranquillity: [Ascend.]
Misty led the procession like a silken herald, plumy tail aloft as they breached the sanctum's forbidden tier. Xu Ling's knuckles brushed teakwood doors exuding sandalwood and secrecy.
"Grant entry."
Qu Xiao presided in a nimbus of vanity light, damp tresses cascading over jade-hued silk that caressed contours beyond couture's artifice. The atmosphere thickened with bergamot and peony unguents as she anointed her décolletage—a sacrament more revealing than disrobing.
"Therapeutic protocols necessitate..." Xu Ling's vocal cords desiccated mid-diction. Stained moonlight painted her collarbones quicksilver.
Lin's conspicuous absence throbbed between them. Qu Xiao's phone trilled—a silent edict delaying her adjutant's return. Her manicured digits faltered on the screen as Xu Ling gestured toward the marbled retreat.
"Sanctuary's facilities..."
"Naturally." Her assent emerged over-hasty.
The lavatory's seal fractured. Qu Xiao was petrified—her inner sanctum violated by musk and maleness. Lavender soap displaced, linen hierarchies disordered. She lunged as the portal yawned inward.
Chronos ruptured.
Xu Ling emerged, aqueous constellations adorning corded forearms. Qu Xiao's momentum fused them—silk and sinew colliding. His grasp anchored at her cinched waist, fingerprints branding through diaphanous weave.
"Pardons, I..."
Her demurral evaporated mid-syllable. The chronometer's hum underscored Misty's metronomic tail from her damask perch. Beyond mullioned panes, a night heron's cry (or perhaps Liu's insistent ping) scored the tableau.
In suspended animation, hierarchies dissolved. The Ice Queen's carotid pulse fluttered against Xu Ling's sternum, her glacial poise liquefying like wax beneath midsummer stars. The manor's ancestral portraits peered through gilt frames, arbiters of this collision between agrarian resolve and metropolitan enigma.
The Forge of Retribution
"Release your hold!" Qu Xiao's command dissolved into a breathless murmur as Xu Ling's sandalwood-infused warmth enveloped her. Her hands pressed weakly against his chest, silk sleeves whispering across cotton weave, awakening dormant currents beneath ivory skin.
Xu Ling's embrace remained unyielding. "The treatment begins," he intoned, settling her onto the brocaded divan with ceremonial care. Misty coiled into a lunar comma upon the bolster, emerald gaze tracking every motion.
The acupuncture needles glinted like celestial pins beneath crystal light. "Meridian alignment necessitates disrobing," Xu Ling stated, arranging his silver implements with shamanic precision.
Qu Xiao's fingers moved with imperial dispassion, pearl buttons yielding to reveal marble topography. The chamber's atmosphere congealed with unspoken truths as Xu Ling's needles pierced twelve astral junctures—constellations mapped upon mortal flesh.
Her eyes snapped open mid-procedure, obsidian irises reflecting lethal inquiry. "What ancient grudge binds you to Li Guangfei?"
The confession flowed like monsoon torrents—medical treachery, familial desolation, vengeance suspended. Qu Xiao absorbed the narrative without flicker, her respiration maintaining Zen cadence.
"Shall I annihilate that bloodline?" Her whisper carried the weight of dynastic proclamations. "Obliterating Li's dominion requires but a gesture."
Xu Ling's needle arrested mid-air. "You share kinship bonds."
"Through matrimonial cobwebs," she dismissed, silk sheets hissing with her regal shift. "Irrelevance defined."
The physician's gaze crystallized to volcanic glass. "Death offers clemency. I demand he witness every unravelling thread of his legacy."
Beneath Xu Ling's stabilizing palm, Qu Xiao's pulse throbbed like war drums. This primal incarnation—no longer a provincial healer but a vengeance-forged entity—ignited an unfamiliar fire within her marrow.
"Summon me when the stars align," she decreed, consciousness succumbing to qi-induced torpor. Her psyche drifted into storm-lashed oceans where Xu Ling's silhouette stood beacon-like against chaos.
Misty's purr harmonized with the grandfather clock's pendulum as needles thrummed with transferred energy. In the crypt-like darkness, two sovereigns of disparate realms acknowledged their covenant—one armoured in corporate platinum, the other tempered in ancestral loam, united in the crucible of delayed retribution and recognized puissance.
The Hostage Gambit
The first cerulean hues of dawn brushed the horizon as Xu Ling retracted the final argent needle. Qu Xiao lay enmeshed in slumber's sovereign embrace, limbs liberated from chronic malaise beneath rumpled silk. He glided from the chamber, discovering Lin Yutong stationed like a jade sentinel at the threshold.
"Her Majesty reposes?"
Xu Ling inclined his head toward the quilted mound sheltering Misty's silver form. Their descent through the manor's dormant corridors unfolded beneath ancestral gazes frozen in gilded frames.
As county boundaries materialized through dissipating mist, night's hush surrendered to steaming bamboo trays and breakfast clamour. Xu Ling selected jujube-filled buns—ambrosial offerings for Yu Mengna's anticipated dawn greeting.
Three sharp raps echoed through her apartment's stillness. Silence answered.
The burner phone's vibration fractured the void. A mechanized baritone oozed through the receiver: "The woman's pulse continues... provisionally."
Takeout containers detonated against asphalt as Xu Ling's fist clenched. A meaty thud and Yu Mengna's choked gasp punctuated the assailant's reptilian chuckle.
"Articulate your demands."
"Your agricultural alchemy's formulae." The voice emerged distorted through layers of digital obfuscation. "Directions await in Bailejia's commercial labyrinth."
Xu Ling's neural circuitry mapped suspects. This crude methodology reeked of mercenary thuggery—Liang Xiaoyong's trademark desperation incarnate.
"Involve constabulary forces..." The threat dissolved into oscillating menace.
"Geolocation". Xu Ling's riposte carried permafrost finality.
Dead air answered. Sparrows scattered as he pivoted toward commerce districts, breakfast remnants crunching beneath determined strides. This brute-force ploy warranted primitive resolution—the agrarian healer would demonstrate why even serpents recoil from wrathful celestial dragons.
The Shadow Exchange
Xu Ling's knuckles cracked like dry timber as he transcribed the botanical formula, sealing it within a supermarket locker. Navigating serpentine alleys veiled in dawn's grey whispers, he arrived at a dilapidated pet emporium where a crooked sign creaked in the wind. Within dwelled a parliament of maimed creatures—monocular felines and tripodal hounds—their discordant chorus greeting his entrance.
"Young sir, these gentle spirits crave sanctuary," crooned the stooped matriarch, her cataract-clouded eyes glimmering. "Merely compensate their sustenance."
Xu Ling's gaze catalogued the clinical sterility beneath the chaos—not a mote of dust marred surfaces reeking of antiseptic sharpness. "Might I peruse unimpeded?"
The crone retreated to her crackling wireless relic as Xu凌 concealed the encoded cypher beneath the third feline spire. Departing, he scanned the counter's QR monolith, transferring 500 yuan with forensic precision.
"For their nourishment," he proclaimed, disregarding the woman's benediction—"Another benevolent soul"—that pierced the bedlam through occult means.
Emerging into sodium-lit gloom, Xu Ling summoned Commissioner Liu Zhonghua. "A professional abduction, Superintendent. Require clandestine surveillance."
Liu's voice acquired a blade's edge. "The emporium and commercial colossus—my shadows shall permeate both."
Hours dissolved into indigo twilight as Xu Ling navigated dead drops, each relocation eroding his composure. When Liu's communiqué arrived—"Cipher retrieved at the menagerie"—Xu Ling's form dissolved into quantum motion, his enhanced biology catapulting toward the locus. The crone's domain now pulsed with forensic luminescence, its immaculate tiles guarding secrets even moonlight feared to illuminate.
The Serpent's Masquerade
Xu Ling dematerialized from the surveillance team's perception like morning mist beneath solar fury. He lingered until the mall's bronze gates groaned shut, the appointed repository undisturbed, its clandestine cargo intact.
The matriarch's benediction—"Another compassionate spirit"—now reverberated with ominous harmonics.
He coalesced outside Xinxin Menagerie's begrimed shopfront, silhouetted against infrared heat lamps' hellish glow. Within, an emaciated silhouette genuflected before a cage, arachnid digits caressing a cyclopean tabby through oxidized bars.
"Commune with these fractured cherubim," the figure intoned sans rotation, his vocal timbre a contrapuntal symphony. The N95 mask veiled his countenance, yet his waders—encrusted with fluvial sediment—betrayed peregrinations through agrestic swamplands.
The crone extended Xu Ling an ichthyic delicacy. "Salvaged this combatant when his orbicular window dangled by fibrous cords," she rasped, elevating the enclosure with arthritic claws.
The interloper's chuckle dripped with thujone-laced saccharinity. "How providential—to unearth asylum amidst putrefaction."
Xu Ling assumed symmetrical padmāsana on cryogenic tiles. "Tribulation besieges the tender," he observed, noting the stranger's oscillating grip on the piscine comfit. "Yet affliction confers no charter for venality."
The treat sundered with ballistic resonance. Three suspended systolic intervals petrified the atmosphere—the tabby's thoracic thrum underscoring the impasse. Beyond besmirched fenestration, forensic hierophants swarmed undetected, ultraviolet revelation exposing ichnological impressions in sanitized flooring—pedigree matching clay from Liang Xiaoyong's defunct agrochemical atelier.
The stranger levitated abruptly, exorcising humus from his palms. "Sanctuary constitutes phantasmagoria," he exhaled, dissolving into the neon-drenched byway where constabulary klaxons commenced their threnodic chorus. Xu Ling's device convulsed—Liu Zhonghua's confirmation that the cypher's digital spoor terminated in Liang's transmarine coffers. The denouement's proscenium now ascended.
The Inferno of Truth
"Let us settle this beyond these consecrated walls."
Xu Ling pursued the shrouded figure into the neon-drenched alleyway, the matriarch's somnolent valediction trailing behind. "A decade's vigil, and only two benevolent souls have succoured these fractured beings," she lamented, her timbre steeped in elegiac resonance.
The figure arrested mid-stride, shedding his facial shroud. Keloid ridges transformed his countenance into a cartography of torment—dermal terrain reshaped by conflagration's kiss. The crone recoiled, arthritic digits clasping her sternum.
"Your charity preserves this haven," the man croaked, his ravaged features momentarily illuminated by beatific gentility. "But inexorable tides compel our departure."
Beneath strobic streetlamps, their attenuated silhouettes enacted a danse macabre.
"Yu Mengna's locus," Xu Ling demanded, fist constricting the man's lapels.
A chuckle percolated through the fire-ravaged larynx. "Chronological peers, yet civilization shrinks from my aspect as from pestilence." Calloused fingertips navigated facial chasms. "Infants ululate at my approach."
Xu Ling's metacarpals collided with cicatrized flesh, producing osseous percussion. The man splayed across bitumen, sanguineous rictus gleaming.
"The alchemical cypher", he expectorated, "for the nymph's coordinates."
Xu Ling proffered his device—spurious phytochemical formulae luminescing on the display. The man relayed them with cryptographic precision, a synthetic voice intoning, "Alipay: ¥30,000 received."
"Now divulge!" Xu Ling's brogue connected with coastal architecture.
The man daubed vermilion from his mandible, oculars blazing with febrile exultation. "Belated. She adorns Li Guangfei's concubinary lair as we parley."
Xu Ling's consciousness executed a forbidden neural incursion, synaptic snapshots materializing—a thirty-minute-prior vox transmission to Li, GPS sigils branding derelict storage coordinates.
Atmospheric resistance screamed past Xu Ling's auditory meatus as he transmuted into a human comet, urban topography dissolving into impressionist streaks. The warehouse materialized—its decomposing edifice limned by emergency vehicle aureoles. Within those decaying walls, Yu Mengna's destiny oscillated betwixt deliverance and profanation's maw.
A Race Against Destiny's Hourglass
A faintly illuminated warehouse materialized in Xu Ling's vision through the gloom.
He charged forth, boot crashing against the weathered door to reveal an emptiness punctuated only by a timeworn wooden stool and coiled nylon cords.
The ghostly whisper of Yu Mengna's perfume haunted the stagnant air.
Pale lunar rays filtered through fractured panes above, etching Xu Ling's shadowed countenance into sharp relief as he loomed over the abandoned seat.
"Li Guangfei," he hissed, voice dripping venom, "pray your clock ticks slower than my stride."
Emerging into the night, Xu Ling's preternatural eyesight immediately deciphered the fresh grooves carved into the mud—tyre tracks glistening with recent passage. A terse call to Liu Zhonghua later, he became vengeance incarnate, bolting along the trail.
The serpentine imprints slithered from dirt path to asphalt ribbon.
Liu Zhonghua's callback pierced the darkness: "A vehicle traversed that stretch thirteen minutes past, Dr Xu."
"Current coordinates?" Xu Ling demanded, breath controlled yet edged with steel.
"Threaded through the township now—veering toward Shilitun's outskirts. Nearing the surveillance void."
A click severed the connection. Xu Ling streaked toward civilization like a wraith made flesh.
The slumbering town loomed like a dormant beast beneath the moonless vault. Flickering vitality emerged near the commercial quarter—clusters of youths weaving through midnight's tapestry.
"Did anyone else feel that sudden breeze?"
"Your imagination's haunted, mate."
"Gods above! Your locks look storm-tossed—spectral encounter?"
"Ah Mu, cease your cursed jests!"
Their laughter froze as Xu Ling materialized like a nightmare given form.
"Direction to Shilitun."
Screams shredded the night.
"E-eastward!" a quavering voice squeaked. "Straight path!"
Before echoes faded, Xu Ling dematerialized. The group crumpled, a trembling hand already dialling emergency services.
Xu Ling's eastern pursuit unveiled arterial roads flanked by sentinel streetlamps. After serpentine twists, his quarry emerged—a fortified dwelling mimicking Qu Xiao's estate in miniature, its austerity belying menace.
*Wuff. Wuff. GRRRNT—*
Canine alerts ricocheted off stone walls. Xu Ling's eyes snapped upward—a lone illuminated pane glowed like a beacon on the eastern second floor.
The estate's maw groaned open, disgorging three baton-wielding sentinels whose musculature strained against uniform fabric.
"Wangcai's hackles are raised—empty air?"
"Perimeter sweep. Now."
As flashlights carved probing blades through darkness, Xu Ling struck—an obsidian shadow seizing the nearest guard, gloved palm stifling outcry as he dissolved into night's embrace.
Claws of the Midnight Panther
The towering sentinel scarcely perceived the spectre materialising before him until glacial digits constricted his windpipe. Xu Ling coalesced from living shadow, his fingers phantoms as they claimed the blade from its leather sheath.
"Name your master's house."
"You vermin dare?" The brute snarled, meaty thigh jerking upward in graceless assault. "I'll—"
Moonlight rippled along the dagger's edge as it caressed throbbing flesh.
"Numbers." Xu Ling's whisper carried the weight of tombstone carvings.
Defiance melted into primal recognition. "Young Master Li's domain... thirty warriors... masters of the kicking arts..."
The sentinel's form folded soundlessly into oblivion. Xu Ling ascended the ivy-clad wall as smoke ascends from extinguished flame, the Doberman's frenetic howls stitching chaos into the night's fabric.
Amateur theatrics.
A decade of armoured shapes converged. Eight became marionettes with slashed strings before radio static pierced the gloom.
Xu Ling's needles hummed through void-black air.
Schlikt.
The beast's death rattle gurgled through fanged jaws as it slumped, obsidian fur now rubied in the security lights' glare.
Li Guangfei's jowly countenance erupted from an ornate casement. "Incompetent swine! Must I muzzle the hounds myself?" Diamond-crusted digits mashed the panic console.
Klaxons screamed their mechanical dirge. Polished oxfords thundered across travertine as human waves breached the compound's gates.
"Secure the perimeter!" The heir's shriek pierced stained glass, perspiration beading above his Ermenegildo Zegna collar. The billion-yuan inheritance duel with half-brother Li Qiang tolerated no weakness—one stumble, and the family sceptre would slip through his manicured claws.
Assured by the armoured swarm, he turned to his captive muse.
Yu Mengna arched against Egyptian cotton restraints, wrists weeping garnet droplets. Grime became gilded filigree across her cheekbones, midnight tresses cascading around eyes that blazed with captured lightning.
"Does your peasant saviour still haunt your dreams?" Li Guangfei's tongue darted over veneered teeth as silk bonds unravelled. "Sixty living walls stand between you and dawn."
Baccarat crystal trembled in his grip as he traced her collarbone. "Compliance, sweetling. We'll... ah... *bathe* in mutual understanding."
Phoenix Amid Carrion
Li Guangfei's jewel-encrusted digits hovered above Yu Mengna's jawline, trembling with the rapturous tremor of an addict before sacramental poppy.
Ptchk.
The crystalline droplet of disdain found purchase upon his monolid. Yu Mengna's fractured dignity momentarily coalesced into a Medusan smirk as the plutocrat reeled, manicured nails clawing at bespoke contact lenses.
"Defile me," she whispered through vermilion-stained teeth, "and your ancestral shrine shall burn with offerings of your marrow."
The heir scrubbed saliva from his Tom Ford eyewear, jowls undulating like storm-tossed suet. "Vermin-birthed slattern!" His Audemars Piguet-encircled wrist lunged for her collar—met by an ascending kneecap honed through a thousand ballet pliés.
Li Guangfei's wheeze echoed through soundproofed walls as he crumpled onto hand-knotted Qom silks. "Cocksucking cunt!" he mewled, chins rippling. "Submit, or I'll have my wolves fillet your pearl!"
Ivory transmuted to funerary alabaster across Yu Mengna's features.
"Ah, the bloom of terror suits your complexion." The oligarch's spawn oozed forward, perspiration blooming across his Kiton cashmere. "Warble sweet nothings, and I'll sheath your throat in Golconda diamonds when the corporate scepter—"
His soliloquy drowned in the sudden rubiate rivulet cascading down her chin.
"CHRIST'S BLOODY STIGMATA!" The magnate's heir crab-walked backward, Breguet timepiece screeching across onyx tiles. "Not on my Pratesi linens! You've gnawed through your tongue, mad sow?!"
Survival instincts doused carnal flames. The boardroom piranhas would strip his inheritance to the bone should this ministerial scion perish in his boudoir. "Truce! I recant! Merely breathe and—"
Splinters rained.
The teak portal detonated inward, catapulting Li Guangfei through a Boschian tapestry of shredded Fortuny drapery and pulverized Jiajing porcelain. Through concussion-hazed vision, he witnessed Erebus incarnate.
Xu Ling stood wreathed in emergency strobes, his Canali blazer in tatters to reveal corded musculature worthy of Bernini's chisel. Dried gore crackled across his metacarpals—none self-spilled, as evidenced by the mountainous tangle of unconscious Praetorians beyond the threshold. Sixty disciples of violence. Sixty. Now discarded like broken marionettes in a puppeteer's midden.
Yu Mengna's whimper fractured the stasis. Xu Ling's obsidian gaze snapped to her engorged lips, the arterial Rorschach blot defiling Frette's finest. A primaeval howl vibrated Swarovski pendants into discordant symphony as he advanced—not strode, but *manifested*—across the chamber, vengeance distilled to humanoid form.
Eclipse of the Guilty Dawn
Xu Ling's breath snagged at the mortuary stillness clinging to Yu Mengna's form.
"Nǎi-Nǎi," he whispered, the nursery-room diminutive fracturing through gritted molars. The titaness who'd once frozen corporate empires with arctic glances now lay sculpted in funerary alabaster, garnet rivulets mapping forbidden constellations across her throat.
"Unclench."
Auroral force vaporized hemp fibres at subatomic levels. Her limbs retained sepulchral rigidity, deaf to his hammering pulse as he gathered her against his stormfront heartbeat. Gilded qi filaments permeated pressure points, quelling neural tempests. Moonmetal needles pierced Shenmen portals, their spiral dance invoking Lethe's counterfeit.
Gradually, thanatotic frost yielded to fevered pliancy.
Xu Ling parted coral lips with reverent fingertips—and witnessed desecration.
Her tongue lay maimed, a half-devoured sacrament to rebellion.
Mercurial sands slip faster.
He cauterized the sanguine deluge through meridian-sealing techniques, yet proper healing demanded sanctuary. Depleting spiritual reservoirs in this viper's nest would shackle them both. The leaden taste of helplessness coated his tongue as he pivoted toward the mewling atrocity by the wainscoting.
Li Guangfei scuttled through bile and shattered dignity, fracturing ribs while performing discordant xylophone sonatas. "Mercy's tithe! The corporate throne! Name your—"
Xu Ling's advance shook suspended crystal prisms. "You plundered my dawns. Shattered my progenitor's atlas. Hell's bellows shall anneal your dross before death's absolution."
The tycoon's scion voided his bowels as corposant flared around Xu Ling's talon-like hand.
Snap. Pop. Splinter.
Palm strikes composed a butcher's cantata—zygomatic arches powdering, enamel shrapnel embedding damask walls, and the moist percussion of qi-fuelled retribution. Li Guangfei's howls decayed to death-rattle wheezes, his visage now abstract expressionism in raw meat and shattered pride.
Tires wailed their vesper hymn beyond ballistic glass.
Xu Ling stilled, tympanic membranes mapping eight synchronised pulses advancing through cordite-scented air. He pressed a phosphorescent digit to Li's solar plexus, planting a chronometric poison in the vagus nerve's root.
"This chrononaut germinates with your decadence," he vowed, lifting Yu Mengna's ragdoll form.
The panoramic window dissolved into crystalline snowfall beneath their gravity-defying descent as tactical boots breached the sanctum. Li Guangfei's closing vision framed Xu Ling mid-plunge—an Icarus inverted, a wrathful constellation cradling stolen starlight, vanishing into the metropolis' hungry shadows.
Veil of Emerald Refuge
"Stabilize the heir! Mobilize aeromedics!" The tactical commander snarled, Kevlar-gloved hand gesturing toward the fractured aperture. "Delta through Foxtrot units—converge and eradicate!"
Six obsidian behemoths dispersed across the slumbering hinterland's vascular roadways. Xu Ling bore Yu Mengna's unconscious form across trembling arms, sprinting until bitumen dissolved into fecund earth's embrace.
Crimson warmth seeped through cotton fibres in rhythmic tides.
"Absolution comes later," he breathed, sacrificing his jacket to consecrate frozen topsoil. Luminous qi cascaded from his palms in gilded rivulets, reweaving ravaged oral tapestry. His inner radiance waned—each reconstructed capillary draining reservoirs to vaporous whispers.
When her lingua finally regained coral vitality, Xu Ling crumpled beside her, perspiration argent in clavicular basins. Lunar luminescence bathed their synchronized respirations until combustion engines ruptured the nocturne.
Phosphorescent spears lanced the agrarian horizon.
"Carrion feeders," he growled, hauling Yu Mengna's leaden form through maize sentinels. Serrated foliage scored his cheeks as they navigated the chlorophyllous maze.
"Podiatric traces at eleven o'clock! Contain and penetrate!"
Predatory footfalls amplified. Xu Ling's cellular device trilled—an absurdist deus ex machina.
"Xiǎo Líng," Qu Xiao's contralto vibrated through the receiver, "has our nocturnal symbiosis slipped your—"
"Besieged," he interrupted, vowels fraying. "Providence permitting—"
Slide-rack clicks echoed through dew-laden stalks.
Adrenal pyrotechnics ignited his marrow. Xu Ling surged forward, emerald blades whirring past like shuriken storm, Yu Mengna's tresses billowing spectral banners in their wake.
Three hundred paces. Two hundred. An onyx Bimmer manifested at the crossroads, hazard lights strobing semaphore salvation.
"Líng-gē! Sanctuary here!"
Lin Yutong's clarion cry shattered dissonance. Xu Ling cascaded into Nappa leather embrace, Yu Mengna's cranium cradled in his lap like fractured porcelain.
Ambient illumination revealed Qu Xiao enthroned opposite, malachite irises sharper than Toledo steel.
"Whose hubris", she articulated, vermillion nail percussioning ballistic glass, "dares eclipse my constellation?"
Her customary icebreaker elegance lay discarded—raven locks cascading over a Brioni trench coat, cosmetics stripped to reveal the predator beneath society's carapace. The Beretta Pico in her grasp gleamed colder than Arctic diamond.
"Speak names." She thumbed the safety. "I'll cultivate chrysanthemums from their marrow."
Valkyrie's Gambit
An anomalous warmth stirred in Xu Ling's thorax as he observed Qu Xiao's alabaster pallor—this enigma straddling kinship and forbidden allure.
"Unforeseen... operational variables," he prevaricated, fingertips grazing Yu Mengna's marble brow. "Tonight's therapeutic regimen, regrettably—"
"My compound." Qu Xiao's edict sliced through objections, lids shuttering blood-mapped sclera. "Security supersedes protocol."
Lin Yutong's lacquered nails blanched against the Nardi wheel. "Xiao-jie, the biometric safeguards—"
Atmospheric pressure cratered. Qu Xiao's Permafrost Empress persona reemerged—that glacial sovereign Xu Ling had first witnessed presiding over boardroom gladiatorial combat. Under dashboard halogens, the shadows beneath her eyes resembled twilight bruise-clouds.
"Meridian replenishment requires his core reserves," Xu Ling stammered, jugular constricting. "Presently... exhausted."
Qu Xiao's pupils dilated minutely. "Celestial mechanics brook no delays."
The sedan suddenly pirouetted. Xu Ling's vertebrae met cold-forged steel as Qu Xiao's lithe frame compressed against him—four seconds of Einsteinian spacetime distortion before inertial dampeners prevailed.
"Encirclement pattern Alpha!" Lin Yutong trilled, adrenal euphoria staining her contralto.
"Disengage."
The Bavarian machine transmuted under Qu Xiao's dominion. Michelins wailed operatic arias as they breached velocity thresholds, maize sentinels dissolving into jade strobe effects. Xu Ling's cervical vertebrae protested as three wraithlike pursuers maintained formation despite terminal velocity.
Selenic rays unveiled the killbox ahead—a constellation of anti-vehicular caltrops glittering like Andromeda's core.
"Flanking stratagem!" Xu Ling roared. "Spike strip!"
Lin Yutong hammered the Brembos, carbon-ceramic discs screaming vespers. "Nibelungen treachery! Scorched-earth gambit?"
The pursuing triumvirate tightened formation, turbochargers howling. Qu Xiao uncoiled like a provoked ouroboros, her Eileen Fisher separates whispering as she navigated cabin topography with felid precision. Lin Yutong's seat-swap choreography flowed like water—a rehearsed pas de deux.
"Anchors aweigh."
The sedan became a tungsten projectile. Xu Ling's ossicles vibrated as Qu Xiao initiated a Tokyo-drift manoeuvre that mocked Newtonian dogma, centripetal violence liquefying his splanchnic organs. The staccato percussion of 9mm Parabellum rounds kissing armoured glass composed a lethal jazz improvisation.
Through vestibular disarray, Xu Ling caught Qu Xiao's reflection—lips skinned back in belladonna ecstasy, a Boudicca reborn in LCD backlight. The Caltrop Galaxy yawned before them, its metallic constellations winking like a basilisk's ocular array.
*Turbulence builds character!* Lin Yutong's psychic cackle resonated through the pandemonium as they breached the event horizon toward glittering annihilation.
Cinders of the Crimson Phoenix
Three ballistic cracks sundered the nocturnal peace. Xu Ling hunched as the rear windscreen disintegrated into crystalline hail.
"Prone positions! Anchor!" Qu Xiao's directive cleaved through bedlam as the luxury sedan pirouetted across asphalt, Yokohama tires screeching a banshee's aria. When gravitational tyranny ceased, their spectral pursuers had evaporated into obsidian void.
"Mechanical cadaver". Qu Xiao emerged from the steam-wreathed wreckage, her Loro Piana slacks defying entropy's touch.
Lin Yutong materialized grinning like a Cheshire spectre, while Xu Ling navigated twisted metal with Yu Mengna's form shielded against his thorax. Lunar radiance unveiled endless agrarian expanses—a monochromatic labyrinth stretching to infinity.
"Strategic recourse?" Xu Ling interrogated the women. His replenishing qi could sustain combat, but rural theatre favoured wolfpack tactics over singular prowess.
Lin Yutong breached the trunk's maw. "Ever danced with plasma-propulsion rollerblades?" She brandished onyx speedsters humming with contained fusion. "The chateau's proximal. I'll retrieve the Emira."
Before objections could crystallize, she transformed into a streaking meteor along gravel capillaries.
"Kinetic augmentation prototypes," Qu Xiao elucidated, noting his astonishment. "My sibling's Icarus complex made manifest. Only Yutong's daredevilry equals their velocity."
The boreal gust gnawed at exposed flesh. When Xu Ling proffered his gore-crusted windbreaker, Qu Xiao recoiled as though offered a plague-ridden shroud.
Phosphorescent eyes ignited on twin horizons.
"Triangulation complete." Xu Ling's musculature coiled.
Qu Xiao consulted her Piaget Altiplano. "Three minutes tardier than algorithmic projections."
A cerise Lotus Emira materialized in a concerto of ion-drive whine and scorched Michelins. "Embark!" Lin Yutong carolled, executing a drift that caressed the BMW's cadaver with surgical precision.
As they dissolved into Stygian byways, their adversaries arrived.
"Evanesced!" The tactical leader booted the abandoned chassis. "Dongfeng! Dissect that Lotus' lineage!"
His ectomorphic cyberneticist blanched. "Commander... ownership veils itself behind tripartite governmental cyphers." A millisecond later, he rasped, "We've roused the Vermilion Sovereign."
The commander's Cuban cigar glowered like a cyclopean orb. "Better to court the firebird's wrath than grovel before the Patriarch's displeasure."
Within the Lotus's techno-cocoon, Xu Ling observed Qu Xiao interfacing with an NSA-tier geospatial intelligence system. The monitor flared crimson—72 rogue tracking signatures purged mid-transit.
"Conserve strength," she ordained, though her own phalanges bleached around the custom Walther. "The true crucible awaits first light."
To be continuous…