The great sun was like a furnace, melting iron and shimmering gold.
Li Fei opened her eyes. The blazing sunlight was like a knife, stabbing at her pupils with a faint, dull ache. She shook her dizzy head and rose from the grass, only to feel her limbs weak and sore, the qi and blood throughout her body somewhat in disarray.
"The aftereffects of the Displacement Crossing Ritual are this strong...?"
Li Fei's fighting spirit surged, a deep crimson glow suffusing her eyes as she quickly adjusted her body's condition. Her magic instinctively nourished her soul, letting the carsick-like discomfort gradually dissipate.
Beside her, Sasha and Eva had fallen into a faint, while Lilith sat cross-legged alone, entering a state of Meditation.
This was Lilith's good point—she knew how to keep her priorities straight. The necklace Li Fei had given her was nearly worn to a patina, yet she only carried and treasured it, without letting better equipment go unused. After her secret stash of picture books had been exposed—though she'd carried on wanting to die for a few minutes—she could still swiftly rein in her emotions when it came time to set up the Displacement Ritual and prepare to descend upon another world. And now, too, she immediately adjusted her state, entrusting the watch duty to trustworthy teammates.
Naturally, Li Fei didn't speak and disturb her, instead standing on tiptoe to survey the surroundings.
It was a weed-choked meadow, the lush overgrowth reaching a half a person's height. A faint sour stench, like rotting corpses, drifted through the scorching air.
"Cobalorum vocate."
With a flip of her wrist, the short staff Quietsong slid from her sleeve into her palm. Li Fei casually summoned a few fairies and ordered them to scout in all directions.
Unlike her daughters born of Summoning Magic, the fairies conjured by summoning spells had hollow eyes, without the slightest emotion to speak of, yet they still retained nimble mobility and reaction speed—like robots of superhigh intelligence, perfect for use as sentries.
Within seconds, a fairy turned its head toward Li Fei in alarm, and a low, eerie snarl came drifting over.
Li Fei's gaze sharpened as she saw a corpse clumsily, sluggishly crawl up from among the weeds.
It was a rotting corpse, its flesh decayed and pitted, white maggots crawling in and out of its eye sockets, staggering toward her.
With her keen sense of smell, Li Fei could catch a thick, dense corpse-stench even across dozens of meters.
"Enslaved corpses? Or something else?"
Li Fei stayed wary of a death-element mage that might be hidden in the shadows, while raising her hand to blast out a fireball of triple power, utterly melting the rotting corpse away.
Lilith, having quickly recovered, said nothing and pulled from her spatial ring a reconnaissance device with a stand, Dark Gold from top to bottom, shaped like an astronomical telescope.
After scanning around, she shared the intel with Li Fei:
"No Transcendents detected within three thousand meters."
Considering that the reconnaissance device was Full Moon grade, its information highly reliable, Li Fei raised an intrigued eyebrow.
—If there were no death-element mage nearby, then why would a corpse move? Was it the influence of a Transcendent item? Or was this world itself... flawed somehow...
Li Fei didn't jump to conclusions. She ordered the fairy sentries to keep scouting, while gathering Eva and Sasha into her arms and feeding them some water.
Lilith, meanwhile, pulled out a dial-faced instrument, observed the readings on it, and soon obtained the next piece of intel:
"The time flow rate approximates 1:1 with the Continent of Enlos."
Some folded planes had a different time flow rate from the Continent of Enlos, so when exploring an unfamiliar folded plane, determining the time flow rate was a relatively high-priority task.
However, since most Folded Spaces had a 1:1 time flow ratio with the Continent of Enlos, some insufficiently professional exploration squads would harbor a fluke mentality and, to save money, skip buying the relevant tools. The lucky ones were of course fine, but some poor wretches, after spending a few months in a Folded Space, would return to find that ten years had passed on the Continent of Enlos—the wife who had sworn eternal vows to them before parting had recently given birth to a fat, chubby boy and was in her postpartum confinement... This counted as a rather classic Folded Space joke, hehe.
"Next up is the Transcendent Factor concentration..."
While Lilith bustled about, fiddling with the various tools, Sasha and Eva woke up one after another.
Generally speaking, after undergoing the Displacement Crossing Ritual, a Sequence 9 Transcendent would lose consciousness within a few minutes, a Sequence 8 would feel intense discomfort, and a Sequence 7 would also be affected to some degree—only at the mid-Sequences could one nearly ignore this side effect.
"Just like you said, the Transcendent Factor concentration here is 'low' bordering on 'medium,' so high-Sequence natives are unlikely; the gravity's no different from the Continent of Enlos, either; it's just that..."
Lili·the-Errand-Girl·th withdrew the equipment one by one into the spatial ring, wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead, and said, "The Transcendent Factor is extremely active and chaotic."
"Good work."
Li Fei encouraged her with a smiling remark and leaned in to wipe the sweat away for her, but Lilith dodged aside like a skittish cat.
In the hour or so since her little secret feelings had been exposed, Lilith had kept her distance from her stepmother. After all, before she could still play dumb, but now, Lilith felt their bond had already changed in nature.
Li Fei, of course, had no such concerns. From the very first glance she'd laid on Lilith, her intent to "serve her up over rice" had never changed—truly, never forgetting her original aspiration.
"Aiya, plenty of girls have secret crushes on me—like all those classmates back in school. Don't I get along with them just fine? At your age, it's perfectly normal to have someone you admire. I was just like you; just go with your feelings, no need to be so uptight..."
Li Fei withdrew her handkerchief and, with a gentle, pleasant expression, launched into her "ideological work."
"I don't want to be like you at all."
Lilith flicked her twin ponytails and vowed resolutely, "I will absolutely, absolutely, absolutely... never do that kind of... contemptible thing!"
"? They're your own feelings—why care what other people think?"
Li Fei tilted her head, putting on a pitifully endearing, innocent expression.
Faced with such twisted logic, Lilith was stunned for a moment before answering:
"I can not care about others, but I will never do anything to make Mother sad."
"You like me, and Teacher Annie also likes me—so wouldn't that make the two of you even closer?"
Li Fei continued to tempt her, "Besides, when a daughter seeks her own happiness, a mother ought to feel glad and support her."
In front of the girl who secretly loved her, a person would always grow tongue-tied—all the more so since Li Fei was a professional PR expert of considerable verbal skill, highly adept at trading on affection to act willful and unreasonable.
After a few rounds of back-and-forth verbal sparring, Lilith soon lost the battle and simply clapped both hands over her ears, turning a deaf ear no matter how sweetly Miss Stepmother spoke.
Yet Li Fei's words were, in the end, imprinted on her heart—to anyone of normal intelligence, it was perfectly clear that Li Fei's words were all twisted logic, but that didn't matter, because people are willing to believe what they want to hear.
Just as fans firmly believe their idol—whose acted works average less than a 5 on Douban—has superb acting chops; just as many are convinced the common folk of developed regions live daily in dire misery; just as some think the courtesans of the feudal era didn't have to serve men with their bodies—Lilith, likewise, happened to crave a reason that could deceive and persuade herself, an earplug that could block her own hearing as she stole the bell.
Miss Stepmother's warmth was like a poison giving off a sweet fragrance, causing that forbidden seed in her heart to sprout uncontrollably faster, until it grew into a sweet fruit from which one could scarcely extricate oneself.
After a period of silence, the sentry fairies relayed important intel.
To the southeast, there was a county town.
"The clothing and architectural style are somewhat like the Eastern Continent."
Li Fei and Lilith rode on their Flying Brooms, hovering at low altitude, looking down on the county town not far off, hemmed in by its walls.
From above, the town's spatial layout was utterly chaotic, without any sense of order—there were quaint, luxurious mansions with wide, tidy roads before their gates; but most were dilapidated wooden houses, thatched huts, and even shantytowns, all winding and tangled in complete disarray.
And yet, for such a backward town, the city walls looked sturdy and thick, showing that the local government placed great importance on its defenses—willing to skim off a little less silver rather than slack off in this regard. Considering the demons and monsters they'd run into all along the way here, Li Fei found the government's original intent easy enough to understand.
"Demons and monsters running rampant—it seems the state of the world in this Folded Space isn't peaceful at all..."
Li Fei curled the corner of her lips, many intriguing ideas surfacing in her mind.
"Shall we go in and take a look?"
Lilith suggested, quickly flipping through the Folded Space Exploration Guide at the same time.
"Well, we're already here."
Without hesitation, Li Fei landed on a small hillside about two li from the city gate.
Lilith set up the reconnaissance tool again and, after a moment, spoke:
"At the city gate, only one of the guards is at the Sequence 9 level; the rest are all ordinary mortals..."
She paused, then suddenly furrowed her brow, her tone sounding a bit angry:
"And their conduct is absolutely terrible."
Lilith saw the slovenly guards laughing and jeering as they toyed with the townsfolk entering the city—who wore ingratiating smiles—even insultingly slapping them lightly left and right across the face.
—So much emphasis on city defense, yet the guards are this poor in caliber; it seems this town's martial strength is quite weak, so there's unlikely to be anything in it that could threaten us.
Li Fei quickly drew her conclusion, patted Lilith's shoulder, and said gently:
"Stay calm. You can't hold the natives to Loxibrook's standards."
"Mn."
Lilith stowed the tossed-over broom, the exploration guide, and the rest into the spatial ring, then looked around for a place to change clothes. "If we're going to gather intel, it'd be best to change into clothing similar to the natives' style..."
"Mm-hm."
Li Fei glanced around casually, took Lilith's hand, led her behind a large tree, and then began to loosen and remove her clothes.
Having weathered so many storms with other people's fairies, Li Fei had long since stopped being the little girl who'd get all bashful just changing clothes in the school bathhouse.
"You! You-you-you!"
Lilith clapped her hands over her face at once, turned away, her tongue tying itself in knots.
"Relax, there's no one nearby, and Eva and Sasha are keeping watch."
Li Fei teased, "This is a Folded Space—there's no changing room of ours here."
Lilith fell silent.
She understood the reasoning perfectly, but Miss Stepmother's figure was truly... truly the kind that... generous and well-endowed, with long legs like a pair of soul-hooking scissors, the sort that could very easily lead a girl to make mistakes.
In a self-deceiving, ears-plugged-while-stealing-the-bell manner, she turned her back, and amid the gradual rustling revealed a slender, fair waist and exquisite, lovely shoulder blades.
Li Fei abruptly poked that mutton-fat-jade back, soft and smooth. And that slight motion of her fingertip made Lilith spring up, her neck flushing red—like Grace, who'd squirm restlessly whenever her jio (feet) were touched.
Weakness—get.
"What are you doing!"
she said, flustered and cross.
"Clothes."
Li Fei's tone was innocent.
Without turning her head, Lilith handed her a white pleated liuxian dress over her shoulder, while changing into a tender-green long dress herself. When she turned back and saw her stepmother in the white dress, smiling with her brows and eyes, that gorgeous, radiant face made her breath catch.
She hadn't expected that Li Fei would suit this Eastern-style clothing so well—not with the elegant bearing and lofty antique air of Qin Zhihua, but appearing ethereal and otherworldly, lending her a few extra touches of that gentle, graceful classical beauty of Eastern women, like a fairy descended to the mortal world, her eyes sparkling as they glanced about.
Why... did it have to be her, of all people.
Lilith stared blankly, distracted, an inexplicable gloom settling in her heart.
"Lilith looks very pretty."
Li Fei praised her sincerely.
The blonde, blue-eyed girl had let down her ponytails and changed into a green gauze dress, giving off a different kind of beauty—bright and adorably charming.
Lilith bit her lower lip and handed her a pair of white earrings:
"Here."
The two had prepared very thoroughly for this exploration trip; they had gathered all the essential supplies listed in the Folded Space Exploration Guide handed out for free by City Hall—of course, City Hall's careful compilation of the guide wasn't solely to serve the public; it also listed recommended shops and addresses, and the advertising fees alone were a massive win.
[Erudition Earring]
Equipment Grade: New Moon
Attribute: Hearing +50%
Enchantment Effect: Universal Language
Li Fei took the equipment but did not remove the [Silence Earring]; she merely frowned, then pierced her left earlobe, so that one black and one white ornament hung on either side.
—W-why is this a little bit cool...
Lilith's heart slammed hard against her barren chest once more; she hurriedly looked away, then followed suit, gritting her teeth as she pierced her right earlobe, enduring the pain and flashing out a healing spell to make the tiny wound close instantly.
"Cobalorum vocate."
Li Fei took out a handkerchief and dabbed a bit of saliva onto it, the stringy, coquettish motion making Miss Stepdaughter freeze up again.
Before she could react, her young, beautiful stepmother gently used the warm, moist part of the handkerchief to wipe away the trace of blood by Lilith's ear, then—as though not noticing her flushed-red cheeks—summoned a few fairies and turned her head to instruct:
"Eva, Sasha, you two hide here and wait for me... these fairies will be in charge of protecting you."
She then handed over two talisman papers and a single-use defensive tool, instructing:
"If there's danger, tear up the talisman paper, and don't spare the tool either—I'll be able to sense it and come right over."
...
"If you ask me, the number one beauty of our Song Dynasty has to be Her Majesty the Empress."
In the open-air herbal tea stall by the city gate, a burly man with his sweat-soaked lapels flung open and a face full of stubbly whiskers waved a cattail-leaf fan and, lowering his voice, boasted of his exploits to his friend:
"In years past I escorted caravans, traveling north and south, and saw plenty of beauties—I fancied I'd feasted my eyes on all the sights of the realm and had a bit of discernment. But the year before last I made a trip to Lin'an and happened to catch the Empress out on procession... Only then did I realize that the so-called Four Beauties of Nan Commandery and the Twin Belles of Biancheng were all second-rate goods! Let me tell you, that carriage the Empress rode in—the phoenix carved on it was lifelike! The steeds pulling it were taller than a man, and the Imperial Guards cleared the way up front. That pomp, that splendor—don't even get me started."
"As for the Empress herself, she truly left me dumbstruck... beautiful, too beautiful—that figure, that face, and that bearing, tsk tsk tsk... You know the Drunken Spring Tower? Even in the imperial capital of Lin'an, it's a first-rate establishment! Your big brother here has drunk there a few times and heard the top girls sing their tunes—every girl in there is a bubbling beauty... but compared to the peerless Empress, they fall far short."
"When your old brother laid eyes on the Empress, he just stood right up at attention..."
At first he'd kept his voice low, but by the end he'd let it out unrestrained, brazenly commenting on how slender the Empress's waist was, how her bosom rallied men's hearts, how her red lips stirred the imagination...
A man who looked like a constable was right beside them, picking at his feet and drinking herbal tea. Hearing someone at the next table so brazenly slander, in broad daylight, the Empress who was mother to the realm, he not only failed to grow angry and make an arrest, but instead leaned over with great interest to listen along, and at the end didn't forget to slap the table in agreement:
"Damn it all, if I were the Emperor, I'd sure as hell have the Empress..."
This constable in official uniform spouted words too vile to repeat, drawing a roar of laughter from the crowd, the teahouse filling with a merry air.
From just this one corner, one could glimpse how rotten this leaking ship of the Song court had already become.
"As I see it, never mind our Great Song—even counting the likes of the states of Qi and Chu... the Empress must be the number one beauty under heaven! In this world, there can't possibly be a woman more beautiful than the Empress."
The burly man was still going on about the Empress, spittle flying, delivering his verdict in a tone of unshakable certainty, and at the end didn't forget a lewd grin: "If the Empress ever set foot in that Drunken Spring Tower one day, then even if I had to sell off my worthless nag of a wife and my two money-losing brats to a slaver, I'd scrape together enough silver to play the Emperor just once..."
But this time, no one answered him.
Could it be my jokes have gotten boring?
The burly man furrowed his brow in confusion and grumbled, "In broad daylight—have you seen a ghost or something? What are you spacing out for..."
"That Empress you were talking about..."
The constable pointed a hand toward the street: "Is she more beautiful... than her?"
"Impossible..."
The burly man scoffed and turned his head—whereupon a sight of breezy, moonlit grace that robbed heaven and earth of all their craftsmanship met his eyes.
As though his very soul had been hooked away, he stared fixedly at Li Fei—her white dress whiter than snow, her elegance beyond compare—and murmured to himself:
"Sell the son too, that works—sell the son too, that works..."
Under the focus of countless scorching gazes, Li Fei walked down the street with composed grace, grabbing hold of Lilith—who was about to use her staff to smash the dog-head of the scumbag in the tea stall—and said softly:
"Relax, take a deep breath."
"What kind of hellish place is this... there are way too many bad people."
Lilith suppressed her displeasure, muttering under her breath.
At the county gate, the townsfolk coming and going were shaken down for silver one by one by the ruffian-like garrison soldiers, and passably good-looking women were groped and molested besides. Back then Lilith had wanted to uphold justice, only to be stopped by Li Fei—fortunately, the soldiers had some sense: one look at the clothing and bearing of the two, and they immediately turned respectful, not daring to act out.
Clearly, these soldiers knew the score and understood how to serve the dish according to the diner. With ordinary commoners, they'd extort, take bribes, and even kick them around for fun, and the commoners would only dare to grin and beg for mercy; but running into a bigwig, it was they who had to grin and grovel in turn. As for a nation-toppling, people-ruining beauty like Li Fei, for nameless small fry like them to provoke her would be no different from feeding their whole family, young and old, to the rotting corpses.
Because those without an eye for reading people had long since been divvied up and devoured by those ghosts and monsters.
Now that they'd entered the city, with Lilith's Sequence 7 hearing plus the [Universal Language] enchantment of the [Erudition Earring], she could naturally hear clearly just how unbridled the mouths of the people in the roadside tea stall were—which made Lilith, who had grown up in [strict and orderly] Loxibrook and had never witnessed [flexible law enforcement], feel furious and disgusted.
Even the most improper Miss Stepmother she'd ever known was usually very polite, the sort who made people feel like they were basking in a spring breeze! Only while studying foreign languages would she describe herself as certain female animals, demand more force, and arrogantly declare "supermarket me"... But Lilith, who—though she'd never eaten pork—had watched, even created, picture books, felt that vulgarity in certain contexts didn't count as being truly ill-mannered!
"Calm down."
Having survived the fandom circles, a certain Miss Li had seen plenty of big storms long before crossing over, her state of mind not the least bit ruffled: "The pressing matter is to gather intel and learn about this world."
After a deep breath, Lilith settled her emotions: "According to the guide, we should find someplace like a tavern, tip the staff some money, and inquire for news..."
"There's no need to go to all that trouble."
Li Fei gave a free and easy smile: "The guide is, after all, only for reference—you can't rely on it too much; you have to learn to adapt... I have a better method."
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