I had imagined our reunion countless times.

  Maybe she would finally come to her senses, realizing my strength was enough to stand against the catastrophe she carried, and—starving, struggling to survive in modern society—she would come to me for help. Or perhaps I would follow the clues I’d gathered, tracking her down as she wandered through the night outside. Or something even more dramatic: I’d arrive just as she fell into mortal danger, descending like a divine savior to pull her from the flames.

  And of course, running into her in the middle of investigating the same monster was one of the scenarios I’d considered.

  But imagination is one thing. The moment her figure actually entered my field of vision, my heart felt like it had been struck square by a bullet—sharp, sudden, overwhelming. My mind blanked out for a heartbeat under the sheer shock of joy.

  Alice had appeared!

  The instant she did, she took the monster’s head clean off.

  Yet the fight didn’t end there.

  The moment the head fell, the monster’s entire body abruptly disintegrated, collapsing into a pool of pitch-black liquid like spilled ink that poured across the ground.

  That wasn’t his real body—it was a clone shaped from shadow.

  The black liquid hit the pavement and instantly became shadow. And the second Alice’s feet touched down—absorbing the impact of her landing—a massive silhouette burst out of that darkness like a fish leaping from water.

  It was the same monster again.

  Taking advantage of the brief stiffness in Alice’s landing posture—when she couldn’t immediately follow up—the monster transformed both arms into long, mantis-like blades. They snapped together like closing scissors in a blinding cross-slash aimed straight for her throat.

  The description makes it sound slow, but all of this happened in less than a second—too fast even for my enhanced dynamic vision to catch every detail. There were probably more exchanges in that fleeting instant than I could perceive or describe.

  Compared to me, Zhu Shi must have grasped the changes far more clearly and reacted accordingly. Before I could even shake off the thunderbolt realization of “Alice is here,” she had already vanished from my side like an arrow loosed from a bow, clearly intending to draw her blade and join the fight.

  But Alice didn’t seem to need anyone’s help.

  The momentary rigidity of landing didn’t hinder her evasion at all. Whether through sheer speed or some form of spatial shift, her figure disappeared from in front of the monster and reappeared in midair—exactly where she had first launched her decapitating strike—now directly behind him. In the same motion, she swung the recurve blade again, aiming another lethal cut at the back of his neck.

  It was unbelievable. The Alice I once knew—so frail—had erupted with movements faster and more powerful than the monster’s own.

  Perhaps the monster sensed her behind him; perhaps he didn’t. Either way, at that critical instant he didn’t freeze. He at least managed to shield his vitals and roll forward, dodging just in time.

  “On time” here only meant he saved his life from the blade. Injury was unavoidable.

  A flash of steel—Alice severed his left wrist.

  He let out an involuntary howl of agony and tumbled forward several rolls.

  Yet she didn’t immediately pursue. Instead, she instantly shifted into a defensive stance toward the suddenly arriving Zhu Shi and shouted warily, “Who are you?!”

  “I—” Zhu Shi began, clearly about to explain.

  But the wounded monster had no patience for their exchange. Seeing Alice pause her pursuit, he scrambled up from the ground—battered but swift—and bolted toward the distance.

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  His initial “flight” when he first appeared had probably been a feint, meant to lure Alice into overcommitting so he could counterattack. Now, though, he genuinely seemed desperate to escape.

  Unfortunately for him, while he’d noticed Alice and Zhu Shi in plain sight, he hadn’t spotted me lurking in the shadows.

  I desperately wanted to speak to Alice first, but I wasn’t generous enough to let a fleeing monster simply get away. My gaze locked onto his body—and in an instant, I set him ablaze.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have vaporized everything below his head in one go, while Zhu Shi severed his connection to the Heart Seed before he died, allowing us to take the head back to Lu Youxun for interrogation. But the situation had erupted too suddenly for us to coordinate properly. All I could do was slow my destruction just enough for her to keep up.

  The monster screamed in soul-rending agony as the flames consumed him.

  Barring surprises, he was the last monster in Saltwater City—and the main culprit behind the recent string of murders. I knew full well that the human flesh now burning beneath those flames had once belonged to a person. Yet no trace of pity for a wounded fellow human stirred in me. He was almost certainly the one who had sent shadow clones to attack Chang’an. I didn’t care why he’d targeted those local dignitaries—but I needed to rip the reason for attacking Chang’an straight out of his mind.

  He tried to keep running even as the fire devoured him. I closed my hand in a grasping motion. The roaring flames around him suddenly flared outward, blooming into the shape of a colossal palm. Just like last night when I’d seized an enemy with an elemental arm, this blazing hand grew directly from his body—clamping around him entirely and slamming him to the ground.

  Zhu Shi had already moved in to support.

  Her eyes had turned the cold, clear blue of glacial lakes; her expression was icy and detached. She had clearly already located the invisible tether between the monster and his Heart Seed and was poised to sever it at any moment.

  Seeing that, I held nothing back. To prevent him from pulling some unknown ability—or trapping us in another bizarre pocket space like the last monster—I simply evaporated everything below his head.

  And in that exact instant, I felt something bizarre.

  Something was slipping away from the palm of my hand—or more precisely, from the enormous flame hand I had conjured. The sensation came completely out of nowhere; I hadn’t had time to prepare at all. It felt like I’d coincidentally brushed against a passing fly while stretching my arms overhead. I tried to snap my fingers shut and catch it, but I was caught off guard.

  In the end, the “fly” slipped through the gaps between my fingers and vanished without a trace.

  Zhu Shi seemed to have sensed something intangible shift as well. Her eyes widened in shock as she exclaimed, “—What?”

  From a purely visual standpoint, nothing appeared to have escaped the giant flame palm. The monster’s body below the neck had been completely vaporized by the fire, and the head simply rolled out through the space between thumb and forefinger.

  But the tactile feedback was wrong. That wasn’t the sensation of incinerating living flesh—it felt more like I’d destroyed an ordinary shadow clone.

  Sure enough, the moment the head stopped rolling, it melted into ink-like liquid, spreading across the ground before dissolving into shadow and fading away entirely.

  “That was a clone?” Alice froze for a second, then immediately turned her gaze toward the severed hand lying not far away.

  The left hand she had just cut off still retained its mantis-blade shape. If the “monster” had been a shadow clone, then that hand should have been a shadow construct too.

  Yet the hand remained vividly real on the ground. More than real—severed from its host, the power within it had gone berserk and was swelling the flesh grotesquely, as though it would explode any second.

  But it never got the chance. Alice stepped forward and stomped down hard on the wrist. For reasons beyond comprehension, the moment her foot connected, the hand immediately wilted. The mantis-blade form collapsed, regressing into an ordinary human hand.

  Alice picked up the bleeding stump, gave it a cursory glance, then warily turned her eyes toward where I was hiding.

  Zhu Shi had already released the “Bu Zhou Mountain” state. Her eyes returned to normal, and the icy detachment melted from her expression. Seeing Alice so guarded, she seemed to be thinking of how best to introduce herself without triggering more hostility.

  I stepped out from the shadows and revealed myself directly in front of Alice, carefully studying her current condition.

  She was still wearing the black printed hoodie, short skirt, cotton tights, and black ankle Martin boots I had once given her. Though she must have worn them for days, they looked almost brand new—whether she’d washed them or not, I couldn’t tell.

  The black cat-whisker mask hung around her neck, presumably for easier breathing.

  The red GPS bracelet remained on her left wrist. In her right hand she gripped a large recurve blade. Her movements had been too fast earlier for me to get a clear look. Now, examining it closely, I saw that the blade existed in a strange, flickering half-shadow state—shimmering between solid and illusory. No one who saw it would mistake it for an ordinary weapon.

  The moment she recognized me stepping forward, shock flashed across her face. The severed hand slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground.

  “Z—?” she whispered my name in stunned disbelief.

  Zhu Shi had just opened her mouth to introduce herself when she heard Alice speak my name. Her jaw dropped. “Huh?”

  Her gaze darted rapidly back and forth between me and Alice. After several seconds, realization finally dawned. Hesitantly, she asked, “You two… know each other?”