"So what you're telling me is... you can't find your auntie?" You Ling crouched by the roadside, the corner of her mouth curling upward. "Come on, don't cry. I'm not a bad person. Have you ever seen a villain this good-looking and charming?"
She hummed thoughtfully, resting her chin on one hand and squinting, then nodded. She raised both hands to the sides of her head and lunged forward with a "rawr," putting on her most menacing face. "That's right, I'm the boogeyman! I eat little kids, you know, so you'd better run~"
The four- or five-year-old girl sitting on a stone bollard by the road froze for a second, then cried even louder. "Auntieeee, wahhhh—"
This was outside the night market, near the parking lot entrance. The child had wandered around aimlessly after getting lost and somehow ended up here.
She clutched an ice cream cone with dust smeared along one side. Her knee was dotted with small, oozing scrapes — it looked like she had taken a tumble somewhere on the road. The pain must have been considerable, because she hadn't stopped sniffling and sobbing.
You Ling had seen the child's aunt before, so she figured she'd just wait here for a while.
There were twenty minutes left until the barrier came down. After that, the phone watch on the child's wrist would regain signal, and she could contact her aunt.
You Shuo, oh, You Shuo. She thought aimlessly.
One blink from her brother and she could tell he was spiraling into guilt again, but there was nothing she could do about it. If she didn't seize this opportunity, who knew how long she'd have to wait for another one. Given the same chance again, she'd make the same choice. Right now, the most important thing was staying alive. She needed heat, needed chances to build her persona.
She had to survive before she could worry about anything else. So she would not regret it.
You Ling had always known she was far more ruthless than her brother. Those people could bully him with talk of righteousness and morality, but they shouldn't dream of using that nonsense to restrain her.
She was going to kill. She absolutely had to kill. Why should the criminal who murdered her get to walk free? She would deal with 【Jiao Tu】, but 【Quick Blade】 had to die.
What was the point of preaching morality to a dead person? She'd think about that once she was alive again.
When the threads had begun controlling 【Quick Blade】, You Ling could see everything he could see.
Where he went, what he did — even the operations he'd requested from 【Red Moon】. She had seen it all.
She had naturally also seen Fang Yuan in front of the night market food stalls, searching for the lost child.
'This feeling... it's as if I became him. As if he belonged to me.' You Ling thought.
She truly hadn't expected the barrier to fail at blocking her threads, but upon reflection, it made sense. The moment the threads had sunk into 【Quick Blade】's skin, the ability had already activated. By that point, 【Quick Blade】 had already become her puppet.
In other words, although her true body was outside the barrier, her proxy was inside it — and naturally wasn't subject to the barrier's screening restrictions.
You Ling closed her eyes, recalling the sensations from controlling the puppet.
She felt she could command the puppet to do anything. As long as she willed it, the other party had no choice but to comply.
From that angle, it was a terrifying ability. But according to the balancing laws governing abilities, the more devastating the power, the harder its activation conditions would be to fulfill.
So what were her activation conditions?
She looked at the crying child, and at the scrapes on her knee. For some reason, she suddenly felt — she could fix this.
Fear. That was the emotion You Ling could sense right now.
She could feel everyone's fear toward her, and the moment she perceived that emotion, golden threads began to dance. She watched a thread extend from her fingertip, spiraling through the air before sinking into the child's body.
The child saw nothing, but when You Ling looked at her, she flinched and shrank back, crying out only for her auntie.
Then came the second thread.
Rule One: The target must fear her.
Rule Two: The target must not dare to resist her.
"The boogeyman's going to eat the little kid~" You Ling said idly. A third thread coalesced from her fingertip.
Rule Three: The target must genuinely believe she has control over them.
When the third thread sank into the child's body, the girl's wide, clear eyes stared up at You Ling, and You Ling saw unmistakable fear in them.
Rule Four: All three conditions above must be confirmed face to face.
You Ling felt her perspective shift without warning.
It was as if she could see inside the child's brain — electrical currents racing along nerve endings. She saw platelets drifting through the bloodstream. Finally, she saw the wound on the child's knee, right down to the infecting bacteria.
The child was still crying. She knew nothing of what was happening.
You Ling tilted her head, thought it over, and wiggled a pointed finger. "Alright, alright, the boogeyman doesn't eat little kids who've cried themselves into smudgy little kittens." A sudden idea struck her. "Actually... the boogeyman knows magic."
At the word "magic," the child blinked blankly, her crying subsiding.
You Ling lowered her outstretched hand, pointed at the child's knee, and traced two slow circles in the air. "It's time to witness a miracle—"
Blood vessels constricted, accelerating platelet aggregation. Neutrophils killed the invading bacteria. Fibroblasts proliferated en masse. In that instant, every one of these processes was artificially accelerated, pushed to a recovery speed visible to the naked eye.
At a pace the eye could follow, the bleeding wound stanched its flow. Scabs formed and rapidly fell away, revealing fresh, tender new skin beneath.
The child's jaw dropped. She forgot to cry.
Stars sparkled in her tear-filled eyes as she looked at You Ling and exclaimed, "Magic fairy!"
She wasn't afraid anymore. Her eyes brimmed with nothing but adoration, and the emotion of fear collapsed in an instant.
You Ling watched the threads hovering in the air. They snapped.
The moment fear vanished, they broke apart on their own — as naturally as anything.
Rule Five: If any of the above three conditions are violated within one minute, the puppetification can be stopped. After one minute, only the Puppeteer's voluntary release of the puppet can end it.
A wave of dizziness crashed through You Ling's head. Her heart felt as though it had clenched in on itself, sharp pains wracking through her chest. Her body was overloaded — overusing abilities beyond one's capacity left the user weakened.
She drew a deep breath and added a sixth rule to her list.
Rule Six: She could currently only control one puppet at a time.
While her head was still swimming, the child's sharp, clear voice rang painfully in her ears. "Auntie! Look, it's a magic fairy!"
You Ling turned. The child's aunt — the one she'd seen through 【Quick Blade】's eyes — had actually found her way here. "Xiao Qing! How did you end up all the way out here? You scared me half to death!"
"Thank you for looking after Xiao Qing— huh?" Fang Yuan froze in place, staring at You Ling with an intensity that made You Ling's skin start to crawl.
She suddenly felt like maybe she shouldn't be here. Oh, right — she still looked like Bi Xi.
It wasn't that she was afraid of You Shuo finding out she'd been scaring a child. But having the child's guardian stare at her with that bizarre look in her eyes — that was genuinely suffocating pressure.
True, she had scared the kid. But the child hadn't started crying because of her. Well... anyway—
"Right, well," You Ling said, glancing at the child's tear-streaked face with immense guilt, "I'll be going now."
She slipped away in a flash, as if ghosts were chasing her. She completely missed the guardian's remark after she left:
"The new character just debuted — how is there already such a high-quality cosplayer?"
...
On the way home, the dizziness had eased somewhat. You Ling tilted her head back to look at the sky, where the red barrier still hung overhead.
"A concept-type ability, huh..." You Ling murmured.
Concept-type abilities were as fickle as gods and demons. Their activation requirements were harsh, but once fulfilled, they could ignore level gaps entirely.
Ability users of this category rarely appeared in current manga, because the volatility was too extreme. Take her ability, for instance — she could only use it when fear was present. Otherwise, she couldn't even control a crying child.
The Puppeteer. She decided the life and death of those who feared her.
She could turn the living into her puppets — bid them live and they lived, bid them die and they died.
Or she could do as she had just done: simply take over someone else's body, regulate their systems, make them better.
She could do all of it, as long as she willed it.
You Ling kept her head tilted back as the system-granted appearance faded away. After the black sludge passed, her true form was revealed.
She needed them all to fear her, to dread her, to be unable to resist her. And the manga had given her exactly that opportunity.
The manga had indeed manifested in the real world, and some ability users already knew about it. It was no longer possible for ability users to ignore the manga — everything depicted within its pages would inevitably come before everyone's eyes. So she would convert the information leak into momentum in her favor.
Combined with the nature of her ability, she had locked herself onto a single path—
To make others fear her, she would become the ultimate villain.
As long as she appeared invincible in the manga, they would be afraid of her.
For now, the best way to establish her identity — and the one she could accept — was to climb to the top by stepping on Jiao Tu. She had to get ahead of You Shuo, find him, and use him to build her reputation.
She couldn't slip up. Couldn't show weakness. If she possessed fear, she possessed everything.
"Only one puppet at a time — so by the ability ranking system, I'm just C-rank right now?" she muttered. "Just C? That's way too low. And ranks can't be raised, so I'm going to have a lot of work to do."
She reached out her hand, as if trying to touch the barrier on the far edge of the sky.
SS-rank ability user, 【Red Moon】. So overwhelmingly powerful — when the puppet had been inside the barrier, You Ling could feel that suffocating pressure even from the outside.
If she too reached that height, then surely no one would be able to define her life anymore.
She curled three fingers of her right hand inward, forming a finger-gun aimed at the red barrier in the sky.
"Bang," she said softly.
In the direction she pointed, the twenty minutes were up. The red barrier dissolved across the sky like melting cream, like descending fireworks, sinking into the ground and extinguishing at the horizon.
Today — remade, reborn, whatever you wanted to call it. As for the days ahead, everyone would just have to wait and see.
【Settlement initiated...】
【Scanning for new relevant scrolling comments.】
【Scan complete.】
【Scanning for new relevant forum threads.】
【Scan complete.】
【Scanning for new large-scale online discussion data.】
【Scan complete.】
【Current heat: 7,298】
【100 heat = 1 hour of survival. System automatically deducts heat required for host activity.】
【Host remaining activity time: 72:01:33】
"Hm? The manga updated?" You Ling withdrew her hand and strolled leisurely through the quiet night toward home. "I'll check it when I get back."
...
Wen Nian opened her bleary eyes and snapped wide awake the moment she picked up her phone.
"It updated again last night?" she exclaimed in delight. Her 8 AM class could wait — she opened the manga app first.
But since she was a bit late to the update, the moment she opened the title page, she knew she was about to be spoiled rotten.
The new chapter's plot seemed explosive. Before she could even make out the title page illustration, the first things she saw were a wall of VIP bold-text scrolling comments and their collective screaming:
[Rewatching. Here for the Trisolaran steamrolling SS-rank 【Red Moon】 again.]
[Coming back from the dead, ignoring the barrier — Fat Fish, do you even see what you're drawing?! The power scaling is collapsing!]
[【Red Moon】 is universally recognized as a top-tier ability user, and her rule barrier still can't block the new character?]
[Just here to watch them hype up the new character by jobbing out the old ones.]
[Attention, villain fans up ahead — you are about to unlock your newest waifu/husbando this chapter! Our lord and savior, Bi Xi!]
[Edge's number-one male ghost makes his dazzling debut!]