The young girl or rather, Yu Ning had tears still clinging to the corners of her eyes, yet her expression shifted into something entirely different. Arching an eyebrow at Yu Sui, she inquired with curiosity: “Just who are you?”
“A magician, Miss Yu.” Lowering his gaze to look at her, Yu Sui spoke with impeccable politeness, though the muzzle of the gun in his hand didn’t waver by so much as a fraction of an inch.
“A magician…” Yu Ning murmured thoughtfully before breaking into a smile: “Of course. Magicians have always excelled at hiding the things they don’t wish the audience to see right in plain sight. No wonder you managed to uncover me.”
Shifting into a more comfortable posture against the edge of the cage, she cast a gaze filled with a mix of appreciative admiration and lingering regret: “You work for Yu Baihua? What a tremendous pity, then.”
Her gaze drifted casually past the direction blocked by Yu Sui as she stated with a regretful sigh: “Everyone in the Yu family is destined to die; you shouldn’t have come here.”
Boarding the Star of the Far East required navigating through exceptionally stringent security screenings designed to prevent any ill-intentioned individuals from sneaking aboard. Without exaggeration, the sole lethal weapon currently present across the entire ship was the security-exempt firearm Yu Baihua carried on his person. Naturally, the playing cards in Yu Sui’s hands specifically, given that they were in Yu Sui’s hands could charitably be counted as weapons as well.
Yu Ning possessed neither capital nor authority, bearing merely the title of an illegitimate, sickly daughter. No one believed she was capable of stirring up any genuine turbulence; she didn’t even possess the qualifications to occupy the same room as Yu Baihua.
Employing this exact method was the only way she could induce Yu Wei to haul her into a crowd, allowing her to make contact with the maximum number of people simultaneously. Thus, whatever mechanism she possessed capable of sending everyone aboard to their graves together was likely concealed directly within her own flesh.
“A biological implant bomb?” Yu Sui murmured softly.
Yu Ning registered a brief moment of astonishment before smiling: “Indeed. So you can kill me right now and let all of them accompany me into the afterlife.”
Yu Ning had originally possessed the simplest of families and the most blissful of lives. Back then, she still answered to the name Jian Ning; her mother had conceived out of wedlock, given birth to her, and subsequently married her stepfather. The stepfather was an exceptionally kind man who harbored no prejudice regarding her origins, treating her entirely as his own flesh and blood.
She had once believed her days would continue unfolding in that tranquil fashion, right up until the moment she laid eyes upon the corpses of both her parents. Her mother had clutched tightly within her embrace the document folder she had managed to rescue while fleeing back then. Jian Ning had never opened it, yet she surmised it contained some variety of crucial evidence.
She had been whisked away into a luxurious mansion, where a circle of haughty young people surrounded her, frowning with undisguised aversion as they looked her up and down to verify her identity: “So long as the documents are retrieved, that’s all that matters. Is this truly my seed? Why didn’t the lot of you simply dispose of her together?”
Nearby, a little boy named Yu Wei giggled and shoved the person beside him: “Little Uncle, look how hilarious she is, she looks like some unwanted stray bastard.”
“Not nearly as hilarious as you lot. Piss off, will you?” Young Master Yu Baihua couldn’t be bothered to entertain the lot of them and simply strolled off on his own.
Seemingly from the very second Yu Wei uttered those words, she truly transformed into an unwanted stray. Not a single soul cared about the cowering Jian Ning any longer. She drifted through this family like a ghost, or perhaps a completely inconsequential patch of moss. No one could ever spare a moment to recall this timid girl dragged in from god-knows-where.
Until she meticulously plotted her approach to Yu Wei, finally securing dirt on both him and her own father. She began laying out her chess pieces, quietly devouring the colossal entity that was the Yu family from within.
Yu Sui thought to himself: No wonder the moment I began making my move against the Yu family in my past life, I noticed numerous things felt deeply amiss it turns out Yu Ning had already struck first. It was simply that her presence was so utterly negligible that her name never even crossed anyone’s mind.
It was both a stroke of fortune and a tragedy.
Because her original name was never Yu Ning to begin with.
“The bomb is implanted inside my body, and I am the only one who knows the activation sequence.” Watching Yu Sui securely bind her hands tight, Yu Ning addressed him in an amicable tone: “Someone as clever as you wasting your life here is a dreadful waste. Why don’t I let you take a lifeboat first, and once you’ve drifted far enough away, I’ll trigger the explosion how does that sound?”
“If you possessed genuine benevolence, you wouldn’t have waited until everyone was gathered together before preparing to strike,” Yu Sui casually rolled up an excess length of gauze and stuffed it straight into her mouth, “nor would you have gone out of your way to dispatch someone to block me. My guess is you’ve tampered with the lifeboats as well save your breath, Miss Yu Ning. I have no intention of wasting time here with you. The simplest way to trigger a biological implant bomb is simply to wait for its countdown to expire or for you to terminate yourself.”
“As for your proposal, I must respectfully decline.” Yu Sui offered her a smile. “I have zero desire to watch Yu Baihua meet with disaster a second time.”
Though their dialogue was conducted in voices so low that crowding any closer would yield nothing beyond fragmented whispers, the mere sight of Yu Sui directly moving to bind her hands made the unfolding situation blatantly obvious to everyone present. Naturally, when confronted with a crisis, people instinctively turned toward the person capable of giving orders; thus, dozens of gazes snapped toward Yu Baihua, eager to see how he intended to handle the situation.
At that moment, Yu Sui strolled back over, naturally looping an arm around Yu Baihua’s waist. Lowering his head, he spoke to Yu Baihua in an unhurried, almost merit-seeking tone: “President Yu, how about we elope right this instant?”
A peculiar expression crossed Yu Baihua’s face as he cast a strange look in his direction, knitting his brows to interrogate him: “What did she say?”
“She intends to exact revenge on the Yu family,” Yu Sui replied, gesturing for him to signal the crowd to disperse while pushing him toward the exit. “So we really ought to escape using a lifeboat first; I happen to value my life quite dearly.”
Whether Yu Baihua believed him or not remained unclear, but he allowed himself to be steered by Yu Sui all the way down the companionway stairwell toward the lower decks. Just as Yu Sui was mentally calculating from which layer of subcutaneous tissue Yu Ning’s biological bomb had likely been implanted, Yu Baihua abruptly ground to a halt.
For a fraction of a second, Yu Sui froze. The next instant, he was forcefully shoved backward against the corridor wall. Lowering his gaze, all he could catch were the vivid, inflamed crimson tips of Yu Baihua’s eyes.
“Yu Sui.” Every single syllable felt as though Yu Baihua intended to chew the name to pieces and grind it straight into his flesh and blood as he demanded: “Did you really think I wouldn’t know what’s churning inside that head of yours? You led me down to the lifeboat, farthest away from Yu Ning, so you could slip back by yourself and test whether you could dismantle that bomb?”
Yu Sui paused for a beat before offering a smiling counter-question: “Am I truly that noble in your eyes?”
Without uttering a word, Yu Baihua closed his eyes, his chest heaving once in a suppressed tremor before he stood on tiptoe and viciously sank his teeth straight into the skin of Yu Sui’s throat.
“Tsk…” Tilting his head back, Yu Sui felt Yu Baihua’s teeth frantically gnawing and grazing across his throat, resembling a predatory beast weighing whether to rip open its prey’s jugular vein. He planted his hand firmly against Yu Baihua’s neck to force him back, yet Yu Baihua stubbornly refused to let go, until the pressure of Yu Sui’s elegant hand left striking, angry red welts across his skin.
A laugh was wrenched out of him by sheer exasperation. “Yu Baihua, if you’re so eager to be strangled to death by me, just say the word are you ever going to let go?”
“Yu Sui,” Yu Baihua cut off whatever else he intended to bark, “I want you to tell me with your own lips why you deceived me, why you used me to access so many of the Yu family’s core secrets, and why you refused to agree to stay with me…”
“If you continue refusing to speak, I will wait until you finally do. If anyone in this world is permitted to drive you toward your death, that person can only be me.”
Fixing a stubborn, unyielding gaze upon him, Yu Baihua slowly continued: “But everything I’ve turned into stems from a single objective: ensuring I can shackle you permanently by my side.”
“Do you comprehend my meaning, Yu Sui? Whether it was deception or genuine sincerity, you will never find a way to shake me off for the rest of your life.”
A Yu Baihua like this held a magnetic pull over Yu Sui breathtaking yet perilous, resembling a blindingly brilliant poisonous blossom unfurling its soft petals solely for him, still glistening with morning dew.
Reaching out with his fingertips, Yu Sui traced the corners of Yu Baihua’s eyes, predictably catching a trace of damp moisture against his skin.
Looking down at him, Yu Sui bent his knees slightly to lock eyes directly with him. Though his expression projected absolute detachment, his tone carried an indulgent, pampering warmth:
“Yu Baihua, do you know why I happen to like you?”
“W-What?” The fierce, aggressive momentum that had characterized Yu Baihua moments prior was abruptly derailed by that single query, causing him to choke and stall mid-sentence.
“Because you always choose me no matter what circumstances arise, and you refuse to change no matter what happens. If I had to pin it down… I suppose I simply have a soft spot for idiots.”
Breaking into a smile, Yu Sui cupped his jaw to tilt it upward, pressed a tender kiss to his lips, and then amidst that gentle tenderness swiftly and decisively delivered a sharp chop of his hand to the back of Yu Baihua’s neck.
“It’s fine.” As Yu Baihua caught himself, his hands reaching out in a final, instinctive bid to grasp at him, Yu Sui murmured softly: “No one understands biological implant bombs better than I do… I’ll be completely safe.”
His tone remained mild and reassuring, while his exterior aura hardened into an icy, murderous frost: ” However, I’ve never been terribly fond of letting anyone else steal the spotlight on stage.”
A magician was bound to perform thrilling illusions over the course of a lifetime such as escaping from a locked water tank, or walking amidst flying blades and axes. Yu Sui was no exception; he had forever relished the thrill of dancing along the edge of a razor blade.
Yet, he mused, once a person acquired genuine emotional attachments, they inevitably grew soft. For instance, a magician who never executed a performance without meticulous preparation didn’t dare allow Yu Baihua, of all people, to step onto the stage as his assistant this time around.
Still, the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Especially that kiss.
Inside the deserted casino, Yu Ning hummed a discordant, meandering tune to herself until the unhurried sound of footsteps approaching drifted to her ears.
Yu Sui walked toward her. His affectionate eyes perpetually hovered at the edge of a smile; otherwise, stripped of that expression, his sharp, angular features invariably chilled the observer to the bone precisely as they did right now. He held a small silver utility blade casually plucked from the dining buffet the blade was profoundly dull, struggling even to slice through a steak.
The utility knife twirled into a graceful arc between Yu Sui’s fingertips before the point leveled with absolute precision directly at Yu Ning.
Bending his knees to drop into a kneeling posture, Yu Sui parked the tip of the blade right against Yu Ning’s delicate, flawless skin, then asked in a slow, leisurely drawl: “Miss Yu, where do you suppose I should begin?”
With a muffled gasp, Yu Ning experienced the agonizing reality of the blade accurately slicing a third of an inch deep without a moment’s hesitation. Yu Sui seemed intimately familiar with precisely where biological subcutaneous bombs were surgically concealed in the human body, targeting those exact zones with unerring precision. He didn’t remotely resemble someone committing a cruel, sadistic act, but rather a master executing a well-rehearsed magical prelude.
Isn’t this person supposed to be a magician ?
Pity that Yu Ning had no way of knowing Yu Sui was an elite villain who had survived countless worlds, nor could she fathom the experiences Yu Sui had endured long before he ever joined the Villain Department.
No one is born a heartless, unfeeling grand magician. Surveying the familiar surroundings before him, fragments of the past involuntarily brushed against Yu Sui’s memories.
Which only made him yearn all the more for that fiercely proud young master Yu from his memories.