"Whimper — awoooo, awoooo..."
The Moonlight Wolves cowered with their tails tucked between their legs, trembling from nose to tail.
The aura of a high-Sequence existence had jolted them from their slumber — and then unmade every last shred of their fighting spirit and wild instinct, turning a pack of ferocious, starving wolves into lambs awaiting the butcher.
Crack.
Their whimpers of submission did nothing to soften the intruder's heart. The staff came down with a shrieking tear of air and connected with a wolf skull, producing a rapid-fire series of crisp, wet snaps — like a burlap sack stuffed with dry branches being ground to splinters under an off-road tire — and sent blood and flesh spraying across a radius of dozens of meters.
[You have slain a Moonlight Wolf. +11 EXP]
"Subarashii ❤"
The sadistic little devil had thrown open the most chaotic, most primal part of herself completely. Blood-light blazed in her pupils. She let out peal after peal of uninhibited, syrupy cries, her expression twisted with pure, unhinged delight. Sprays of blood bloomed across her face like flower petals — like a vampire empress bathing in song at a crimson feast, or a rose blooming from within a vial of poison, radiating a sweet and bewitching allure without the slightest restraint: decadent, depraved, and breathtakingly beautiful.
The den that had housed dozens of Moonlight Wolves was now a vision of hell on earth. Bones and viscera carpeted every surface, and the walls had been redecorated with abstract, grotesque murals of crimson — painted by nothing more than the wild arc of flying blood.
Howls filled the air without end. Blood welled up and spilled over the cave entrance in a steady stream, swallowed by the hungry earth outside.
"Ah ❤ My brain is shaking."
Li Fei, pleasured to the bone by the slaughter, let her tongue slip out as she panted, her jet-black hair plastered to her flushed, stunning face with sweat.
"·S·t·a·y·s·t·i·l·l."
She swayed over to the last remaining Moonlight Wolf, a smile on her face so sweet it ached, and delivered the instruction in the most impossibly gentle, honeyed voice imaginable. At the same time, she assumed a golf-swing stance — hips rotating, her silver-serpent waist twisting through a smooth arc — and the staff swept out in a full, gorgeous trajectory, carrying a thunderous, savage force that sent the Moonlight Wolf, along with its shrill, desperate shriek, slamming straight into the ceiling of the den.
[You have slain a Moonlight Wolf. +11 EXP]
"Hm? That's all of them?"
Warm blood dripped down from above and shattered at Li Fei's feet. She tilted her head, scanning the cave in every direction. Not a single Moonlight Wolf remained standing.
An expression of thoroughly unsatisfied wanting spread across her flushed face. Li Fei tapped her lower lip with one finger and called out toward the depths of the cave: "Don't hide — come out, come out."
Then she tilted her head and listened. In an instant, a delighted expression bloomed across her face. She even began humming a children's song as she skipped toward the back of the cave, steps light and airy.
"Little bunny, oh so sweet~ open up the little door~ hurry up and open wide~ I want to come inside~"
Amidst a floor carpeted with shattered limbs and bone, her long boots stirred up little splashes of crimson with every step. The blood-painted woman hefted her skull-crowned staff and hummed her cheerful little tune, the melody echoing through the silent cave.
Halfway there, she stumbled — nearly pitching forward.
Dragon's Might had run its course. The power that had surged like a tide and then receded left Li Fei's legs feeling like rubber — but she steadied herself against the wall, took a few steps, and quickly straightened up again. The light in her eyes glittered with anticipation and joy, like a desert traveler who could finally see the water source.
"Found~ you."
At the very back of the cave, a pile of white bones lay heaped together — rotting feathers, antlers, and scraps of human clothing scattered among them.
Li Fei stepped over a humanoid skeleton. Her sharp, gleaming eyes fixed on a litter of fluffy, round little wolf pups.
"Kawaii."
Li Fei hugged the staff to her chest, laced her fingers together, lifted one leg at the knee, and let her eyes fill with little stars.
The wolf pups mewled in tiny, milk-soft voices, pawing at the air with unsteady little legs.
"Hungry, aren't you?"
Li Fei's face was all tender sympathy. "There, there. You won't be hungry much longer."
She sent them to rejoin their family — clean, efficient, and without ceremony. The EXP counter jumped again.
Morality: -9 → -10
Charisma: 190 → 200
Paying no attention to the shift in her Morality score, Li Fei leaned back against the rough cave wall, fished out a cigarette with practiced ease, and raised it to her lips with a faintly trembling finger.
The cigarette burned down to ash. The flush in her face faded with it, and a calm, settled stillness returned.
Raw power was savage by nature — and the transcendent force that had swelled and churned in a tangle of chaos and order, threatening to burst beyond all control, had stirred a surge of destructive desire in Li Fei's chest that she could not suppress. It had woken something in her. The abyss within.
Even Li Fei herself could not say whether the steadily falling Morality score was the source of that abyss — or merely the catalyst.
But it didn't matter anymore. There was no going back.
The cigarette butt dropped into the pooled blood at her feet, hissing as it went out, trailing a thin wisp of smoke.
Li Fei stretched her limbs out with a long, languid exhale, letting a look of quiet contentment settle over her.
Day to day, she always had to mind her image — even when she was being seductive, she couldn't afford to let it show too plainly. Getting to cut loose and vent without restraint for once left her feeling light, body and soul.
"What an absolute haul…"
The tip of her pink tongue ran across her lips. Li Fei lazily pulled up the System Panel and surveyed the exploding EXP counter, letting out a heartfelt sigh of satisfaction.
The efficiency was staggering.
This entire den of Moonlight Wolves — if she had been picking them off one by one, finishing each with a killing blow, factoring in the time spent hunting down targets — god only knew how long it would have taken.
Moonlight Wolves were nocturnal creatures: active through the night, sleeping in their dens by day. They always moved in packs under the moonlight, dragging prey out of hiding to be torn apart and swallowed into their bottomless wolf-stomachs.
Only the unlucky few — the ones hunger woke early — would venture out during daylight hours to try their luck. That habit had been badly throttling Li Fei's hunting efficiency.
But the very same habit had made this possible — it had allowed her to catch this many targets all penned up together in a single den. And the battle itself had gone far more smoothly than she had imagined.
Rumor had it that high-Sequence powerhouses had long since transcended the boundary of life to stand on the same existential tier as mythical creatures like phoenixes and Titans. A single breath of their aura was enough to press down upon lesser beings like the weight of heaven itself — stripping them of the courage to resist or even flee.
And eighth-tier spells were, by their nature, a domain only high-Sequence Transcendents could reach — a manifestation of the deep laws of existence, capable of rousing the most primal terror buried in mid- and low-Sequence creatures, leaving them too paralyzed to fight back or run.
All of that was why the harvest had come so easily.
"Should I keep going…"
The thought of all that EXP just sitting there waiting to be claimed made Li Fei's fingers itch. She turned over whether to squeeze this wolf den "grinding zone" completely dry in one go — using the mounting pile of corpses as a staircase to climb higher along the Transcendent path.
"All or nothing — let's go!"
She made up her mind quickly, muttering to herself: "Dead sooner or later anyway. Might as well help them get there faster. I'm practically a saint."
Mana running low? No problem — pop a potion. Getting the EXP in hand came first.
Once she ran out, she'd just head to Qin's Apothecary to restock. A measly Tier-I Mana Recovery Potion — surely Zhihua-jiejie wouldn't have the heart to charge her for something so small?
The only real issue was that she hadn't brought enough mana potions with her. Dragon's Might burned through mana at a punishing rate — she would need to make a supply run before long.
Li Fei reached into her custom-made belt pouch and pulled out a mana potion, tugged out the stopper, and was just about to bring it to her lips — when her hand stopped.
She remembered a small trick she had picked up from a MOBA game she used to play.
Before using a consumable — drop your equipment first…
The Ogre Staff was drenched in blood right now, slick and sticky.
Curiously, the cursed item appeared to be silently drinking the blood — absorbing it, as though it were a living thing, sinister and uncanny.
Li Fei didn't spare it much thought. It was just a cursed piece of equipment. Could it really be more wicked than her?
She set the staff aside, unpinned her brooch, and removed her pendant. Then she opened the System Panel again.
Truth be told, the moment she felt the mana draining from her body, she had already known the answer.
Mana: 94/270 → 19/55
"Just as I thought…"
The corner of Li Fei's mouth curved upward.
For the past two-plus months, she had been quietly probing the secrets of her system — and it had rewarded her handsomely at every turn. This time was no different.
"Corpus lapis."
A Firefly-grade mana potion restored 50 MP. To avoid waste, Li Fei fired off a Stone Skin on herself first, then waited patiently for the spell cooldown — planning to bank two more proficiency points before she drank.
The wait gave her a moment to think.
Whether it was the intoxication of the slaughter or the excitement of uncovering a new system mechanic, her mind was running at full speed:
Equipment loses its effect the moment it leaves your hands. So in a fight, could she try to knock the enemy's equipment away — stripping their combat power with it?
Also — a trick this obvious as "drop gear, drink potion" couldn't be something only she had figured out. Which meant… could she ambush an enemy while they had their defenses down?
Of course, she'd need to watch her own back too — an enemy could just as easily catch her mid-sip.
And finally — if the drop-gear-drink trick worked, what about "item swapping"? Like equipping the gear that maxed out her Strength and Constitution before activating Dragon's Might, then swapping to something else afterward?
A flood of ideas surfaced in her mind. Li Fei filed them away quietly and resolved to test them one by one in the future.
"Oh no."
The second Stone Skin had just settled onto her body when Li Fei suddenly smacked herself on the forehead. She stared at her spell points — now down to a miserable 3 — with a thoroughly disgruntled expression.
She had just made a small but irritating mistake: she should have cast eleven Stone Skins while still fully geared up before dropping everything to drink the potion.
It wouldn't have cost more than a few minutes…
"Whatever. I'll take it out on the Moonlight Wolves. Let's see how many levels I can gain today."
Having smoothly redirected her frustration to its rightful target, she downed the mana potion in one go, grumbled her way back into all her equipment, and stepped out of the den.
Time to pick a random wolf den and hand out complimentary tickets to paradise. Now, where was the next lucky family hiding?
...
Under the dying light of dusk, a woman was stumbling forward across the grass, leaving a trail of blood behind her with every step.
"Ugh… someone, please help me."
The woman — who might have been quite striking under better circumstances — was deathly pale now, letting out occasional sob-edged cries for help as she did, all while scanning her surroundings with terrified eyes, desperately hoping that whatever answered her screams would be a rescuer and not a pack of hungry Moonlight Wolves.
A few miles away.
Li Fei walked out of a wolf den wearing a beige mask over her face and carrying a small beige bundle in one hand — this was her sixth den cleared.
Every den had been packed with Moonlight Wolves. The smaller ones held twenty or thirty; the larger ones, fifty or sixty. She had long since lost count of the exact numbers — but over the course of that single afternoon, she had leveled up four times and harvested somewhere between two and three thousand EXP.
Once the initial high had worn off, Li Fei found the smell inside the dens increasingly difficult to stomach. She had simply torn a strip from her inner clothing and fashioned it into a mask. The leftover fabric hadn't gone to waste either — it had become a small cloth bundle to hold her spoils.
Some of the dens had contained humanoid skeletons. The beautiful and thoroughly acquisitive intruder had — after converting the residents into EXP — made a point of rummaging through the place before leaving, and had squeezed out a modest haul.
Three gold coins. Fifteen silver coins. Copper pieces she couldn't be bothered to pick up.
The only item of any real note was a single Transcendent artifact:
[Fairy Bracelet]
Equipment Rating: Firefly
Attributes: Charisma +1
Li Fei had no intention of using this herself. It had been stripped off a corpse, worth less than ten gold coins — beneath the dignity of the Golden Kumquat Tavern's star courtesan.
Besides — Charisma was an attribute she was going to have in unlimited supply going forward. What was one measly point?
She walked a few dozen steps clear of the den before finally pulling the mask off and drawing a long, deep breath of clean air — though the faint, metallic reek still clung stubbornly to the inside of her nose.
"Give me one more afternoon and I should be able to finish sweeping the dens clean."
Li Fei glanced up at the sky and patted the silver brooch at her chest, channeling the Cleanse spell she'd been holding in reserve all this time — wiping the blood and filth from herself in an instant.
"Sys."
At the soft call, a luminous screen bloomed into view before her eyes.
[Character Panel]
Name: Li Fei
Level: 8
Sequence Level: None
EXP: 124/1,000
Class: None
Legacy: None
Mana: 85/270 → 85/290
Strength: 18 (8) → 22 (12)
Agility: 10 → 14
Constitution: 13 (8) → 17 (12)
Intelligence: 14 (11) → 18 (15)
Charisma: 200
Morality: -10
Luck: 1
Command: 0
Aptitude: 0
Achievements: None
Innate Talents:
1. Depravity
When Morality decreases, Charisma increases. (Irreversible.)
2. ???
Knowledge Tree:
1. Nature Alignment:
Introductory Natural Magic (Unlocks "Basic Natural Magic" upon advancing to Sequence 9):
Allows learning and casting of Tier-I Nature spells.
Introductory Cycle Principle (Unlocks "Basic Cycle Principle" upon advancing to Sequence 9):
Nature-type spell effects increased by 10%.
Introductory Summoning Magic (Unlocks "Basic Summoning Magic" upon advancing to Sequence 9):
Automatically summons a Nature-alignment unit loyal to you once per day.
2. Chaos Alignment:
Introductory Chaos Magic (Unlocks "Basic Chaos Magic" upon advancing to Sequence 9):
Allows learning and casting of Tier-I Chaos spells.
Potential Points: 4
Spells: Stone Skin Lv1, Dragon's Might Lv1
Combat Skills: None
Evaluation: A non-combat unit in possession of an eighth-tier spell.
[Messages Panel]
[You have slain a Moonlight Wolf. +11 EXP]
...
[Shop Panel]
Wealth: 940
[Gacha Panel]
Remaining Draws: 6
"Good. The dens are yielding more EXP than I expected. The remaining Moonlight Wolves should be enough for another two levels or so… Beyond leveling and learning my way to Sequence 9, the most urgent priority is finding a new grinding spot… Oh, and I need to figure out a way to boost my Luck — letting those gacha draws stack up forever isn't a real strategy."
Li Fei ambled along the path home, turning her future plans over in her head — and the more she thought, the more her head began to throb. "Almost forgot — there's going to be a new little fairy every day from now on. I can't just let them freeload. I need to find somewhere they can actually be useful."
"And Dragon's Might — the incantation takes too long. In a real ambush, there's no time to cast it at all. The enemy would have killed me three times over before I finished reciting it… And on top of that, I absolutely cannot let anyone see me use this spell. If word got out that a non-combat unit is walking around with an eighth-tier ability, the entire Continent of Enlos would probably have a collective earthquake — even my best friend might not be able to protect me from that fallout…"
"Alas, the road ahead is long and steep…"
Mid-sigh, the star courtesan's brow furrowed. She stopped walking and listened.
"There's a woman calling for help…"
A peculiar smile crept across Li Fei's face.
So it's finally happening, is it?
Over two months since transmigrating, and the classic scenario had finally arrived — the heroic beauty rescuing a damsel in distress, after which said damsel pledges undying devotion and throws herself wholeheartedly into her savior's arms.
"But…"
Li Fei pressed a finger to her lips, suddenly hesitant. "There's already no shortage of beauties who've quietly developed feelings for me and are just waiting to fall into my arms. Do I really need one more?"
The star courtesan found herself sinking into profound, conflicted contemplation.
"Do I save her… or don't I?"
____
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