A small heap of gold dust and mana crystals gleamed in the light. Beside them lay an assortment of rare ores, herbs, and other materials — a haul that sent her Wealth value spiking by over thirty thousand points in an instant, leaving Li Fei in no doubt as to just how generous the Secret Garden's coffers had been.
She stepped forward and scooped up a handful of gold dust, letting it trickle through her fingers, then shifted her gaze to the Transcendent items laid out beside it.
Naturally, these were the treasures left behind by the various "guests" who had visited the Secret Garden in the past. Given that those women had all been defeated by fairies, their combat strength could be readily imagined — and Li Fei found nothing among the items that caught her eye.
"No Lucky Four-Leaf Clover?"
Li Fei's brow furrowed, her voice giving nothing away.
The Lucky Four-Leaf Clover was one of the Secret Garden's most prized products — but not every Secret Garden could reliably produce something so coveted.
"Y-yes… I'm sorry…"
Sasha's small face had gone deathly pale.
"Useless."
The Mother of Fairies gave a cold snort. "Bring me the last guest's personal effects. I want to look through them."
Sasha trembled, rallied what remained of her surviving subordinates, and spent a good while turning everything upside down before finally delivering a scattered collection of odds and ends to Li Fei.
An ordinary Transcendent with no notable background.
One sweep of the items was all it took. Li Fei tagged the previous guest in her mind, then tapped her temple with one finger, her thoughts hesitating.
Leaving her alive as a breeding sow was obviously out of the question — the woman was a resident of Loxibrook, after all. If the truth ever came out someday, even the hardiest network of connections could only protect one from legal punishment. Social ruin, however, would be inevitable.
That left two options:
Save her and earn some goodwill — or silence her permanently?
As she looked down in thought, her gaze happened to drift to the Bronze Honor Medal pinned to her chest — the emblem of a model citizen and pillar of public virtue — and beside it, the Special Enrollment brooch, a symbol of the great expectations that she would develop into a well-rounded, exemplary individual in mind, body, and character. Something stirred faintly within her.
And so she stopped hesitating, and walked quickly to the side of the woman who lay at death's door.
"Save me…"
Like the last flare of a dying ember, the woman's vacant eyes suddenly blazed with a fierce, desperate hunger for life. Somehow she found the strength to seize Li Fei's sleeve, tears and blood mingling on her face as she forced out the plea in a hoarse, failing whisper.
"There's no saving you."
Li Fei shook her head and drew Darknight, sending her on her way. "Count yourself lucky it was fairies that captured you, and not goblins."
[You have slain Ginny Bagwa. +137 EXP.]
The decision had come down to a simple calculation. Killing her meant a small inheritance of relics and experience points. Nursing her back to health and escorting her home would have earned some goodwill, yes — but it would also have meant covering the ruinous cost of treatment, enduring the near-certainty that the woman would go to any lengths to bring friends and family back to the Secret Garden for revenge once she'd recovered, and — judging by the meager contents of her belongings — extracting absolutely nothing of tangible value from the whole ordeal. The gratitude of a saved life was all she would have received. Too high a cost. Too little return.
The Honor Medal, for its part, had simply reminded Li Fei that she had already earned more than enough goodwill to spare — and that with tens of thousands buried across Viranean, a little discretion was all it took to ensure nothing would ever surface.
Blood spattered across the medal on her chest, making it look all the brighter.
While the wild fairies set to work digging holes and erasing all traces, Li Fei dusted off her hands with quiet satisfaction. She had accomplished everything she had come for: harvested EXP, sharpened her combat and leadership instincts, plundered the wealth within, and secured preliminary control of the Secret Garden. She turned to her daughters with a serene, radiant smile and declared the day's work a resounding success:
"My dear little maid-ladies."
"Once we have more sisters in the future, you'll be able to take turns rotating out here for some proper rest and recreation."
"Now — let's go pick out our new home."
―
Grey stone tiles traced a wide, smooth path through neatly clipped lawns, and the top courtesan skipped along the pattern of the flagstones, chatting and laughing as she followed behind the blue-haired elder sister.
Aurora, former top hostess of the establishment, had gone with her signature forest-maiden aesthetic today — a crisp, pale-blue dress suspended from her alabaster shoulders by two slender straps, its hem swaying with each step to reveal the clean, delicate lines of her calves.
Below her slender white ankles: a pair of beige sandals, her toenails painted a clear, luminous sky-blue.
She paused mid-step, one hand reaching up to steady her wide white brim hat, the other extending to point at a massive, lushly canopied ancient tree:
"Look — this oak tree is two hundred years old. Oak trees are a symbol of the Nature alignment, you know."
Li Fei tilted her head back and listened to the soft rustle of leaves in the breeze, something quiet and settled rising naturally in her chest.
After a brief pause to take it in, Aurora took the top courtesan's hand and walked her through the garden, introducing the decorative stones, sculptures, and fountains along the path. Li Fei, who possessed the aesthetic sensibility of a brick, had always privately thought "what's worth looking at in a bunch of old rocks and ugly statues — rich people must be out of their minds" — but today, somehow, she found herself listening to Aurora's commentary with genuine interest, nodding along, growing fonder and fonder of every strangely shaped decorative stone she passed.
"Here we are."
Aurora gestured toward a grand and distinctive building.
It was a five-story duplex villa, with a floor area of roughly a quarter of a hectare. The design bore the unmistakable character of Nature-alignment architecture — walls in mint green and pale brown that felt crisp and cheerful, blending harmoniously with the vibrant, living environment that surrounded it. The effect was genuinely pleasing to the eye.
Li Fei had lingered in Viranean longer than planned, and the sky had deepened to dusk by now. Warm amber light already glowed from the third floor, catching in the windows, and the sight of it gave her an unexpected feeling of warmth — like coming home. Then one of the windows swung open, and a pretty beast-eared maid appeared, dusting off the windowsill.
"Aurora-jie, does the house come with that?"
Li Fei pointed at the beast-eared girl with a grinning squint.
"You naughty thing — she's doing an honest job."
Aurora tapped her on the forehead with one finger and gave her a mock-reproving look. "If you want her, you'll have to pay extra."
The moment she heard pay extra, Li Fei fell silent.
It wasn't that she was counting coins — it was more that she was the top courtesan of the Golden Kumquat Tavern, and the idea of paying for companionship herself… well, if word got out, wouldn't that be a stain on the establishment's illustrious reputation?
"Come in, then."
Aurora led Li Fei by the hand toward the villa. Maids who had been waiting at the entrance bowed to them both and pushed the double doors open wide.
The moment the interior came into view, Li Fei's eyes lit up.
From the outside, the villa was fresh and elegant — full of natural beauty and artistic character.
But through the doors, a completely different world revealed itself.
Spotless walls. A crackling fireplace radiating heat. A sofa that was both vast and sinfully soft. A tiered pastry tower on the coffee table… every single element was steeped in that languid, indulgent, petit-bourgeois luxury that could dissolve a person's ambitions entirely.
Li Fei adored it immediately.
She kicked off her shoes and padded across the carpet in her white cotton socks, wiggling her toes with satisfaction, then followed Aurora on a tour of every floor — pushing open windows to properly admire the riot of blossoms in the garden below, the pool with its gleaming tiled surround, and the wide, open enclosure beyond.
"Do you like it?"
Aurora pressed a small, exquisite bite of pastry between Li Fei's lips, her voice soft.
"Mm-hm!"
Li Fei answered by flopping directly onto the enormous bed. The mattress bounced her a solid fifteen centimeters into the air before swallowing her back down. She buried her face in the sheets, breathing in their fragrance, and mumbled contentedly.
A five-story villa spanning two thousand five hundred square meters. Its own "garage." A garden and a pool. A stone's throw from work. What more could she possibly ask for?
Sure, the square footage was generous enough to leave some rooms vacant — but the top courtesan, who had never quite shed a certain deeply ingrained instinct, held a firm belief: when you have the means, buy as much house as you can and claim as much land as possible. Two thousand five hundred square meters? Even twenty-five thousand wouldn't be too many. As long as her ability to attract women kept pace, every room would eventually be spoken for…
Carried away by the thought, Li Fei rolled onto her side out of professional habit, arranged herself in her most practiced, devastating pose — one hand propping up her cheek, the upper leg hooked at a lazy angle, fingers brushing back the hair from her ear, eyes going liquid and inviting — already calculating how to finagle the villa out of Aurora without spending a single coin…
Then she caught herself. This particular ask was frankly a bit much. Never mind the market disruption — Aurora was the former top hostess of the Golden Kumquat Tavern, and a fellow Witch to boot. By any measure, she was not the sort of person who would fall for that.
Seeing Aurora settle onto the edge of the bed, the top courtesan inched across the mattress like a caterpillar and maneuvered her head onto a pillow considerably more springy than the mattress itself. She let out a contented little hum and looked up at Aurora with bright, gleaming eyes:
"So — how much is this place?"
Aurora smiled at the corner of her mouth, one hand drifting with practiced ease to stroke Li Fei's cheek, the other holding up a single finger to indicate the price.
"Thank you so much, Aurora-jie."
The top courtesan beamed her sweetest smile.
After arranging to meet Aurora and getting the address, Li Fei had slipped away to the washroom under the pretext of freshening up, fired off seven consecutive window-shake alerts at Bai Mengtian along with a barrage of back-to-back calls, interrupted her very busy good sister, and quietly sounded out the going property prices in the area.
The figure Aurora named — set against the market rate she'd just learned — had been so low that Li Fei hadn't even considered haggling. Properties in this area started at thirty thousand gold coins on the open market. Aurora was offering it for twenty thousand. To put that in perspective: if an ordinary person spent every waking hour after work on a second job, scraping their annual income up to a single gold coin, then lived without eating, spending, falling ill, or taking a single day off from the age of eighteen to one hundred and eighteen — and after all that, reincarnated and did it again, two hundred lifetimes in a row — they might just barely afford the same house.
"Don't mention it — it's just been sitting empty anyway. Of course I'm going to give Fei-bao a good deal."
Aurora's expression was faintly indulgent.
Her face was made for ice — high, refined features with a cool, faint air of detachment, the kind of beauty that kept the world at arm's length. And yet her warm, sunlit smile melted all of it away in an instant, leaving something radiant and disarming in its place — the kind of beauty that made you fall without noticing you'd stepped off the edge.
"Abba abba."
For someone as shamelessly susceptible to beauty and wealth as the top courtesan, this hidden-depths diamond heiress was entirely beyond her defenses. She couldn't even form a coherent sentence. It took a long moment before she gave herself a mental shake and ventured, haltingly:
"Aurora-jie… why do you work at the tavern, anyway?"
"Because life needs a passion, doesn't it?"
Aurora's ice-pale eyes still held their bright, warm smile. "Plenty of poets, painters, and novelists are born into nobility. I chose a career I love — why should that be any different?"
The top courtesan was genuinely struck with admiration.
She realized, in that moment, that Aurora was a truly elevated practitioner of the arts — one who had transcended all vulgar considerations, a woman of pure and noble calling.
Unlike herself, who, despite quite enjoying the work, would flip the table and walk out — and then find herself another establishment — the moment the Golden Kumquat Tavern stopped being profitable.
After a beat, Li Fei caught the implicit dig beneath the sentiment. Her cheeks puffed out in indignation. She reached out with practiced fingers and flicked one of Aurora's shoulder straps loose with a single snap, accompanying the action with a distinctly sour mutter:
"Must be nice, being a rich young lady… free to choose any work you love, without ever having to worry about the cost."
"It isn't quite that simple."
Aurora slipped the strap back into place. The warm smile never left her face. She spoke in a gentle, unhurried voice about the effort she had invested in her career:
"First, you have to kill the father who tries to arrange your marriage. Then kill the brother who sets his sights on your younger sister. Then deal with the various relatives and rivals who covet both your family's wealth and your personal beauty — all of this without leaving a single thread for City Hall to pull on. Beyond that, you'll need a few months to properly domesticate a stepmother with an equal claim to the inheritance…"
The top courtesan felt a distinct chill creep over her. She curled quietly into herself, and a private thought surfaced in her mind: the [Mad Witch] class must deduct more Morality points than any other Witch variant… Putting herself in those shoes — if she had done all those things, she'd have furrowed her brow at the very least. How did one maintain such an elegant, captivating smile through all of it?
But damn, this woman is fascinating… I really should study her closely. One day I want to be a graceful, refined — well. A graceful bad woman.
The top courtesan stared at Aurora without blinking, her mind churning with a swirl of impressions she couldn't quite pin down.
Mage Nicole gives me personal lessons and hands-on guidance every single day, and I've absorbed exactly nothing. But the moment something touches my professional field, I'm all ears, drawing connections left and right.
They chatted idly for a while longer, and then Aurora asked, out of nowhere:
"Oh, right — is there anything about the house you're not satisfied with? If not, it's yours. You can handle the transfer paperwork at City Hall whenever you have the time."
"Also — the staff currently looking after the property signed a one-year contract at the start of the year, and their fees have already been paid. So for the remaining months, they'll be serving you free of charge."
Too thoughtful. Too, too thoughtful, Aurora-san…
Li Fei offered up a silent prayer of gratitude, then craned her neck to look around, left and right, before bringing her fist down into her open palm with a decisive clap:
"Oh — actually, yes. A few of the rooms need some remodeling."
"If possible, I'd like the master bedroom enlarged. Much larger. And a bed to match — big enough."
"Floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four walls. And on the ceiling, too."
"A few hanging rings… a rocking horse, a water bed, and a rocking chair… actually, never mind, I'll buy those myself."
"The carpet absolutely has to be absorbent — nothing too expensive."
The top courtesan laid out her renovation vision item by item. Beyond the master bedroom, other rooms were earmarked for conversion into a classroom, an office, a railway carriage-style private room, a medical ward…
Somewhere near the end of the list, Li Fei registered that the requests had grown rather extensive, and her voice gradually dropped. She added, with a slight air of guilt:
"I'll, um — I'll cover the costs myself…"
"No need — consider it my housewarming gift."
Aurora touched one finger lightly to the top courtesan's lips, then tilted her head down just slightly, fixing her gaze on the breathtakingly beautiful dark-haired woman below her, and breathed in a near-whisper:
"Just remember to invite me over."
Ever since that visit to the Bai Mansion — where she had barely escaped with her virtue intact — a certain Miss Li had developed a tendency to let her imagination run away with her at the phrase "come over."
But this time she was certain her imagination wasn't the issue, because Aurora's lips were approaching at a very deliberate one centimeter per second.
A silver pendant slipped free from Aurora's neckline and knocked against the corner of Li Fei's lips — cool and faintly heavy, unmistakably metallic. The scent that drifted over her was quietly intoxicating; that flawless snow-white collarbone and throat filled her vision, dizzying in their beauty; the blue-tipped ends of Aurora's hair fell across Li Fei's face, feather-light, teasing at something tender.
A shimmer rose in the top courtesan's eyes, something like feeling beginning to stir — and then, quite deliberately, she hooked the corner of her mouth upward. She raised one index finger and pressed it gently against those approaching lips, cool to the touch.
The gesture wasn't about salvaging the rapidly evolving dynamic between colleague and sister. It was simply that as a consummate professional, she understood a fundamental rule of the trade:
Yielding immediately after extracting a favor makes you look cheap.
As for last night's lapse in composure — that was absolutely not a failure of technique or willpower on the top courtesan's part. Lady Gneia simply possessed a ripeness and abundance reminiscent of an earth goddess, with an air of bewitching married-woman allure that was frankly impossible to withstand. Any woman would have made the same mistake.
She gently redirected Aurora's lips with that one finger, then turned her head to glance at the darkened sky beyond the window. She touched the same finger lightly to her own lips and said:
"You're going to be late for work, Aurora-jie."
―
To capture, release, recapture, release again, and capture once more — this is the foundational art of the chase, and it must be tasted.
― Well then. Have you learned it yet?
____
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