Lu Xien was walking along the Forest Path when he suddenly heard the Communication Stone ring.
He had one hand in his coat pocket, while the other clutched the Blue Magic Stone Brooch he’d “borrowed” from the Demon King’s Warehouse.
The Communication Stone vibrated at his waist.
He took it out.
And saw three big characters written on it: Wei’erna.
Lu Xien answered with a blank expression.
“Hey… couldn’t you have at least sent me somewhere decent?!”
Wei’erna’s nearly screeching roar came through the other end.
“Do you want me to get assassinated or what?! Why did you drop me right in the center?!”
Lu Xien was silent for a second.
Then, mimicking a voice he’d once heard at an academic conference, he said:
“The number you are trying to reach is currently busy. Please try again later~”
And then he hung up.
Lu Xien tucked the Communication Stone back into his waistband and continued studying the brooch in his hand.
The blue brooch gave off a faint, eerie glow under the gloomy sky, with condensed Mana swirling inside.
He remembered this thing was loot taken from some noble’s estate during the assault on the Holy Kingdom many years ago. Back then, he wasn’t the half-dead wreck he was now.
“Sigh… time really is a butcher’s knife…”
He looked up at the sky.
The clouds were starting to thicken, and the wind through the Forest was growing heavy and muffled.
“It wasn’t like this when I got here… what a pain…”
{Oh well… since the weather’s like this…!}
Lu Xien raised his hand with absolute confidence, preparing to teleport back.
And then—
Nothing happened.
“Huh?”
He stared at his hand.
The Teleportation Array at his fingertips flickered a few times before dying out.
Lu Xien’s expression finally changed.
“Why… is something interfering…?”
The next instant, the scenery around him began to distort.
The trees and ground started crumbling and twisting apart, and then chunks of soil flipped up from beneath the path.
The damp dirt road of the Forest of the Black Trees gradually became a street paved with stone bricks. Tiled eaves emerged from the fog, and rows of tall smokestacks appeared in the distance.
Black steam erupted from the chimneys.
A haze thick with coal smoke and heavy metal filled the streets.
Lu Xien raised a hand and immediately layered Concealment Magic over himself.
“Space Interference, of all things…”
He narrowed his eyes.
“And it’s not the Demon King’s Magic… this era… no.”
The legitimate practitioners of Space Magic should theoretically have been dead and gone by now. These days, the only person who could casually warp coordinates was the Demon King himself.
But this Magus in front of him was completely unfamiliar.
He released a small Light Ball.
The Light Ball trembled in the air, then began to move, tracing a path.
Lu Xien followed the direction the Light Ball shifted, avoiding the distorted, twisted spaces.
The streets gradually became clearer.
On the building walls, the old emblem of the United Kingdom was carved.
A squad of people wearing special gas masks walked past on the roadside.
They wore gray-black long coats, their faces covered by iron masks, with two hoses hanging from the sides of the masks, connected to tanks on their backs. Everyone wore the same badge on their chest.
The badge bore the insignia of the Seventh Experimental Division.
Lu Xien’s pupils contracted sharply.
“How can this be…?”
He held his breath and hid in the shadow of a withered bush.
“The War… wasn’t it already over?”
The Seventh Experimental Division.
One of the darkest organizations in the United Kingdom.
The units whose names had been erased after the War were appearing again on a path that shouldn’t exist.
He moved quickly through the less crowded corners.
The buildings on both sides of the street began to disintegrate, like they were being repeatedly erased by time. Gray walls crumbled into smoke, iron windows dissolved into mist, leaving only the outline of some square growing ever clearer.
In the center of the square stood the Judgment Platform.
On the Judgment Platform hung a person. She had black hair and black eyes. Lu Xien recognized her immediately.
And her chest was pierced through by a sword.
At that moment, Lu Xien felt his heart slam hard against his ribcage.
Crowds of citizens gathered around, wearing masks, holding up lanterns, all chanting the same words.
“Another Demon Race that disrupted the peace.”
“Finally dead.”
“Everyone must see this… only Humans and the Hero are the saviors of this world!”
Lu Xien charged forward almost instinctively.
“Tina…!”
He wanted to seize her body, to confirm whether she still had breath.
He wanted to blast every single person standing below the platform, judging her with such flippant words, into ash.
But he’d barely made it halfway when the space suddenly restored itself.
The stone-brick street turned back into the muddy Forest path.
The smokestacks, the Judgment Platform, the citizens, and the dead Demon King all vanished like an illusion, leaving no trace.
Lu Xien fell to his knees on the path, breathing hard.
“As I thought…”
He said in a low voice, colder than he expected.
“You people… you humans who judge others so casually.”
He gritted his teeth.
{We finally had peace… we finally managed to make it this far.}
{Why does she still have to die?}
{No…}
Lu Xien forcibly spread a Teleportation Spell.
This time, he didn’t teleport back to the Academy. He locked the coordinates to the Demon King’s Castle instead.
He returned to the Demon King’s Castle without hesitation.
In the castle’s main hall, the Demon King was sitting at a small table beside the throne, reading a book.
She yawned, her black hair loosely draped over her shoulders, munching on a cookie with her hand.
“Why are you back again?”
She looked up, a little puzzled.
But the next second, Lu Xien was already in front of her.
He snatched the book from her hand, then reached out and grabbed her shoulders, quickly checking whether her body had any wounds.
The Demon King was stunned at first.
Then, her face gradually flushed red.
“What… what are you doing?!”
Bang!
She kicked Lu Xien flying.
Lu Xien slammed into a stone pillar and spat out a mouthful of blood.
“Pfft… Demon King, stop moving! I need to check if you’ve been affected!”
“You perverted vampire!”
The Demon King clutched her chest, her blush reaching all the way to her ears. She raised her hand, and black Magic instantly condensed into a heavy Greatsword, pointing the blade tip at Lu Xien.
“Don’t come near me!”
“I’m trying to check if you have any mysterious wounds!”
“Do you need to pin someone to the throne to check their wounds?!”
“It’s not like I’m interested in you!”
Lu Xien was so angry he held his forehead.
He figured the Demon King had probably read too many books lately and fried her brain.
“Even if I had an interest in someone, it wouldn’t be you. Is that good enough? I’m genuinely just checking.”
The Demon King’s expression shifted. She looked like she wanted to kill Lu Xien.
“What do you mean by that?”
Lu Xien still hadn’t realized he’d stepped on a landmine.
“I mean, even magical tools are more worth researching than your body, and better looking too.”
The air went still.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Then, an overwhelming murderous aura erupted.
She swung the black greatsword in a horizontal slash. The moment the blade cut through the air, it left behind a pitch-black sword trail. That trail didn’t dissipate. Instead, it began devouring the surrounding light, air, and dust.
Lu Xien was about to retreat.
But the space behind him suddenly collapsed, forming a gravitational field.
He realized he couldn’t dodge it, and at the same time, he discovered a new application of Magic.
“Yes, yes, that’s it!”
He stared at the sword trail, an excited expression spreading across his face instead.
The Demon King had already appeared before him, bringing the greatsword down in a vicious strike.
Lu Xien hastily gathered Light Magic and yanked the Holy Sword of the Previous Hero from his storage space, barely managing to block the blow.
BOOM!
He was sent flying backward again from the sheer force of the clash, crashing into another stone pillar.
Stone chips and dust scattered all around.
Lu Xien figured he’d probably broken two ribs.
“Gah! You brute-force woman… you barely had any strength back in the day, what the hell have you turned into now?”
The Demon King was so furious her shoulders were trembling.
“The last time we fought was eighty-five years ago!”
“Oh.”
Lu Xien crawled out from the rubble, taking off his cracked glasses.
“No wonder… time flies.”
The Demon King took a deep breath and finally drove the Greatsword back into the ground.
The surrounding space returned to stability.
“Now, business. What exactly did you see?”
Lu Xien wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
“You died.”
The Demon King was taken aback.
Lu Xien pointed at the spot where the sword trail had warped earlier.
“I saw a distorted timeline in the space turbulence… The army there was the Seventh Experimental Division. Then I saw you pierced through the heart by a sword, and the people of the Western Continent were all cheering.”
The Demon King fell silent.
After a long while, she spoke softly:
“I don’t go outside anyway… And the people of the Western Continent all think I’m dead by now. There’s no way something like that would happen.”
“…I’m worried you’ll be tricked into going out and getting killed.”
“I’m not a child, you know!”
Lu Xien frowned deeply.
“Also, that Space Interference is very similar to your ability. The construction method was different from yours, but the structure was similar.”
“Similar structure to mine?”
The Demon King’s expression finally turned serious.
Just then, the Communication Stone at Lu Xien’s waist vibrated again.
He took it out and saw Wei’erna’s name on it.
This time he was about to hang up, but the voice on the other end sounded urgent.
“Can you hear me? Professor Lu Xien, come to the Training Ground quickly… something’s happened!”
“What is it? Talk fast.”
“I… I saw one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon King’s Army—”
Before he could finish, the connection cut off.
Lu Xien slowly looked up at the Demon King.
The Demon King looked back at him.
They both spoke at the same time.
“Huh?”
“Don’t look at me! I didn’t send anyone out!” The Demon King immediately retorted, “And besides, weren’t two of the Four Heavenly Kings already dead?!”
Lu Xien rubbed his brow.
“First, let’s confirm where the surviving one is.”
“About that… no worries!”
The Demon King raised her hand, and a special blue Magic Array unfolded.
The next second, a dragon-man with cyan hair was yanked out.
He was wearing a raincoat, had slippers on his feet, a fishing bucket strapped to his back, and was holding a fishing rod in his hand. When he was teleported over, he looked completely bewildered.
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