Chapter Ninety: An Ruxiang's Flirtation

The room erupted into a scramble.

Jing Fei was the first to lose his composure. Seeing the gang leaders behave with such shameless abandon, he no longer cared about saving face and rolled up his sleeves to join the mad rush.

Mu You: "Hold on..."

"Pick me, pick me! Hey, you little convict, that’s dirty, what are you grabbing for?!"

"Exactly. Have you pulled an almost-legendary-grade mission?"

Jing Fei: "Uh... no, I haven't..."

"Then why are you making such a racket?"

"Right. We have no choice here, we’re forced to cling to a strong thigh, so what are you flailing around for? Get lost!"

Jing Fei’s furious momentum was instantly extinguished by the other leaders. His face darkened, the words stuck in his throat, unable to come out.

Mu You could not take it anymore and barked, "Enough!"

The room fell silent at once.

No one made a sound. They all waited for Mu You to speak.

"You’re exactly six people. Split into two teams of three. That way your fighting power can be concentrated. As for me, I already have the right person."

With that, Mu You turned his eyes toward Jing Fei and asked with undeniable authority, "You said that after half a year, your life would belong to me, didn’t you?"

Jing Fei heard this and, though he did not know why Mu You had brought it up, saw the others beginning to stir again and immediately nodded.

"Yes. I said that."

"Good." Mu You snapped his fingers and nodded. "Then I’ll take your life now. Stay by my side."

After saying this, Mu You sent off the six leaders with a smile. Among the crowd, there were no leaders from the other two blocks, D and G, so they must already have joined Long Tongue. That was, after all, the three-man team universally acknowledged as the strongest on the surface. No wonder the other six had been so frantic to poach him. If the combatants were mismatched in such a dangerous almost-legendary mission, the moment it began it would be a one-sided slaughter.

Jing Fei had never imagined that Mu You would give up a group of death-row leaders ranked among the top ten in strength and instead choose him. He knew that with Mu You’s intelligence, he could not possibly have missed his little movements, yet Mu You had neither pressed him for an explanation nor interfered in the matter. Instead, he had chosen to trust him. Moved to the point of emotion, Jing Fei could not help but show a rare sincerity. After taking a deep breath and calming himself down, he thanked Mu You with a voice that was slightly hoarse yet extremely earnest.

During the trial, the restriction forbidding the convicts from using their abilities had been lifted. Otherwise, early this morning, before the instructors could even make a move, a large number of them would already have fallen.

"Anything else? If not, let’s all break for today," Mu You said to his own people after seeing off the six leaders.

Yan Cang and the others nodded and got up to leave. They had experienced too many things recently and could faintly feel the threshold of a new realm. With the final deadline drawing near, they wanted to go back and sort through everything carefully, hoping to achieve a breakthrough.

But An Ruxiang, Huo Lei, and the others did not leave. Instead, they looked at him with expressions that seemed to want to speak yet hesitated.

"What is it?" Mu You asked, amused. They were comrades who had faced life and death together; what was there to be embarrassed about now?

"Well... last night, in order to escape, we used our abilities again..."

So Huo Lei and the others recounted in full what had happened the previous night when Mu You had fainted in pain. Only then did Mu You understand. No wonder there had been such a huge bump on the back of his head this morning. Could it be that he had been dragged back by them? At least his face had not hit the ground.

Looking at the half-expectant, half-awkward expressions on their faces, Mu You, who would never miss any chance to grow stronger, could only smile helplessly and cut his finger. As he had done the night before, he held it out in front of everyone. Since he was sitting on the bed and therefore not very high up, Huo Lei and the others all half-knelt on the floor and sucked on his finger, their expressions solemn, as if they were taking part in some sacred ritual.

As for An Ruxiang, to Mu You’s astonishment, she got onto the bed, parted his chest, and along the bite mark from the previous night, bit down again in a fit of pique.

"Ah!"

Mu You howled once more.

...

Half an hour later, Mu You woke from unconsciousness. Only An Ruxiang remained in the room. The others also felt that today’s An Ruxiang was somewhat abnormal, somewhat off, and tactfully left, leaving her a little room for imagination.

"So I’m the only one left? Where are the others?"

In truth, what Mu You really meant was: why are you still here?

He still had many questions he wanted to ask Mu You, and he had also discovered that after absorbing the souls of more than a hundred dangerous convicts, Mu You seemed faintly capable of breaking free of final punishment. For Mu You, this was undoubtedly tremendous news.

An Ruxiang did not answer directly. Instead, she asked a different question. "Are you hungry? I brought some fries from the cafeteria. With ketchup, eat them while they’re hot. They were just fried. I remember you said that morning that they tasted pretty good."

Mu You was slightly taken aback after hearing this. He knew An Ruxiang had her own pride, yet she kept breaking that pride for him again and again. He had also never expected her to pay such careful attention to his everyday preferences.

He casually picked up a golden, crisp fry. It was indeed hot, almost as if it had just come out of the fryer. Mu You dipped it into the ketchup squeezed out beside it, and a fragrant breeze suddenly swept over him. In the next instant, An Ruxiang struck at the hand holding the fry with lightning speed.

"How can you eat without washing your hands? Isn’t that filthy?!"

"Hey... you missed."

An Ruxiang was fast, but Mu You was even faster. He dodged at once, stuffed the fry into his mouth, and at the same time sucked hard on his finger, shaking his head as he chewed happily. Seeing this, An Ruxiang looked away helplessly, but she could not hold it in and burst out laughing.

An Ruxiang looked beautiful when she laughed. She did not hide it coyly; she simply laughed openly and brightly, spirited and dazzling, with a thousand charms blooming at once.

At first the ketchup tasted a little sour, but the aftertaste... was sweet.

After laughing for a while, An Ruxiang saw Mu You staring at her while unconsciously stuffing fry after fry dipped in ketchup into his mouth. Before long, the corners of his lips were stained red.

"What are you looking at?"

Feeling a little uneasy under his gaze, though not displeased, An Ruxiang let her hair fall loose again, took out her crystal thorn and flower blade, opened her mouth, and while still staring straight at Mu You, bit down on the hilts of the two daggers. Then she took a deep breath, thrust out her chest, and slowly raised her swanlike, jade-white arms. She "accidentally" revealed her waist without a trace of excess flesh. Her long, straight legs crossed gracefully as she placed a hand on her hip and let her waist-length hair fall open. The cat-shaped gem on her earlobe reflected layers of iridescent light. Her abdomen was perfectly flat, and on her navel a beautiful emerald-green butterfly was tattooed. Beside the sharply drawn line of her waist and the proud curve of her chest, another emerald-green butterfly hid itself there as well, as if wanting to take flight yet still shy, exposing only three parts of itself.

She was already a vision of peerless beauty, enough to overturn a kingdom, graceful beyond compare. At that moment, she also carried a touch of pure, dew-kissed elegance, unsullied by the dust of the world, neither ashamed nor timid, like a small water lily just beginning to bloom—slender, graceful, refined, and noble.

"I’m asking you. What exactly are you looking at?"

An Ruxiang deliberately mumbled around the daggers, her whole body radiating an unprecedentedly seductive and aggressive allure.

At this moment, An Ruxiang was going all out.

Clack.

Mu You unconsciously shoved a fry straight into his nostril and still did not realize it.

This woman... unbelievable. I really can’t take it anymore.