Chapter 124
Chapter 124: I Am You, You Are Me
She had said it before.
Humans and magic creatures were never meant to coexist.
How could they? How could anyone live peacefully with the things that killed them?
Blood debts didn’t fade. Homes turned to ash didn’t rebuild themselves in the heart. Watching the people you loved die in front of you… that carved grooves so deep they never smoothed over.
“Qian Qi…”
Something unseen folded over her vision—transparent hands, gentle as a lullaby, cruel as a trap. They covered her eyes, and the red in her gaze deepened into something almost luminous.
A woman’s voice slid into her mind, cold and sweet, threaded with madness and obsession. It whispered like a nightmare that already knew the way.
“Use my power… You are me, and I am you—!”
Come with me.
Kill every magic creature.
“Ugh—!”
Qian Qi’s awareness snapped back for a blink, and she clutched her head as pain tore through her skull. Nearby, the little copper-scale beast kept screaming—high, ugly, relentless—each cry like a nail in her brain.
Her patience shattered.
With a savage swing, she drove an iron rod into its forehead and ended it. The scream cut off mid-note.
Silence rushed in, brutal and clean.
Just now… what was that?
Whose voice?
Her mental power felt like it had been stirred into sludge, and she was still half-drowning in it when the larger copper-scale beasts surged forward.
The moment they saw their kind die, they stopped caring about the humans around them.
They cared about her.
Copper-scale beasts looked like giant lizards—massive bodies plated in black, bronze-like scales. Their tails were thick and long, and a casual sweep could fling people like dolls. Their hind legs were short but powerful. Their front limbs were thick as pythons, ending in claws that gleamed a sickly green.
Standing, they rose several meters high.
Crawling, they were fast and savage.
Jumping, they covered terrifying distances.
They leapt in from every direction, forming a living circle that trapped Qian Qi alone. In midair, their claws stretched for the back of her skull.
Without a defense fruit, this was a death sentence.
Roars slammed into the hall. Claws fell like a sudden storm, tearing through the cold, blood-stinking air.
[Qian Qi—]
“Qian Qi.”
Her name hit again, sharp and close, and Qian Qi’s head snapped up.
She turned, and something cold unfurled across her face.
Her bloodshot eyes went predatory.
A flood of mental power exploded outward.
The copper-scale beasts in the air slammed into the ground as if an invisible fist had swatted them. They hit hard, rolling and shrieking, bodies twisting in agony.
Qian Qi’s voice came out calm. Too calm.
“D-rank,” she said, almost bored. “And you think you can hurt me?”
The iron rod spun lightly in her palm, quick and practiced, as if her hand had done this a thousand times.
A thin smile curved her lips—indifferent, contemptuous, hungry.
Then she moved.
The rod punched into the nearest copper-scale beast’s chest. She hooked upward, ripped out bloody organs, and flung them aside like garbage.
She walked through bone and blood as if strolling through a park, harvesting D-rank magic beasts one after another. They twitched and died beneath her, all caught under crushing mental control.
When the iron rod finally bent under the abuse—folding, warping—she tossed it away without a second glance and stepped up to the first beast that had charged her.
Her small hand, knuckles faintly blue, rested on its head.
She lowered her eyes, voice dropping into something almost conversational.
“Hey. If you can’t keep your own little monster under control… you deserve to be taught a lesson by someone else.”
The copper-scale beast tried to struggle, but her mental power ground against its consciousness with deliberate cruelty.
It was like being plunged into ice and stabbed by needles.
Like being thrown into fire and peeled apart.
The beast writhed, mind breaking in slow motion.
“Why didn’t you stay underground?” she murmured. “Had to come out?”
Her fingers tightened.
“Then you die.”
She plunged her hand into its skull and crushed bone bit by bit, savoring the resistance, the crumble.
And then—without warning—a tear slid down her blood-smeared cheek.
Because she remembered.
Child A’s head.
Crushed like nothing.
Grief and rage rose together, a wave too high to breathe through.
She couldn’t calm it.
Because it wasn’t just her rage.
It was Qian Qi’s rage.
And “she”—
“she” was only a leftover shard. Cold. Clear. Killing.
“Qian Qi,” that voice whispered, intimate as breath. “Let go and kill.”
Kill everything that blocks you.
Threatens you.
Hurts you.
What’s mine is yours.
The presence leaned close again, those invisible hands covering Qian Qi’s eyes.
And then—
It pulled back.
The suppression vanished.
A sea-deep mental power surged into Qian Qi’s mind. Her own consciousness—small, fragile—was a tiny boat caught in a whirlpool.
It rocked once.
Twice.
Then the whirlpool swallowed it whole.
Qian Qi lifted her gaze.
In her head, only one word remained.
Kill.
She turned away from the pile of D-rank magic beast corpses, ignoring the terrified, hopeful stares of the survivors, and walked toward the hole where the copper-scale beasts had burst out of the ground.
The buried dungeon’s entrance yawned open—black, slick, waiting.
Qian Qi stared into it.
Then she jumped.
She fell like a devil descending into hell, hit the ground hard inside, and rose without flinching.
The dungeon was a forest soaked in green life: thick vegetation, towering waterfalls, mist hanging in the air. Magic beasts roared in the distance, the sound rising and falling like the place itself was breathing.
A herd of D-rank magic-horn rhinos gathered by a river.
Birds wheeled overhead, diving toward blue-ice magic rabbits scattering below.
Copper-scale beasts sprinted through the trees, tails snapping and splitting strange trunks, startling black birds from the branches.
They lived in easy comfort.
Outside, humans lay stacked in blood.
Qian Qi watched them and felt something ignite again—hot, fierce, nameless.
Kill. Kill them all.
She would turn this place into a graveyard too. Wash the soil with blood. Offer their ruined bodies as tribute to the people she’d lost.
Her mental power screamed for release, threatening to shred her mind if she didn’t use it. The only way to keep herself from breaking was to break everything else.
The copper-scale beasts caught the scent of their own blood on her and charged, roaring.
Qian Qi lifted her hand.
“Wind.”
One word.
Her mental power hardened into something real and violent, whipping forward like a blade.
Heads exploded.
One after another, copper-scale skulls burst like fruit under a hammer. Blood sprayed. Flesh rained down. Nearby magic beasts bolted in terror—only to have their heads pop too if they strayed too close.
It still wasn’t enough.
Qian Qi walked deeper into the forest.
Every step became a bloom of red—beautiful and horrific.
A cyclone of mental power spiraled around her, shredding every magic creature that wasn’t hers. The ground became a mess of torn bodies and broken trees, a trail of ruin that screamed what she was.
She wandered without direction, moving only because stopping felt impossible.
Until she finally grew tired.
She stopped at a massive boulder, climbed up, and sat like she belonged on a throne.
Legs folded, chin propped on her hand, she let her mental power spread.
It rolled outward like a tsunami.
Every magic beast within a hundred miles shuddered.
Then they came.
From the river. From the woods. From the cliffs and shadows.
They ran in trembling waves and collapsed at her feet, crawling, heads down.
Qian Qi looked over them through half-lowered lashes, face blank.
The heavy use of power steadied the little boat of her awareness. The killing urge that had filled her like smoke began to thin.
Calm seeped back in.
Silence.
Peace.