Jing Yuan: Whose Little Demon Is This?

Bai Tang first took out the broken glaive and laid it across her thighs. Then she set a round green game table beside her and took out a damaged eye, placing it on the table. She laid out a fan, a white command flag, a longevity lock, a gourd, and other things beside them and counted them.

There were fifteen things related to the Luofu in all, six of them connected to Yingxing. Thinking about the Luofu's current circumstances, Bai Tang put away the ones that didn't fit with the present, leaving only nine.

The marks on them told stories that had been lost to time. Any one of them could bring someone familiar with it to tears.

Good grief, she was supposed to use these to gain Jing Yuan's trust?

Forget it.

If she did that, they'd probably just forcibly extract her memories next.

As for negotiating, could she pull it off?

At most, she could go wild.

As long as she was strong enough, she could go wild successfully without worrying about getting beaten up. How great was that?

Negotiating was, of course, a job for someone suited to it.

She was better suited to chatting with people. As for her own story, she wasn't prepared to tell anyone. If they wanted to dig, they could do it themselves. In any case, until they obtained information about her past and confronted her, they wouldn't hear about those things from her while she was conscious.

So what should she do?

Bai Tang hugged the broken blade and rubbed it absentmindedly. If she wanted to get close to her favorites, she had to earn their trust. But the Xianzhou wasn't the Express, and that trust wouldn't be easy to win.

She decided to take things one step at a time!

Why worry about so much? Wasn't she the type to fight whenever she was dissatisfied? When had she become so hesitant? This wasn't like her at all.

Without another word, Bai Tang put everything away.

She could just act confident, like she had with Aventurine!

What was there to fear?

With her worries gone, Bai Tang decided to do her own thing. She peered into the water to see if there were any fish. Klee loved blast fishing, so she would give it a try too, to see if it was as fun as people said.

She pulled out a reduced-power, black-tech bomb she had developed earlier, the kind that could blast a fish until it was cooked. She watched until she spotted a fish, then immediately tossed it in, making the same cheerful sound as Klee:

"Da da da~"

"Boom!"

Water erupted and shot skyward, spraying wildly more than ten meters into the air like a white wall exploding apart. Fish that had been lively moments before landed in front of her, half charred and half raw.

Bai Tang picked one up, hesitating a little.

Could she eat this?

The next second, she decided to test it for poison and took a bite. Wow, it was actually salty and savory, with no fishy taste, and tender and juicy besides. It was a feast for her taste buds.

Wonderful!

She helped herself to a few more and ate with relish. Afterward, feeling dizzy, she lay down beneath Yubie's statue, curled up, and went to sleep.

Before falling asleep, she was still thinking that no wonder Klee liked blast fishing; the fish really did taste good, though there was something a little wrong with her sense of taste, with teen mode turned on. Klee might not necessarily have gone blast fishing because she liked eating the fish, either.

Bai Tang hadn't paid any particular attention and, it could be said, hadn't activated her ability. She had no idea that someone had already arrived and watched her let loose.

That someone was Jing Yuan.

After learning that Bai Tang had been lost, Jing Yuan began to wonder where the little fox might have run off to. Since no one had seen her, she must have gone somewhere without people.

Considering Baiheng's appearance as well, he guessed that she had most likely gone to Scalegorge Waterscape. So he hurriedly skipped work and came here, under the respectable pretext of monitoring an unknown individual.

When he arrived, the first thing he saw was the broken glaive Bai Tang held and rubbed. Its undamaged parts were familiar enough that Jing Yuan recognized it at a glance.

Wasn't that the Stonefire Dreambody he wielded?

Jing Yuan was so familiar with the signature weapon Yingxing had given him that he was certain the glaive was the Stonefire Dreambody, not an expensive imitation.

Half the conspiracy theories in his head were overturned in an instant.

This purple-haired fox was probably not a weapon aimed at the Luofu. No matter who it was, no one could forge a top-tier weapon identical to Yingxing's, much less one containing a fragment of the sky-felling light arrow fired by the Reignbow Arbiter.

Who would go to such lengths just to deal with the Luofu? Did they have a death wish?

He swept his gaze over the other eight things beside Bai Tang one by one, his heart growing colder the more he saw.

What had happened to the Luofu in the future?

The longevity lock he had personally placed on Yanqing, the gourd Bailu often wore, the damaged third eye from Fu Xuan's forehead, the game table beloved by Qingque, the slacker under Fu Xuan, the fan of Tingyun, the chief representative of the Sky-Faring Commission's merchant guild Minghuo, and a standard-issue command flag from the Ten-Lords Commission.

Of the remaining two, one looked like something belonging to a Cloud Knight transferred from the Yaoqing, and the other looked like it belonged to an outworlder who livestreamed.

No matter how he looked at them, they seemed like mementos of the dead.

And Bai Tang was downcast as she rubbed his damaged blade, a clear sign that their relationship was "not simple."

He had been about to step forward, but stopped at that moment and silently thought things over. Seeing her so emo that she looked ready to float away, he was just about to interrupt when she seemed to cheer herself up. She grew excited again and quickly put the things away.

The foot he had been about to step out with stopped again.

Then he witnessed an epic display of little-demon behavior. Bai Tang stared at the water for so long that, just as he thought she might be contemplating something drastic, she pulled out a bomb.

Wait!

What is she doing?!!!

Scalegorge Waterscape is full of dragon eggs underneath!!!

If she blows them up, the dragon elders will come after her with their lives!!!

In the end, Jing Yuan looked at the water thrown ten meters high and breathed a sigh of relief. Fortunately, she'd shown some restraint. For a moment, he'd thought it was all over.

He could confirm she wasn't Baiheng. Yes, Baiheng had been a little demon too, but not this much of one. At most, she'd run red lights and wreck Starskiffs; she'd never thought of blast fishing, let alone the kind that made his heart race like this.

Jing Yuan watched this little demon happily pick up fish that were obviously inedible and eat them with relish, as though they were a rare delicacy.

Leaving aside whether they were dirty after being picked straight off the ground, and whether these fish were edible to begin with, anyone with eyes could tell they couldn't be eaten when they were charred on one side and raw on the other.

She ate five in a row, then apparently got poisoned and collapsed beneath the statue.

Jing Yuan: "..."

Whose child is this?

Jing Yuan's attitude toward Bai Tang had changed again and again. At first, he'd spun conspiracy theories, guessing she might be a potential criminal planning trouble on the Luofu, and that curing the Mara-Struck was a gimmick to draw in her own people.

Then he'd thought she was a Luofu Foxian from the future or another timeline, a pitiable traveler who had brought mementos of the dead here in hopes of changing fate.

Now, whose child was this? Was she an adult? Was she even eighteen?

He hadn't expected her to nearly get herself killed before he even had a chance to question her. If he didn't get her to the Alchemy Commission quickly, he was afraid she might stop breathing.

They were out in the wilderness, so he could only carry her himself. Sigh.

As Jing Yuan approached, he noticed something was wrong. He was an Emanator, after all, and could clearly sense the chaotic energy inside Bai Tang, as though it were fighting itself.

When he picked her up, she was so light that she seemed weightless. It wasn't a normal weight for a person.

He would have to ask Bailu about the details.

Before leaving, his gaze swept indifferently over the few stiff, dead fish on the ground, and the corners of his lips dipped slightly. This child just loved finding random things to eat. Once he found out who her guardian was, he would have to bring it up with them.

After all, she was a young Foxian of the Xianzhou.

Suddenly, his attention was caught by something Bai Tang seemed to have forgotten to put away: a brick-sized liquid glitter charm with an image of him drinking in the background.