"Have you... ever looked up at the stars at night?" Xia Fan asked slowly after a moment of silence.
Faced with this utterly unrelated question, Chu Pu was somewhat at a loss.
Still, she answered truthfully. "Of course. Sorcery Arts include spells closely tied to celestial phenomena. Though I'm not skilled in them, I've studied them a little."
"What if I told you that all those stars are fake?"
"What did you say?" Chu Pu could not help freezing. "Fake?"
"Not just the stars—the sun and moon are as well. Or, in a sense, you have never seen a real day or night, nor have you seen a real sky."
Was he... joking?
Chu Pu stared into his eyes, trying to discern Xia Fan's thoughts.
Had it been anyone else, she would have taken such words for mockery and flicked her sleeves as she left. Even just a few days earlier—say, if this question had come up when they first met—she would have done exactly that. But after traveling through the underground, Chu Pu found herself unable to disregard a single word this man said.
Even if it sounded so wildly absurd.
No, the Yuheng Envoy's heart skipped a beat. The key was not whether what he said was true, but rather—
"How did you determine what was real and what was fake?"
"Because I have seen it," Xia Fan replied succinctly.
To Chu Pu's surprise, she could not hear the slightest trace of guilt in those words.
"Can you let me see it too?" Since that was the case, she decided to cut straight to the heart of the matter.
Yet he refused her. "Unless you pass the Affairs Bureau's assessment and become one of us. Otherwise, the more you know about this, the greater the danger to yourself."