"Mei, you always say I've got no filter, but look at Kiana. Doesn't that little wench's mouth stab people right in the lungs too?"
So he whispered to Mei, trying to lure a third-party force into the battlefield.
Seeing through A Li's rotten intentions, Miss Mei merely smiled without speaking. Kiana, meanwhile, snorted. "You're such an adult, yet you're tattling to the parent!"
There was no hiding the smugness in her tone.
She had always been suppressed by this guy before. This time, she had finally pulled one back.
This was a great victory for the Kaslana spirit!
Facing the adorable little Kiana whose tail was practically sticking up into the sky, Fu Li's eyes shifted.
"Pretty soft."
"What's pretty soft?"
"I mean, it feels pretty soft on my back."
The great Lady Kaslana froze, and a crimson flush suddenly spread across her pretty face.
She scrambled down from Fu Li using both hands and feet, planted one hand on her hip, and fired off a string of insults. "Creepy loser! Pah! You pervert!"
"A real pervert wouldn't point that out. They'd be thrilled to have a woman crawling all over them." Fu Li glanced at her twice. "Correction—they'd be thrilled to have a super cute white-haired, blue-eyed girl crawling all over them."
Kiana, embarrassed and flustered, pulled out her bat.
"Hey! The Fourth-Dimensional Skirt and Galaxy Bat are both mine. Isn't it a little inappropriate to use them to start a fight with me?"
"Inappropriate? How is it inappropriate? If you ask me, using them to teach a smooth-talking pervert like you a lesson is called giving you a taste of your own Kiana medicine!—Take a swing from Great Sage Kiana!"
"Docking your pay for that homophone pun!"
Seeing Fu Li and Kiana about to come to blows again after just a few words, Mei thought that people really did flock together.
She stepped forward to separate the boy and girl who were tangling together. Thinking that this household would be doomed sooner or later without her, she soothed them. "Alright, alright. We've walked so far that our stomachs are growling. Why don't we go see what everyone's looking at? Maybe a new shop opened with twenty percent off everything."
"Hmph! I'll let it go for Mei's sake and not argue with a creepy loser like you!"
Kiana would always give Mei face.
"You two go ahead. I need to answer nature's urgent call."
Fu Li said he needed to take care of a physiological need. After leaving them with a "call me if anything happens," he hurried toward a public restroom in the distance.
"You said you'd treat us, so don't you dare run off!"
With an annoyed look, Kiana cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted the reminder. Then she took Mei's hand and plunged into the impenetrable crowd like a sharp sword.
The people who had secured their spots earlier were rather displeased. But when they saw that the ones shoving past them were two breathtakingly beautiful young girls, they generously—though not openly—decided they did not mind.
Before long, the girls reached the very front of the crowd.
Then they discovered that the thing drawing so much attention was not a newly opened shop, but a woman dressed in mourning clothes.
She knelt in the shadows cast by a building beside the street, hands clasped in prayer. Her almond-shaped eyes were lowered in sorrow, while black gauze concealed half her face and obscured her features. Her entire being radiated a captivating air of grief and tragic beauty.
Mei raised her meteor-and-moon-shaped brows and took out her delicate little phone to check the time.
—March 27, 2014, 11:35 A.M.
She put away her phone and wondered, I didn't transmigrate or anything! Why is such a bizarre scene appearing beside a sidewalk in a developed country in the twenty-first century?
Kiana, however, was different. At that moment, she was staring fixedly at the enormous objects wrapped in black translucent fabric on the woman's chest.
Conservatively estimated, those had to be D-cups!
What if she buried her face in them...
The strawberry-flavor-loving female hooligan swallowed several times, only to get slapped on the back of the head.
Smack!
"Victim"
Smack!
"Ow! What was that for?!!!"
Clutching the spot where she had been hit, Kiana glared at the newcomer and waved her pink fists, clearly meaning, "If you don't give me an explanation, then I'll give you one!"
Didn't she know how much psychological trauma such a huge slap could cause an underage girl?!
"Your eyes were practically glued to her. With so many people around, aren't you embarrassed?"
Silvery-gray hair as pure as snow cascaded down like tassels, while pale violet eyes, clear as gemstones, rippled with breathtaking beauty.
The culprit behind Kiana's sneak attack possessed beauty on the level of an artwork. Her exquisitely curved figure stretched the white shirt beneath her women's suit jacket taut, while her slender, graceful legs were wrapped entirely in thirty-denier black pantyhose. Higher up was an incredibly alluring office-lady pencil skirt.
Kiana's eyes went blank again, and she nearly forgot that she had come charging over to demand an explanation.
Fortunately, Miss Mei beside her was not like some dumb grasshopper who spent all day muttering absurd nonsense such as, "What is marriage? Both characters have the female radical, which means marriage is a ritual for two women to be together!"
She spoke up. "Ma'am."
"Blair." Bronya, disguised as an adult, said flatly, "You may call me that."
"Very well, Miss Blair."
Mei wore a flawless, professional smile and clearly had no intention of introducing herself. "I admit that our idiot's reaction just now was indeed somewhat rude, and afterward I will properly reprimand her to prevent similar mistakes... However, we are all strangers, yet in broad daylight you singled out and punished only one weak young woman. Doesn't that make you seem a little too eager to pick on the weak while fearing the strong?"
As she spoke, her gaze swept across the surroundings.
It was as though she were saying, So many ill-intentioned people are leering at this poor widow-to-be. Since you are so brave, why not beat every last one of them too?
As the saying went, mourning clothes made a woman prettier.
Leaving aside the half of her face concealed by black gauze, the kneeling young woman had an absolutely stunning figure.
Combined with the fitted Western mourning outfit she wore, quite a few men had been drawn in by exactly that. They crowded closer with wicked, lewd looks in their eyes, apparently intending to "get a share."
Such scenes were commonplace here. Far East society had a special group known as God-Waiting Girls. For various reasons, these girls left their homes and wandered the streets. As long as someone offered them free lodging and meals, that person could become a "god" in their eyes, and they would drag their suitcases home with them.
As for what happened after going home... Ah, it was fine, nothing would happen. Trust me, the odds were dripping!
Thus, in the eyes of many onlookers, the reason this woman was making such a grand spectacle of herself was merely to gain more leverage in the negotiations to come.
In short, she was artificially inflating the price.
"These guys sure know how to play. That's what you're thinking right now, isn't it?"
Blair crossed her arms. Her silver-gray hair, tied into a ponytail, naturally draped down and split into two Roman curls at the ends.
"I never said that."
After her initial surprise, Mei realized that the Far East had its own unique conditions and smiled softly.
"Unfortunately, you guessed wrong." Blair snapped her fingers. "Kiyono isn't some filthy woman who casually sells her body. She was forced into hawking herself on the street because she truly had no other options."
"What do you mean?"
Having come back to her senses, Kiana scratched the back of her head. The moment she heard that the other party had been forced into such a situation, blue flames representing fairness and justice immediately ignited in her crystal-clear eyes.
"Do you know about the Raiden Ryoma embezzlement case?" Blair answered her own question. "You should. In Changkong City, where ME Inc.'s roots run deep, it was known by practically everyone."
Kiana froze and instinctively looked toward Mei beside her.
The girl's face abruptly turned pale.
Four months ago, on November 16, 2013, ME Inc. president Raiden Ryoma had been arrested by the police on charges of "defrauding approximately 3.4 billion US Dollars under the pretext of financing the development of ultra-high-frequency electromagnetic field containment."
3.4 billion US Dollars—what kind of concept was that?
To put it bluntly, if a small or medium-sized country like Cambodia suddenly took a hit like that, there was a considerable chance its government would go bankrupt on the spot.
And since it was fraud, there were bound to be a great many victims.
"Kiyono's husband was involved in that project. Because he blindly believed in the business legend Raiden Ryoma had built over more than a decade, he not only mortgaged their house deed and all their savings, but even borrowed multiple high-interest loans."
Looking at Kiyono kneeling there, Blair could not help sighing softly. "When the financial bubble burst and Raiden Ryoma was arrested and imprisoned, her husband was devastated. Under pressure from every side, he hanged himself."
The death of that gambling-addicted scumbag made Kiana instinctively want to clap and cheer. But when she caught sight of Mei's pale face and guilty expression from the corner of her eye, she forcibly swallowed it back down.
She comforted her, "Miss Kiyono is so pretty. She can just find another good man to marry!"
"Oh, you..." Blair pressed a hand to her forehead, utterly speechless at the length of this girl's reaction time. "Didn't you hear what I just said? That dead bastard borrowed more than one astronomical high-interest loan before he died."
Kiana suddenly understood. "So Miss Kiyono came out onto the street to seek help because she had nowhere else to turn?"
"Exactly."
"This won't do." Kiana frowned and muttered to herself, "We have to help her."
"Mm." Mei nodded softly.
She could not simply ignore the debts of sin her father had incurred.
Bronya, disguised as an adult under the alias Blair, raised an eyebrow at this and gave the potbellied man on her right, who had spoken frivolously before, a meaningful look.
The man grinned upon seeing it and withdrew the foot he had been about to step forward with.
According to the plan they had made earlier, his next move should have been to play the role of a wealthy mine owner and spend lavishly to win Kiyono, disrupting the girls' thoughts and prompting them to draw their swords and help without thinking.
Now, however, it seemed that this white-haired girl's sense of justice was off the charts. There was no need for him, a mere background actor, to give her any further push.
But on second thought, it was precisely because this girl bore the Kaslana name that Commander Bronya, wary of the other party's formidable strength, had chosen diplomacy before force. Rather than directly arrest Raiden Mei, she used the girl's guilt and sympathy to set a trap, luring her into a carefully laid net to capture her like a turtle in a jar.
In a sense, this outcome had been inevitable.
"Experience Count Glasses"
Bronya liked people like Kiana. It was not only because Kiana's willingness to stand up for justice had saved her a lot of trouble, but also because Bronya simply admired people who carried fairness and justice in their hearts.
Bronya also hated people like that. At the very least, she absolutely did not want an idiotic grasshopper who could be led around with just a few words and obediently act according to a third party's wishes.
Still, thanks to her, the operation to capture Raiden Mei could proceed quietly instead of turning into a brawl in a busy downtown area and attracting a heap of unnecessary trouble.
All they had to do next was guide the two of them into the trap Kiyono had already surrounded with an inescapable net, and it would be like Qin Shi Huang touching an electric wire—winning beyond belief—
"But before that."
Kiana reached into her Fourth-Dimensional Skirt, rummaged around left and right, and pulled out an utterly ordinary pair of non-prescription glasses.
She muttered, "First, I need to verify whether they're lying."
Bronya/Kiyono/the Anti-Entropy employee disguised as a rich businessman: !!!
Danger!
Yes, the Kaslana Family prided itself on being the people's shield, and every Kaslana carried that creed through their life.
Whether it was Kallen Kaslana five hundred years ago or Sigfried Kaslana during the Second Honkai, they were all the same.
However, that absolutely did not mean they were easy to use as pawns.
What was more, Kiana had wandered alone for four whole years. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, she had suffered more losses than many people had eaten meals. There had to be a limit to how often she could forget a lesson after learning it.
She put on the glasses and looked again carefully—
At that very moment, an Arabic numeral slowly appeared above everyone's heads in the girl's eyes.
For example, Mei had a zero above her head;
Kiana herself, reflected in the lenses, also had a zero;
Bronya, using the alias Blair, likewise had a zero.
Everyone else was a mixed bag, with both single-digit and double-digit numbers. Kiana even saw one person with a three-digit number.
Whoa! Has that person done it that many times?!
She was thoroughly shocked, then turned her gaze toward Kiyono in mourning clothes.
"You're lying!!!"
The Experience Count Glasses, one of the many utterly useless strange items Kiana possessed.
As its name suggested, it showed the number of times people had experience making love.
At that very moment, the number displayed above Kiyono's head was zero.
Before you continue