An Extra Pair of Eyes Within Five Hundred Meters

An Extra Pair of Eyes Within Five Hundred Meters

The vertical pupil looked more like a child's doodle, just a few simple lines standing in the black space like a picture pasted onto it, utterly lifeless.

But the next second, the vertical pupil vanished in the reverse order in which it had formed: first the circle in the middle, then the arcs on either side. Yet when it had shrunk to the last point, the lines began to grow again. This time, they no longer looked drawn in white, but had the texture of something carved by a blade. The lines first joined to form two arcs, then extended inward from the center to meet in a circle. But just as they were about to complete it, they stopped and began to retract.

Once it had shrunk to a point again, the point hovered motionless for ten seconds before it started to move.

This time, the lines were much thinner. They looked neither like a single brushstroke nor as deeply carved as before. If he had to describe them precisely, they were more like a thin sheet of metal, gleaming white. Two layers lay flush against each other, each drawing an arc that represented an eye socket on its outer face. But as the lines extended inward from the midpoint of each arc, the originally flat pupil became three-dimensional, forming a curved surface on both sides.

It was still a simple vertical pupil made of lines, only now it had a front and a back. It looked more like two eyes placed back-to-back, sharing a single, double-sided pupil.

Xu Huo turned to look at the vertical pupil. As his eyes moved from side to side, it glided along with them. Though it had no eyeball, the curved circle in the