The speaker's voice was slick and greasy, as though a hundred pounds of honey had been mixed with a thousand pounds of lard, fermented with yeast for three months, then blended with another hundred pounds of fresh sugar, kneaded into a thumb-sized pill, and stuffed down someone's throat. That was what his voice sounded like.
So sweet it was cloying, so oily and slick it made one want to chop him to death with a single stroke—this was the sort of voice that belonged only in nightmares.
With that unpleasant voice came a young man in a multicolored robe, dressed like a giant rooster. He flipped up from below the terrace, sat laughingly atop the railing, and nodded carelessly at Lin Qi. "Eastern Harmony King, right? We should be family, shouldn't we?"
Holding the stiff-bodied Princess Qingli in his arms, Lin Qi merely cast the man a sidelong glance from the corner of his eye.
He looked to be in his twenties, with an utterly ordinary face—except his complexion was white enough, the ghastly white of a corpse soaked in water for half a month. One eyebrow was thick and the other thin, one high and one low. He had a sharp monkey face, cheeks visible from the back of his head, a thin pointed nose bridge, a tiny pointed mouth, and a mouthful of small, fine white teeth. Everything about him looked particularly awkward.
His multicolored robe was woven from countless thumb-thick ribbons of colored silk, and at least a hundred dangling ornaments hung from it. Whenever he moved, these strips swayed wildly with his body, making for a dazzlingly irritating sight.
What displeased Lin Qi was that the moment this young man appeared, he gave Princess Qingli and Elysian Heaven each a bare, undisguised look of greed—his gaze