"Your bond can find me—and catch me?"
She raised her head to look at Mu Yunyao, and for the first time, genuine surprise entered her voice.
Mixed within that surprise was a trace of wariness she herself had yet to notice.
Mu Yunyao gripped the peachwood sword and slowly walked toward her.
The pink-white light along the blade continued to flow, bathing his features in a gentle glow like white jade.
Yet his eyes held a fathomless calm.
That calm was like a garden after spring flowers had all fallen. Though the ground was strewn with crimson petals and life filled the eye, deep within it lay the utter desolation left after all things had withered.
"My bond is tied to only one person."
His voice was exceedingly soft, so soft it was like someone lowering his voice for fear of waking something.
"She died, and the bond was severed. But one end of that broken thread is still in my hand, while the other end..."
He raised a hand and pointed to his chest, his fingertip resting over the place beneath the cloth where his heart beat.
"Is tied here."
"When you use the Law of Shadow to evade, every displacement tugs at the empty place at the other end of that broken thread in my heart."
"I can sense your presence. No matter where you hide, that thread tells me something is moving here."
"Though she has left, she is still by my side."
Phantom Shadow's expression changed completely. The change spread from the depths of her vertical pupils across her entire face.
She slowly rose to her feet. Every scale on her tail stood on end like the fur of a startled cat, while her vertical pupils shrank into two hair-thin slits, like ink dots pierced by