Water Moon Mirror Splendor (3)

The four words "eat him clean and wipe him dry" struck his heart like ice picks. Chu Shihan's fingers abruptly clenched, his knuckles turning bluish white, and his voice sank so low it seemed water could drip from it. "Explain yourself. What exactly does that mean?"

Startled by the sudden eruption of coldness around him, Flame Fox shrank his neck. His furry paws instinctively gripped the icy floor, the pads of his claws nearly embedding themselves in the cracks.

But when he caught sight of Chu Shihan's taut jawline and the panic desperately suppressed in his eyes, the pleasure of revenge in his own gaze grew wild like weeds.

He even deliberately leaned closer. His fluffy tail slowed, sweeping across the polished floor with a showy air as his voice took on an unpleasantly teasing note. "It means exactly what it says, my dear senior brother."

"My sister has never been skilled at crude killing and life-taking." Tilting his head, he stared at Chu Shihan's increasingly cold, frost-covered profile as though admiring a masterpiece. "What she is truly obsessed with is 'erosion.'"

"Like the gentlest yet most merciless water—it nourishes all things, yet wears through stone; it can awaken everything, yet hasten the fall of a hundred flowers. It is so slow that no one notices. By the time they realize it, they are already sunk deep in the mire. That is the deadliest thing of all."

Flame Fox raised a paw, his hooked claw tips lightly scratching at the hem of Chu Shihan's hanging outer robe. Every faint scraping sound seemed to rake directly across Chu Shihan's taut heartstrings.

"She will patiently wear away all his vigilance and distance, little by little, until he believes Sister is the one person in this world who understands him best, the gentlest