Illumi, Your Waist Is So Soft

As several children entered, the choir began to sing, and a solemn atmosphere enveloped the entire chapel.

Bai Zhu showed no trace of reverence. His gaze swept across the crowd, picking out each female believer waiting in line to be baptized.

Noticing Bai Zhu's attention shift, Illumi narrowed his catlike eyes slightly and activated Gyo.

In his vision, beside the faint auras of ordinary people, several especially conspicuous clusters of life energy twisted and pulsed... from inside those pregnant women!

Their mothers were clearly ordinary people, yet the fetuses in their wombs had been born with Nen! That was highly abnormal.

Just then, Bai Zhu's gaze fixed on something.

At the end of the line stood a young couple. The man wore a fanatical expression and muttered constantly under his breath, while the woman beside him had delicate features but a face filled with struggle and resistance.

"Could it be her?"

Bai Zhu narrowed his eyes. Only when the woman drew closer did he catch sight of the small cross tattoo on the back of her hand, almost hidden beneath her sleeve.

It was her!

At almost the same moment, Illumi noticed the woman as well.

The Nen of the fetus in her womb was similarly faint, but it was far stronger than all the others combined!

"Let's go."

Bai Zhu suddenly stood up, gave the two brothers behind him a look, and headed straight out of the chapel.

Illumi and Milluki exchanged a glance. Without hesitation, they immediately followed.

At the chapel entrance, a blast of cold wind made Milluki shiver just as he was about to ask where they were going.

"Wait."

Bai Zhu stopped, lazily leaning against the stone pillar by the door. As if performing a magic trick, he pulled out a pack of chocolate candies from his pocket and began eating them on his own.

He lifted his chin at Milluki. "Chubby, want some?"

Milluki's eyes lit up. Just as he reached out, a pale hand pressed down on his shoulder, freezing his outstretched paw in midair.

"Who are we waiting for?" Illumi's throat produced a teenage boy's voice despite his stunning disguise as a beautiful married woman. No matter how many times Bai Zhu heard it, it made his whole body feel uncomfortable.

"The couple who were baptized last."

Illumi's brow twitched almost imperceptibly.

"Reason."

"Reason... not really." Bai Zhu chuckled and tilted his chin toward the chapel entrance. "I just think it's interesting. A devout Puritan with a cross tattooed on the back of her hand comes to worship some no-name, backwater church... Don't you think that alone is pretty abnormal?"

He casually stuffed the entire pack of chocolate candies into Milluki's arms.

"Have some. They're not poisoned. Your brother's just too cautious. Must be exhausting to live like that."

Milluki glanced at his eldest brother. Seeing no reaction from him, he tore open the wrapper without a care and happily became a spectator.

Illumi shot his disappointing younger brother a glance before quickly returning his attention to Bai Zhu.

"In the Kakin Kingdom, it is customary for a wife to adopt her husband's faith. That is normal."

"Yes, it's normal. But only devout believers raised in the church from childhood would tattoo crosses on the backs of their hands. Would someone like that marry a heretic? Unless..." Bai Zhu deliberately drew out the last word. "She was deceived, and she loved that man desperately."

"And there's something even more interesting." Bai Zhu shifted the subject, lowering his voice. "Those born with Nen, or who have Nen while still in the womb, are either magical beasts, or..."

He paused and looked straight at Illumi's beautiful face.

"...they're 'outsiders,' right?"

Bai Zhu knew perfectly well: Didn't Illumi's family have one such "foreign thing" hidden away?

The moment those words left his mouth, the air seemed to drop several degrees.

Illumi said nothing. Those hollow catlike eyes merely locked tightly onto Bai Zhu. His grandfather had sent them here to investigate, saying only that this church was "special," without offering specifics. Only now did Illumi connect the dots from Bai Zhu's words.

After a long while, Illumi turned without a word and walked to the other side of the entrance, facing Bai Zhu from afar.

One ate chocolate candies, looking unreliable from head to toe.

The other wore a cold expression, radiating an unmistakable stay-away-from-me aura.

From a distance, they looked like two guardian statues, blocking the chapel entrance just like that.

Wind at the chapel entrance swirled snowflakes through the air.

Ten minutes passed. There was still no sign of their target.

Bai Zhu rubbed the soles of his shoes against the stone steps again and again, itching all over with restlessness. He had never been the type to stand still obediently, and his patience had gone to the dogs ages ago.

He turned to glance at the beautiful woman, Illumi, standing ramrod straight beside him. Forget it. Not worth provoking.

His gaze shifted to Milluki, who was squatting in the corner tinkering with mechanical bugs.

This chubby guy actually had rather handsome phoenix eyes, but the extra fat on his face had squeezed them nearly out of sight. Bai Zhu touched the jawline he had worked so hard to slim down and decided generously not to mock that watermelon-shaped head. After all, eight months ago, he himself had been a cube with equal length, width, and height.

"Hey, Milluki." Bai Zhu strolled over and nudged Milluki's shoe with the tip of his foot. "Can I borrow that bug of yours to play with?"

Milluki pulled his hand back and shoved the mechanical cockroach straight into his pocket.

"Get lost. This thing is dangerous. What the hell do you know!"

Dangerous?

Bai Zhu was immediately intrigued. As a seasoned shut-in with a serious collecting obsession, he simply could not suppress his curiosity toward such intricate mechanical creations. If he could borrow it and take it apart for a look, maybe the system would even pop up an exploration achievement.

"Cheapskate." Bai Zhu bent down and reached for it. "Let me see it, or I'll beat you up right now."

Milluki rolled half a meter away and rolled his eyes so hard they nearly flipped over.

"Stop trying to scare me. I said no, and no means no! I admit I can't beat you, but if you've got the guts, go beat up my brother! See if he doesn't carve you up!"

"Fuck..." Bai Zhu choked on his breath, leaving thirty thousand words unspoken.

Just then, the sound of people talking came from inside the chapel.

Bai Zhu immediately swallowed the words at his lips and straightened up.

Believers emerged in twos and threes. The young couple came out at the very end.

The man looked exhilarated, muttering lines from hymns without pause as he took huge strides. He dragged the delicate-looking woman along by force. Her face was even paler than during the baptism, and she staggered as she walked.

The two descended the steps and turned into a narrow alley at the corner.

After they had gone more than ten meters away.

Go.

Bai Zhu exchanged a look with Illumi, and they swiftly followed.

Just as they were about to turn into the alley, Bai Zhu took two steps to Illumi's side and, without warning, wrapped an arm around Illumi's disguised slender waist. Not only did he wrap his arm around it, he even pulled Illumi heavily against himself with full commitment to the act.

The air fell deathly silent.

Even the wind in the alley stopped.

Bai Zhu could clearly feel that what he held beneath his hand was not some soft body at all, but a block of C4 ready to explode at any moment.

An intensely frigid Nen aura erupted without restraint, piercing Bai Zhu's surface layer of spiritual-pressure protection like needles.

Milluki, following behind them, nearly had his eyes pop out of their sockets. His legs went weak, and he almost dropped to his knees in the snow. The way he looked at Bai Zhu was exactly how one looked at a corpse.

He was really going to die.

Bai Zhu's scalp went numb. He forcefully suppressed the instinct to turn and run, pressed his head close, and hurriedly whispered an explanation.

"Don't attack! Don't attack! The alley ahead is too narrow. If the three of us walk straight in like this, we'll stand out too much!"

He tightened his grip around Illumi's waist and leaned close to his ear in a feigned intimate gesture.

"Pretend we're a couple! It's cover for the tail! Got it?!"

He could clearly feel the body beside him stiffen to the extreme. Those hollow, emotionless cat eyes slowly turned, their dead gaze falling inch by inch upon Bai Zhu's dog paw.