"Lu Mingfei? What's wrong?" the girl beside him asked softly.
Lu Mingfei took a deep breath and looked around.
He was in a classroom, in the afternoon. Every student wore a uniform. Some were sleeping, others had their heads buried in books. The rustle of pages, coughs, and quiet conversations flooded his ears. Nothing was out of place. The previous lesson's notes were still on the blackboard. Lu Mingfei thought back. He wasn't on cleaning duty today.
Eight large Chinese characters hung at the front of the classroom: "Build your strength, then shine. Heaven rewards diligence."
A round clock hung between the two halves of the motto. It showed eight minutes until class began.
But as Lu Mingfei stared at the ticking second hand, that sense of wrongness returned.
He had clearly had a very, very long dream. How could he have been asleep on his desk for only two minutes?
It was a strange feeling, an emptiness in his chest. He vaguely felt he had been doing something important, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember. What important thing could there be? Cleaning duty? Homework?
"Lu Mingfei, could you help me with this problem?" Chen Wenwen asked.
The girl sharing his desk lowered her eyes, her lashes distinct in the sunlight.
Lu Mingfei could only set aside his unease and pick up a pen to work through the problem she handed him.
He happened to have solved a similar problem before. Whoever had written this one had merely changed the numbers and the scenario. He worked out the answer in no time, then mentally checked the arithmetic twice. Once he was sure it was correct, he handed his neatly written solution back to Chen Wenwen.
Everything was fine. He was a senior in high school. What could matter more than studying?
Yet that faint sense of wrongness kept crawling through the depths of his marrow like ants. Unable to shake it, he closed his eyes and concentrated. Then the classroom suddenly fell quiet. The math teacher walked in carrying exam papers and lesson plans, dumped the heavy pile on the lectern, and lifted his cup to take a sip of tea.
"Who's on cleaning duty?" Just as Lu Mingfei had expected, whoever was responsible today was about to get scolded.
The round-bodied Xu Yanyan jogged up to the front, picked up the eraser, and vigorously wiped away the vocabulary and long sentences the English teacher had left on the board.
Everyone waited for him. The math teacher began in a slow drawl, "As I've always said, I don't mind if you waste a dozen seconds of your own time. But multiply that by the dozens of people in this class, and how much time have you wasted?"
So far, Lu Mingfei had predicted everything that happened without opening his eyes.
He felt more and more certain that what he wanted to find wasn't any of these things before him. Not the desk, not the math problems, not the thick study guides and exercise books piled on his desk, not Chen Wenwen, not these high school students, not the teacher, not... this classroom!
He suddenly stood up.
"Lu Mingfei, do you have a question?"
The balding math teacher sounded displeased.
"You're wasting everyone's..."
The middle-aged man's mocking words abruptly stopped. Lu Mingfei ignored him completely, left his seat, and walked out of the classroom with a bewildered expression. Standing in the doorway, he looked left and right down the corridor, then shook his head and muttered to himself.
The math teacher felt his scalp prickle.
He screwed the lid back onto his cup, motioned for the students to keep quiet, and cautiously approached Lu Mingfei.
"Mingfei? Are you feeling unwell?" He leaned down beside Lu Mingfei, keeping his voice as gentle as possible. "Would you like me to take you to the hospital?"
He watched Lu Mingfei's expression.
The pressure of senior year was intense. Students in previous years had suffered mental breakdowns. Their parents had insisted the school was at fault, even using connections in the city to sue it, causing an enormous uproar.
An investigation had later uncovered actual corporal punishment and abuse by teachers. Every teacher assigned to that class that year had been disqualified from awards and promotions. The homeroom teacher had even been demoted, transferred out, and permanently barred from frontline teaching.
Lu Mingfei ignored him. Instead, he suddenly smiled.
The afternoon sunlight spread gently across every stone slab in the school corridor like golden brocade. Everything gleamed, comforting and relaxing, like a faded old photograph.
He remembered.
This was his favorite scene, a beautiful moment from his memories that he had imagined while staring drowsily into a campfire.
Seeing Lu Mingfei grin foolishly, the math teacher immediately went on high alert.
"Quick, quick!" He called over several boys nearby. "Hold him down together. Be careful."
Several boys came into the corridor, but for a moment, none dared approach. Lu Mingfei's smile faded. He stood quietly at the edge of the corridor, gazing at the distant school grounds, then glanced back at them. His eyes were utterly empty, not focused on them at all. It was more like he was looking at dead objects.
Zhao Menghua moved first. He liked Chen Wenwen and had long resented the looks she and Lu Mingfei exchanged.
With someone taking the lead, the others found their courage and rushed forward together to grab Lu Mingfei.
Lu Mingfei suddenly turned and punched Zhao Menghua in the abdomen, making him crouch down clutching his stomach. But he had no time to deal with the others. Several strong boys grabbed his arms, waist, and legs. Under their combined weight, he couldn't avoid being brought down.
Zhao Menghua raised his head, his eyes red. A strand of saliva still clung to the corner of his mouth. Lu Mingfei's punch had hurt so badly that he had spasmed.
Pinned to the ground, Lu Mingfei faced Zhao Menghua directly and saw the intense venom in his eyes.
Zhao Menghua suddenly pulled a set square from his sleeve and lunged at Lu Mingfei.
At that instant, someone stripped a frame out of the world. Before even Zhao Menghua realized it, the ruler he was stabbing toward Lu Mingfei's back had become a sharp knife.
Lu Mingfei suddenly exploded into motion. He seized Zhao Menghua's wrist and twisted hard. Bone ground and snapped with a teeth-aching crunch. Zhao Menghua's wrist bent beyond anything a human could endure. Screaming, he collapsed backward, and the set square in his hand clattered to the floor.
At the same time, Lu Mingfei drove his elbow back. One boy behind him staggered away clutching his chest. Then he threw a punch. A sickening clack of teeth came from above his shoulder, and another boy fell to the ground, curled over. Only two remained clinging to him.
Lu Mingfei slammed into the wall. The boy on his back grunted and let go. He seized the last boy's arm, abruptly rose onto his knees, lowered his body to generate force, and hurled him to the floor with a shoulder throw.
In mere moments, Lu Mingfei had gone from being restrained to leaving every boy curled up on the ground.
The math teacher stood dumbfounded, his mouth opening and closing. For a long while, he couldn't form a complete sentence.
He took out his phone and called the police.
Xia Mi looked grim.
The mirror no longer reflected the Nibelungen, but a school. Every NPC she had just directed to attack Lu Mingfei had been defeated.
"Are you still not done over there?" she asked through gritted teeth. "Does a dragon body that's lost its self-awareness really take this long?"
"Don't worry. The mirror world's rule is equality. As his consciousness gradually awakens, your interference can grow stronger too. But he's inside the mirror, and you're outside. He only gets to lose once," the master of the Alchemical Domain explained. "Don't count on me. I might be the one who needs you to make a breakthrough in the mirror world. You have no idea what I'm facing... One thing is certain now: he's the source of this upheaval."
For a moment, Xia Mi was bewildered.
Could an unconscious Lu Mingfei really be holding his own against a subadult-level alchemical puppet?
The situation was even worse than Xia Mi imagined.
"Lu Mingfei" swung his sword again and again, stepping through an elegant dance. Bloodhound's Fang moved so nimbly in his hand that it hardly seemed like a long blade.
Odin had already been cut in half twice. That golden sword light was profoundly strange. It belonged to none of the five elements.
He had tried forming a wall of water before him, but the blazing golden sword light passed through it like a phantom, unhindered by physical matter.
He swung Gungnir, shattering the brilliant golden arc. As the radiant flames dispersed, he experienced a terrifying illusion, as though his soul were burning.
"Lu Mingfei's" fighting style had changed as well. He no longer relied on his bone wings for ultra-high-speed charges. His movements had become fluid and ethereal, his body rising and falling with the dance of his blade, as though he and the sword had become one.
He spun through the air and swung his sword like a crane dancing alone. Golden flames roared as the blade flashed.
Only Odin, who had fought him, knew how dangerous that beautiful dance was.
Nearly all the surrounding Deadpools had been killed or wounded. "Lu Mingfei" was deliberately clearing out the lesser enemies. He passed beside the hideous monsters as though gently caressing them, piercing their chests or shearing off their heads.
His movements were fluid and precise, following a unique rhythm, full of both power and beauty.
This was a hunt.
Odin was a hunter himself. He had a keen instinct for the presence of his own kind.
He put away Gungnir and drew a heavy greatsword instead. The eternal spear could no longer anchor his opponent's fate. Aside from being sufficiently durable, it was not an ideal weapon.
His aura changed with it. An immense domain unfolded. Fierce winds blasted outward from him in every direction, and black waves surged across the sea.
Facing such power, "Lu Mingfei" stopped circling and lowered his body like a cat preparing to hunt.
Both were poised to strike.
The next instant, black lightning and a golden meteor collided with a thunderous crash. Their blades ground against each other. Watching through Odin's eyes, the observer finally looked directly into Lu Mingfei's oppressive gaze at close range. Its coldness, majesty, and depth were unlike those of dragon eyes.
The scene seemed to reset. The math teacher and the injured students suddenly went blank-faced and returned to the classroom.
Even the police the math teacher had called never arrived, as though the world had forcibly smoothed over the disturbance Lu Mingfei had caused.
But Lu Mingfei knew what had just happened was no hallucination. The instant he saw the knife, he seemed to see through a layer of illusion in this false world. The bloodline within him had immediately awakened to the level of a B-rank hybrid.
He guessed he was inside a dream or some vast Alchemical Domain. This domain had its own rules. Even its creator couldn't interfere at will. Otherwise, they could simply have controlled everyone and killed him while he still had only an ordinary person's strength.
His opponent's interference created flaws in the world. Replacing Zhao Menghua's ruler with a knife, for instance, had restored Lu Mingfei's memories and partially awakened his bloodline.
The rule, then, was very likely "plausibility." If they could plausibly kill him here, perhaps he would truly die.
Implausible actions on Lu Mingfei's part could also create danger, giving his opponent an opening. His best option was to wait until their move created a flaw, then counterattack.
His opponent didn't make him wait long.
The scene returned to an ordinary lesson. Suddenly, the classroom's back door was pushed open. The students assumed it was the dean making rounds. At the sound, those sleeping, reading novels, or playing on their phones immediately sat upright, discreetly slipping the evidence into pockets and drawers.
The biology teacher reacted first. She frowned at the person in a black security uniform, took out her phone in preparation to call the police, and calmly asked with a polite smile, "Hello, can I help you?"
Lu Mingfei reacted second. He remained seated.
The security guard suddenly drew a gun. Shouting for everyone to get down, he fired at Lu Mingfei.
This was the instant Lu Mingfei had been waiting for. He had been counting silently all along. A shudder ran through his body, and he tilted his head to dodge the bullet. The dark red round struck a textbook and burst into crimson smoke.
Frigg Bullets.
Everyone, including the teacher, froze when the muzzle flashed. Fear stunned them all. Only when the guard shouted for them to get down again did they react.
Lu Mingfei leaped onto a desk and hurled the thick study guide in his hand at the guard, jumping across the desktops as he did.
The guard had clearly received professional training at Cassell College. Between shots striking the book, he fired straight into Lu Mingfei's chest.
Flames ignited. Before the bullet could touch his body, it burst.
Word Spirit: King's Flame.
"Damn it, the rift is widening this fast? Is that guy really this unreliable?" the person behind the scenes exclaimed in furious alarm. "I'll have to force it."
Lu Mingfei landed, crouched low, and spun into a high sweeping kick, a killing move from Capoeira. The instant his foot struck the guard's head, the man lost consciousness.
Ignoring everyone trembling in the classroom, he realized his opponent might be able to interfere in ways that matched his level of awakening. A B-rank hybrid corresponded to Cassell College's Executive Department. But would Cassell College really send only one person?
He stepped into the corridor outside the classroom and looked down.