That's Not Going Too Far, Is It?

"You want to wear a mask on the livestream?"

After hearing Zhao Xing'er's idea, Yue Wen's first reaction was that it was a bit of a shame. Her looks would probably have won her plenty of fans.

But since she had said she'd run away from home and was worried her family would find her, Yue Wen couldn't really object. He only said, "Then discuss it with the media company. If they're still willing to sign you like that, you can stay on the project."

"Mm." Zhao Xing'er nodded. "That's my only option."

Yue Wen ventured, "Sorry to pry, but what exactly happened between you and your family? Why did things get so bad? If it wasn't anything serious, wouldn't it be better to talk it out? You're family, after all."

"Boss, you don't have a family. You wouldn't understand." Zhao Xing'er shook her head solemnly.

"I shouldn't have bothered worrying about you." Yue Wen rolled his eyes. Why was she still coming after me?

"My relationship with my dad is beyond repair," Zhao Xing'er said. "How should I put it? It's practically a blood feud over a father's death."

"What?" Yue Wen asked. "You made your dad so mad he wanted to kill himself?"

"Huh?" Zhao Xing'er blinked. "How did you know?"

Yue Wen shook his head. "If I were your dad, I'd probably have that thought several times a day."

"You have no idea how unreasonable he is." Bringing it up put an indignant look on Zhao Xing'er's face again.

"I was on a graduation trip with a few girlfriends. We were happily rowing on a lake when a Snake Demon suddenly came out of the water and scared them. I caught it with my bare hands and ripped its tendons out. That's not going too far, is it?"

"Hmm..." Yue Wen gave his assessment cautiously. "It sounds a little bloody, but there's nothing wrong with killing evil spirits..."

"Then we found out the Snake Demon had been released by some cultivators on the next boat. They belonged to a few minor local clans and deliberately let a Demon Beast loose to scare us so they could come over and chat us up. After I killed the Snake Demon, they actually came over and kept demanding compensation, saying they wouldn't let us leave otherwise." Zhao Xing'er continued, "So I broke eight legs between the three of them. That's not going too far, is it?"

Yue Wen counted on his fingers, a trace of fear appearing on his face. "Your methods were a little brutal, but I suppose you were punishing evil and upholding justice."

"Their families came to my house, and my dad actually told me to go apologize. When I refused, he even chewed me out!" Zhao Xing'er's eyebrows shot up. "I got so angry I smashed the beds. That's not going too far, is it?"

"Haha." Yue Wen laughed. "Compared to what you did before, smashing a bed is nothing. Even smashing up the whole bedroom wouldn't be going too far."

"Well, they weren't beds in my bedroom," Zhao Xing'er said. "They were the beds in those guys' hospital ward."

"?" Yue Wen fell silent, then asked slowly, "You didn't smash them along with the beds, did you?"

"They happened to be there." Zhao Xing'er shrugged.

"How surprising. People with all their legs broken were lying in hospital beds. What a coincidence." Yue Wen held his forehead. "Even gangsters don't usually chase people into hospitals to hack them up, do they?"

"And over something that trivial, my dad actually wanted to confine me!" Zhao Xing'er said angrily again.

"That really was going too far," Yue Wen said. "It's not like the Supernatural Affairs Bureau doesn't have prisons."

Zhao Xing'er said, "I had no choice. To escape, I had to cause a little chaos."

"Basically, I set off a Demon-Slaying Talisman Technique bomb stored in our family's armory. It only blew up half a mountain... then I took advantage of the chaos to quietly swipe a few weapons. I also blew open the barrier around the Demon Beast enclosure so they'd focus on catching the beasts. Then I set fires around the residential area, hid a few of the younger kids in a cellar and told them to come out that night, and left a ransom note to distract everyone... I also got my third uncle drunk on Spirit Wine and used his phone to invite his affair partners and my third aunt over for a meeting... swapped the virgin boy urine my maternal uncle used for refining medicine with my fourth grandfather's Ginseng Wine... went back and kicked my third uncle in the face... chewed up a few of the Spirit Plants and flowers my second aunt grew... went back and slapped my third uncle a few times..."

"Hold on." Yue Wen raised a hand. "Everything else was to cause chaos, but with your third uncle it was just pure hatred?"

Zhao Xing'er spent nearly half an hour recounting everything she'd done before leaving. Finally, she finished. "I think that was all. Once I was done, the whole household was in chaos. It was probably days before anyone noticed I'd run away."

At the end, she looked up at Yue Wen. "That's not going too far, is it?"

"Not remotely." Yue Wen nodded. "You're right. We can never go home for the rest of our lives. Even if your family goes on TV crying and begging you to come back, they're definitely trying to lure you home so they can execute you by a thousand cuts."

Good grief.

A couple of days earlier, Yue Wen had still been wondering what the Demon Race was actually like. Now he felt he had a concrete example. Even a demon king descending upon the world couldn't do much worse.

Still, Zhao Xing'er's story had reminded him of something. He'd previously seen a post on the Cultivation Chat forum in which the head of the Zhao Family apologized to his runaway daughter and hoped she would come home soon.

Now Zhao Xing'er looked highly suspicious.

So he asked, "Don't tell me you're the runaway young lady from the Zhao Family in the Heavenly Capital?"

"Aiya!" Zhao Xing'er suddenly covered her face, stamping her feet as she backed away. "What're ya talkin' like that for? Bullshit! I ain't no Zhao Family young lady!"

You great big idiot, Xing'er!

Even your accent changed!

Zhao Xing'er fled downstairs as fast as her legs could carry her.

She really was that young lady from a cultivation clan. That came as something of a surprise to Yue Wen.

His shabby little agency had actually attracted someone who could make the trending list on Cultivation Chat. It felt rather surreal. Although the Zhao Family only counted as a second-tier power in the cultivation world as a whole, compared with the Immortal Sects and cultivation clans in Jiangcheng City, it was an absolute behemoth.

But after hearing her story, Yue Wen felt that her relationship with the Zhao Family might not be any closer than his own from now on-he might be an insignificant stranger to them, but she was their sworn enemy.

From that perspective, she was right not to show her face.

After chuckling, Yue Wen turned back, closed his door, and continued studying his newly acquired visualization diagram.

Shadow-Shifting Talisman Art.

Once he had sat down cross-legged, he turned his hand over and summoned three palm-length Shadow Talismans. They were heavy, with chilling edges and a dangerous sheen flowing across their surfaces.

Holding them in reality gave him a much stronger sense of their sharpness than watching the demonstration had. These Shadow Talismans might be even more lethal than he'd imagined.

With the Shadow Talismans in hand, Yue Wen pictured the visualization diagram and instantly immersed himself in it.

Boom-

It was a great hall formed from black-and-purple runes, suspended high in the sky. Yue Wen stood inside it, holding the three Shadow Talismans.

Outside the hall, high in the heavens, countless Black-Armored Monsters charged at him menacingly. They wore interlinked armor like ancient soldiers, with wings on their backs and spears and dagger-axes in their hands!

Although he had studied visualization diagrams several times before, this was his first time encountering a scene like this. Everything felt incredibly real. For an instant, he felt that if one of these Black-Armored Monsters drove a spear through him, his soul really would be annihilated here!

He tried to invoke the Sword-Controlling Technique to fight them, only to find that he couldn't summon his Flying Sword. It was as though that connection had vanished from the world.

In desperation, Yue Wen flicked his hand and sent a Shadow Talisman spinning outward. Hiss-

The razor-sharp Shadow Talisman instantly sliced through the Black-Armored Monster flying at him from the front. With a bang, its black armor exploded into a cloud of black sand that fell through the air.

But that was only one. More than a dozen Black-Armored Monsters attacked from every direction at once. Yue Wen could only throw his two remaining Shadow Talismans, killing the two in the lead. The monsters behind them swarmed forward. At this moment of life and death, Yue Wen sensed three strands of spirit breath responding to him from afar.

They were the three Shadow Talismans!

He instantly activated one of them. His figure flickered, and in a flash he appeared in midair, right where the Shadow Talisman was.

So this was how the shifting worked.

But after he had thrown that Shadow Talisman, it had been falling from high in the sky and had yet to reach the ground. Yue Wen tried to rise into the air on the wind, only to discover that he couldn't even perform the simplest act of using true qi to stay aloft.

It seemed the Shadow Talismans were the only technique he could use in this world.

Wait...

He flailed his arms and legs, trying to grab something. Unfortunately, all three Shadow Talismans were falling from high in the sky. He had absolutely no way to save himself.

Bang!

His last conscious impression in that world was a dull explosive sound beside his ears. It seemed to be the sound of his own body splattering.

"Ah." Yue Wen opened his eyes in his room and looked around, still shaken.

The sensation of falling to his death from ten thousand meters up had been far too real. He'd almost thought he was actually going to die there.

The Shadow-Shifting Talisman Art's visualization diagram seemed somewhat different. Rather than containing a wealth of complex Dao profundities, it seemed to make him master the use of the Shadow Talismans through repeated trials.

Or perhaps...

This divine ability was built on the mysteries of the Shadow Talismans and wasn't itself particularly profound.

Yue Wen stroked the weighty Shadow Talisman, feeling that the spiritual essence within it was like north sea extreme ice, deep and substantial. The method used to draw these talismans was completely different from that of talismans sold on the market.

The pills and talismans he could buy from Da Long were all like this. Their methods of refinement and effects differed enormously from those of the present age, often producing unexpected results. If he wanted ordinary pills or talismans, Da Long actually didn't have them. Otherwise, Yue Wen wouldn't have needed to go online looking to buy Blazing Flame Powder.

Sometimes Yue Wen even wondered whether that dragon's true form was some mysterious shop connected to another world, or a system from a novel that let him exchange evil-spirit kills for rewards... and it had merely taken on this impressive form to meet him.

After all, the history books said that the Four Seas Dragon Palace held only a small number of Dragonblood People descended from the interbreeding of the two races in ancient times. They possessed the purest true dragon bloodline still alive today.

There were no living true dragons in the Human Realm.

If that really was just a conjured form, next time I should see if we can negotiate a change to a curvy, long-haired, mature beauty, one meter seventy tall, in a tight skirt and black stockings.

That's not going too far, is it?