Chapter 9: No Bullying
“What do you need me to do?” Zhu Hui asked.
“I need you to let your guard down with me.” Xu Xunyue looked at the chasm in the snow not far away, and at the unsightly black gravel by the ruins, as he mentally called his spiritual body out to work.
“Oh,” Zhu Hui nodded. “I’ll be very cooperative.”
Xu Xunyue glanced at him.
“I know.”
If this conversation were to get out, it would probably make everyone’s jaw drop. The two people who were predicted to be one hundred percent incompatible were actually having such a peaceful, understanding, and even slightly ambiguous conversation.
What Xu Xunyue was more focused on, however, was that flicker of Zhu Hui’s emotion.
The other man clearly didn’t know much about mental soothing. The words and tone of his reply were a bit awkward, an awkwardness that felt… like he was forcing himself to accept an unknown activity, pushing down his unsteady emotions to get ready.
Xu Xunyue indeed did not sense any rejection from Zhu Hui, nor did he sense any rejection from this spiritual landscape.
In other words, Zhu Hui wasn’t rejecting him, but subconsciously resisting the mental activity represented by the term “mental soothing” itself.
But Xu Xunyue didn’t press the issue at this time. He filed the information away in his mind and turned his attention to the snowfield before him.
The contaminated snow was black and hard. The cabin ruins buried within it were decayed and frozen. Beside them was a crack nearly ten meters long, dark and gaping within, making one wonder what would happen if someone fell in.
The ground here was not level. There was a dip on the left, a bump on the right. Some places had little snow, others had a lot. It looked very difficult to clean up.
Even the most renowned mental soothing physician in the Imperial Capital would have to rack their brains over this snowfield, thinking the spiritual landscape was too vast and the environment too harsh to find a starting point.
And yet, despite being so severely injured, the master of this spiritual landscape had never shown any vulnerability, let alone asked anyone for help.
Until an Offensive Guide invaded this place.
Everything began to get better.
Shadows spread out from under Xu Xunyue’s feet, scattering in all directions.
Their color was deeper than the cataclysmic factors that stained the snow, a pure, absolute black. The area they covered was also vast enough to blanket the ruins on the ground. They could also move at will, forming tools or encirclements.
They eroded the ice and snow, entered the earth, each one incredibly proactive, even faster than the Death Icicle, with the air of a cuckoo taking over the nest, ready to become the new masters of the snowfield.
Compared to them, the immobile cataclysmic factors embedded in the snowfield were nothing. The two were on completely different levels. The shadows were a mighty, unstoppable force. It seemed that they were the ones who should be the most feared.
Xu Xunyue was in a good mood.
He knew his emotions were running higher than usual. This was his first time performing mental soothing, and the effect seemed to be even better than he had imagined.
So this was what mental soothing, a required course written into the White Tower’s textbooks for Guides, was like.
It had a grand, subtle feeling that was difficult to describe accurately.
There was no need for a sculptor’s mindset to study and polish it. As long as he followed his instincts and touched, he could do it naturally.
This was also something he had longed to do in his youth.
After experiencing loss, people always wanted to hold on to other things. When Xu Xunyue had survived the first year of the Cataclysm by a stroke of luck and entered the White Tower to study, he had always been very competitive, wanting to be the best at everything, trying everything he could.
Theory classes, practical combat classes, firearms classes, wilderness survival classes… and a few years later, life in the military. Everything he wanted to do, he would do his best to do, until he was satisfied, or until he was certain it was impossible.
Back then at the Guide Academy, Xu Xunyue was a legendary figure for several years, holding the record for the highest scores in many of the academy’s courses.
But some things were not up to him to decide, such as the practical class for mental soothing.
A zero.
A zero!
Before him, no Offensive Guide had appeared in the Empire for several hundred years. The term, like “Dark Sentinel,” had become a mysterious, heroic image in legends.
And this specific attribute of an Offensive Guide couldn’t be tested in the early stages of awakening. It had to be identified and judged over the years, based on a person’s combat style, attack methods, and compatibility with Sentinels.
So, although Xu Xunyue had quickly confirmed the fact that it was “impossible” back then, it couldn’t be said that the fourteen-year-old him hadn’t been happy about it at all.
Individual combat ability was certainly important, but the role of a team could not be ignored. In the military, everyone had to have partners.
A blank compatibility list, difficulty in establishing a mental link with a Sentinel—would that lead to difficulties in joint combat with Sentinels? Would the training time to achieve the same level of coordination be longer?
Of course, later on, Xu Xunyue proved with facts that his team combat ability was just as outstanding as his individual combat ability.
But he had absolutely never expected that after more than a decade, someone would actually appear on his once-blank compatibility list.
Xu Xunyue looked at his spiritual body’s enthusiastic circling and also started to walk.
This place was called a snowfield, but in reality, there was more than just snow. In the less central areas, there were also white fir trees covered in snow and rocks showing their original color.
Xu Xunyue walked for a while in the direction away from the green mountain, then stopped and slowly crouched down.
He propped up a pitifully collapsed plant that was growing between a rock and the white snow.
At the same time, the shadows were also moving quickly.
While Xu Xunyue wasn’t looking, a small portion of them actually broke off and brazenly approached Zhu Hui’s military boots.
The young Sentinel subconsciously took a step back.
The shadows took another step forward.
Zhu Hui had wanted to retreat again, but for some inexplicable reason, he glanced in Xu Xunyue’s direction.
And found that Xu Xunyue wasn’t looking his way at all. Xu Xunyue seemed to be looking at a blade of grass on the ground.
Zhu Hui: “…”
That was right. If Xu Xunyue were deliberately controlling his spiritual body, the shadows’ speed certainly wouldn’t be slow enough for him to notice and easily avoid, taking one step back after another.
So it must be the spiritual body acting on its own.
A spiritual body had its own thoughts to some extent, but it was not a completely independent creature. When their master was focused and giving a command, their wills were completely aligned. But if the master was distracted and not specifically managing them, they might engage in some improvisation.
Faced with the shadows surrounding his feet, Zhu Hui was in a bit of a predicament.
He didn’t know how to describe his current feeling. After all, he always felt that what the shadows were doing was not very much in Xu Xunyue’s style. It was hard to connect the two.
Did he find it malicious? No.
Did he feel repulsed? No.
He didn’t quite understand what Xu Xunyue’s spiritual body meant.
Did it want to play with him?
The snow wolf certainly liked to play with it, but this… that probably wasn’t what it meant, right?
In his moment of hesitation, standing in place for two seconds, the spot where Zhu Hui stood was actually encircled by a white circle, with a black ring outside it.
The scene looked quite terrifying, but the shadows didn’t move again.
Zhu Hui pursed his lips.
Then, the large man simply vanished.
A white, fluffy wolf, shrunk down to the size of a sub-adult, dropped from the sky, landing right in the white circle.
Not an inch more, not an inch less.
The released snow wolf didn’t know what had happened yet. Its ears flattened back, its eyes filled with confusion.
…
“?”
Xu Xunyue was watching the snowfield before him slowly return to its truest color when he suddenly heard the sound of his spiritual body’s barely suppressed cheers from a distance.
When he turned around, he saw large swathes of black pouncing toward the same spot.
That spot was also black, much deeper than the gray-black left by the cataclysmic factor contamination. He knew at a glance that it was also his spiritual body, but it seemed like something was moving underneath.
Xu Xunyue began to communicate with his spiritual body in his mind.
He asked what they were doing, not expecting a serious reply, but he didn’t expect that a few seconds later, a dizzying wave of overlapping emotions would crash over him.
[It’s a little wolf cub…]
[No, this is a sub-adult wolf.]
[He’s so smart, he knows how to slip away.]
[What nonsense are you talking about? We were going to find the little wolf to play with anyway.]
[Yeah, yeah, we just wanted to look at him, he’s the one who ran away.]
[You can’t fight us for the little wolf. The little wolf is ours. He is yours.]
Xu Xunyue was stunned for a moment.
His spiritual body had actually produced such rich emotions.
For him, among all the spiritual bodies of high-level Sentinels and Guides, the snow wolf’s emotions were the clearest. The rest were rather vague.
As for his own spiritual body…
He couldn’t say it was vague. They often behaved very “profoundly,” the kind of “profundity” of a child acting like an adult. Sometimes they even had to maintain a “silent and taciturn” spiritual body persona.
When they encountered people and spiritual bodies they disliked, they would just convey “dislike, dislike, dislike” to Xu Xunyue, like a broken record, without any complex expression.
When they encountered people and spiritual bodies they didn’t dislike, they wouldn’t say an extra word.
When they encountered people and spiritual bodies they liked…
Perhaps it was like this.
The snow wolf hadn’t appeared before. Now, Zhu Hui had probably let it out to play.
So Xu Xunyue instructed his spiritual body that it was okay to play with him, but they couldn’t bully him; and even if they did bully him, they couldn’t go too far.
[Of course.]
[We will, we will.]
[We know, we know.]
Amidst the shadows’ chatter, Xu Xunyue faintly heard the snow wolf yelp a few times.
The sound was soft, as if its snout was being muffled.
