NOVPUBChapter 108: Chapter 107: The Stranger Visitor n𝚘𝚟𝚙u𝚋.co𝚖
Chapter 108 -107: The Stranger Visitor
Chaoyang gazed at her for a long while until Ailuodi couldn’t help but ask, “…what are you looking at?”
“Nothing much,” he smiled, “just feeling a bit surprised. You work for me, I pay you; it’s the fair deal decided by the contract, you shouldn’t be thanking me, really.”
“What I’m thankful for isn’t the wishing power.”
“Then what is it?” he asked curiously.
“I’m thankful for the fact that you gave me a choice in the very beginning,” the Angel turned around and walked forward with her hands clasped behind her back, “Although I can’t rule out the possibility that you had an ulterior motive, without that choice, I couldn’t have accomplished what I did today—the skeleton…” Her voice suddenly dropped by an octave, “…would still be just an ideal organization.”
It was evident that both she and her cause had made significant progress.
Chaoyang followed at a leisurely pace, “I thought it was something serious, isn’t it inevitable? If you work with me, you won’t lack benefits in the future.”
“Hmph, I’ve seen plenty of pie-in-the-sky promises; only a few ever materialize,” Ailuodi snorted lightly, “Don’t even think about turning me into one of your employees.”
“Right, you seem to have been to many places and joined quite a few ‘charitable’ organizations?” At this point, Chaoyang suddenly became interested, “What attracted you to those people?”
“Are you genuinely interested or just looking to mock me?” Ailuodi appeared quite sharp.
“Can’t it be both?”
“Whatever you like. You can call it naivety or stupidity; I won’t hide the mistakes I’ve made,” she shrugged, “I was drawn in by their slogans, but once I joined, I realized they had nothing but slogans. I also wasted a lot of time before I gradually understood the cost of goodwill. But these mistakes weren’t meaningless; without those years of experience, I wouldn’t have met my current companions.”
There wasn’t even a gap left for mockery.
“Are all Angels like you?”
“How could that be… everyone’s experiences are different before awakening; how could they become the same person after awakening—” She stopped mid-sentence, then turned around slightly annoyed, “Well, Demon, you are mocking me, aren’t you? But before I met you, it was indeed mentioned in the ancestral rules that if a person tends towards goodness, they are likely to awaken as an Angel, and vice versa for a Demon. Moreover, you haven’t told me about your past, so this rule hasn’t been disproved!”
Uh… Chaoyang rubbed his head, wondering what unforgivably bad things he must have done in his childhood to have the qualifications to awaken as a Demon.
“Does pulling a classmate’s braids and pushing her out of the desk count?”
“Of course!” Ailuodi’s eyes lit up, “When I was young, I was the one helping old ladies cross the street! Hahaha… I knew it, the ancestral rules are quite reasonable after all.”
Chaoyang couldn’t help but roll his eyes.
“So I’ve always been thinking about a possibility,” Ailuodi chuckled for a good while before she stopped, “that is the loss of information brought by textual descriptions. You pulling a classmate’s braids certainly isn’t as good as helping old ladies across the street, but as one grows older, their mind matures. If they awaken at this point, and suddenly obtain great power, those past tendencies can hardly be decisive in judging the choices they then make. Sadly, these speculations are too nuanced, so they aren’t mentioned in the rules.”
“So the ancestral rules you speak of are actually a book?” Chaoyang asked incredulously, “Not some Angel who taught you through words and deeds?”
“Yes, the book is over five hundred years old, reportedly written by a sage from some fraternity.”
Chaoyang almost choked.
Five hundred years—if that book were written in English, even the spelling of words and sentence structures would be quite different from now!
“Have you actually seen any other Angels?”
“Of course! But she has… retired from the front lines for many years,” Ailuodi muttered softly.
So Angels can get tired and retire?
Chaoyang’s skepticism was written all over his face.
“Anyway, I didn’t lie,” she said, turning her head away. “And I can’t tell you any more than that, lest you use this information for something nefarious.”
“Alright… then I’ll ask another question,” Chaoyang didn’t fuss about it. “Can an Angel live a whole lifetime without meeting a Demon and not die?”
“No. We don’t need to extract souls… wishing power,” Ailuodi glanced at him and quickly corrected herself. “As long as we don’t use our abilities in a lifetime, the bit of wishing power we get from awakening is enough to let us die a natural death. The things that I do, they have nothing to do with wishing power, I only do them because I want to. Of course… an Angel can also choose to burn out, to use all their power, but that is the only time.”
What the hell, why do Demons have to consume wishing power every day, and die if they don’t replenish it?
It’s clearly discrimination!
That thought filled Chaoyang with dissatisfaction.
“Speaking of wishing power… have you found your next contract yet?” Ailuodi suddenly asked.
“Not yet, why do you ask?”
“Just a reminder, living off your reserves isn’t good,” she said earnestly. “Your last contract was quite rewarding, but if you hesitate to make the next one, you’ll lose your direction.”
Chaoyang could feel the times were indeed changing…
Now it had become Angels urging Demons to stop being lazy.
“We’ll talk about that later…” Chaoyang laughed it off, but the other party was not entirely wrong; after gaining a large amount of wishing power at once, he really didn’t want to wander the streets like before, looking for every little bit of wishing power he could find.
The two of them chatted away, and eventually arrived at the room where Chaoyang was staying.
Just as he was about to push the door open, Ailuodi suddenly stepped forward and grabbed his hand.
“Shh—there’s someone inside.”
She whispered in a low voice.
“Ah?” Chaoyang activated his Lingxi Vision but couldn’t see through the wall and wooden door to determine the situation inside. “Could it be the cleaning nun?”
“There’s more than one, I’ll go in first,” Ailuodi said as a current of air swirled in her hand and she pushed the door open first, the air turning into a gale in that moment!
But no battle ensued.
The Angel maintained a cautious stance and shook her head at Chaoyang.
It indicated that she too was unclear about what was going on.
Seeing that there wasn’t any obvious danger, Chaoyang then slowly entered the room.
To his surprise, there were three people in the room who hadn’t been there before. The leader was a woman with rare gray-white hair and white patterns on her shoulder blades with brown skin, indicating her Seaguardian identity. Unlike other Seaguardians, however, her ears were notably elongated, akin to an elf’s, and there were tiny scales on each cheek, glistening like teardrop-shaped jewels.
Behind her were two masked men, with short swords hanging at their waists, appearing to be the woman’s bodyguards. One was a Seaguardian, while the other was a regular human.
All three were sitting on their knees on the floor, and in front of them was a wooden box.
Chaoyang realized why Ailuodi hadn’t taken action—despite the fact that they were uninvited guests, they were sitting upright on the floor, and their attitude didn’t suggest they were there to take lives.
However, they could’ve chosen any other room, but they chose this one; the purpose of their visit couldn’t be clearer.
“This room is too small, and there aren’t many chairs, so you must have had a tough time waiting for me,” Chaoyang said, pretending to be relaxed. “What brings you here?”
