Chapter 360: Seeing A Goddess
By the time they reached the front of the mansion, Rouxi was still walking with her eyes closed.
Yuche watched her drift half a step to the left, one hand tucked into the sleeve of the shirt she had stolen from him, with her hair falling loose around her face and her expression caught somewhere between sleep and murder.
She was awake in the technical sense. She was vertical and moving forward, but that had more to do with Chenghai refusing to leave until she got dressed and out of bed. To say that Rouxi wasn’t that far from a zombie like state right now wasn’t a far off assessment. If the world had any sense of self-preservation, it would have waited until she had twelve hours of sleep and breakfast before presenting her with yet another problem that demanded her attention.
But the world had never been that intelligent.
Lingyun snickered under his breath when Rouxi’s slipper caught on a loose stone in the driveway. Before Yuche could reach for her, Lingyun caught her arm and guided her around it with exaggerated care.
"Careful, pretty princess," Lingyun murmured, guiding her away from a rose bush that was about waist height that wouldn’t be able to get out of the way fast enough. "The driveway is attacking."
Rouxi did not open her eyes. "Tell the driveway to make an appointment. I think I have an opening five years from now."
Lingyun’s mouth curved, but he kept his hand on her arm. For once, Yuche did not feel the urge to remove it. Rouxi was entirely capable of gutting a man while half-asleep, but he still preferred not to let her walk into her own wall before she had the chance to threaten whatever was waiting outside it.
Then Yuche saw the man on the road, and the small amount of amusement that he was feeling died before it had time to really take off.
Old Chen stood several meters behind the stranger with two workers at his back. That alone was enough to make Yuche’s mood sharpen. Those people did not belong near Rouxi’s wall. They did not belong in her world, not this close, not when every problem that had stepped through the mansion doors lately seemed to have come with their shadows dragging behind it.
No matter what Zhenlan and Chenghai thought, those workers weren’t one of them. They didn’t deserve to even see Rouxi’s face, let alone keep throwing problems at her and then have a comment about how she deals with it.
But he knew Rouxi had made her decision. He knew why she had allowed workers to remain nearby, and it had a lot less to do with her offering them protection so much as, since they weren’t in the house, she didn’t care what they did. However, he also knew that mercy was just another door people tried to pry open when they wanted access to someone else’s house.
The stranger crouched on the broken road in front of the wall and looked like he had gone through a wood chipper that had gotten bored halfway through the job and just decided to spit him out.
His clothes were torn into dirty strips, and there was dried blood on enough of him to make the workers uncomfortable. One side of his face was swollen, his lips were cracked, and grey-black smears marked his chin and fingers. At first glance, he looked like every desperate survivor who had learned too late that the end of the world did not care how loudly people begged.
But at second glance, he was much, much worse.
Starting with the fact that his arms were wrong.
The shoulders sat unevenly beneath his torn shirt, and both arms hung at angles that should have made him unconscious from pain. The joints had been twisted until his hands faced nearly the wrong direction, his palms comfortably facing outward without any strain or discomfort. Even his fingers were curled against the road in a way that made Yuche almost sick to his stomach over the wrongness of it all.
Mind you, his legs were not much better. One knee was bent too far inward while the other foot pointed at an angle that should have made standing impossible.
But despite everything that should have left him in a crumpled heap of snot and tears, his eyes were clear.
Too clear.
Yuche had seen men in pain. He had caused enough of it to recognize the difference between a body enduring injury and a mind using injury as costume. Pain was a great way to create clarity in people. It dragged them inward, stripped them down to nothing more than breath and fear and whatever god they had started bargaining with too late.
But this man was not begging for death or accepting whatever would come next. Instead, he was simply watching how everyone behaved around him.
He started with the wall first.
But he ignored the vines threatening him and the metal woven through them. Instead, he studied the wall itself, as if he was trying to measure where it was the weakest. His tongue slipped over his cracked lower lip before he pulled it back into his mouth, and the movement was too slow to be a sign that he was thirsty.
No, this man looked pleased, too pleased for everything that was going on at this moment.
Then his gaze slid sideways, keeping Old Chen at the edge of his vision.
Yuche’s hand moved toward the metal before he thought about it.
The wall was already reacting. The vines nearest the stranger had driven themselves into the road instead of into his flesh, stopping so close to his hand that even a twitch would cost him fingers.
The flowers had turned toward him in a neat, silent row of patience and teeth. They were not hungry, and that was the first detail that mattered. Rouxi’s plants were always hungry when blood was involved, especially with humans or zombies.
But this was different. This was a new level of disgust that screamed that the injured man wasn’t even worth trying to digest.
And then the man on the road started to trembled. It was a bone jarring trembling where his teeth started to knock against themselves and he gripped his upper arms like he was trying to control the uncontrollable shaking.
But he wasn’t shaking that hard because of fear.
No, this was pure, unadulterated excitement.
The man was shaking like a puppy that had seen its owner.... or a hungry man looking at a steak he had been staring at for over a week.
Yuche looked at Chenghai and saw the other man’s weapon already in hand, his expression hard, and his attention completely fixed on the stranger’s injuries. Chenghai saw the danger, but he saw it like a guard. He was mentally measuring the distance, the motion, the angles, the immediate threats. He was watching for the moment the man decided to lunge forward.
But Yuche was looking for the reason why the man hadn’t done it yet.
Lingyun guided Rouxi the last few steps forward, and the moment she appeared in front of the wall, the stranger completely changed.
It was small enough that Old Chen missed it. Chenghai might have missed it too, because Rouxi had finally opened her eyes and the vines had shifted toward her like the entire wall wanted to give a report on how much they hated the injured man.
But Lingyun didn’t miss it. His fingers tightened on Rouxi’s arm for half a breath before he let go, his flames already sliding over his knuckles like he was getting ready to throw hands.
The second he saw Rouxi, the stranger’s eyes brightened like he had seen a Goddess.