Chapter Ninety-One: Blossoms Bloom and Fade, Through Another Turn of Spring and Autumn

The whole mess had spiraled completely out of control.

It had only been a matter of helping to catch an adulterer, and yet it struck like lightning: the one cheating was her own husband. That alone was bad enough, but the other party was actually a man...

That was exactly how Alpha Girl felt now.

Chaos. Shame. Panic.

"You, you, you, Ye Chao!" In a fit of exasperation, she rushed straight home, glaring furiously at Ye Chao. "What else are you hiding from me?"

So the man in sunglasses could only stare dumbly as the stunning woman before him suddenly went haywire, then vanished in an instant, waving in and out like a passing cloud, not even bothering to ask a question.

Was it real? Or was it all a dream?

He could not help wondering.

"Hey, don't go. At least name your price..."

"I can't see your brain waves. My powers are different from that man in sunglasses. I just... can sense them, but I don't really understand what they mean." Ye Chao offered a strained explanation.

Actually, joy, anger, happiness, and the like could still be distinguished a little. It was just that Alpha Girl, this woman who said one thing and meant another, often had expressions, speech, and magnetic field utterly out of sync. So Ye Chao, this iron-straight man, had never managed to derive an accurate emotional equation from her brain waves, and was still working on it.

That... did make some sense.

After the initial burst of rage, Alpha Girl gradually calmed down enough to think.

Ye Chao, when it came to written exams, whether closed-book or open-book, it made no difference; either way he got full marks. But if there were an emotional intelligence exam, closed-book or open-book would also make no difference; either way he would fail.

Even if he could sense her brain waves, that did not mean she was stripped naked before him.

No, wait. His expression...

Alpha Girl fixed Ye Chao with a hard stare, recalling the look on his face when he had just been exposed. She even replayed it frame by frame in slow motion. "Ye Chao, you are still hiding something from this palace. What is it? Say it now. Don't force this palace to use methods..."

I didn't. I have not. Don't talk nonsense...

At first Ye Chao still wanted to resist a little, but seeing her fuming like that, he eventually gave up.

Fine. He really was hiding something else from Alpha Girl.

What was it?

It was this: when could Alpha Girl hit someone, and when could she not? Why was it like Duan Yu's Six Meridians Divine Sword or Yang Guo's Melancholy Palm, sometimes working and sometimes not?

It was not that her stance was wrong, nor that there was anything wrong with the martial technique she was trying. It was because... Ye Chao had not been letting it work properly.

That's right. Whether Alpha Girl could actually make contact with people was decided by Ye Chao, or at least by him in large part.

Those first two accidental hits on Ye Chao may have been because Alpha Girl's aura was too overwhelming, causing him to feel as though he had been struck, and then he really was struck.

But Ye Chao soon discovered the secret behind it, so after that, whenever Alpha Girl tried to study that move...

"What the--!" Alpha Girl's shriek could practically blow the house away.

And this was no ordinary house. In all of Jiang City, there was only one enormous house connected together, and it still felt as if it might be blown away.

For example, in the special holding facility.

The black-robed figure who had appeared out of nowhere could not help rubbing his ears. "Hiss, what the heck is that hiss?"

The man in sunglasses unconsciously rubbed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. "So, so strong! Is some master in Jiang City warning us about something..."

After a moment's thought, his face suddenly changed. "No, no, this is bad."

"What's bad hiss?" The black-robed figure took off his hood, revealing a snake's head.

His head was smooth and covered in golden scales at a glance, clearly carrying the bloodline of a golden python. His nose was flat, his mouth rather wide, and his red eyes were set apart on either side, with vertical pupils. His snake mouth opened and shut as a forked tongue flicked out, giving his speech an odd accent.

Yet he was not ugly, perhaps even a little cute in an awkwardly endearing way. In any case, he looked far better than Orochimaru.

The man in sunglasses was not surprised that the black-robed figure looked more like a monster than a human. He only urged, "Quick, hurry, get out of here!"

He was not sure whether this intense electromagnetic wave had anything to do with the earlier celestial beauty, but his instincts somehow connected the two.

"Don't worry hiss. When we came in, we checked carefully. No one will know what happened here hiss," the snake-headed man said confidently. "Besides, this kind of thing can't be rushed."

He carefully took out a seed, placed it on the ground, then took a knife, grinned, cut his finger, and dripped blood onto it.

With a crisp cracking sound, the seed sprouted.

A rainbow brilliance blossomed, and the entire cell seemed to pulse with it.

"Someone might come back... ah, forget it." The man in sunglasses wanted to remind the snake-headed man that someone might return, but thinking that this was a return ticket already bought in advance, he could only endure it.

At Ye Chao's home, Ye Chao was facing the unprecedented fury, frenzy, and rage of Alpha Girl.

In fact, Alpha Girl had even made him hide behind Gungun, so her negative emotion value would not explode and turn directly into hatred.

"Alright then, Ye Chao! I really did not see it. You are this kind of person!"

"Every day I am running around for you, working myself to the bone, exhausted beyond belief, and what about you? You do nothing all day. Ask you to play games and you pretend to be dead. Ask you to sell helmets and you say you can't. Ask you to exercise and you are born useless. All you do is read, read, read..."

"Fine, you love studying, you love reading, then read all you want. But I never knew you were reading books while also watching me, laughing at me."

Ye Chao trembled behind Gungun.

"Your existence is continuously being strengthened. At first only I could see you, later others could see you too, and after that... being able to touch others was only a natural progression."

"And that matches the growth of my own ability."

Considering that, all along, Alpha Girl had only been able to manifest in places Ye Chao could "see"...

And considering that three-star manifestation theoretically allowed remote control of Fireseed weapons and targeted fantasy modification...

"The hint was actually obvious..." Whether Alpha Girl could touch people, the power to control it lay with Ye Chao rather than with herself, at least at this stage. Otherwise, would all that hard-earned three-star advancement be wasted?

But that was not an explanation at all. It was suicide...

"Are you saying I'm too stupid to figure out such an obvious hint?" At the peak of her anger, Alpha Girl instead grew calm.

Phew, finally calm. Ye Chao let out a breath of relief.

"Actually, I wanted to say this long ago..."

Alpha Girl: Oh? So this idiot finally knows to admit fault?

But Ye Chao simply pointed behind her, motioning for her to look at the projection screen. "Something strange seems to have happened in that man in sunglasses' room..."

And then she unleashed a torrent of fury, each blow to Ye Chao's favorability worth fifty points.

I was wrong!

I should never have woken up in the first place. If I had not awakened, I would not have ended up with such an unreliable guy. And if I had not been with such an unreliable guy, I would not have fallen into such a heartbreaking place...

After several days of seesawing struggle, Ye Chao's favorability finally broke through negative two thousand.

Fortunately, negative two thousand was not yet the beginning of hatred. It was still only dislike.

With resentment, with helplessness, with indignation, Alpha Girl gave Ye Chao one last glare, then turned and plunged into the camera feed.

That place should have been showing the inside of the man in sunglasses' cell, but for some unknown reason it had become a blot of blackness.

Ye Chao could not see through it, so he simply granted Alpha Girl the ability to touch reality.

Just to try.

And indeed, Alpha Girl passed straight through. Then she saw the snake-headed man, the man in sunglasses, and a sapling of radiance blooming from the center of the cell floor.

"What the heck is this..."

The sapling had only a single slender stalk and two or three leaves. Aside from glowing, it looked terribly shabby. The only thing truly eye-catching was the flower at its tip, swelling at a speed faster by a thousandfold than a night-blooming cereus in full bloom.

Its opening and withering was like one cycle of spring and autumn.

In the blink of an eye, spring and autumn blossomed and faded. And Alpha Girl, along with the snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses, who were staring in astonishment at her sudden intrusion, disappeared together amid that fading...