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Join the ServerSunset always brought the noisy bustle of the human world. The lingering heat of late summer dyed the plane trees amber.
Children swarmed out of the school gate, clutching candy and spicy strips as they chased each other through the crowd.
Bai Ling stood awkwardly in the shade of a plane tree. Her gaze passed over the children and settled on one dejected student.
The student pushed through the crowd and stopped beside a woman with curled hair.
His eyes were downcast, like a frostbitten eggplant. The woman put an arm around his shoulder, her slightly curled hair brushing his brow.
“Dad only went away on a business trip. He’ll be back soon.”
She forced a gentle tone, but Bai Ling could hear the loneliness hidden inside it.
To think Professor Weasel’s wife and child were pure humans.
The child was not Professor Weasel’s own either. Well, of course. How could a demon father a pure-blooded human?
The woman was a widow. Her former husband had died in an accident, leaving her and the child in her belly. What happened afterward followed every cliché story to the letter.
Professor Weasel met her. He needed a human wife to hide his identity, and the pretty widow who had lost her husband needed someone to rely on.
They teamed up to get by, and hit it off immediately.
No one knew that later, in the days that followed, they would both end up taking it seriously.
Even the child, the little one still in elementary school, did not know he was not the professor’s own.
How ironic. A demon treated a human child as his own, only to be forced to abandon his wife and child and leave his hometown because he saved another human child.
The mother and son disappeared into the after-school crowd, along with drifting half-red maple leaves, into the amber sunset.
Amid the street noise, Bai Ling sighed. She did not know whether the envelope in her hand should be given to the mother and son.
“Young Miss?” The Wolf Demon’s big head suddenly leaned in. His sunglasses flashed with patches of light through the gaps in the plane tree leaves.
“Go away, go away.” Bai Ling shooed the husky off. When they first met, he had looked like a no-nonsense gang enforcer. After spending time with him, anyone could tell he was a husky at heart.
“The Young Miss is upset! What are you, idiot, sticking your nose in for?” The Tiger Demon grabbed the Wolf Demon by the back of his collar and dragged him behind the plane tree.
Bai Ling was indeed upset. The letter was written in Professor Weasel’s own hand. The words were decisive and cruel. He wanted the letter to make the mother and son hate him, hate his sudden departure, hate his abandonment of wife and child.
That was better than letting grief and longing, like gloomy rain clouds, torment them for a lifetime.
But Bai Ling still could not make up her mind. She did not know if she was right, or if Professor Weasel’s actions were right.
She stuffed the crumpled envelope back into her pocket and decided to ask someone else for advice.
The girl casually sent the two demons tailing her back to the Demon Market and strolled across the crosswalk with her hands in her pockets.
Maple leaves by the street seemed about to fall. The girl took two steps forward, and the Shanhe Group employee dormitory emerged from behind the trees, filling most of her view.
The grand zombie hunt had ended two days ago. Most of Lin’an University’s campus had been destroyed, with the dormitory area suffering especially heavy damage.
Xu Zhi had felt great sending Feng Yi flying with one sword strike, but the flying sword light and Feng Yi’s body had smashed through twelve whole buildings, including Bai Ling and her roommates’ dormitory.
Fortunately, Zhou Xuan had evacuated all the students beforehand. Otherwise, Bai Ling did not know how many innocent people would have died in the fight.
She also did not know how the Demon Suppression Bureau had smoothed things over afterward. Lin’an University was truly unlucky. In less than a month it had suffered two heavy blows in a row. This time more than half the campus was gone, and the direct and indirect losses had soared to an astronomical number. She did not know if anyone would compensate for it.
The Demon Suppression Bureau should be the one to pay, right?
At the rate of two major destructions in less than a month, who knew when they would go bankrupt from compensation.
The aftermath of the destroyed campus was considerable. Take Bai Ling. She had just moved into the old Building 4 dormitory a few days ago, and now she was homeless again.
The school had originally rented apartments near the school to house students, but when it came to Bai Ling’s dormitory, they suddenly said there were no empty rooms left and told them to find temporary places themselves.
The dormitory repairs would not be fully completed until at least next year. Chengzi was fine. She was a local of Lin’an anyway, so the only problem was a longer daily commute.
Right, that battle had destroyed most of the dormitories and half the library, and even the unmanned attack drones had raked the area with firepower again. Only a few teaching buildings and the comprehensive building were intact. Even the newly repaired cafeteria had only a few broken windows.
So they had only gotten a few days off. Once the break ended, classes would still go on.
Su Jiuli and Lin Xiaoxia both had relatives locally and could stay with them for a while. Only Bai Ling had nowhere to go.
Rent a place? The nearby listings had long been snatched up, and the remaining rents were so expensive they made Bai Ling’s heart jump.
She could actually stay at Guan Qing’s place, but the old alley in the north of the city was too far, and she had been avoiding Guan Qing since that day.
Failing to complete her mission was one reason. The other reason was…
She was afraid Guan Qing would see through what she had given to Xu Zhi. Logically, Guan Qing would not concern herself with something like that, but Bai Ling always felt that with her mother-hen personality, she would probably break Bai Ling’s legs without hesitation.
She would go see her after she had recovered a bit more…
So the homeless Bai Ling could only inconvenience Xu Zhi.
She entered the password with practiced ease: 0214. Bai Ling had always been puzzled why Xu Zhi’s door code was 0214. It was not his birthday, and apart from Valentine’s Day, it did not seem to have any special meaning.
The moment the door opened, the evening wind carried the scent of herbs into her nose.
The already small dorm room was divided by a curtain drawn across the middle. Xu Zhi insisted she take the bed while he slept on the floor, saying something about propriety between men and women, and had insisted on hanging a curtain between them.
Still, the girl’s takeover of the nest made the dorm room feel a little more lived in. At least the furnishings were no longer so bare they suffocated her.
The single bed that had belonged to Xu Zhi was now covered with all kinds of plush toys, leaving only a small space for her to curl up in. She always felt this kind of cramped, crowded space put her at ease.
This dorm room was the same.
The bookshelf was stuffed with novels and manga the girl had brought, with a few plush ornaments for decoration.
The desktop computer and laptop lined up side by side on the desk. Xu Zhi had specially swiped a brand-new ergonomic chair from Zhou Xuan for the girl, but she still thought the one Xu Zhi used before was more comfortable.
So she brazenly claimed it as her own.
Xu Zhi said he was going to report on his work… Was he not back yet?
The girl plopped down in the ergonomic chair that had originally belonged to Xu Zhi and spun herself around by pushing against the floor.
This sense of leisure always made her feel like she was dreaming. How strange! A snake demon, and one on the Demon Suppression Bureau’s wanted list, was openly living in a Demon Suppression Bureau dormitory!
If the people at the Demon Suppression Bureau found out, they would probably be furious.
Hmm…
Xu Zhi was not here, so she could play games for a bit!
The girl pressed the laptop’s power button, and the RGB lights that represented powerful performance began flowing through the gaps in the keyboard.
From the day of the comic convention until now, she had not logged in for four days!
She had been busy fighting, running, and moving. Since this laptop had been placed here, she had not had time to touch it.
The screen lit up. On the desktop, a beautiful girl image signed by Qinglin winked at her.
Ah… long time no see. She had missed it so much!
When the mouse pointer clicked the game icon for Chronicle of Xuanhuang, the snake demon swordsman she had not seen in a long time leaped into the mortal world.
“Ding!” A notification suddenly sounded in her earphones.
The icon for friend mail lit up with a red dot. A complete set of high-level crafted equipment lay in her mailbox.
[Stupid little bro, I crafted a full set of equipment for you. Remember to buy me milk tea! ღ( ´･ᴗ･` )]
The attached message was a note from Gu Xiyan.
Bai Ling suddenly remembered that four days ago by the river, Gu Xiyan had called out for her to log into the game and take a look after she got back.
So that was it…
She wondered what Gu Xiyan was doing now. Probably worrying over a report, right?
……
“Target currently shows no obvious threat. Needs observation…”
The keyboard clattered. Gu Xiyan’s fingertips flew like butterflies as she typed out sentences, then after thinking for a moment, deleted the information about Bai Ling word by word.
How had she carelessly written something like this into the report?
Gu Xiyan scratched her hair, feeling that she had probably been too tightly wound lately.
As someone belonging to the Records Bureau, she was supposed to write all intelligence gained during a mission into her report. That was the duty of an intelligence officer, and she had almost trained it into instinct.
But…
A friend login notification suddenly sounded in her earphones. Gu Xiyan’s hands moved fast as she pressed alt+tab and switched to the game screen. The snake demon swordsman in pure white was in the main city crowd, inspecting his new equipment.
“It’s hard to find another stupid little bro teammate…”
She found a reason for her dereliction of duty in zero point one seconds.
“Come on, big sister will carry you through a dungeon!”
The half-demon assassin made a heart shape in midair and dashed to the snake demon swordsman.
The adventure continues! If you loved this chapter, How To Survive Without Dying at The Hands of The Emperor is a must-read. Click here to start!
Read : How To Survive Without Dying at The Hands of The Emperor
