Chapter 93: The Truth Revealed

Listening to Xiao Moyuan’s calm words, Su Mian stood frozen, as if even her breathing had ceased.

Were it not for the fluffy ears atop her head trembling uneasily, and the lingering, tingling sensation on her sensitive tail from his earlier playfulness, she might have believed it.

And the terrifying strength that had, moments ago, uncontrollably sent him flying with a single punch was still vivid in her memory.

Otherwise, she truly would have thought Xiao Moyuan was playing some shockingly risqué, bizarre role-playing game with her.

But the irrefutable evidence of reality stood firm, leaving no room for her to deceive herself any longer.

Xiao Moyuan watched her panicked and astonished expression, a slight curve to his lips. His smile carried the composure of one who held everything in control.

He continued, unhurriedly:

“So now, while I investigate you and confirm that you currently pose no subjective harm—”

He deliberately slowed his speech, clearly emphasizing the words ‘investigate you,’ with a distinct hint in his tone.

“—you must remain within the scope of my control. This is the rule, and it is also for your own safety.”

Su Mian’s small head spun rapidly. Shame instantly ignited her cheeks, making them burn an even deeper crimson, staining even her fair neck with a flush of scarlet.

She glared at Xiao Moyuan, brimming with grievance, her voice soft and sweet. It was less a question and more a petulant complaint:

“Last night… didn’t you already… already investigate very thoroughly?”

Her eyes, still carrying a hint of lingering passion, shifted seductively, her cherry lips slightly pouted—a captivating allure she seemed utterly unaware of.

“How much longer do you plan to investigate me?”

Her voice grew softer with each word, the last syllable carrying a subtle, almost imperceptible tremor.

Perhaps it was just a misconception, but Xiao Moyuan felt that ever since this little fox had fully awakened her demonic form, every gesture, every smile, even her unconscious grievances and anger, naturally exuded a soul-stirring charm.

Xiao Moyuan’s eyes deepened. He emphasized his point, his tone possessing a self-evident dominance:

“Didn’t I say? Until I deem you harmless.”

He paused, then added, “Or rather, until I am completely satisfied with my investigation of you.”

Su Mian’s face was so red it seemed on the verge of dripping blood, her heart hammering wildly in her chest. She couldn’t tell if it was from shame and indignation or something else.

She was now both embarrassed and furious, coupled with a deep sense of powerlessness.

Clenching her fists, her nails dug deep into her palms. She tried to use the slight pain to stay clear-headed, asking the question that had been swirling in her mind for so long:

“Xiao Moyuan! You… when exactly did you know my identity?!”

She truly wanted to know the exact moment she had become completely exposed before him.

This feeling of being kept in the dark, performing like a clown, made her so uncomfortable she wanted to cry.

Seeing the redness around her eyes, Xiao Moyuan finally softened his tone and explained:

“The first time you sent me that selfie with the cat ear headband using the Sweetheart Marshmallow account, I already sensed a problem.”

He watched her eyes widen suddenly, then continued his calm assessment, as if analyzing a mathematical problem:

“You told me you were a student from another school, but I recognized a corner of the bookshelf and the outline of the buildings outside the window in your photo. That’s a unique layout and perspective specific to N-University dorms.”

“I cross-referenced all registered female student data at N-University, including freshmen and exchange students, but found no information matching your face.”

“Someone with a questionable identity and unknown motives, yet deliberately approaching me with such a face, wanting an online romance but unwilling to meet—naturally, I was curious.”

He paused, his gaze sharp as he looked at her.

“So, even before our ‘official’ meeting after the first Mid-Autumn Festival gala, I was already highly suspicious of your identity.”

“And that night, when you truly stood before me, despite your best efforts to conceal it, certain subtle expressions and habits… confirmed that Sweetheart Marshmallow was you, my love rival, Su Mian.”

Su Mian froze completely.

Her eyes widened.

Her face was a canvas of disbelief and absurdity.

It was… that early?

From the moment she sent her first selfie, her disguise had already been on the verge of collapsing?

Then all her subsequent elaborate disguises, her tests, her supposedly clever flirtations… had they all been nothing more than a ridiculous performance?

An indescribable shame and embarrassment instantly engulfed her.

“Then… since you knew all along… why did you… play along with me?!”

Her voice carried a subtle catch, her heart feeling tightly squeezed, aching with bitterness.

“Was it… was it just for your amusement? Watching me act like a clown in front of you—was it very interesting?!”

The more she thought about it, the more uncomfortable she felt, a sharp wave of grievance rushing to her nose.

If he had exposed her earlier, at most it would have been social death, a bit of ridicule, which she might have been able to tough out.

But it wouldn’t have been like this… with her body and mind completely ensnared, utterly transformed, even the very foundation of her identity as ‘Su Mian’ shaken!

Huo Moyuan, however, merely retorted calmly:

“Weren’t you the one who meticulously created a female account to toy with me first?”

Su Mian was speechless.

She was instantly choked, as if her neck had been squeezed, all her grievances and questions stuck in her throat.

Yes, she was the instigator.

She was the one who, with impure intentions, took that first wrong step.

Huo Moyuan didn’t let her off the hook, continuing to voice his true thoughts in a calm tone that nonetheless carried a cruel analytical edge:

“To be honest, when you first approached me using ‘Sweetheart Marshmallow,’ there were many flaws. Your intentions were too strong, completely unmasked.

“You repeatedly claimed to like me, to want to date me, even daring to send those… rather bold photos to flirt with me. Yet, when I suggested meeting, you made every excuse, playing hard to get.”

“My initial reaction was that you were either an unsightly person who dared only to boast online, or you had ulterior motives.

“So, I ignored you, even deleting you from my friends list at one point.”

“However, when you reappeared later and sent clear photos of your face, it overturned my ‘unsightly’ guess.”

His gaze fell upon her astonishing beauty, which remained striking even in its current pallor.

“This only made me more curious. Why would a girl with such looks be afraid to meet, only insisting on an online romance? What was your true purpose?”

“So, when I finally confirmed that the person who was so brazenly flirting with me online, and yet so coldly dismissive of me in reality—my ‘love rival,’ Su Mian—was one and the same…”

He paused, his voice devoid of discernible emotion.

“I was very angry. Extremely angry. I even considered finding an opportunity to ‘teach you a lesson’ and make you pay for your deception.”

Su Mian’s heart plummeted, her blood seemingly chilling by half.

Sure enough, he had entertained thoughts of revenge.

Then, everything that happened last night, could it be…?

“Then why didn’t you do that…?” she asked, her voice trembling, almost afraid to hear the answer.

Huo Moyuan looked at her instantly bloodless face and slowly said:

“Because I discovered something else, something far more urgent and important.”

“What… what thing?”

“Your identity.”

Huo Moyuan’s gaze deepened.

“Not just the dual identity of ‘Su Mian’ and ‘Sweetheart Marshmallow,’ but more importantly… your non-human identity.”

“My… identity?” Su Mian looked bewildered.

“That night we first officially met, after you got drunk in the hotel room, you unconsciously exposed signs of your demonic transformation—those ears and tail.”

He explained.

“And, more critically, I sensed that the scent of your blood seemed to possess an extraordinary, almost instinctive attraction for Shen Zhixia, who had already been transformed into a blood kin at the time.”

As Shen Zhixia was mentioned, a thread of realization cut through Su Mian’s muddled thoughts. She urgently asked:

“Zhixia… what exactly happened to Zhixia?”

She suddenly recalled Xiao Moyuan coldly referring to Zhixia as a ‘monster’ last night.

Xiao Moyuan scoffed, his tone laced with cold mockery: “Her? She’s no longer the childhood friend you knew.”

“To be precise, she was human before, but was later embraced by a high-ranking blood kin, transforming her into a monster that feeds on blood and fears sunlight—a ‘blood kin,’ or what you commonly call a vampire.”

Su Mian was utterly dumbfounded, her mind a blank. Not only was she herself not human, but Shen Zhixia, whom she had grown up with and regarded as a goddess… wasn’t human either?

How much more about this world was she still unaware of?

Xiao Moyuan continued to drop bombshells:

“And the reason I came to the university, my superficial identity as a student, was to find and capture the special-grade blood kin lurking there—the culprit who turned Shen Zhixia into a monster.”

Su Mian processed this immense amount of information, and a persistent question resurfaced in her mind:

“Then you… why did you ask Shen Zhixia to the teaching building in the middle of the night? And… and do those… those excessive things to her?!”

As she spoke the latter part, her tone couldn’t help but turn accusatory, a surge of grievance and bitterness, which she herself couldn’t quite decipher, welling up inside her.

Was this his ‘investigation’ method for all female monsters?

“Are you, you perverted demon hunter, do you just… just like to ‘investigate’ female monsters?”

Her eyes reddened, her voice laced with a tearful accusation.

Xiao Moyuan twitched his lips, finding her peculiar thought process exasperating:

“Even now, your little fox brain is still filled with such filthy thoughts.”

“I am not!”

Su Mian retorted indignantly, as if her tail had been stepped on, her cheeks flushing even deeper.

“You dare to do it but don’t dare to let me speak of it? Don’t think I don’t know, you just wanted to… wanted to do those sordid things!

“Because I caused you to let Zhixia go, you… you did that to me!”

By the end of her outburst, a huge wave of grievance surged again, and tears finally welled up in her eyes.

She stubbornly believed that everything that happened last night was his punishment and revenge for her disrupting his ‘good deed’ and for her cross-dressing prank.

“And Zhixia becoming a monster must have been forced, right? She’s so kind… Do you demon hunters not eliminate even the good, coerced monsters?”

She tried to defend Shen Zhixia, and it was also as if she was seeking a sliver of comfort for her own uncertain future.

Xiao Moyuan’s voice suddenly turned cold, carrying an undeniable authority:

“Whether she was forced or not is irrelevant. Do you know how many innocent human lives your seemingly delicate ‘good’ childhood friend has already stained her hands with since transforming into a blood kin, all to satisfy her bloodlust or to carry out her master’s orders?”

He watched Su Mian’s face turn instantly pale, then continued to coldly state the truth:

“Furthermore, it wasn’t I who sought out Shen Zhixia late last night! It was that ‘good’ childhood friend who proactively sent me messages, using that ambiguous, soft tone to lure me to the teaching building!”

With that, Xiao Moyuan took out his phone, pulled up his chat history with Shen Zhixia, and directly displayed the screen before Su Mian’s eyes.

White background, black text, crystal clear.

Shen Zhixia’s words, filled with affection and innuendo, stung Su Mian’s eyes.

She completely froze, her blood seemingly congealed instantly.

“She invited me out yesterday, intending to seize the opportunity to drain my blood, perhaps even to kill me. I played along, preparing to counterattack and capture the mastermind behind her. Is there a problem with dealing with a monster who wants my life?”

Xiao Moyuan stated the facts calmly.

Su Mian fell silent for a moment, her mind reeling from the massive shock.

The beautiful world and people she had known were utterly overturned at this moment.

After a long pause, she finally asked a seemingly unrelated question that had lingered in her heart for a long time:

“Then you… your purpose in approaching Shen Zhixia, from beginning to end… was it only for the monster behind her?”

Xiao Moyuan answered decisively: “What else? Did you think I liked her?”

Hearing this definitive answer, Su Mian’s heart was a maelstrom of emotions. A strange feeling of relief subtly loosened within her, only to be immediately covered by even greater doubts.

She bit her lip, stubbornly pressing: “Then why did you strip her clothes?!”

This incident was like a thorn, lodged in her heart.

Unless this question was clearly explained, she couldn’t trust anything Xiao Moyuan had said before.

Xiao Moyuan fell silent for a moment upon hearing her question, a faint, complex expression flashing across his face.

Seeing his reaction, Su Mian’s heart sank again, a wave of disappointment spreading through her.

“Indeed… your intentions weren’t pure either! Who knows how much of what you told me before was true, and how much was false?”

She turned her head away, not wanting him to see the disappointment in her eyes.

Xiao Moyuan took a deep breath and finally spoke, his voice a few shades deeper:

“You saw me yesterday…”

Su Mian recalled the grotesque, writhing black patterns on his face and nodded involuntarily.

“That was not my will.”

Xiao Moyuan’s voice carried a heavy weariness.

“When I was a child, I was cursed by an extremely powerful monster. If I don’t regularly consume demonic blood to suppress it, the curse will fully erupt, I will gradually lose my sanity, and eventually become a monster that knows only slaughter, devoid of emotion…”

Su Mian froze, staring at him blankly. She never imagined Xiao Moyuan harbored such a heavy and painful secret.

“Then you… investigating me last night… that’s still an undeniable fact, isn’t it?”

She still clung to this point, though her voice had weakened.

She clearly remembered that before losing consciousness, he had leaned close to her ear and said in that cold, dangerous voice:

“Since you want to be a girl so much, then I shall grant your wish.”

She then mustered her courage and asked the most crucial question:

“Did you… did you already know my body’s secret? Did you know… that after that, I would completely transform into a girl?”

Xiao Moyuan looked at her, not evading, and admitted frankly: “Yes.”

Indeed, he knew everything.

Su Mian’s heart felt icy cold, heavy as if a huge stone had been placed upon it.

So, everything last night, perhaps from the very beginning, was within his calculations?

He calmly, clearly, watched her step by step fall into the ‘trap,’ completing this so-called ‘transformation.’

“If… if you were doing this to retaliate against my initial deception…”

Her voice trembled uncontrollably with despair. “Then you… you certainly succeeded.”

Especially when she uttered the word ‘retaliation,’ her heart felt pricked by needles, a dense, aching pain spreading through it. An indescribable discomfort and emptiness swept over her.

It wasn’t just the grievance of her body being changed, but also an inexplicable heartache.

She would rather he had simply hit her or cursed her than destroyed her so utterly.

Xiao Moyuan gazed at her instantly dimmed eyes and her tearful expression. He remained silent for a moment before slowly speaking, his tone more serious than ever before:

“Firstly, I never intended to ‘retaliate’ against you in this manner.”

“Secondly,”

He paused, then pointed towards an extremely hidden spot in the corner of the bedroom wall, which was emitting a faint red light.

“Last night, I was not acting on my own initiative.”

As he spoke, a very peculiar and somewhat playful smile even appeared on his face.

“How about it? Little fox, shall we uncover the truth of what really happened last night together?”

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