Chapter Eighty-Eight: Aesthetics and Explosion (Fifth Update)

The banshee suddenly laughed.

Yes, instead of flying into a rage as she should have, she laughed.

And she laughed with extraordinary charm, even with a touch of seduction.

She fluttered upward for some distance, then came to a halt high in the air, nearly eight hundred meters above the ground.

She abandoned the remaining thorn-vines, as though she no longer had a care in the world.

Seeing this, Ji Yu finally understood why the banshee was smiling.

Because she was taking advantage of the fact that the little deer could not fly.

“What the...?”

Ji Yu stared, stunned, then could not help feeling both amused and helpless.

Wasn’t it said that the creatures of the Violet Moon had no reason?

No reason? In Ji Yu’s eyes now, the truly mindless ones were only the lowest and most twisted aberrant beings.

The higher a Violet Moon lifeform was, the more intelligent it seemed to be.

Only one thing remained unchanged: most Violet Moon creatures were bloodthirsty by nature, consumed with the urge to slaughter every life that belonged to the natural world.

The world of the Violet Moon was a realm ruled by the law of the dark forest, where the strong devoured the weak. That was more or less the whole truth of it.

He looked at the banshee, at the beautiful, shapely legs she had revealed.

...

One must not stare at what is improper.

Ji Yu felt a little awkward, but as an ordinary man... well, he continued to look, his gaze full of appreciation, savoring the sight while it lasted.

No point not looking. Since he could do nothing to her, then so be it. In any case, she was the only seemingly delicate banshee left now. Once the domain vanished, everything would naturally grow quiet again.

While admiring her graceful figure, Ji Yu walked toward the remaining thorn-vines.

There were no further twists. Under the banshee’s control, the thorns tried to resist, but they soon followed the fate of the others of their kind.

With all settled, Ji Yu guided the little deer to crouch at the highest point of the cliff on one side of the domain.

He watched the banshee, and the banshee watched him.

Ji Yu’s gaze was one of appreciation; hers was full of wariness.

“More than three meters tall. What a pity, for such a lovely figure.”

“Then again, if my true body transformed, wouldn’t I actually match her shape quite well?”

“One at five meters, one at three... almost like the ideal difference in height between a man and a woman.”

“Yes... I can see the scene already. A beauty and the beast?”

Crouched on the cliffside, Ji Yu’s thoughts began to drift freely.

He was bored, after all, and as a man, that could hardly be helped.

Innocent as he was, he still possessed an excellent taste for beauty.

There were only a little more than ten minutes left in today’s game, and Ji Yu had no wish to do anything else.

Since the banshee had no intention of testing the little deer’s terror again, Ji Yu was happy to take it easy.

And besides, with such a beauty there to please the eye, why not enjoy it?

These past days, he had exhausted himself over the growth of the oak, meditating day after day until it had long since grown dry and tedious.

A fresh and delicate sight like this banshee was beauty of a rarer sort.

What Ji Yu did not know was that, as the little deer watched its father staring unblinkingly at the banshee, certain strange thoughts began to arise in its heart.

“Why does Father keep looking at this bad woman who looks so much like a human?”

“Does Father want to catch her?”

“But he can’t. I can’t fly.”

“...”

“He’s still looking? Still looking? Still looking?”

“Could it be Father wants a woman like that to keep him company?”

“But I don’t like that.”

The little deer began muttering to itself with childlike persistence.

“It would be better if Father had a doe about my size instead.”

The little deer suddenly recalled its dim, half-understood days as an ordinary deer. Back then, it had had a mate.

Remembering that instinctive feeling of being a creature among creatures, the little deer felt an inexplicable trace of loss.

But the feeling quickly faded.

After all, the little deer’s mind was still rather childish, and its thoughts leapt in all directions.

Looking at the banshee, it suddenly thought that human men and women ought to do that sort of thing too, right?

And its elder brother had said that humans were the most numerous in this world, and also the wisest. So did that mean Father had such thoughts as well?

Unlike Adam the oak, the little deer did stand in awe of Ji Yu, but not so deeply. More than anything, it was like a child yearning for its father’s praise and encouragement.

“Could Father have children in the human world?”

“Children like me and Elder Brother?”

“Probably not. Elder Brother said so.”

“But maybe he will in the future?”

As it gazed at the banshee, a sudden flash of logic seemed to strike the little deer.

“This bad woman should count as one of the prettier humans, right?”

“If I catch this bad banshee and give her to my human younger brother, he’ll definitely be happy, won’t he?”

Thinking that it might one day become an elder sibling itself, like Adam, lecturing it with solemn authority, the little deer felt a strange surge of anticipation.

And with that thought, it felt that if it could catch this bad woman and give her to its future human younger brother, perhaps he would come to like it and maybe even listen to everything it said.

During these days, what Adam had taught the little deer had not been limited to logic and knowledge. He had also shared fragments of the wisdom Ji Yu had given him, including broken images from television dramas and films.

It was through repeatedly trying to understand those scenes that the little deer had gradually come to know more about humans, and in the process its own intelligence had slowly grown.

Of course, the little deer’s wild imaginings did not escape Ji Yu’s notice.

What could he say to that? He merely smiled.

These childish, naive ideas were rather nice. At the very least, Ji Yu liked this lively, skipping quality in the little deer.

Seeing that there were only five minutes left on the interface, Ji Yu began planning to explain a few things to the little deer.

At the very least, it needed to be told to guard against the possibility of a later attack from the banshee.

But just as Ji Yu was preparing his words, beneath the bright night sky he suddenly seemed to hear an unusual sound.

Of course, Ji Yu was not the only one who heard it. The banshee, floating more than eight hundred meters in the air, heard it as well.

In an instant, the little deer under Ji Yu’s control and the banshee both lifted their heads and looked toward the source of the sound in the sky.

And the moment they did, they saw two points of light.

The two points were falling from the heavens, growing brighter and brighter.

That glimpse lasted less than a second.

For at the very instant they saw the lights, within mere milliseconds the two streaks struck the banshee one after the other.

Medium-range missiles traveling at more than Mach ten moved so fast that by the time they were seen, they were already upon their target.

The banshee’s upturned face, frozen in puzzlement, was the last image before the explosion that burst skyward.

Guided by a hovering reconnaissance craft at an altitude of twenty thousand meters, those two medium-range missiles had no chance of missing.

Boom! Boom!

After the two thunderous detonations, countless tongues of fire blossomed in the sky above the forest domain like a small sun, illuminating everything below.

The huge explosion and the violent blast wave swept across more than a dozen kilometers.

On the ground, even the little deer was unable to open its eyes for a time because of the searing light and the rushing air.

When everything finally settled, what Ji Yu saw again was the banshee lying beneath the forest domain, barely alive, her flesh torn and bloodied.

Her body was covered in dense wounds, violet blood spreading all over the ground, and her wings had been blasted away entirely.

And even so, she had not died. She had not even lost an arm or a leg.

But judging from her condition, she was not far from death.

Ji Yu fell silent at the sight before him and lifted his eyes deeply toward some point in the sky.

Then he jumped down from the broken cliff.