Yekase stood in the shower’s rain, mind replaying today’s match like steam painting scenes on glass.

Bowman was a cyborg who lived by his armor, nothing to admire; Xiaoyuan’s piloting looked goofy, yet held tricks worth stealing.

Like how he used affixes.

Affix spells usually cost less than regular spells. You lean on the 1+1 trick—drop the effect, spend the minimum, farm the maximum casting markers.

Still, the real lesson comes the other way: don’t stack buffs without Parallel Chant. Don’t be clever with no safety rope.

She traced on the fogged glass, letters blooming like frost patterns:

Parallel: cast simultaneously.

Delay: postpone the spell’s effect.

Silent: cast without a voice.

Steady: raise precision and resist interruptions.

Chain: skip the chant when repeating the same spell.

Passion: raise your crit rate.

Battle: speed up casting.

Seven common affixes in all. Remove the special Parallel Chant, the rest can pair freely like tiles in a child’s game. Some Archmages keep secret affixes known only to them; those live far beyond Yekase’s reach.

Weaving them through your casting is required coursework for every PvP mage.

Yekase’s a theorist at heart, a pure-blood PvE player; yet she learned magic to survive PvP. So, into the PvP column she goes—and she needs to drill her affixes hard.

Textbooks recommend a drill: call the menu.

Rattle all seven affixes together, fast and on repeat. Train the tongue till a standard action becomes a helper motion. You shave about half a second off your bar.

There’s a mnemonic too: “Parallel Silent Delay Steady Passion Battle Chain.” It sounded like a 4 a.m. street brawl in a northern Jiangsu city.

“Parallel Silent Delay Steady Passion Battle Chain… Parallel Silent Delay Steady…”

—Click.

The bathroom door slid open. Liu RuoYuan stepped in, underwear hugged to her chest like a timid bird.

“Steady… what are you—!”

Yekase flinched. The showerhead’s sheet smacked her face. She rubbed water off and blinked—and saw Liu RuoYuan already undressed, hand on the glass door to the stall.

“You, you, you—what are you doing? There’s no room for a full-grown adult—”

“Nice development. Good figure.”

“—Puh?!”

Liu RuoYuan’s hands took her “headlights” without ceremony. Testing, weighing, smooth as a jeweler.

“162, 50, 80, 65, 90.”

She recited numbers like notes on a staff.

“Eh? Why…”

Height, weight, the three sizes. How did she nail them so clean?

“You can tell at a glance.”

“You can’t! Not normally!”

“I’m a genius inventor’s little sister. Higher IQ is perfectly normal, right?”

A sideways jab tucked in a smile—no, was that praise? Yekase’s mind tied itself in neat knots.

She kept finding that Liu RuoYuan had changed completely in these years. A sharp edge flashed from her without trying—like guessing “Magical Girl” from nine-key typing last time.

And now the measurements too.

Her panel felt maxed in Perception and Intuition. If she went into certain lines of work, she’d be untouchable.

…Yekase meant private detective.

Nothing else.

Luckily Liu RuoYuan’s frame was only a little bigger. They squeezed into the stall, two sparrows in a lantern. Yekase shrank to the corner, too afraid to move—but gentle, firm hands pulled her in, lathered shampoo, and began a careful wash.

“Is this some ritual to deepen bonds?”

Till now, she’d bathed with Ling Yi and… and someone else. She thought next would be Shen Shanshan or Jiang Bailu. She never imagined the third would be her own grown little sister.

Is this… right?

If their mother back home heard, she’d catch a red-eye to Twin Towers City and hang Yekase up like laundry.

Country-born, brisk women never lose strength with the years. They make you respect the iron in their voice.

Forty-eight-year-old Comrade XiaoLei stands foremost among them. Liu RuoYuan said that when bored, she runs next door to play basketball with teen boys—and once dunked the hoop clean off.

Under her “What did you do to your sister” iron fists, even Yekase’s enhanced body would be pulp—no, powder under a hammer.

Yekase started shaking like a leaf.

Liu RuoYuan thought she was cold. She lifted the showerhead and poured warm rain over her from crown to heel.

Foam slid away like clouds leaving a mountain. Yekase finally opened her eyes, a little dazed, a little wary. She asked, soft as a whisper:

“So… how do you see me?”

Liu RuoYuan’s keen gaze caught the hidden tremble in the question—one Yekase hadn’t noticed in herself.

She hugged the shorter miss tight, heart to heart.

“Like an older brother and a little sister. Like a father and a daughter. Like kin long lost, and a new friend found. Does that answer reach you?”

“…”

I don’t get it. Can we not do riddles… Yekase wanted to say, but the mood held her tongue.

She rested her cheek against Liu RuoYuan’s chest and listened to the river of water in silence.

…

…

The next evening, Yekase walked into Greenbelt Park, wind threading through empty paths like silver wire.

She’d compressed her affix casting to shorter than a tongue-flick. Sorcery ran rich, transformed by Flash Energy like lightning bottled in glass. She wanted to try a new way to use magic in a quiet, wide space.

In short, she brewed a fresh playstyle overnight—and decided she was ready.

She came with lab goggles for wind, a thick windproof jacket like a second shell, heading for the place she remembered as the best takeoff runway.

“Celestial Speech.”

“Parallel, Passion, Battle, Chain—Levitation Spell!”

She opened with three affixes at once, a fan spread under a kite.

Levitation only gives single-impulse lift; flight-wise, it loses to a proper Flight Spell. Even affixed, it barely ties. But in Yekase’s eyes, a sudden Levitation in combat buys a heartbeat of confusion—where possibilities bloom.

She loved those moments, even if they cost two helper motions and extra mana.

…She’d learned Flight Spell too, as insurance. Skills never weigh you down.

A crit-doubled Levitation snapped taut like a giant slingshot. Her body turned cannon shell and punched for the sky. She cleared the city’s average height, arrowed near the Twin Towers’ top.

She’d felt acceleration before, facing the Prismatic War Chariot. Never this fierce. With crit rate and multi-cast affixes alone, one Levitation beat the force that once drained two people dry.

Chain-cast lingered. Even speaking was optional—and wind stuffed her mouth shut anyway. She hammered out three more Levitation Spells in a single breath.

Layered thrusts bloomed like stacked waves, each guided by her hands to different vectors, trimming speed, angle, and, most crucial, posture.

The feeling was new as dawn on snow.

Before, Levitation made her a thrown stone, body near-uncontrolled midair. Even topping off with more Levitation felt like a giant’s hand tossing her around—nothing like storybook flight, nothing like “freedom.”

Now it was different. With centimeter-precise pushes, she finally held her body like a hawk holds wind.

Where to fly, how to fly—one thought steered everything.

Moisture streaked her face, like the tickle before a back-lying sneeze. She squinted. The goggles’ lenses were cut by thin water scars.

Clouds… she was knifing through clouds.

“Holy f—”

Air flooded her throat like a river. She almost coughed up lunch.

Her body wobbled. She steadied, trimmed, and kept climbing straight as an arrow.

Hand over mouth, she murmured:

“Chain, Helen Disk.”

Above her crown, three transparent disks interlaced and clipped through each other, bulging upward into a simple fairing.

Helen Disk is a variant of the Oz Floating Disc. It moves with the caster’s will and lasts longer. It costs triple mana, and any contact with other magic shatters it like thin ice.

Against mere wind pressure, it’s a sturdy shield.

With the fairing on her head, breath returned smooth as a lake. She’d pierced the white sea of clouds, now skirting near the stratosphere; the drop to below zero and thin air warned her not to go higher.

Here’s the line.

If not up, then chase speed on the level. She looked down at the city turned to tiny dots and started planning something very risky.

With her current body, that wind earlier felt only a bit heavy. Zero temps, a jacket held fine. Add this on-the-spot fairing… maybe she could touch transonic?

She hovered on Levitation’s afterglow, eyes sweeping wide. Planes and suspicious shapes threaded the clouds, a busy sky road. No one with flesh alone broke the troposphere like her.

She kicked her legs.

There was nowhere to land. Nothing but blue emptiness and a fall waiting.

It brought no panic. It brought a deep, rising clarity and freedom. Earth’s gravity still tugged a cord at her waist—but she’d found a way to pull back.

Yekase called an Oz Floating Disc and sat cross-legged, a lone figure in a vast bell of sky.

Last time she sat like this in the open midair, she and Zhang Wendao had clashed over an organization’s internal mess… they sat on discs then too, watching fireworks and the moon from far away.

Now, only she watched the sunset.

She snapped a photo and sent it to Ling Yi, her sister, and Jiang Bailu.

[Luminous Infinity: Doc, where’d you run off to?]

[Little Sis: Pretty]

[Little Sis: Dinner’s ready]

…

No reply from Jiang Bailu.

She called her.

“…Hello? I’m still on overtime. This phase hands off soon, I—”

“Come watch the moon tonight.”

“Huh?”

“I found a spot with a killer view. Tonight. Just us.”

“You’re again…”

“Make me a list of the technical issues.”

…

“Where do I meet you?”