“Morning, Lu.”

Early next morning.

Xiaoxiao Ji sat in the classroom like a quiet reed in a pond and offered a polite nod, while Lu Ming walked in with ink-dark circles, his voice like damp ashes.

“Morning… Xiaoxiao… and the ghost next to you…”

He gave her a paper-thin smile, then saw the white-clad woman floating above Xiaoxiao’s head like a pale moth, and his words skittered and changed midair.

“You look awful, did you not sleep last night?”

Gratitude still glowed in Xiaoxiao Ji like a small lantern, and she leaned over from two seats ahead, concern first and movement after, her eyes soft as rain.

“When would he ever lose sleep? He probably spent the night with some woman.”

Nana Toki drifted over Xiaoxiao’s head like a lazy cloud and smeared the Protagonist Lord’s reputation with a brush of soot, her voice bright as a bell and cold as steel.

Even if the hero of this plane hadn’t broken character, Nana Toki held a bizarre grudge like a thorn stuck under the skin of fate.

It was as if the plane’s hero and heroine had stolen the rice from her pantry, a petty theft turned mountain in her heart.

“Well… you’re not wrong, in a way…”

Lu Ming’s bitter smile was a cracked mask, because last night he’d watched Li Kexin die with his own eyes, the scene etched like frost on glass.

A flawless girl, backed to a cliff by despair, never caught by any hand in that villa, her fall as slow as a leaf and as cruel as gravity.

From the third floor, head-first wasn’t instant death, only a drawn-out winter, while the people inside drifted past her like blind fish, laughing back into warm light.

How bottomless was that kind of despair, a night sea with no shore, a scream swallowed by velvet darkness?

He hadn’t lived her pain, but as a witness he shook like a sapling in a storm, helpless before her blizzard.

A girl who had embraced the world with kindness stepped into the sky to keep her purity, landing in a red pool that bloomed like a poisonous flower.

She watched, vision frayed like old silk, while her killers wandered off one by one, their white aprons blooming red, their faces lantern-bright and heart-dark.

Her diary, buried deep like a seed that would never sprout, sank with the truth into soil that refused the sun forever.

Four long years turned a gentle girl into a blood-soaked wraith, a winter blossom that learned to drink fire.

Lu Ming was the only witness, a lone candle in a windy room, and who could see how that flame guttered?

“By the way, the Red Robed Wraith I handed you last night—how is she?”

Nana Toki remembered the old plot like a map, where the Red Robed Wraith escaped using Ling Jiang as a stand-in, then fattened on hate and died scattering like ash.

Now she’d stuffed the wraith straight into the Protagonist Lord’s hands, and the river of fate would likely change course, maybe even turning the wraith into an early ally by sweet talk.

“She’s… fine, I guess.”

He hadn’t expected the question, and his words came out like pebbles tossed into a dark pond, each ripple careful and slow.

“The Red Robed Wraith’s resentment and fixation are stronger than most spirits, and my cultivation’s not enough, so I’m keeping her close to slowly purify her.”

Nana Toki heard how smoothly that stone skipped and decided there was a whirlpool under it; something had happened last night, as clear as moonlight on a blade.

She cursed her own morning temper like a storm she’d woken into, wishing she’d smashed the wraith to dust and denied the Protagonist Lord any chance to turn foe into friend.

“Since you can’t ferry her on, hand her to me, and I’ll do it for free for that yin-jade you gave me,” she said, circling him like a curious swallow, eyes bright as frost.

“Believe it or not, I’m excellent at sending spirits beyond,” she added, firm as a drumbeat and smug as a cat with cream.

Lu Ming: “…”

I don’t buy that for a second, he thought, the words like sparks snuffed by rain. You’re a ghost—how do you cross anyone over, with your fists?

If you could cross spirits, why haven’t you crossed yourself, he wondered, the logic sharp as a knife and absurd as a dream.

He remembered how she’d beaten Li Kexin in that red night until the soul almost shattered, her strikes like thundercracks on glass.

If he’d come a little later, Li Kexin might have scattered to wind and salt, and what normal ghost had that kind of storm in her sleeves?

“Where did you get that axe?”

The question landed like a stone in a still lake, because last night had raised too many ripples and too much moonlight on metal.

A Red Robed Wraith shouldn’t take harm from ordinary steel, a rule old as bone, yet her axe almost shook a soul apart like a temple bell.

There had to be something crooked and uncanny in it, a shadow under the bridge of reason.

“Oh? You want to know?” Nana Toki tilted her head like a fox catching a flute’s note, a toy found and a grin blooming.

Her smile made Lu Ming’s skin prickle like frost under cloth, because this woman felt thornier than the red robe, a rose that hid knives.

“Have you heard the legend?” she said, spreading her arms wide as a stage, words painting mountains and stars.

“Long ago, a human War God tried to prove he was the mightiest Martial Deity, and he wielded a Black Great Axe that drank night.”

“He chopped his way from the South Heavenly Gate to the Penglai Immortal Road, back and forth for three days and three nights, blood running like rivers.”

“Onlookers saw one thing only—hand up, blade down, hand up, blade down—blinkless as a statue facing the tide.”

“In the end, the War God lost, and the weapon was lost in that storm, until a few days ago I fished it from a junk heap like a pearl in mud.”

“It’s my soul-devouring demon arm now, and I’ve named it the Demon-Expelling Battle Axe,” she finished, pride shining like lacquer on steel.

Lu Ming: “…”

She was making it up, a kite of words without a string; he’d never heard that tale, and those places were stories dressed in mist.

How did a human War God walk into myths, he wondered, the question kicking at the sky like a trapped bird?

System: “…”

The System faintly remembered the axe came from a mountaineering club, once called the Ghoul Slayer, renamed like seasons, three or four times between planes.

“Ring, ring, ring!”

The class bell chimed like rain on bronze, and kids in the hall flowed back to seats like leaves caught by a current, while Lu Ming stopped sparring with Nana Toki’s nonsense.

He stacked books into a little fortress, a paper citadel against daylight, and then sank into sleep like a stone into a deep well.

He’d spent the night running in Wang Yan’s villa, his bones heavy as wet wood and his eyelids stitched with lead.

Nana Toki watched Xiaoxiao Ji pull out a textbook, a model student crisp as clean linen, and she drifted around the room like a lazy wind.

She finally perched on Xiaoxiao’s head like a dangling ornament, the ghost and the girl sharing one patch of sun and shadow for class.

Her main quest still hadn’t arrived, a letter lost on the road, and Nana Toki suspected her System had no wish to let her farm this plane’s main-quest virtue points.

System: “…”

“Soon, the school will organize a week-long off-campus trip, so go home and prepare, and don’t oversleep and miss the bus,” the homeroom teacher said.

The theme meeting promised a six-day, seven-night exchange with another school, the plan laid out like a map with red lines.

Nana Toki hadn’t heard the other school’s name, but the old plot did have an exchange trip where the hero hunted demons, a thread glimmering in the same loom.

Ding—Side quest triggered: [Ghost School Fiend].

Quest description: Board Bus 14 with Xiaoxiao Ji, enter Longvine Academy, and complete the exchange trip.

A cascade of System chimes rang in her skull like beads tapping porcelain, and Nana Toki almost dropped from midair like a startled sparrow.

Great, no main quest, but the side quest leaps out first, she thought, cursing her treacherous little System like a fox scolding the moon.

She straightened the white triangular kerchief on her head, calm as a nurse folding gauze, then drifted down beside Xiaoxiao, ready to speak.

“W-what is it, Sister Ling Jiang…”

Xiaoxiao was used to the air with Nana Toki in it, like a room scented by tea, but that paper-white skin still made fear rise like gooseflesh.

Your courage is too small, like a candle in wind, Nana Toki thought, seeing the little tremor in the girl’s shoulders and the future go dim as dusk.

“Forget it, nothing urgent, I’ll tell you later,” she said, tucking her cards under the table like a river gambler.

If she told Xiaoxiao the exchange school would be crawling with ghosts, the girl would try every door and window to escape, a rabbit sniffing the snare.

For the sake of her quest progress, it was better to keep quiet, to get the girl on the boat and then mention the storm, late as thunder.

Nana Toki hadn’t forgotten her hidden mission either—to turn this timid little masochist Xiaoxiao into a normal person, a twig hardened into a bow.

System: “…”

Host, don’t twist the mission, it scrawled, rain on parchment; it’s to temper her, not to train her like a pet.

Aren’t tempering and training the same furnace, she thought, smirking like a cat sunning, and you lazy System, stop nitpicking dust motes in sunlight.

System: “…”

In persecuting Nesting Phoenix, Nana Toki was a devil in a silk veil, a smile hiding horns, relentless as winter.

Who knew what tangle of feelings Nesting Phoenix would have when her memories thawed and returned like swallows in spring?

Xiaoxiao Ji sat at her desk and glanced up at the ghost above her like a child peeking at a dangling charm, none the wiser.

She didn’t know this very ghost would lead her by the hand into a den of ghosts, a lamb stepping into mist that smelled like pine and iron.