Ling didn’t loosen her guard; while the daemon lay silent, she spun her mana like moonlight over water, shaping Phantom Night—“Moonlit Beauty, Wild Bloom.”
The daemon didn’t rise. Instead, a black vortex flowered among the heap of daemon corpses, a portal rippling like ink in a bowl.
Relief unknotted inside her, soft as a sigh in fog; she drew back her mana. The one she’d waited for had finally stopped goofing off, and this game had grown stale.
Every gaze hooked onto the sudden portal like fish on a line. Wang Xiaoming stared too, propped up by the elder’s steady, tremoring hands.
“Kid! Careful! That thing looks like it links to somewhere!”
Ling tasted the elder’s kindness like warm tea, yet she knew the space beyond hid someone she didn’t exactly favor, a thorn behind silk.
She couldn’t tip her hand now. So she drifted to the elder’s side, wearing vigilance like a cloak, eyes on the door’s dark moon.
Seeing her approach, Wang Xiaoming offered a polite nod, words neat as folded paper cranes. “You’re the one who pulled me out? I’m Wang Xiaoming. Thanks for that.”
Simple words, yet his name tugged a thread in her past life, a memory clanking like armor under sunlight, faceless but heavy.
“Wang… Xiaoming…? Can you transform?”
“Transform into what?”
“Forget it. I didn’t say anything.”
The moment passed like a pebble skipped across a pond—three beats at most—because the door finally stirred, whispering arrival.
Click, click, click.
The sound, crisp as glass heels, rang into everyone’s ears like rain on tiles, deliberate and bright.
Ling’s mind sketched a scene she dreaded: a slightly taller, absurdly voluptuous Rafi in heels, playing at sultry maturity like lacquer over wood.
A cold shiver crawled her spine like a spider in winter.
Thankfully, it was only ink on water. When Rafi stepped through the portal, the picture shattered like frost under a boot.
Rafi wore pure white silk, sheer in places, moon-pale and river-smooth; bare shoulders and qipao-like slits invited eyes to linger like moths at a lamp.
Her lips burned with deliberate red, a poppy against snow-pale skin; odd yet irresistibly lush, a fever under the moon.
Her aura was nothing like before. Ling felt off-balance, as if a pure junior from home had arrived in risqué lace, flaunting curves like a sudden spring storm.
Rafi, unaware her image had collapsed in Ling’s eyes like a paper screen in rain, walked with the poised stride of a learned elder sister.
Just before she reached them, her body rose, floating like a lotus caught by wind, lifting until she could look down on the three.
“Was it you who fought my Demon Elite for so long?”
She fed force into her words—iron filings in honey. Demon King pressure, layered with tempered presence, made her question strike like a decree.
The weight felt like mist to Ling, light and thin. To the elder and Wang Xiaoming, it pressed like a mountain on reed shoulders.
Wang held better; years of battle had forged his spine like tempered steel. He only trembled, a leaf in a steady breeze.
The elder fared worse. An S-class mage, yet not a fighter; without the grit of war, the pressure shook him—legs quivering, mind hazing like heat over sand.
Ling’s brow tightened, a line cut in porcelain. If those two dropped now, her next act would stumble; Rafi wasn’t easing up—clearly on purpose.
She didn’t know the aim, but she had to stop the blade before it bit.
“Hey! Who opens with questions like that? Aren’t you going to introduce yourself first?”
Her tone was protest, but her mana pushed Rafi’s pressure back like tide against tide, carving a clean pocket of air for the two behind.
Rafi took the cue and drew most of it in, leaving a thin thread like incense smoke—just enough to prove this wasn’t a dream.
She drifted down, soft as falling petals. Her hands lifted as if pinching a hem—though today’s silk had no hem—and the gesture breathed nobility like scented wine.
She finished a formal bow, head rising, eyes settling on Ling like a hawk on a lone branch, curious and bright.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Rafi, the new Demon King.”
She spoke with a smile sweet as candied haw, red lips curved like a crescent.
“Demon King?!”
“N-no way!”
The title cut deep, a bell struck in a temple. Shock and fear flashed across Wang and the elder’s faces like lightning under cloud.
So, the Demon King is someone even a nation’s general and a top mage fear—thunder behind velvet.
Ling had known little of the role, only that the last one, a shut-in uncle, was weaker than her—dust on old armor.
By that measure, Rafi felt even weaker, like a softer echo on the wall.
Yet the moment’s weight said otherwise. When a man who’d faced seventy-two daemon hordes without a flicker of fear showed dread, the title carried iron under silk.
