“Let’s go on a date.”

She said it like a breeze, but the date walked in like a blade wrapped in silk.

I felt her hostility humming first, then caught the motion; on the way to the shopping street, Anna flicked a small sickle by reflex more than once, then froze and reeled her hand back like a hawk suppressing its talons.

So what did you really come for?

Anna isn’t the type to chatter; if she can, she’ll let her hands speak. I kept my mouth shut too; one wrong word and we’d spark flint on tinder and start a street fight. Luck hates that kind of scene.

She wore her true childhood face—sprinkled freckles, a round, soft moon of a face, long flax hair—the “Naiqie” look. But I still wore Andor’s face. If we really brawled, the Hero’s image would crumble like a painted idol in rain.

You can’t always count on tossing the blame downstream and pocketing the glory. Shifting blame is a craft; you stack stones upstream long before you redirect the river.

In theory, there shouldn’t be a fight. Like a storm stalled beyond the horizon.

Here’s why: I’m guessing Anna traded with the Devil, paid the price of “not initiating combat against me” to buy my identity.

I rate my cover airtight, a sealed jar sunk in the lake with no bubbles; the ways she could’ve found me shrink to a few thin threads.

First, I don’t consider Wisdom God Haydon; He swore alliance with me before Ferrel. He won’t sell me out.

The “Value” Demon King, Miss Kadula, can exchange equivalence for equivalence—even mist-thin things like intel or knowledge. She’s a dove among Demon Kings, and my ally. Shameless as I am, yes, but per Daviya, Anna once captured and tortured Kadula; in Kadula’s ledger, Anna owes a mountain of “price,” so Kadula won’t sell to a debtor on fire.

Daviya doesn’t know where I live in truth.

So among those above the sky who know I exist, that leaves the Devil.

If she got my info from the Devil, she had to promise not to use it to attack me or expose me. At most, come talk and test cooperation. Balance is the toll the Devil demands at the gate.

Balance of sight, balance of strength; to know what mortals shouldn’t know, you pay something. That’s the rule for anyone still bound to a body, reaching for supernal sight.

Divine Beings, Devils, and the minority-share “Value” Demon King Kadula each keep their own rules. They will touch the world, but because they hold mountain-high sight and star-hot power, they pin down steady laws. The greatest law sings a famous line: “Those beyond speak not a word.”

Devils chase fairness—turn the amber and you see “equilibrium.” Among the three, their demand for “fair” is the strictest, polished to a cutting edge.

Call the Demon King’s invasion a game. The Demon Kings play it, delighted; those aloof ones stand on the ridge and watch us butcher each other, eyes like hawks over fields. Their price: they don’t get to be players. And players don’t get easy enemy info from screenwatching bystanders.

Divine Beings sometimes whisper lines off-script to mortals. Devils never.

Devils keep to “equivalent exchange.” If anyone loses in a deal with them, it’s because they grasped at fruit that wasn’t theirs.

Keep your word, and the Devil becomes the best broker in the market.

They’ll act as helper, hired blade, even spoiler—but only within “what the original contractor could have done.” Devils and Divine Beings just simplify the path. They’re supporting cast; they must ensure their steps don’t rewrite history by their names alone.

I can ask the Devil to knock on the wall and hint ideas to Nivifar, but no price will make the Devil spit out Nivifar’s answer key. The Devil moves only within the fence of fairness, like I keep to “evil that can be understood.” Break the rule, and you break yourself.

At the bend in history, it’s always human Heroes and not-yet-ascended Sons of the Demon King who stand in the wind—never the transcendent gods and devils. That’s the rule they wrote together.

So Anna should have sworn not to ambush me. But will she chew the breach-price and still thrust? The fear arrives first, then logic; my sister’s been extreme since we were children, a knife hidden under silk.

“How’s this dress on me?”

After we tiptoed through the shopping street for half a day, she finally held up a pure white dress against herself, asking for my opinion like a swallow testing the wind.

“Mm… a very youthful dress.”

What I wanted to say was, You’re past pretending to be fresh dew—but her face lit up at my line, and she lifted another piece to show me, petals opening one by one.

The tension between us loosened, like frost thinly melting. I even teased her now and then—while my eyes never left the little sickle she palmed like a moon crescent.

It’s been so long since I played with my sister; nostalgia swelled like warm tea in the chest.

“Big brother, pass me that, would you? Yes, that one by your left hand.”

I picked up the hat by my side and held it out.

Then my heart grew a blade—about a meter long, a standard saber—as if a winter spike sprouted through the ice.

“Kuku, sorry, my hand slipped.” Her smile was a fox’s, and the chuckle was dark. “But you’ve said it yourself, never drop your guard in front of an evil person.”

Anna stepped out from the fitting room’s inner side, grin sharp as lacquer.

“I’m the same. Truly sorry. I meant to give you the hat, and then, sigh…”

I pointed at her forehead, wearing my own crooked grin.

She felt the pain like a bell struck, and lifted a hand to her face. In the dead-center of her brow, a sword stood pinned—a regulation iron double-edged blade raised like an obelisk.

Now neither of us could laugh—no, we should be laughing together, teeth red and eyes bright.

She mocked the saber through my heart, a rail line clean through. I mocked the sword-in-forehead look, so postmodern you could buy tickets.

Words turned vile, and we didn’t spare punches. Blood and pain—this is how I’m most comfortable with people like me; it’s the way villains keep company, like wolves gnawing the same bone.

We laughed until the world shook, clutching our stomachs, salt and iron in the mouth.

When the laughter wrung us dry, I sent Anna to wait on a street bench and went to buy lunch boxes and snacks. We came back loaded; the blades and swords lodged in us were instant-death to mortals, but to Demon Kings, just pranks concocted like child’s glue. We tore each other’s bodies a thousand times and learned this degree of harm barely registers.

Just a prank; otherwise we wouldn’t add the little ritual to “fix” them so the weapons won’t pull free. It let us blend into the shopping street’s costumed parade, playing revenant wraiths risen for a night.

“Try these—Baro Rabbit King barbecue, and Filo tentacle rolls. They’re famous snacks from the Hero Academy.”

Anna bought all the clothes she’d just tried, then sent them back to her domain using the “Slaughter” concept churned up by the restaurant’s killing of stock—like catching a current and riding it home.

She wore the pure white dress now. After a century of seeing her in black backless evening gowns, this clean look had the kind of contrast that cuts like dawn.

“So good… really so good… No one in the Demon Realm makes me food like this.”

Her mouth was stuffed with octopus rolls; the Filo octopus’s stubborn vitality made the cut tentacles keep writhing like vines in wind, making her cheeks bulge and pulse.

Very erotic, the kind you see in R-rated tentacle pieces.

The Demon Realm is low on resources—almost no plants, beasts mostly “modded” by the Ocean of Darkness from the Creator’s designs, all blood-hungry and venomous, like night-blooming thorns.

The Demonfolk say “silver as poison, poison as blood.” Our blood runs black, sign of the highest blessing from the Ocean of Darkness, and we can eat venomous beasts like swallowing thunder without lightning.

But Sons of the Demon King inherit golden blood. Our souls are born near the Ocean of Darkness, unlike our forebears, but this flesh doesn’t change much; taste stays close to human, like rain on rice.

Under the Demon Realm’s poor pantry, only very high craftsmanship—turning food into lust-tonics, even into light—can please a Demon King’s tongue.

Not to brag, but I have that level. I’ve found whatever I can do, I can explain with “the Demon Realm is boring,” like a joke I keep polishing.

“Tastes so good… Want to stay?”

The world’s bounty outstrips the Demon Realm by a valley of harvests; flavors please Demon Kings more—and what pleases them most is human flesh.

The Demonfolk eat people. Did I mention? Ah, irrelevant. For human relations, I haven’t eaten any in a long while, like a tiger fasting for peace.

I lobbed the tricky question. The path bent toward the core.

“I do. Everything here is interesting. But we still belong to the Demon Realm. That’s the game’s basic rule.”

“You use ‘game’ now, huh?” I laughed, a pebble in a bowl.

“Because you say it all the time. Oh—big brother, look.”

Anna took off her sunhat. A strong wind shouldered through; her flax hair streamed like river grass.

Up close, you could still see the horns.

Two horns, yes. Ordinary Sons of the Demon King have only one.

Anna has ascended. She is a Demon King now.

“I can leave any time.”

She lifted her chin with pride, not hiding her twin horns. People around us thought we were playing Demon King parts, just part of the grand parade, like masks in daylight.

They didn’t know that the instant they saw those horns, half their blood chilled and their lifespan was halved, like candles cut mid-flame. That’s the price of staring at the unnameable dark, of taking in scraps of supernal knowledge this world doesn’t hold.

Want it or not, sight alone is enough. They’d learned a shard of the meaning of Slaughter, and the tax was soul-debt that never gets paid off.

Thankfully, Anna dropped the sunhat back on, like a lid over a deep well.

“But my quarrel with you isn’t over. Give me the grandest performance—paint the stage red with blood, set souls as jewels, walk the boards with resolve and obsession. We’ll have our final reckoning—and my curtain call… or yours.”

I felt the premonition before the words; I guessed the line she’d speak. And because my hunches land true, I pulled an overnight and spit out a three-hundred-page proposal like a storm of paper cranes.

“This is what you want? Only this?”

“Andor.”

“What?”

“My dress. Is it pretty?”

“My eye never misses. Never.”

“Is it the prettiest?”

“Yes. Of all we’ve seen, the most beautiful, the one that suits you.”

“Mm. Good. Then the date’s perfect. The first price has been paid to you—Catherine, and my exit—so return Nan Lu to me.”

“No problem. Anything else?”

“Well, if possible, I want coffee cultivation techniques, the full maid café recipes, your forbidden curses, land in the Demon Realm…”

A girl with a fresh, round face spun through the crowded shopping street, dancing like a white egret among waves of people.

You couldn’t call it great.

Maybe she choreographed it herself. I dimly recall her tugging my sleeve as a child, swearing she’d become a dancer, little fist raised like a sprout breaking soil.

How did we end up killing each other after that? I forgot. I wasn’t interested for a century; today the mood drifted in like mist, and I started to trace.

“But that’s too much. If not, how about a child? Yours and mine?”

“If that still won’t do, then…”

“At least give me a kiss.”

The white-dressed girl pressed a hand to her sunhat and smiled at me like sugar over tea.

Her lips were smooth and soft, dangerously cute, like ripe fruit glowing in late light.