A Smile From the Villain [BL]

ASV Chapter 45: The Cost of Imagination

Translator: Chrysanthemum Bud

(T/N reminder: Please keep in mind the warnings/tags for this novel before reading.)

The vermilion door made a slight noise. Although the light was very dim, he could still vaguely see what was going on in the room. Qin Kaiyi's face paled; he completely didn't dare to believe the scene in front of him.

He saw two people sitting on the engraved lacquered bench facing the door. A man dressed in black was embracing another man dressed in snow-white in his arms. The white-clad man was obviously not willing to sit on the man in black. One could see that from his bound arms and his deathly pale complexion. The black-clad man seemed to not be able to see Qin Kaiyi standing at the door, burying his head in the man in white's neck. With that ambiguous look, as long as one was a human one could understand what was happening.

This sort of scene on its own wasn't too extreme, but it made all the blood in Qin Kaiyi's body freeze—the reason was that the man in white had the same exact face as him, and the man in black had Shen Feixiao's adult appearance!

What exactly was going on? Qin Kaiyi, who was so disturbed by this strange scene that his mind was completely in chaos, almost wanted to scream. His hand holding the lantern continually trembled, and the faint light in the lantern was obviously about to extinguish.

At this moment of crisis, Qin Kaiyi suddenly heard a heavy sigh in his chaotic mind. The sigh seemed to contain helplessness and countless pains, which made the somewhat sluggish Qin Kaiyi instantly wake up. When he glanced back, he found that the terrible scene that had just appeared in front of him had gone away. Not only that, but even the richly ornamented, incredibly luxurious building began to fade away as if by wind erosion, vanishing like smoke in thin air.

Qin Kaiyi lowered his head and saw that his body had begun to turn into powder starting from his feet. He didn't feel any pain. But when the transformation reached his head, Qin Kaiyi's vision suddenly went black.

"Shixiong, shixiong?" The feeling of being shaken was too obvious. Qin Kaiyi struggled to open his eyes, and actually saw Shen Feixiao's expressionless face. He opened his mouth to scream, but fiercely suppressed it back into his mouth.

"Shixiong?" Shen Feixiao saw Qin Kaiyi's frightened expression, and swallowed back the words that he was about to say.

"I... what's wrong with me?" Qin Kaiyi calmed down slightly and looked around, only to find that he was lying on the bed of the inn.

"You slept too heavily," Shen Feixiao said indifferently. "I couldn't wake you no matter how much I called."

"What?" Qin Kaiyi listened to this for a while and had the illusion that he was Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly (T/N: the philosopher Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, and when he awoke, he was no longer sure whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man dreaming he was a butterfly)... what was real, was he dreaming now or was he dreaming then?

"The other shixiong are waiting for you." Shen Feixiao said lightly: "Shixiong, are you following the rest, or will you catch up later?"

"... other shixiong?" Qin Kaiyi was flabbergasted: "Didn't they disappear?"

"What disappeared?" Shen Feixiao puzzled: "Shixiong, what are you talking about?"

"We... where are we?" Qin Kaiyi realized that everything had become strange. The face of Wei He flashed in his mind. Why couldn't he believe that everything that had happened was just his own hallucination?

"We set off from the Lingshan Sect and encountered heavy rain halfway, so we rested in this inn." Shen Feixiao's voice was still calm and without fluctuations. He was completely indifferent to Qin Kaiyi's confusion: "Shixiong, what actually are you talking about?"