Witch trials

But in the end, Bai Liu and his team were not able to join You Zhen's team.

"Men are not accepted in the Witch Zone." You Zhen pointed a warning finger at Bai Liu's nose, "Stop following us, or you'll be in trouble!"

Leah fell back on a rare moment of hesitation as she gave them a complicated look in her eyes, "We can't take you in right now, there's no way to deal with the changes you've caused since you've been in here."

"But ...... witches don't hate all men, as you'll soon see."

Looking at the back of You Zhen pulling Leah away, Mu Sicheng also sighed with mixed feelings, he was a bit disillusioned, "Are we still going to follow them? They don't seem to want us to follow?"

"Follow." Bai Liu was very straightforward, "Jiayi's order is to assist in robbing the court, so we have to carry it out to the end."

"Actually ......" Mu Sicheng scratched his head, "We can split up with the witches and rob the other courts, right? That would be more efficient as well?"

Bai Liu said, "No, it's not an assisted court-jacking, it's us acting on our own."

Mu Sicheng was a bit confused, "Does it have to be aided? Why?"

Bai Liu lightly swept Mu Sicheng's eyes, "Our purpose at this stage is to join up with Jiayi, that is, to enter the Witches' area, but as you can see, since we are men, the Witches are very repulsive towards us."

"Right." Mu Sicheng went on rightfully, "But if we show more ability, help them more, rob some courts for them more, then they might-"

Bai Liu coldly interrupted Mu Sicheng's speculation, "--Then we will never be able to enter the Witch Zone again in our lifetime."

Mu Sicheng's hopeful exposition stalled, and he asked, puzzled, "Why?!"

"Because in this copy, our position and their position is completely different, we are the vested interests of this environment, if at the same time our ability is also very strong, even can force over them to be the dominant position, interfere with their decisions, interrupt their planning, this will lead to a very terrible end -" Bai Liu leveled Mu Sicheng eyes, "If they easily accept us, we backwash, the current they can not accept the consequences, we will become enemies, both will lose. -Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng levelly in the eyes, "If they accept us easily, and we turn against them, they will not be able to accept the consequences, and we will become the enemy, and both of us will lose."

"That's why they'll never easily agree to our decision to enter the Witch Zone - even if we're not hostile to them, people change."

"It's a very wise decision, in this situation where we can easily backtrack for greater benefits after we defect, there's no point in interfering too much in the other party's decision making if we're truly sincere about joining their organization, rather it's more important to present our own sincerity, so we can only assist- -That's why Jiayi gave this order."

"Otherwise, with Jiayi's current position in the Witch District, she could just tell the person in charge of the other side that she wishes to let us in - and I'm sure the other side would seriously consider it, but it's not what she wants."

Mu Ke nods, "So Jiayi wants us to impress the witches ourselves by our actions, so that they will slowly accept us."

"In this context of witch trials, sincerity is more important than ability." Bai Liu said in a light tone, "The people who tried them could all be very capable people in the Order."

"So what do we do next?" Tang Er asked, hitting his gaze.

Bai Liu calmly replied, "Jiayi didn't order us to stop, so we continued to follow."

"But next them we see the situation to assist, not necessarily all the people in the court of judgment who are being judged to save, they do it before we do it."

Tang Er frowned, "Why?"

Bai Liu's tone was calm, "Because the next ones to be judged are all men."

Trial Chamber 77.

Mu Sicheng and Bai Liu, hidden behind the massed jury, stood slightly on tiptoe to look at the defendant tied to a pole in the center of the courtroom, then withdrew his gaze in some shock: "It's really a man!"

"Aren't the witch trials only for witches! Why are there still men!"

"Have you forgotten about that trial case in the Witch's Heart?" Bai Liu's tone rippled, "After that, in addition to the witches who were tried, anyone who had a relationship with a witch was also tried."

"Unless you're the one testifying against a witch, if there's a witch in your family, then you're bound to be implicated."

The bishop in the judge's seat slammed his gavel, "Silence!"

"Defendant, your wife defected from the court three days ago after being accused of being a witch; have you assisted her secretly since then?"

The man tied to the post shivered and didn't speak.

The Bishop slammed the hammer hard, his tone lowered, "Answer me, defendant, or you will be pronounced guilty together for aiding a witch!"

"Your family fortune will be confiscated in court by the Church as a punishment, and you, in turn, will be executed or sent to the borderline to work as a laborer to the point of death in order to atone for the sin of welcoming a witch into your life!"

"But we won't completely deny you a choice, after all, you are a victim too." The bishop's voice became softer, "Now, there are two choices before you."

"The first option is to permanently disassociate yourself from your witch wife, report her to the Holy See at the first sign you see of her, and now contribute half of your family fortune to purchase holy water from the Holy See, drink it in court to cleanse you of the spell cast by the witch, and swear that from this point on you will always belong to the Holy See, serve as a member of the Holy See, and dedicate yourself to killing all witches in sight. "

"The second option--"

The bishop's voice lurched and went noticeably cold, "That is if you confess your sins, and we judge you, and the rest of your family, with holy fire like the witch trials."

"What are your options?"

Everyone looked at the man tied to the pillar, the whole place went quiet, only to hear the rapid and messy breathing of this man with his head lowered, his expression confused and frantic, as if he was a trapped beast struggling.

Hidden in the shadows, You Zhen's breathing was also messed up, and she stared at the man with a deadpan expression of self-struggle just like this man.

"The witch district took in a witch three days ago, supposedly his wife who defected." Lia said softly, "The witch said that her husband and other family members helped her defect."

"She regretted defecting at first because all of her family would have been tried except for her."

"But more than regret, she was afraid of seeing the outcome of her family's trial."

"--is betraying her, is it?" You Zhen takes a deep breath as she raises a hand to wipe her reddened eyes, her tone sarcastic and weepy, "We can help her save her family from harm, but her family won't necessarily choose the outcome of being saved by us."

"They'll choose something else, they'll choose to stand across from us - they won't go with us."

You Zhen's hands were shaking and his voice was shaking when he said this, "It's like when I went to save my family."

Leah patted her shoulder wordlessly. "I ......" the man asked, looking up, almost hoarsely, "Can I choose neither?"

"I'll give you all my family's fortune, but I don't want to be part of the Order to hunt witches, is that okay?"

The bishop turned him down icily, "There are only two kinds of people here, the enemies of witches, and the enemies of us."

"If you are not the enemy of the witches, then you are our enemy."

"The judgment panel pronounces sentence."

The gavel fell heavily.

The men's backs were also flush with [Guilty] signs - after these jurors tried a witch or someone related to a witch, they were able to share a portion of the tried person's property as a reward from the Church.

Tang Er struck a solemn brow at the firewood being placed at the man's feet, "Do we save?"

"Wait." Bai Liu's tone was unhurried, "We'll save them if they save us, and we won't move if they don't."

Meanwhile, Leah looks over to You Zhen, whose eyes are struggling and whose expression is frozen, and asks her in a low voice, "This choice, do we save it?"

You Zhen deadpanned the man's face, her teeth clenched, her chest rose and fell violently twice, then the moment the torch was lit, she drew the bow and arrow behind her and aimed it at the bishop's head sitting on top of the high dais, and said in a harsh and cold tone:

"That choice doesn't satisfy me, and on principle I don't want to save any man."

"--But I don't want to spare any bitches on principle, either."

"Witch code number four." You Zhen hissed out through his teeth, "--The judgment of the innocent shall not be ignored!"

Bows and arrows were released, the court of judgment was instantly in chaos, Bai Liu's eyes twitched as he quickly ordered, "Match their attack."

After a moment of soldierly rescue, Bai Liu stepped forward and lowered the man tied to the post, pressing the unresponsive man into a quick retreat out with the witch before the Order could counterattack twice.

Immediately afterward, the two sides met.

You Zhen began by asking, "Why are you still following me?"

Bai Liu quickly threw up his hands in surrender and innocently stated, "I just saved this person wanted to ask how you are going to place them?"

Both You Zhen and Leah's gazes gave a frozen-like lurch at the sight of the unresponsive man with burns on his body.

--Dealing with men has always been a problem for all witches.

To protect the witches, the Witches' Quarter doesn't accept men, but sometimes they do save the witches' male relatives from the Inquisition, such as parents, such as brothers, and such as husbands - these men are generally saved by the You Zhen women after they've made the choice in the courtroom that they'd be burned in a trial for being on the side of the witches.

But problems ensued; while they had saved the men, how to place them had always been a problem.

Baola Currently it's an area around the witch zone to open up an area for these men, but the witch zone is so polluted that it's not safe for these men to stay there, but it's not possible to send them back to the safe zone ......

And with the area already full, the matter is currently on hold against the backdrop of the impending Great War, and is now in a complete stalemate.

You Zhen rarely paused in place, staring at Bai Liu without saying a word.

Bai Liu's waist vibrated as he glanced down at the message he had just received from Liu Jiayi, looked up, and smiled as he offered the resolution, "If you don't mind, you can place the rescued males on our side, and we'll help you process and vet them."

"You can think of us as a third-party organization [of normal males obeying a witch's deployment], where we don't enter the witch zone and use our male identity to lurk in the safe zone, while we obey your deployment and help you attack."

You Zhen ahs suspiciously, and Leah raises an eyebrow subtly-

-This decision, completely feasible, was almost as appropriate as if it were a customized tactic for the girls right now.

Bai Liu smiled and asked, "What do you think?"

The message from Liu Jiayi on his belt was - [Third Party Organization].

Meanwhile, the Papal Palace.

The Pope's Palace is the most central processing organization of the entire country, where the highest authority of the Holy See in every generation, the Pope, as well as cardinals, archbishops, nuns and other core positions of the Holy See promoted from bishops, after the witch trials began, the power of the Holy See quickly spread all over the world, the Pope's Palace has also become bigger and bigger because of this.... Up to today, it has been the sixth large-scale renovation and expansion of the Pope's Palace, and the size of the Pope's Palace is close to the size of half a city.

This generation's Pope had a very striking proposal for the expanded Palace of the Popes - he expanded the Palace to the bottom of the Island in the Sky and built a stairway to the sky.

But this is not surprising, every generation of the Pope is the owner of the Island in the Sky, and this expansion can be said to overlap the territories both above and below his sky, and make it easy for the ecclesiastical people to go up and down the island at any time, and under the sky ladder, connected to the Sisters' Hall of the Pope's Palace.

The Sisters' Hall is a place within the Pope's Palace dedicated to the cultivation of Sisters of the Church. Every year, the Holy See will gather and collect girls between the ages of 8-14 from all over the world, and after verifying their faith almost strictly, and that they haven't touched or swallowed an eel, they will be brought to the Palace to be cultivated, and will familiarize themselves with the Scriptures and the Catechism, and will cultivate a holy and unadulterated nature, and then, after qualifying for two to three years, they will be sent out to the various chambers. After two to three years, they will be sent out to the various chambers of justice.

Nuns were required to remain pure, so they didn't have to swallow eels, and the role of nuns was to purify things and people contaminated by witches, which also included praying for purification rituals after each trial, where the nuns would pray reverently for an hour in front of a burned witch to destroy the witch's spirit - this was done to prevent the witch's spirit from escaping from her body and leaning over into other women's bodies to continue to haunt them. out and stooping down into other women's bodies to continue its haunting.

The ones with the best purification effects are all young nuns, that is, those under eighteen, then after a nun reaches eighteen, according to the teachings, her purification efficacy diminishes, and although the benevolent Holy See will not excommunicate them for this reason, most of the nuns consciously withdraw from the Holy See at this point in time.

There are two very "good" ways for a nun to leave the Church:

The first is that she can marry a man and never be accused of being a witch again for the rest of her life because she was once a holy nun.

Secondly, that is, they have the priority to ascend to the Sky City.

So becoming a nun was the best path for most young girls who hadn't yet been accused of being witches, bar none, and having a nun who had withdrawn from the Order as a wife was the greatest fantasy of all men - when a commoner had a nun in their family, they were insulated from the whole witch trial thing, because the nun's holiness would purify everything.

And so the families that had girls would do everything they could to send their children to the Church to be trained as nuns, and the families that had boys would teach their children, frantically from the start, that you must work hard now, and that everything you do is so that when you grow up you will be able to afford to marry a nun.

--If you are not a nun, if you are not surrounded by nuns, then you will one day be judged by the Holy See!

As a result, nuns have become a particularly popular profession, but there are, after all, only a small number of nuns, so the competition among members of the Sisters' Preparation is fierce - as fierce as the competition among their suitors.

Despite the fact that the doctrine only required nuns to be pure and devout in their beliefs, when the Holy See selected them, good-looking and uniquely temperamental young girls would always be given priority in the selection process, and many parents even went so far as to give their children, who were only in their teens, plastic surgery in order to send their children into the Sisters' Formation Hall - but this behavior was soon strictly banned by the Holy See.

"Don't go around modifying your looks as you please, we need you to stay the way you are." The priest of the Church who selects the nuns compassionately explains, "That is the look that God has given you."

With this stiff competition, every nun selected is naturally beautiful and pure, and this year's batch boasts one of the most beautiful nuns since the witch trials.

She didn't come from within the Kingdom, but from outside of it, and she had bright green eyes and long, silky, curly, shiny blonde hair that made her look as innocent as the angels that accompanied God in the glazed paintings - which was why everyone praised her as the most beautiful of the bunch, and she fit perfectly into everyone's fantasies about the word nun.

Every time she closed her hands tightly and lowered her eyes in compassion and prayed for those who came to her in distress, it was so touching.

"May your distress dissipate sooner." She whispered, "May your soul go to heaven after death."

"Thank you!" The man who had come to complain was so grateful he was on the verge of tears, he reached out his hand and subconsciously tried to shake the nun's hand, but quickly came to his senses as if he had suddenly awakened under the nun's evasion and blushed in great embarrassment, "I'm sorry, I forgot that the nuns are not allowed to touch us non-clerical ordinary men."

She simply smiled and waved her hand to show she didn't care.

Growing more and more grateful, the man stole two glances at the nun, took a deep breath, and mustered up enough courage before daring to inquire, "You, may I ask when you will probably leave the Order?"

--In this country, asking a nun when she will leave the Church is like asking when she will marry.

"Of course! I know I don't deserve you!" The man quickly mouthed his defense, but his words of explanation seemed so weak under the gaze of the nun's innocent bright green eyes that he stammered a little, "I-I was just asking! You don't have to answer me either!"

"Leave the Order?" The nun smiled gently, "I turned sixteen this year, when do you think I'll be able to leave the Order?"

"Two, two years from now?" The man stumbled over his answer.

"No." The nun's bright green eyes glittered with an unknown emotion as she curled her lips, her tone so careless, "Anytime, of course."

The man left the Sisters' Hall with his head spinning and his expression confused, and he brushed shoulders in the inner gardens of the Papal Palace with a lowered head, anxious and hurried-looking priest who pushed open the door of the Sisters' Hall and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead before calling out, after seeing that she was the only Sister, "Phoebe!"

Phoebe turned, her green eyes darkening for a moment, "Still no word on Heart's identity in this game?"

Qi Yifang, dressed as a priest, broke out in a cold sweat as if by reflex at Phoebe's sweeping glance, and replied weakly, "...... No."

Phoebe commented in a lazy tone, "You and Liu Ji are really two losers."

Qi Yifang : "......QAQ."

Queen, where the hell are you? Come on! We can't hold Phoebe!

Their guild is really a bad year, first in the challenge match was drawn, to play a game, and now it is a login this copy of the contact between them and Heart on the break, how to contact can not be contacted, and do not know where Heart's landing point, forcibly blocked the contact between them and Heart, now they can only be a big map slowly to search for news, looking for Heart. Now they can only search for Heart slowly on a huge map.

"Where's Titan?" Phoebe sat casually under the idol, took one of the apples these people offered to the god and took a large bite, her green eyes sweeping Liu Ji, "You didn't let him get caught, did you?"

"No no no!" Qi Yifang shook his head frantically, "We hid Titan by the sea as you instructed! Currently Liu Ji is in charge of the Order over there, and it hasn't been discovered!"

"But it is true that the Queen has not yet been heard from."

Qi Yifang collapsed sadly, "This shouldn't be, the Empress usually takes the initiative to contact us ah, this shouldn't be that we've all converged and she hasn't heard from us yet."

Phoebe flicked her eyelids, "I got a tip that there's someone on Sky City from the title Queen of Heart."

Qi Yifang was delighted, "Then it must be the Queen! Then let's go up and find it ......"

"But that person is a man." Phoebe spared a glance at the stunned face of Qi Yifang, who knew nothing of it, and said, almost nastily, "As you know, you can't change your gender in the game, so what do you think, or what do you expect ......"

"Is this person the Queen?"

Qi Yifang's expression went blank: "Huh?!"

Phoebe, after admiring Qi Yifang's dumbfounded expression, withdrew her gaze in boredom and her tone became cold again, "We can't go up to Sky City to look for it for the time being, I don't know what's on that map, and the fact that Heart can even get stuck up there and can't come down to us means in itself that there's a bit of a problem with that map. "

"We should sweep the map from under the island first."

"But, but ......" Qi Yifang's mind was already too shocked to think by the things Phoebe threw out one after another, and he could only stutter and ask, "But we haven't even met up with the tactician yet! But we haven't met up with the tactician yet! Are we just going to push straight ahead like this! We should wait until the Empress meets up with us and comes out with tactics before we push ......"

"Why do we have to wait for him?" Phoebe interrupted Qi Yifang impatiently, she looked up, her eyes and words were completely icy cold in her obviously innocent face, "He can't come down from the island to us on his own, that's his own waste."

"It's league time, and I don't leave time for waiting for losers."

Qi Yifang was dumbfounded, he was so anxious that he was on the verge of crying, "Phoebe, but we don't have a tactician! How can the league play without a tactician?!"

Oooooooh, he'll miss Jiayi when he gets to this point, Jiayi will also be their tactician, but at least it's a negotiation, Phoebe is the type that's so strong that there's no way she can interject, except for Heart, who can barely communicate with her on an equal footing - this is also mainly because Heart's panel is higher than Phoebe's. Phoebe is the type that can just send you away on the spot for the sake of victory. Phoebe is the type of person who can just send you away on the spot to win.

--whoever you are.

"It's just that Heart isn't here, so why no tactician?" Phoebe gave him a strange look, "Am I not human?"

Qi Yifang simply wanted to hold his head and scream - he knew it!

With Phoebe in the game, every game is a big game of usurpation - Phoebe is constantly stealing tactician privileges from Heart, and sometimes even attacking Heart, thanks to Heart's experience and ability to fight back.

That's why Heart didn't let Phoebe into the team before.

Phoebe is a player with very strong attack power and ambition, action and offense can be described as strong, although it is the personal skills of the auxiliary, taking the [control] position, but [roaming] and [main attack] position all-around play, can be said to be a genius all types of players, in some ways even stronger than the original Liu Jiayi, and Bai Liu and the reverse God they are a level of players, the Every time, he dragged their teammates who couldn't keep up with the speed to death.

She's a natural tactician - Qi Yifang More than once I've heard the Queen say this about Phoebe.

But Phoebe has an Achilles' heel - and that's that her tactics are so aggressive that it's easy for her to die teammates.

In other words, the team is too weak.

Qi Yifang, as a teammate who has been mocked by Phoebe, is really afraid of Phoebe taking control of the game. Heart's tactics are relatively mild, not aggressive, but rather defensive, or at least concerned about the limits of their abilities, but Phoebe's is completely the same way of playing.

She doesn't care about them at all.

But now that Heart is gone, there's simply no one left in the entire arena who can hold Phoebe down!

Phoebe breezily hopped down from the pedestal table under the idol, throwing away the core of the apple she had finished nibbling on and clapping her hands together slightly happily, her bright green eyes curving into a smile, "It's just as well that Heart isn't here, I don't like his limp-wristed style of play at all, it's not enjoyable at all."

"He's stuck on the island right now and can't get out, so if he's smart and wants to win this game, he'd better delegate tactician privileges to me now."

"Of course it doesn't matter if it's not delegated." Phoebe shrugged indifferently, "Just wait until he can't hold out on the island and dies and leaves the game, and the tactician privileges are mine."

She clasped her hands together and closed her eyes in a devotional prayer, "Lord, then I wish Heart to go to hell right now."

"?!?" Qi Yifang was scared and wanted to cry, like a poor kid whose parents left home and could only stay with the bad kids who bullied him, he could only retort in a shivering whisper, "Phoebe, the Empress is at least our president, right? Wouldn't it be bad for you to curse her like that?"

"President?" Phoebe gave Qi Yifang a light eyed squint and suddenly smiled innocently with a hooked lip, "Maybe not right away."

Qi Yifang was stunned, "What does it mean that Empress ...... is not the president right away?"

"That weakling." Phoebe smiled sweetly, her hands clasped together against her jaws, a holy glow all over her face, "In order to run away from something he didn't want to face, he gave me the access to the guild heir right before this year's tournament oh."

"- As soon as he does die, I'll be the King's Crown President."

"So please, let him go to hell quickly."

Qi Yifang's mind really went completely blank now, "What? The Empress gave you the presidential authority?!"

Phoebe's system panel shook and a line of prompts popped up:

[System Alert: Player Queen Heart has transferred the team's tactician authority to you, please deploy carefully and lead the team to win!

"What a weak approach Heart style." Phoebe snorted very softly as she laughed and shook the system panel in her hand at Qi Yifang, whose expression was on the verge of dementia, "The Tactician privilege is now mine as well."

"Come with me, punk teammate."

Ornamental Pool.

Wang Shun gasped when he saw the tactician's logo appear on Phoebe's head, and his reaction was echoed by the large crowd in the auditorium.

This time even the host looked numb, his face was in a trance as he looked at the big screen, and his speech into the microphone was a bit intermittent: "Guo, the King's Guild has also delegated their own Tactician's authority to the new team members ......"

"So what's this?!"

The host said incredulously, "Two freshman tacticians from two families dueling? On a crucial field that will determine whether or not the two families will make the playoffs?!"

The audience whispered:

"Woah shit, a newcomer against a newcomer, so it's not certain who will win and who will lose?"

"...... I can't figure out what these two presidents are thinking anymore?"

"Am I the only one who cares about what the nun just said, that she's the new president when the queen dies? What's going on here!?"

Yuan Guang who was sitting next to Wang Shun also tensed up, he was sitting here on behalf of the merged Russell Cemetery, before when Bai Liu delegated his authority to Liu Jiayi he was dizzy for a moment because of this operation, now that the other party had delegated as well, his mind was even more dizzy and he had to hold Wang Shun up and ask him: "What the hell is going on here?"

"I didn't expect ...... Empress to give Phoebe the guild and tactician's authority so quickly." Wang Shun's face sank slightly, "All I know is that she didn't want to be president a long time ago, that's why she picked Jiayi to be the heir and groomed her to take over her permissions."

Yuan Guang was stunned: "You don't want to do it anymore? Why? She's one of the strongest players in this game?!"

"I don't know." Wang Shun bowed his head heavily as he folded his arms in front of himself and remained silent for a few moments before speaking, "The Queen's skill would make me become the person I wanted to see in the core of my greatest desires when I looked directly at her, so I have never succeeded in trying to find out what she thinks."

"Why would a top player in the prime of his powers give up his position?" Daniel, lying on his back on the railing, asked bored, turning his head to Cen Buming, "Hey Chairman, you look like you know everything, any idea why?"

Cen Buming clasped his chest and gave Daniel a nonchalant squint, "Shouldn't you know better about the King's Guild?"

"That dangerous nun, she's your sister, isn't she?"

"Biologically speaking, she is indeed my sister all right." Daniel looked at Phoebe on the big screen with a slightly resistant expression and tsked in annoyance, "But by all accounts, a more accurate definition of her status would be that of my competitor than sister."

"And a pretty strong contender."

Cen Buming raises a slight unilateral eyebrow, "While I have no interest in your family business, if you want to talk about it, I can listen."

--What a gossipy sentence of refusal.

Daniel didn't resist switching hands and dragging his jaw as he stared at Phoebe on the big screen for a moment, his apple-green eyes darkening.

"You should know who I am in reality, right, Chairman? There's no need for me to give you a little more background on me, right?" Daniel's voice rang out suddenly.

Cen Buming nodded coldly, "Acknowledged. "

--An arms dealer so powerful that Bai Liu of other world lines would voluntarily cooperate with him would use a way that could be described as cruel, like taming a beast to choose an heir from his own offspring.

And Daniel is the winner of these offspring who kill each other, inheriting the whole group after his father's death and becoming one of the best and most fragile guns in Bai Liu's hands.

"My father had many lovers, he didn't care about them and wouldn't let them into our family, but he would bring back all of his children born to those lovers and teach us to handle guns and shoot from the time we started walking." Daniel tilted his head and said in a casual tone, "My mother was the first wife he took into his family, then when I was five, he killed her while she was praying at her bedside because she betrayed him."

"Phoebe's mother was his second wife, and Phoebe had been raised in the Sinchimani family until she was five years old when he married Phoebe's mother, and I was almost seven at that time."

Daniel paused for a moment, and as if in amusement, he began a question-and-answer game with Cen Buming: "Why do you think my father chose to marry Phoebe's mother as his second wife, out of all the lovers he had?"

Cen Buming was quiet for a moment, "I don't know."

--All in all there would be nothing in this little madman's family that could be routinely inferred.

"It's because of Phoebe." Daniel leaned back lazily in his stance, "My father was going to marry another boy's mother-his other lover."

"But Phoebe changed his mind."

Daniel looked up as he looked at Phoebe in the big screen, his tone obscure, "At only five years old, Phoebe is simply a perfect inheritor of his genes, even surpassing him, she is cruel, strong, cold, and will cling to a gun when she is crawling, and has an innate desire to take control of anything she can loot to move her up the ladder, and compared to the other heiresses who only cry, Phoebe is simply as good as any creature of another species."

"Phoebe's excellence impressed my father, and even though there had never been a female heir in the Sinchimani family, Phoebe swayed him."

"He decides to marry Phoebe's birth mother to pave the way for Phoebe's position as heir."

"When I was thirteen and Phoebe was ten, our family had heir trials." Daniel looked at the big screen and narrated in a calm tone, "The trial was simple: shoot a living person ten meters away with an apple on their head."

"These living people were the closest thing we had to foster mothers at the time, and all the kids were crying on the floor, except Phoebe."

"-although the living target she had to shoot at, the living person standing across from her topping the apple, was her birth mother."

"We'd have to fire a total of ten shots and someone would replace the apples for us, and some of the kids broke down and stopped on the first shot, and there was a constant stream of people on the field who were injured and dragged down to be resuscitated."

"There were only two kids on the field who fired all ten shots, me and Phoebe, and my live target was my maid at the time, who was uninjured and left the field crying at the end of the day, and I called a time-out when I got to the sixth shot and took a minute's break."

Daniel paused, "Phoebe didn't call a timeout."

"She just calmly raised the gun and fired ten shots with uncanny accuracy at the apple that kept getting replaced off her own birth mother's head."

"On the third shot, her mother couldn't hold it together and broke down and got on her knees and started crying and praying and said she wanted this to stop, and my father asked Phoebe if she needed to pause for a break, and Phoebe said - no."

"She said, hold mom in place, keep changing apples, it'll be over soon."

Cen Buming is silent.

Daniel looked up, "--and now Phoebe is still the number one heir to the Sinchimani family."

"She didn't seem satisfied with having to wait until her father died to get what she wanted, though, so-" Daniel shrugged indifferently, "I'm not surprised to see her in the game for that matter. "

"Did you just say that all the kids on the field cried except the nuns?" Cen Buming asked thoughtfully in return, "So you cried too?"

Daniel: "......"