Colin Gu suddenly shot to his feet and pressed the emergency alarm on his watch.
Lily Bai smiled, grabbed his collar, and in the blink of an eye, vanished from the room.
When they reappeared, they were on a ship.
It was a luxurious cruise ship, but in the endless sea, it looked tiny and utterly alone.
"This is exactly the kind of ship. Same model, same condition," Lily Bai said. "I was locked up for a month on a ship just like this, humiliated and tormented every day by the Leaf Clan mother and daughter."
"Are you... are you human or ghost?" Colin Gu asked, his voice dry and tight.
"Neither," Lily Bai grinned at him. "I'm... a demon!"
"Lily! Lily!" Colin panicked. "I know there are all sorts of unbelievable things in this world, and I’ve always been super respectful! No matter what you are, I have absolutely no ill will toward you, really! That time I fired at you on the mountaintop... I—I was just panicking, my finger slipped..."
Lily Bai smiled: "I told you, I’m not here to get revenge! So you don’t have to be this scared."
Colin Gu: "Then you..."
"I just want to ask you—who is the Prophet?" Lily Bai said. "Tell me, and I’ll let you go. If you don’t..."
With a sweep of her sleeve, iron chains shot toward him and wrapped around his waist.
The chains were studded with heavy iron blocks.
"If you don’t tell me... then you’ll get to experience how I died in my last life." Lily Bai said.
"Lily, you’re trapped in a fantasy. There’s no such thing as a previous life!" Colin Gu said. "I truly loved you. Why do you have to use these imagined things against me?"
"Truly loved?" Lily Bai said with a laugh. "Do you even have that in you? Before you tricked me, I thought you truly loved me. Later, I thought you truly loved Tanya Tanner. Now I finally get it... The only one you truly love is yourself!
Doesn’t matter if it’s me, Shaun Fane, or even the Prophet—we’re all just tools for you to get what you want!" Lily Bai said. "What do you want? To be President? To seize power, and then chase immortality?"
Colin Gu didn’t reply.
Because that’s exactly what he was thinking.
"Too bad... you probably won’t make it," Lily Bai said. "Being used by the Prophet is the biggest stroke of luck you’ll ever have in this life."
"Are you really a demon?" he asked, slipping his hand quietly into his pocket. "So, what exactly is a demon?"
"Just means being a bad person." Lily Bai smiled with an almost innocent purity, her beauty breathtaking in the sunset. "I’ll ask you one last time—who is the Prophet? What did he do to Evan Lan?"
Colin Gu didn’t answer.
Instead, he quietly opened the talisman pouch the Prophet had given him, right there in his pocket.
No wonder he’s the Prophet—he must have known Colin would face danger, so he gave him this pouch.
This pouch was supposed to save him.
Then, he felt something bite his finger.
It went numb.
He pulled his hand out and saw his finger had turned black, swollen up like a sausage.
What the hell?
What was that thing?
Hands shaking, he pulled the talisman pouch out of his pocket.
From the open mouth, a tiny bug suddenly shot out, flying toward Lily Bai.
But before it could get close, it exploded into dust.
"What is this? What the hell is this?" Colin Gu collapsed to the ground, staring in terror as his hand turned black and swollen, numbness spreading through half his body.
"Did the Prophet give you that?" Lily Bai frowned.
"Yeah... He told me to open it if I ever faced an emergency. So this is what I get... He really is the Prophet... ha!"