Chapter 133 Revelation
Chapter 133 Revelation
Without warning, she stepped closer and placed her palm on his upper arm. Her fingers pressed lightly, then more firmly, as if testing the reality of what she felt.
Her sharp eyes tracing the lines of his shoulders and arms beneath his simple shirt.
Vandal’s brow furrowed. He stood slowly, towering over her in the confined space. “Why are you touching me?”
A faint flush colored Mei Mei’s cheeks, but she didn’t pull away immediately. “Your body… it’s sculpted like it was forged from iron. Even without actively circulating resonance, the power coiled beneath your skin is extraordinary.” Her voice softened with genuine wonder. “I’ve never felt muscles this dense on someone so young.”
She let her hand linger another second before withdrawing it, though her gaze remained locked on him.
“I am what some call an anaemis,” she said quietly. “People born with an insane affinity for one particular thing, yet cursed to never wield the elemental echo abilities others take for granted. My gift is sensing resonance energy on levels most cultivators can only dream of. I can feel the flow, the tangles, the foreign notes hidden inside.”
She reached up and gently pulled aside the collar of her sailing attire. A faint silvery spiral mark rested just below her collarbone, shimmering subtly in the lantern light like liquid mercury.
Vandal’s gaze locked onto it.
“All anaemis bear a mark,” she said softly, tracing it with a fingertip. “Somewhere on the body. This is mine.”
Vandal’s eyes traced the spiral before returning to her face.
“This is also why I helped you and your friends,” Mei Mei continued, her voice warm with quiet sincerity. “I noticed you carried a mark as well the moment you stepped onto my ship. It means you’re an anaemis too. I couldn’t turn my back on one of our own.” She tilted her head slightly, curiosity shining in her eyes. “Since mine is sensory, I’m curious… what is your absurdity?”
Vandal stayed silent for a moment, searching his memories. He thought of the overwhelming berserk strength that had flooded his body in desperate battles, the abnormally powerful berserk transformation that seemed to shatter normal limits. Perhaps that was it… Yet the full picture still felt unclear.
“I don’t really know,” he admitted, still unsure. “Not completely.”
Mei Mei smiled softly. “That’s alright. I’m just happy to have found another anaemis after all this time.”
She studied him for a heartbeat longer, then her expression grew more focused. “I sensed it clearly the moment I brought you onto my ship. Energies twisting together at your focal points like knotted ropes pulled too tight. And something else. Something foreign in your left eye.” She reached up slowly, intending to brush her fingers near his face.
His hand shot out faster than she could track, catching her wrist in a firm but controlled grip. “Stop,” he said, voice low and edged with warning. “I’m dangerous. You shouldn’t try to look too deeply into my body. You’ll get hurt.”
Mei Mei didn’t flinch. Instead, her expression softened with quiet determination. “I can help you, if you let me. The entanglement in your meridians… I know a way to free it. It will be gradual, but it can be done.”
Vandal’s eyes narrowed slightly. “How?”
“I can guide the process. Right now, though, I sense a lot of dark emotions swirling in your energy. I don’t understand how you got infected by it.” She searched his face. “It feels like layers upon layers, some yours, some not.”
He remembered then. The first days after arriving in this world, how every kill had fed something inside him, a hungry pull when that thing in his eye had been active and alive. Now it was sealed, dormant, yet he still felt it: the passive absorption, the foreign emotions that weren’t truly his seeping into his own, influencing him like whispers he couldn’t quite silence. The realization made his jaw tighten.
He was eager, almost desperately so, for relief. But Mei Mei raised a hand before he could speak.
“Before I help you, you have to give me something in return. Tell me why those two mistresses of the Resonance Council are after all of you.”
He still didn’t fully understand her true motives for sheltering them. And now this new revelation, that he was apparently an anaemis, only added to the storm in his mind. Trust was a luxury he couldn’t afford yet.
“In due time,” he said carefully. “I’ll speak more on that matter later.”
Mei Mei studied him for a heartbeat longer, then nodded. “Fair enough. Get some rest for now. We’ll talk more soon.” As a sign of good faith, she stepped behind him. Her fingers moved with practiced precision, pressing specific points along the sides of his neck, then the inner creases of his elbows.
Vandal felt it instantly.
The turbulent energies in his meridians, which had been clashing like warring currents, suddenly eased. They were still tangled, still messy, but they no longer fought against each other. For the first time since the chaos began, the tiny, intrusive voices born from those jumbled emotional energies fell silent in his mind.
The relief was profound.
Then his gaze caught on something. Just below the collar of her sailing attire, on her lower shoulder, a faded burn mark stood out, shaped unmistakably like a handprint.
“What happened there?” he asked.
Mei Mei’s expression shifted. Pain flickered across her face, raw and unguarded. She touched the mark almost unconsciously.
“It was a woman… she burned me with purple fire. Tried to kill me.” Her voice grew thick with memory. “My brother and I were trying to escape her. He used explosives to trigger an avalanche, hoping it would bury our tracks and keep her from following us, give us time to get away. The snow came pouring down as we ran. He didn’t survive the downpour… but I did.”
She swallowed hard, eyes distant and glistening. “I still remember the cold. It bit straight through to the bone. It was supposed to be spring that day, yet it was snowing so heavily. I kept wondering why the weather was so weird… why the skies had turned against us at the worst possible moment.”
She shook her head slowly, the weight of that old grief still clinging to her. “That woman’s flames were highly abnormal. She could drain resonance energy from her victims. One of those people we hear of in children’s stories who steal other people’s echo abilities through forbidden rituals. Hybrid echo users--”
The words struck Vandal like a hurricane.
A flashback surged forward unbidden.
\---
His mother’s face, twisted in manic devotion, looming over him in the candlelit chamber. Cold stone beneath his back. The ritual circle glowing with energy. Her hand reaching for his left eye, nails like claws, murmuring about consuming his mark, the mark that would make the nocthra clan fear her.
\---
Vandal’s breathing hitched. The cabin seemed to tilt for a moment before he forced the memory back down.
Mei Mei noticed the shift in his expression but said nothing more, simply watching him with those keen, perceptive eyes.
As the lantern continued its gentle sway, Vandal sat on the edge of the bunk, elbows on his knees. The weight of her words pressed down on him. Another anaemis. What exactly was his “absurdity”? Was he really an anaemis, or was the rose mark simply because of his advancement in the Nephilim Fists of Destruction? His thoughts churned slowly, mixing with the distant crash of waves outside.