010. Do Not Die

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At that moment, blessings descended from heaven—and so did fury, twisted and terrifying.

Nanyun Yuyue was lying on the floor, staring up at Toyokawa Saki.

Sunlight spilled from the azure sky like scattered gold, filtering through the branches outside the window and weaving a mottled tapestry of light and shadow across the floor.

The girl’s long, pale-blue hair, tinged with silver, was tied into twin tails with two black satin ribbons, trembling faintly with her movements.

It would have been a beautiful scene—

if not for those golden eyes. Without them, Nanyun Yuyue probably would not have felt as though he were about to be eaten alive.

Toyokawa Saki looked down at him and declared loudly, her expression utterly serious:

“No!”

“I’m sorry I knocked you over.”

“But you mustn’t die.”

She paused, completely oblivious to the way Nanyun Yuyue’s face had twisted from pain and bewilderment, then continued:

“You were trying to kill yourself just now, weren’t you?”

What? I was trying to die?

Never in his wildest dreams had Nanyun Yuyue imagined that, in someone else’s eyes, his act of leaning out the window and reaching for something could be interpreted that way.

For a moment, he felt so exasperated that he nearly laughed. But when he met those ever-burning golden eyes, he chose to answer calmly:

“No. It was a flower…”

“Which is more important—the flower or your life?”

He had not expected Toyokawa Saki to yield on this point in the slightest.

What?

Obstinacy was a form of paranoid personality disorder. People of this sort insisted on their own opinions, refused to listen to others or accept criticism, and were prone to impulsive behavior.

The stubborn often ended up breaking with friends, parting ways with lovers, or turning against their own fathers and sons. In that sense, stubbornness could be called the greatest enemy of human relationships.

Nanyun Yuyue was almost ready to write her a prescription when Toyokawa Saki suddenly seemed to think of something and continued:

“No, that’s not right. Flowers have lives, too.”

“Since it had already fallen, it should have been dead…”

Though the young heiress had raised the upper half of her body slightly, giving him enough room to breathe, her legs were still pressing down on Nanyun Yuyue’s lower body.

A faint fragrance drifted over him, and his giant dragon was on the verge of rising.

“Dead…”

Unexpectedly, the moment she heard that word, Toyokawa Saki’s expression dimmed slightly.

She turned her gaze toward the window. It was already late spring. The scene of all things reviving beneath the spring sun had quietly begun to shift toward the fervor of summer, leaving behind only the faintest shadow of spring.

Cherry blossoms on the school grounds fell in a soft, rustling shower, like shards of jade and crystal. Amid that surging tide of pink and white, even a young lady like Saki inexplicably understood, to some small degree, the emotion poets called grief for spring.

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Nanyun Yuyue watched as Toyokawa Saki’s gaze shifted from him to the window, and a sudden thought occurred to him:

“At this point in time, Saki’s mother, Mizuho Toyokawa, should already have passed away.”

“No wonder she’s so sensitive whenever she hears the word ‘death.’”

The pain from being knocked down surged through him, and he hissed again.

“Perhaps she suddenly thought of her own mother. That must be why she saw me leaning out the window and assumed I was about to kill myself.”

For some inexplicable reason, Nanyun Yuyue began to pity Saki.

Saki’s grandmother had a hereditary illness. Both her grandmother and her mother had died young. The Toyokawa family’s bloodline almost seemed cursed.

Could it be that Saki, too, would not live long?

He speculated silently.

Chu Zihang’s eternally blazing golden eyes were the result of repeatedly entering Blood Rage, which had caused the concentration of dragon blood in his body to become excessively high.

Could Toyokawa Saki’s golden eyes likewise be the result of an unstable bloodline?

The Eight Sheqi Families were divided into the Inner Three and Outer Five.

The Gen, Tachibana, and Uesugi families—the Inner Three—were clans that inherited imperial blood. Their numbers were few, and there were even rumors that their bloodlines had already died out.

The Inuyama, Fuma, Ryoma, Sakurai, and Miyamoto families, meanwhile, made up the Outer Five and contained large numbers of mixed-bloods.

Which branch of the Toyokawa family had split away on its own?

Nanyun Yuyue remembered that, for two successive generations, the Toyokawa family had continued its bloodline through men marrying into the family.

Those were only the two generations known publicly. What about the ones before them?

“You have no idea how terrifying the Toyokawa family really is.”

Or could it be that even the current public head of the Toyokawa Group, Joji Toyokawa, was not its true master?

He had never hesitated to imagine the worst when it came to mixed-bloods.

The world of mixed-blood society was too deep and too cold.

You people should just form a band…

Thoughts continued to churn through Nanyun Yuyue’s mind.

At last, Toyokawa Saki turned away from the window and looked back at him.

“So I misunderstood.”

Her words pulled Nanyun Yuyue’s thoughts back to the present.

No, you misunderstood. Where’s the apology? You knocked me over!

Nanyun Yuyue felt his leg begin to ache again.

On his very first day as a transfer student at Tsukinomori Academy, he had already suffered both physical and emotional harm.

He could not imagine how powerful the bloodline rank of someone capable of surviving two full seasons of an anime must be.

“Good day.”

Toyokawa Saki stood up, and the heiress’s legs finally released Nanyun Yuyue’s lower body. His giant dragon could finally rise without obstruction.

She then turned around, preparing to leave.

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What?

I haven’t even gotten up yet.

Nanyun Yuyue truly could not take it anymore.

His fall had injured him, scraping the skin along his lower right leg and bruising the surrounding soft tissue. There was localized bleeding and obvious swelling.

The diagnosis was conclusive.

If this wasn’t school bullying, then what was?

He had been about to call out to Toyokawa Saki and ask her not to leave until she helped him up.

But after taking only a few steps, Saki suddenly turned around.

“Life is precious. Never die, no matter what.”

Her expression was utterly serious.

“You’re a transfer student. I understand that you haven’t adjusted yet. If something is troubling you, you can talk to a teacher or a friend.”

“What?”

Nanyun Yuyue paid no attention to what she said afterward. His mind had captured only the three words from her first sentence.

Never die?

Never… die…

Die…

Nanyun Yuyue shuddered violently as though struck by electricity, and his breathing abruptly quickened.

Everything around him seemed to vanish in that instant. Only those three words—never die—remained, entrenched in his mind.

When Saki had said “No,” “trying to kill yourself,” and “you mustn’t die,” he had not felt anything like this.

But the moment he heard “never die,” Nanyun Yuyue trembled from head to toe.

Suddenly, his leg no longer hurt.

He lowered his head and looked down. The wound had already begun to scab over.

Normally, if a wound was shallow, a scrape might form a scab within one to three days. A deeper wound would take even longer.

Yet after Saki uttered those three words—“never die”—the injury on his leg had already begun to heal.

This…

What was happening?

In that instant, the long-standing suspicion in his mind was finally confirmed.

[You have witnessed the initial awakening of the Path to Godhood. Free Skill Point +1]

[Progress toward igniting a Word Spirit: 2/4]

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