Chapter 2: The Man in the Purple Mask

Sigh, impulse really is the devil; impulse is a killer.

"Hiss..."

A sudden, stinging pain flared through her body, as if every bone in her entire frame had been broken. Su Wanluo gasped; she instinctively opened her eyes to see seven or eight men in coarse cloth garments swinging heavy clubs violently toward her.

Her head was spinning so intensely that she couldn't quite process the situation. It was only when the clubs swung toward her that she relied on years of instinct to dodge, attempting to evade the descending blows.

However, she hadn't realized she was already at the edge of a cliff. This instinctive roll caused her to fall immediately, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

Seeing the woman on the ground fall off the cliff, the servants' movements paused, their clubs frozen mid-air.

"What do we do? That low-grade bloodline fell down. Will the Heir think we failed our task and kill us?"

One of the younger men looked as if he were about to cry, but an older one immediately comforted him, "Don't worry. The Heir originally ordered that the low-grade bloodline be beaten to death with clubs and then thrown off the cliff, which is why he sent us here to carry out the execution..."

***

"Damn it, this trick again..."

As her body plummeted at high speed, Su Wanluo roared in fury. It would have been one thing if it were just her acting on impulse and jumping down herself, but what was happening this time? Was that little interlude just a hallucination? But then why did her body hurt so much?

The howling wind lashed against her, making her delicate face sting with a burning pain.

A speck of golden light flickered; before Su Wanluo could avoid it, she swallowed it directly into her mouth. The sensation immediately made her eyes widen in shock. In the next instant, she fell into a soft embrace, and Su Wanluo vaguely heard a man let out a muffled groan.

"Huh, I wasn't crushed to death. I'm still alive..."

Su Wanluo was utterly bewildered. Falling from such a great height and not dying was truly strange. Wait, what she was lying on was so soft; why didn't it feel like the ground?

Just as Su Wanluo was about to shamefully reach out to feel it, she finally heard the man beside her ear cough painfully a few times.

"Cough, cough..."

Su Wanluo immediately jumped up, but because her movement was too sudden, a violent wave of pain surged through her body again. She gritted her teeth and curled her lip, ignoring her physical discomfort to stare wide-eyed at the man she seemed to have landed on.

He wore a magnificent and gorgeous purple-gold flowing cloud robe. Looking up, his three thousand strands of ink-black hair cascaded like a waterfall. On his forehead, white as jade, was a complex and dim patterned mark. Two-thirds of his face was obscured by a simple golden mask, leaving only his perfectly curved lips visible.

She couldn't see his features clearly, but Su Wanluo had a very strong intuition that this man must be exceptionally handsome—at least more handsome than Ji Chen.

Wait, Su Wanluo's eyes widened as if she had discovered something terrifying. Why was this handsome guy wearing long hair and ancient clothing? A gust of wind blew, fluttering the clothes on Su Wanluo's body.

As her purple, low-quality gauze skirt fluttered, Su Wanluo froze on the spot. She lowered her head and lifted the fabric of her clothes. Strange—when had her fiery red tight-fitting outfit turned into this cheap gauze skirt?

As strands of hair brushed against her face, Su Wanluo instinctively grabbed a lock. Her hair was very long, and it was a beautiful smoky purple. Su Wanluo froze in place as if struck by lightning; her hair was short and red—had it actually turned into long purple hair?

"So, you are a woman of the Charm Race."

The man on the ground, who appeared to be quite injured, spoke with a tone of great surprise after seeing Su Wanluo's ghost-stricken expression, parting his crimson lips.