High above the Yuewan Mountain Range, far from the city, a fierce battle was raging.

An hour after the first ship set out, another airship finally lifted off and headed for the Yuewan Mountain Range.

On board were Jing Pei, Zhang Simiao, and several of the younger generation from the atavist families—Feng Yilian, Tang Qiaoqiao, Chen Mo, Tao Ying, and the others—serving as an escort, just in case.

“Yilian, how do you think Long Jin managed to convince them?” Chen Mo was dying of curiosity. He glanced at Zhang Simiao, who was standing off to one side with Jing Pei, looking out at the scenery, and fidgeted so hard she looked ready to claw at her own face.

“No idea.” Feng Yilian turned the Rubik’s Cube in his hands. “Maybe she beat them into agreeing.”

Chen Mo rolled his eyes. As if. Jing Pei’s atavist form was still a juvenile, wasn’t it? Sure, she was already strong, but not strong enough to sweep through an army.

They had no idea what was happening ahead. All they knew was that their job was to escort Zhang Simiao to Lou Ting in the Yuewan Mountain Range.

“Hey, what kind of person is Lou Ting, anyway?” Tang Qiaoqiao asked in her thick, muffled voice.

“No idea. He was already up there by the time we were born. How would we know what he’s like?” said Chen Mo. “But if someone gets locked up in the sky from birth, there’s a good chance he’s not exactly normal. Is Zhang Simiao really going to be okay there with him?”

Tang Qiaoqiao said, “If Long Jin went to this much trouble, she’s not sending Zhang Simiao there to die.”

Lou Ting and Qiu Fa belonged to the same generation, about ten years older than they were. Everything they knew about Lou Ting came from scraps of family talk. No one knew what he looked like or what he was like. But judging from his ability alone, he was terrifying. Ever since childhood, their families had drilled one rule into them: never go within fifty meters of Lou Ting.

Which meant that even at a distance like this, on the edge of the Yuewan Mountain Range, they still probably had no chance of getting anywhere near him.

Besides, in other atavist families, a child with ninety-five percent atavist purity would bring honor the family had never known before. Lou Ting was the only exception. What he brought was fear, so much fear that his whole family had fallen silent. That alone was enough to show what kind of danger he was.

Jing Pei and Zhang Simiao were pressed to the glass, looking out at the sky. Zhang Simiao’s huge eye shone with excitement. She looked so happy she could hardly contain it.

Jing Pei took out a preserved plum. “Want one?”

The next second, Zhang Simiao came at her with all five limbs and nearly picked her clean off the floor in a bear hug.

“Okay, okay. We’re not at the last step yet. Don’t get too excited.” Laughing, Jing Pei patted her arm. Honestly, it was a good thing she was a dragon. Anyone else would have had a few ribs crushed by now.

…

After seeing Jing Pei off, Long Yiming stayed home with a headache for quite a while before getting ready to go to work. The real power in the family might now rest with Jing Pei, but the Long family business was still far too large for him to ignore.

The moment he stepped outside, he saw a car pull up in front of the old Long family residence. A man got out carrying a case. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with hard muscle and a distinctive little mustache. From his face to the way he carried himself, he gave off two contradictory impressions at once—sunny and imposing, open and hard to read.

One thing, however, was obvious at a glance: this was the kind of man who had never lacked admirers.

Long Yiming looked at him in puzzlement.

“Hello, Mr. Long.” The man spoke first, flashing a row of white teeth. “I’m here to apply for a job.”

Long Yiming gave him a once-over. “What position are you applying for?” A bodyguard?

“Family doctor.”

Now there was a combination that did not match the face.

“My surname is Tang. Here’s my résumé.”

The Long family really was hiring a family doctor—but they were looking for an atavist physician. Recently, in order to sharpen her fighting instincts and technique, Jing Pei had been sparring with Mei Yanlan every day and getting battered black and blue. She was almost fully healed by the next day each time, but the ordinary members of the Long family couldn’t understand just how much punishment atavists could take or how fast they recovered. So they had put out a public listing, hoping to find Jing Pei a dedicated physician.

Atavists healed fast. That was precisely the problem. Bones that set wrong had to be broken again and reset. Bullets that couldn’t be removed in time had to be cut back out through muscle that had already healed over. Atavists also used different medications from ordinary people and could suffer from illnesses the average person had never even heard of.

That was why atavists usually went to atavist hospitals, and why their medicine wasn’t something you could buy at a normal pharmacy. By the eighth year at the Twelve Zodiac Academy, students were at roughly the equivalent of university freshman level, and they could begin choosing a specialization. One of those options was atavist medicine.

Long Yiming sat down and looked over the résumé in his hands.

The man’s name was Tang Woxue—a name that somehow suited him and didn’t at the same time. He was thirty years old. His school and work history were dazzling. To achieve that much in medicine at his age, he had to be a once-in-a-generation genius.

“But your degree isn’t in atavist medicine,” Long Yiming said. The family already had ordinary doctors, after all. Everyone in the house was an ordinary person except for Jing Pei.

“My apologies. I taught myself atavist medicine,” Tang Woxue said with a smile. “My certification should come through in a couple of days. I know this is presumptuous, but I’m truly obsessed with the Chinese dragon. I was afraid someone else might take the job before I got here, so I came early just to get my foot in the door. Please give me one chance to prove what I can do.”

One of Long Yiming’s brows twitched. Like the old fox he was, he asked, “And how many days did you spend teaching yourself?”

Tang Woxue laughed. “Less than a week.”

“…”

A few minutes later, Tang Woxue was standing outside the gates of the old Long family residence, scratching his head with the awkward look of a man who had just been shown the door. But his eyes were deep as ancient wells, and the sunlight in his manner was like winter sun—bright, but without warmth.

He pulled a business card from his pocket.

On the black card were the words: Puzzle Intelligence Agency.

It was the card the courier had dropped off at his door. He had stayed wary, but in the end, he had still sent an email on the off chance it might lead somewhere.

The thing you want is with Long Jin of the Long family.

…

In the Yuewan Mountain Range, inside the Lou family research institute beneath the Angel Cage, several members of the Lou family were waiting for their guests to arrive.

“The one who said she wanted to go up and talk to Lou Ting is that little girl from the Long family, isn’t she? Youth really doesn’t know fear,” said a silver-haired old woman. She wore a black patterned qipao and high heels, with lipstick and impeccable poise. One glance was enough to imagine how beautiful she must have been in her youth. She held the hands of two children, each eight or nine years old, while two more stood behind her.

“Are they almost here?” she asked.

“They should be. Looks like the fighting over there is nearly done,” said a tall middle-aged man standing by the floor-to-ceiling window.

Below the window, herds of yaks grazed at leisure across a broad stretch of grassland.

He had a pair of binoculars in hand, trained on the distant sky. Of the three small airships, two had already been shot down, and the last was trying to flee, with the larger ship in pursuit.

“They were right about one thing. Live long enough and you’ll see anything. Who would’ve thought they’d end up fighting side by side with Qiu Fa?”

“That’s because of the little girl from the Long family.”

“Exactly. She must have known our family was clean, that there were no moles in it, which is why she lodged them at one of our hotels and staged all this.” He broke off, his face shifting. “…Wait. Did that pilot panic after seeing Qiu Fa? Where does he think he’s going?”

Up in the sky, the criminal organization’s remaining elites had known it was a trap the moment they laid eyes on Qiu Fa, and they had been trying to escape ever since. But Qiu Fa and Mei Yanlan were too strong, and the others from the atavist families were no weaklings either. Since the other side had come prepared, many of their people had already been killed or captured.

The few who remained had barely found a chance to break away. They got back into their ship and fled.

The larger airship chased after them. In terms of power system and every other piece of hardware, a small ship had little hope of outrunning a large one. In the end, the pilot of the smaller ship seemed to panic and took it straight toward the cage.

“Idiot! Where do you think you’re going?!” someone on the ship shouted in alarm.

“You’re the idiot. Of course I know we can’t get too close!” the pilot shouted back. “I’m doing this to shake them off. His attack range is a fifty-meter radius, right? Then all we have to do is stay outside it. They care too much about their own lives to follow us into danger.”

Just as he had expected, the moment the little ship shot straight toward the cage, the pilot of the larger airship seemed to freeze. The ship slowed at once, then only after several seconds did it creep after them with obvious caution. But in that brief pause, the distance between the two ships had widened.

The large airship was packed with honored guests, not desperate criminals like them. It couldn’t charge headlong into a danger zone.

“Hah! See? I told you!” The pilot of the smaller ship burst into wild laughter. “Watch closely. I’m about to show you an aerial drift!”

By then, the ship carrying Jing Pei and the others had almost arrived. At the very least, they could already see the other vessels—and the ship heading for the cage.

“They’ve got nerve,” Jing Pei said, sounding entertained. She tilted her head. Were they trying to survive, or were they tired of living?

The others ran out one after another and crowded against the windshield to watch.

“Whoa. Is the cage really that huge?”

“From the city it looks like a speck. If it didn’t glow, I probably wouldn’t even be able to see it.”

“If it weren’t that big, how would you be seeing it from that far away?”

“It’s freezing…”

The huge cube bound in thick chains was as large as an island suspended in the air. The closer the ship flew, the smaller it made the airships look, and the harder the pilot’s heart pounded. He swallowed again and again.

His eyes kept darting to the display. The number showing the distance to the cage kept shrinking. Smaller and smaller.

“Get ready. I’m going to drift,” he warned his companions.

They were ready. Once the ship swung wide and opened more distance from the larger airship, they would jump. They could never escape by ship alone. Their only chance was to leap. The Yuewan Mountain Range covered a hundred thousand square kilometers within Hualan alone. Trying to find them after that would be like scooping a needle from the sea.

When the ship drew to within a single meter, it suddenly whipped sideways in a perfect drift, slinging itself in an arc along the edge of the cage’s fifty-meter radius and skimming the outer fringe of the holy light pouring from inside it. Flying skill like that was rare enough to make any airline fight to hire him.

The little ship opened the gap again.

The people on board strapped on parachutes or gliders and began jumping.

Catch us if you can. Just wait and die, all of you atavist families. One day we’ll kick you off your pedestal for good.

Faces on the larger airship changed at once. But before anyone could act, an astonishing sight appeared in the air—

A vast golden scale shimmered into being like a mirage. One end caught the people who had jumped, yet after taking their weight, that arm of the scale did not sink.

Inside the cage, a pair of silver eyes turned gold.

Jing Pei pushed forward. There it was—the Scales of Judgment.

The people trapped on the scale went white with terror. They struggled to escape, only to find that an invisible wall sealed them in. They struck it with everything they had, and it did not so much as tremble. Why? Why? They hadn’t even entered the fifty-meter range, had they?!

“Those who stand before judgment—guilty, or not guilty?”

The voice that rang out was as beautiful as a hymn, but none of them could hear beauty in it. They felt only fear.

Everyone on both airships held their breath and stared.

This was the first time they had ever seen Lou Ting’s power, and it was nothing like that of the Eastern atavists. In truth, it was unlike the power of any atavist in this world.

He was the world’s only angelic variant—the one and only six-winged angel, something that might not appear even once in several thousand years.

Before everyone’s eyes, it was as if something were pulled from the minds of the people caught on the scale. Scene after scene rose into the air.

“Hahaha, bite his thigh! There’s more meat there!”

“I don’t like hurting children, but those are the organization’s orders. Sorry.”

“The only mistake you made was betraying the organization.”

“Die.”

“…”

Along with the victims’ screams, the killers’ cold and brutal acts were laid bare for all to see. And as one scene followed another, the side of the scale they stood on—steady at first—began to sink.

By the time the images vanished, that end had dropped all the way to the bottom.

And yet the people on it had gone still. Their eyes had rolled back, terror fixed on their faces, as if somewhere no one else could see, they were enduring something unspeakable.

A burst of agony tore through the left side of his body. He turned his head and saw that his left arm was gone. In horror, he looked up and saw a hideous mutant with an arm hanging from its mouth. Behind it, a man was laughing. “Hahaha, bite his thigh! There’s more meat there!”

He was living through what his victims had suffered. He had become prey, helpless as they had been. He felt the same fear. The same collapse.

He ran, begged, cried, fought to survive, and received not a shred of mercy. All he could do was watch as he was eaten piece by piece.

And it wasn’t just him. His companions were all reliving the things they had once done to others, though from the outside, it only looked as if they had suddenly lost consciousness.

Then, like people jolting awake from a nightmare too real to bear, they came to gasping for breath. Relief had barely touched their faces—

“Those who are guilty—be purified.”

That beautiful, terrible voice rang out again.

White fire burst across the lowered side of the scale.

The people caught in it screamed in agony. They were all atavists, all strong enough to face the great families in battle, yet inside those flames they could not escape. They shifted in frantic, useless bursts between human form and atavist form, twisting and writhing as if hellfire were burning their souls. What they felt was worse than being flayed alive.

The fire consumed them in moments.

Not even ash remained.