Most of the onlookers on the two airships stood frozen in shock, then lurched back a step.

In that moment, Tang Qiaoqiao and the others finally understood why their elders treated Lou Ting with such extreme caution—and why he had been imprisoned in the sky from the day he was born.

It was a terrifying power. The higher a person stood in the hierarchy, the more they feared him.

Only a handful of people remained calm. Jing Pei was still pressed to the glass, watching. On the other airship, Qiu Fa and Mei Yanlan leaped onto the smaller vessel, now slowing without a pilot, to check whether any stragglers had slipped through. Even with the wind howling around them high in midair, their footing never wavered.

“Director, did this ship enter the fifty-meter range just now?” Mei Yanlan asked, glancing at the controls in front of the pilot’s seat.

From where they had been, with that distance and angle, there was no way to judge with that kind of precision by eye alone. But no pilot should have been stupid enough to cross the line. Everyone knew that the moment you entered a fifty-meter radius of Lou Ting, his passive ability would trigger and judgment would fall.

Qiu Fa frowned. With his enforcement baton, he shoved aside a stack of crates blocking the view and said nothing.

They caught every last straggler.

Then the two airships landed in front of the Lou family research institute.

They still had to make sure Jing Pei could really send Zhang Simiao up to Lou Ting.

“Miaomiao.” The moment Wen Yuxian saw Zhang Simiao step off the airship safe and sound, he ran to her. In the past four years, this was the first time he had ever been separated from her by such a great distance, and it had left him deeply uneasy.

Zhang Simiao’s eyes curved with delight. She looked frightening, but anyone could feel the joy pouring off her.

“Is that so? The wind here really does feel nice. And there are lots of animals too.” Wen Yuxian smiled with her, and the fear in his chest eased a little under the glow of her happiness.

“Thank you.” He looked at Jing Pei.

Jing Pei only smiled.

The others from the atavist families, meanwhile, looked at the battle-scarred young couple with open disgust. If not for them, how could they ever have ended up being threatened by a junior? The thought still made them seethe. Yes, they had crippled that hateful Atavist Serum Organization, dealt it a heavy blow, and pulled the moles out of their own homes in the process. That felt good.

But they were still angry.

Most of that anger, though, came from how disappointing the children of their own generation were by comparison. The Feng family head had it bad enough, but the Tang family head had it worse. He looked at his lovelorn daughter, eyes red and lips puffed out, and felt his heart seize. For once, they had all learned exactly what people meant by someone else’s child.

The Lou family came out to greet them.

At the front was an elderly woman in a qipao, elegant to the point of breathtaking. A middle-aged man stood one step behind her. Then came several children, brimming with curiosity. Two of them even had little wings on their backs.

“We don’t get visitors here very often,” the old woman said. “Come inside and have some hot tea.” Her eyes were bright and clear as she looked at Jing Pei, full of curiosity and approval. She held out a hand. “You must be the Long family girl.”

The old lady was so warm that Jing Pei offered her hand without hesitation and let herself be led inside.

As they walked, the old woman made introductions. The middle-aged man was her son. The Lou family youngsters had come here to play and to keep the old woman company. After all, living year after year in these deep mountains was the sort of vast loneliness that most people could not endure.

The atavist families and the Lou family had been half-cut off from each other for years. If not for Zhang Simiao, most of them probably would never have come here in their entire lives. The cage in the sky was far above the ground—far beyond fifty meters—but just knowing he was up there made it feel as if a blade were hanging over their heads.

They drank tea out of courtesy, exchanged a few formal words, and then got down to business.

The research institute sat directly beneath the cage. There was a vertical lift that went straight up into the sky, and that was how the Lou family normally traveled back and forth. It had been built from the same material as the cage and its chains, able to withstand every kind of hellish weather, and they called it the Sky Ladder.

The name was apt in more ways than one.

“Are you certain you want to go up?” the old woman asked Jing Pei. “Anyone who gets close to him is judged. It’s not a pleasant experience. It will turn your soul inside out and rifle through it like a pocket.”

That was what made Lou Ting’s power so terrifying. If all he did was search a person’s memories, then hypnosis or other forms of manipulation might erase any memory of a crime. But what his power examined was the soul itself. Sin left a brand on the soul. Whether you remembered it or not made no difference.

In other words, there was no loophole to exploit. No way to slip past his judgment.

“If you want something, paying the price is only natural,” Jing Pei said.

Then she stepped into the lift.

Qiu Fa moved forward, only for the old woman to raise a hand and stop him.

“You can’t go up.”

The others from the atavist families almost wanted to shout, Let him go! There was no telling how much blood stained his hands. Surely not all of it belonged to the guilty. Let Lou Ting burn him alive.

But this was the Lou family’s territory. No one dared make a scene.

Qiu Fa’s brows drew tight as he looked at Jing Pei.

Jing Pei smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep our deal. When this is over, I’ll give you the information, big cat.”

The doors closed.

The lift rose straight upward.

The ground dropped farther and farther away. Even without a fear of heights, your legs would have gone weak by now. The cage’s shadow slowly spread around her. The air grew colder and colder. Her breath turned white, and snow-covered ridgelines came into view.

Below, the people on the ground craned their necks so hard it felt as though they were about to snap them.

Jing Pei had killed before, yes—but those four had been monsters in human skin. Killing them had only saved others. Under a Judgment Angel’s law, that counted as justice. So she wasn’t worried about being hurt.

If anything, she was curious what it would feel like to stand on the Scales of Judgment.

But as the Sky Ladder climbed higher and higher, it passed well inside the fifty-meter range. The entrance was already close enough to touch, yet the Scales of Judgment still did not appear.

She entered the cage without any trouble at all.

With a soft chime, the lift doors opened.

A vast hall lay before her.

The inside of the cage was built like a palace, all gold and gleaming light. Smooth staircases curled upward in sweeping arcs. An angel stood on the railing above, looking down at her.

He had long silver-white hair and silver eyes. Of his six wings, only two were visible, folded behind him.

If the darkness on Qiu Fa ran deep as ink, then Lou Ting was white enough to dazzle the eye.

“You—” Jing Pei broke off.

The angel’s face was suddenly right in front of hers, so close it stole a breath from her chest. He was too near. She could count every white eyelash. And those eyes—were they holding a galaxy inside them?

“Long Jin?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

“Interesting.”

He smiled, and in that instant the cold beauty of his appearance vanished. He suddenly seemed bright, almost sunny, with a strange note of innocence in it.

Interesting how? What was interesting?

Jing Pei stared, caught off guard.

Something about this Lou Ting was off.

She was the kind of ruthless writer who gave every character a profile, and Lou Ting had one too. She had written down what he looked like, described him in detail, even though in the actual story he was barely more than a background figure—the kind of role who showed up for a few seconds in a TV drama and then disappeared. That was why she had thought persuading him to set rules for Zhang Simiao would be no great difficulty.

But this Lou Ting seemed… off.

She meant to skip straight to the point, but Lou Ting spoke again first.

“Do you believe there’s a god in this world?”

He took two steps back, pleased with himself.

“The kind worshipped in the West?” Jing Pei asked, yanking her words into a sharp turn at the last second.

“No. Another kind. A true creator. One whose existence can be traced. Proven.”

Are you talking about me? Jing Pei thought, not even a little embarrassed.

“If there’s real proof,” she said, “then I’ll believe it.”

“I’m the proof.”

Jing Pei: ?

“My face. My wings. My power. I was given the mission of cleansing the world. If this world rests in God’s palm, then I am its chosen protagonist, beloved by my God. You may not believe me, but It truly exists. And I truly have heard Its voice. More than once, It told me It loved me.”

He looked delighted.

Jing Pei: ??

For one wild second, she wondered whether years of confinement had broken his mind. That would be understandable, in a way. Locked up here since birth, loved by no one—of course he might invent a god who loved him.

…Wait.

A few fragments of memory flashed through her mind. Trivial memories. Ones she had never thought mattered.

“Did someone really make Lou Ting look this good? I’m in love.”
Received fan art of the character design +1.

“This art is incredible. I’m in love with this Lou Ting.”
Received fan art of the character design +2.

“This is so good. I love this Lou Ting.”
Received fan art of the character design +3.

“I’m in love…”
Received fan art of the character design +4.

“Obsessed…”
Received fan art of the character design +5.

…

For some reason, even though he was only a character who had appeared for a few seconds, a surprising number of highly skilled readers had loved drawing him—and they had all drawn him very beautiful. So yes, she really had praised those pictures from the bottom of her heart.

But that couldn’t have anything to do with her.

Could it?

It wasn’t as if Lou Ting, as a character inside the book, could somehow have heard her back then.

Thinking that, Jing Pei felt an odd flutter of guilt.

Then Lou Ting looked at her and smiled.

“So if I, beloved of God, was given the power to judge the souls of others… why is it that I cannot judge you?”

The smile turned dangerous.

Behind him, his snow-white wings slowly spread. Every feather, glowing with a faint holy light, hardened into a blade and pointed straight at Jing Pei.

“Who are you, really?”

So that was the reason Jing Pei had entered the fifty-meter range without triggering the Scales of Judgment.

It wasn’t that Lou Ting hadn’t used his power on her.

It was that he couldn’t.

The Scales of Judgment refused to take shape. The moment even a shadow of them began to form, they collapsed.