Chapter 53: A Kiss Goodbye in the Crowd, the God of Wealth at the Bank

White clouds drifted idly across the sky, resembling endless mounds of pristine white cotton. Yet, this cotton offered not a shred of warmth, stirring instead an infinite sense of melancholy.

Numerous feathers plummeted into the blazing flames, striking the colossal fire crabs, but these magma-born crustaceans possessed an overwhelming incineration ability that instantly reduced every feather to ash, rendering them utterly useless.

"Qi Lingfeng, let me go! Let me go, you bastard, you demon!" Qiao Xiwang screamed wildly, her voice echoing and reverberating through the quiet night.

She had always known that in a place like this, no one would ever treat you with genuine kindness, so she had to take good care of herself.

"I know, nine parts water to one part nutrient-rich liquid, you can rest easy, Second Sister," Lidong said with a chuckle.

He hesitated for a moment, then pulled his hand back. After all, this place was extraordinary, and since he was lacking in ability, he would only make things worse by trying to help.

I shivered involuntarily as the insect swallowed the very last piece of skin. It turned its head with an air of profound boredom, finally noticed me, and paused to observe me with eager interest. Then, with the overwhelming momentum of Mount Tai crashing down, it abruptly opened its wide jaws and lowered its head directly toward Changpu and me.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation, let out a huff at Jun Li, and then refocused my attention entirely on the divination setup in the palm of my hand.

Li Qianqian naturally knew the truth, but it was precisely because she knew the truth that she felt an extra pang of heartache for this fool, Wang Yao.

Following the incident with the gold leaf, Su Yunjin had already learned the conversion rate between gold and silver: one tael of gold equaled ten taels of silver. The Dowager Princess had given her one hundred taels of gold the last time.

The moment Tang Mingming scored, Harden snapped out of his dazed state. Yet, having recovered, Harden could do nothing but gaze at the ball and sigh in utter despair.

With the suppression provided by the cyborg soldiers, Su Yi hardly needed to worry about what kind of trouble these former Royal Navy soldiers of the Cangyu Empire might stir up in the future.

However, regardless of whom they were targeting, their objective was clear: to eliminate any obstacles blocking their advance to Taiwan.

Li Shou gripped his longsword and charged recklessly toward Xu Yan. He had no regrets, for as long as he could pierce his opponent's body with a single thrust, he would die content.

Kobe had witnessed with his own eyes how Tang Mingming turned back to confirm the position of the rim just before shooting, which proved that Tang Mingming's shot was not taken blindly, but with deliberate intent.

He had taken Jiang Wan'an's identity card; perhaps he had once thought of living out the rest of his life as Jiang Wan'an, but in the end, plagued by a guilty conscience and the fear of being exposed as an impostor, he acquired a fake ID instead, under the name Luo Ping'an.

As a seasoned film forum member and critic, Luo Litao was certainly no stranger to time-loop films, but such a genre had yet to be established domestically. It all depended on whether this young director named Fan Zhiyuan could tell the story well. If the execution was solid, what harm was there in praising him?

Though I could not reach those supreme heights, performing a simple exorcism was still well within my capability.

Before Bai Bing could recover from his utter astonishment, Xu Yan had already bypassed him and strode toward the canyon.

Although Shen Ruoying still harbored some hesitation, her trust in me was absolute. As long as I was by her side, she had nothing to fear. After a brief moment of thought, she gave a firm nod, seemingly agreeing to the plan.

This complicated matters. Without evidence, he lacked the initiative to strike first. To force the old Fu family to bow and yield, intimidation seemed to be his only recourse.

Thus, he began with poetry and odes, followed by classical texts, using them to make a name for himself. Then, as a Confucian scholar, he sought to reunite the scattered factions of the Confucian school. No matter how formidable the schools of Buddhism and Daoism might appear in the present state of Chu, looking ahead millennia into the future, Buddhism and Daoism would wax and wane, while Confucianism alone would endure ceaselessly, never once facing extinction.

If Chu Ruan could be so easily subdued by Li Sicheng, she would never have earned her status as an elite secret agent.

"What is so difficult about this riddle? 'Alas, how vast, yet it keeps me not alive!' " Shi Qiyu recited aloud as he casually unveiled the riddle, and indeed, those very lines were inscribed upon the lantern's wall.

Yet... who could have foreseen that the ruler of the Dayu Kingdom—that old scoundrel—somehow caught wind of the news and suddenly dispatched men to demand priority purchases the moment Lu Qian's product was completed?

We would just have to make do for the night on the sofa. My constitution was robust enough that sleeping on a couch presented no problem at all.

Hearing Zhou Wei put it that way, Long Wei and the other bodyguards exchanged glances, as none of them seemed to have caught the intricacies of his movement technique just moments before.

After eating my fill, a sudden wave of drowsiness washed over me, so I lay down to sleep beneath the eaves at the back of their kitchen. But shortly afterward, a group of people arrived. Seized by panic, I fled toward the backyard and hid inside a room.

The smile on her face was like a flower withering in the rain. A gentle breeze swept past, lifting the ponytail behind Tang Rain's shoulders, a few stray strands falling across her eyes. The air grew deathly quiet—so silent that one could almost physically feel her sudden, overwhelming sorrow.

Yet, Godn and KK swam through the water with the slippery ease of grease-slicked loaches. Relying on experience, they bobbed up and down beneath the surface, making it temporarily impossible for Chen Guanxi and Yang Shuang to actually finish them off.

"Thank you, Officer Xu." She had already pulled herself together from the cruel twist of fate, addressing me with formal politeness.

As we spoke, a strange gust of wind swept in from the southwest, rustling the grass and once again filling our nostrils with the foul stench of rotting corpses. After the wind had passed, I remarked to Zhang Han that perhaps no one else present had noticed a specific detail: none of the bodies at the scene had heads.