A cold sweat instantly broke out across my back.

  Zhu Shi’s ability could see through lies? Reflexively, I started replaying every interaction I’d ever had with her—every word, every excuse, every fabrication. How many lies had I told her?

  Fortunately, unlike with Alice and Chang’an, I’d generally been fairly honest with Zhu Shi… or so I wanted to believe. That was impossible. I’d lied right to her face more than once—always using Agent Kong as a convenient scapegoat, claiming he’d told me this or that, even pretending I didn’t know Alice while fishing for information in front of both her and Lu Youxun.

  Sure, the lies I’d told Zhu Shi weren’t as numerous or as heavy as those I’d told Alice, but to claim I’d been “mostly honest” with her would be a ridiculous overstatement. Lately I’d been lying so often that I couldn’t even be sure I hadn’t forgotten some of the smaller ones the moment they left my mouth.

  Had she seen through all of them? And here I’d once quietly mocked her in my head for being easy to scam!

  “Z, what’s wrong? Are you feeling unwell?” Zhu Shi asked, tilting her head curiously.

  “No… it’s nothing…”

  Wait. Hold on. If she could truly see through every single lie she encountered, then Agent Kong—despite his ability to temporarily transfer his Heart Seed—could never have hidden the fact that he was a monster from her.

  Moreover, if she’d known about my lies all along and simply chosen to ignore them, there’d be no reason for her to casually reveal her lie-detection ability to me now.

  Putting together everything I’d observed so far, her ability probably wasn’t something that stayed constantly active. I needed to probe a little more.

  Perhaps noticing my odd reaction, Zhu Shi frowned thoughtfully. “Wait… have you lied to me about something before?”

  Was she really unaware?

  “I have,” I admitted upfront, then flipped the script and tested her with a challenging tone. “Do you know which one?”

  Seeing how calmly I owned up to it, she seemed to relax, assuming it wasn’t anything too serious. She answered lightly, “No idea. Which one was it?”

  “The one I just said—‘If it’s inconvenient for you to explain your ability, you don’t have to force yourself.’”

  “Oh! That one!” Her face lit up with sudden understanding. “Right, of course. You’re so curious about anything anomalous—you’d definitely want to dig into my ability. So it was just a polite throwaway line!”

  So she really hadn’t noticed. Also… honestly, I hadn’t actually planned to press her that hard. There’s a certain charm in not knowing everything. I wasn’t that desperate.

  “You don’t usually use that ability, do you?” I asked.

  “Not on people I trust. It’s too easy to offend someone that way. Plus, keeping it active for too long strains my eyes.” She answered straightforwardly.

  I let out a quiet mental sigh of relief—then caught something in her wording. “Seeing through lies offends people that easily?”

  I tried to follow the logic in my head. It wasn’t entirely illogical, but it still felt incomplete.

  “It’s not just lies. My ability can also easily expose other people’s abilities.” She continued, “Remember the monster from last night?”

  “Of course. You made his ability completely unusable. Was that because you found a flaw in it?”

  “When an opponent activates their ability in front of me, I can spot the flaw in how it works—and in the process, the true nature of their ability gets laid bare to me. That’s how I instantly saw that his was ‘damage transfer.’”

  I understood. She’d once emphasized to me how important it was to hide one’s true strength. To anyone who wanted to keep their trump cards concealed, her ability was a massive threat—naturally, she wouldn’t use it casually on allies.

  In those superpower battle-of-wits manga, an ability like hers would practically upend the entire genre from the foundation up. And here she’d once called my skills unfair—hers were, in a way, far more broken.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “But what exactly did you see in his ‘damage transfer’ ability that let you suddenly shut it down?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “There wasn’t actually a flaw like that.” She paused, then said something even more outrageous. “When the target has no objective weakness—or when there’s no exploitable flaw I can find—my ability lets me forcibly perceive one that I can use, even if it’s entirely subjective.

  “As long as I strike that perceived flaw, the effect becomes extraordinary. Because his ability was ‘damage transfer,’ I was able to inflict damage he couldn’t redirect.”

  What kind of rule-breaking power was this? If I understood correctly, she could make a weakness appear out of thin air—one the opponent didn’t even know they had?

  “Your ability is honestly way more broken than mine…” I said.

  “No way.” She sounded a little proud despite her denial.

  “Does it have a name?” I asked curiously.

  “It does. My grandfather gave it one.” She made a small fist, cleared her throat lightly, then declared with exaggerated solemnity, “The name of this ability is ‘Bu Zhou Mountain.’ ‘Bu’ means negation, ‘Zhou’ means complete. ‘Bu Zhou’—the negation of completeness.

  “And ‘Mountain’ carries my grandfather’s wish for me: that I would grow strong enough to cleave a mountain peak with a single sword, just like the ancient gods who toppled Mount Bu Zhou…”

  By the end, her voice had shrunk to a shy murmur, her cheeks flushing red.

  I completely understood. Explaining the grandiose meaning behind your ability name out loud felt exactly like reading aloud the edgy lore you wrote in your middle-school notebook. Even though her grandfather had come up with it, saying it herself clearly made her mortified. She’d started out fine, but halfway through she’d begun turning steadily pinker.

  Seeing how embarrassed she was, I tactfully rescued her by changing the subject. “Since your ability works on inanimate objects too, could you take a look at this for me?”

  She latched onto the lifeline immediately. “What is it?”

  I pulled out the Black Rope Heart-Locking Ring Lu Youxun had given me.

  “The Black Rope Heart-Locking Ring?” She blinked in surprise. “That’s an artifact modeled after the authority of the underworld’s Yama King—making the target unable to lie or stay silent, or else face death as punishment… But isn’t this Lu Chan’s item? Why do you have it?”

  “Lu Youxun gave it to me. He said it was a personal thank-you gift for helping him track down leads on the Humanity Division.” I explained. “But we’re not that close, and him suddenly giving me something like this makes me uneasy. I wanted you to check it.”

  “What?!” The moment she heard Lu Youxun had given me a gift, her eyes widened in shock. “You two met privately?!”

  “Uh… yeah.” Realizing she was worried he’d try to recruit me, I quickly clarified. “He tried to pull me into the transcendentalist faction, but don’t worry—I turned him down. More importantly, can you take a look at this ring?”

  At that, Zhu Shi snatched the ring and held it close to her eyes, inspecting it with intense focus.

  Her expression grew graver by the second.

  My own heart started pounding. Was there actually something wrong with it? Should I just get rid of it? After finally getting my hands on a usable supernatural item, I really didn’t want to let it go.

  After a long while, she finally lifted her face and said gravely, “There’s nothing wrong with this ring.”

  “Then why did you look so serious just now…?”

  “That damn Lu Chan… I haven’t even given Senior Brother Zhuang a gift yet…” She ignored my question entirely, muttering resentfully to herself before suddenly turning to me. “Senior Brother Zhuang, is there anything you’d like as a present?”

  “You don’t need to give me anything. I haven’t done anything special for you.” I wasn’t great at this kind of exchange, so I shifted topics again. “Also… you’ve clearly been putting a lot of effort into hiding the fact that I can elementalize. But I should tell you—Lu Youxun already knows. Last night, he was watching our entire fight through a pair of binoculars from a distance.”

  “What?! He actually pulled that?!” She looked furious again.

  I was just about to explain the rest of my conversation with Lu Youxun.

  Although he’d accused Zhu Shi’s faction of ultimately being the ones who would enslave mortals, I didn’t believe they had any such conscious intention right now—at least not Zhu Shi herself. Even Lu Youxun couldn’t deny that much.

  I had no interest in dissecting either side’s ideology or platform in exhaustive detail, and even less desire to get dragged into their power struggles. I would focus on pursuing what I wanted, walking the path I’d chosen, and calmly accepting whatever consequences—good or bad—came from those choices.

  And if the day ever came when Zhu Shi could no longer stand the faction she belonged to, I would stay by her side as a friend. That was enough.

  Before I could say any of that, however, a sudden, violent roar erupted from the distance—rushing rapidly toward us.

  Zhu Shi and I exchanged a glance and immediately ducked behind a parked car.

  We’d barely hidden when I saw the compound’s outer wall explode inward from the other side. A massive black silhouette smashed straight through it and barreled into the residential area. Even in the darkness of night, the unmistakable outline was instantly recognizable: a grotesque, hideous goat-headed humanoid monster, three meters tall, muscles bulging grotesquely across its frame.

  It was the exact monster we’d been hunting!

  The creature didn’t stop after breaking in. It charged toward us at a terrifying speed.

  Had it spotted us? No—though it was only a hunch, it felt more like it was fleeing. And when it was less than twenty meters away, a new figure appeared out of thin air behind it.

  The newcomer materialized without warning, as though spat out by the air itself—hovering mid-leap, gripping a large recurve blade in both hands.

  The instant she appeared, she swung the weapon in a vicious arc aimed straight at the monster’s nape.

  I recognized her immediately.

  She was a girl of thirteen or fourteen, with the face that haunted my dreams and a small, delicate frame—yet her movements were razor-sharp, silent until the moment they struck with devastating force.

  The blade fell like a guillotine, severing the monster’s thick muscle and sturdy bone in one clean stroke.

  Alice—suddenly reappeared—had just taken the monster’s head with a single swing.