Is it the third day today?
Feng Ling crouched on the sofa in the living room, the Switch controller in her hand.
Link on the screen had been standing on the edge of a cliff for nearly ten minutes now.
Her thumb rested on the joystick without moving, but her eyes were fixed on the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
The chandelier’s light, cast under the glow of the red light orbs, projected a faint halo.
She stared at that halo as if it were a screensaver, her mind churning over the same thing over and over.
Three days ago, when she used her first Right of Refusal, Ling Yue had taken her hand away from Feng Ling’s collarbone.
Two days ago, when she used her second Right of Refusal, Ling Yue had put the silk ribbon back into the wedding chamber, sparing her from the training scenes of the previous cycle.
“Are you testing something ridiculous…? I swear, you look like you’re playing a puzzle game.”
Feng Ling muttered at Link on the screen, then made him jump off the cliff and glide.
“What is Little Feng Ling mumbling to herself about again?”
Ling Yue’s voice drifted over from the kitchen.
She was in the kitchen now, separated from the living room by an entire corridor and a wall.
“I’m talking to Link!”
Feng Ling shouted back.
“Not you!”
But these damn vampire ears let Ling Yue catch every single murmur Feng Ling made while curled up on the sofa.
“Link won’t answer you.”
“He… he answers me spiritually!”
Ling Yue chuckled softly in the kitchen but didn’t continue the conversation.
Feng Ling then pulled her focus away from the chandelier and played the game seriously for a while.
Well, “seriously” meant she played while splitting a small part of her perception to monitor the area outside the castle.
After all, it was never really safe out there.
Also, while practicing reverse perception, she had noticed a pattern.
If she could avoid Ling Yue detecting her, it was best not to actively touch that drop of Primordial Blood, keeping it at its lowest active state.
No active probing, only passive reception.
That way, she could only receive very vague external signals, but at the same time, the amplitude of the Original Blood Resonance on Ling Yue’s side would drop significantly, making it almost impossible for her to detect Feng Ling’s eavesdropping.
Ever since she sensed that faint fluctuation from outside the castle on the sofa last time, the intensity of that fluctuation jumped a small notch every day or two, right up until last night.
Last night, after Ling Yue held her to sleep, she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.
Then, lowering her perception to its minimum sensitivity in a half-asleep state, she caught that signal again.
This time, it was a continuous low-frequency tremor, wandering back and forth at about nine kilometers from the castle’s outer perimeter, like a hunting dog circling a yard.
It hadn’t found the door yet, but it could already smell that something was living inside.
And by the time she woke up this morning, her premonition was so strong she couldn’t ignore it.
Something was going to happen soon.
Either today or tomorrow.
At the latest, the day after.
Right now, the string in her heart was stretched so tight it was about to spark.
“Little Feng Ling, come here. Breakfast.”
Ling Yue walked over from the corridor carrying a tray.
On the tray, besides a cup of blood and a small plate of blood-based snacks, there was also a very small crystal bottle.
Inside it was a layer of silvery-gray liquid.
“What’s this?”
Feng Ling pointed at the crystal bottle and asked.
“A gift for you~”
Ling Yue set the tray on the coffee table, then picked up the crystal bottle and gave it a gentle shake.
“This is a Perception Enhancement Potion. After you drink it, your whole body, including your magic power, will become much easier to identify within a perception field for about half an hour. Originally, this was used by tracking vampires to search for others, but it can be used in reverse too~ After you drink it, your own perception range will also expand by a circle.”
Feng Ling took the crystal bottle and examined the liquid inside against the chandelier’s light.
If this thing could really expand her perception range, her plan to verify the external situation would take a big step forward.
But would Ling Yue be so kind as to hand her the tool directly?
The last “reward” she received from Ling Yue was that Sensory Amplification Magic.
As a result, she had almost sucked Ling Yue’s wrist dry in the bathtub, and was then pressed down in the tub to experience a complete chain reaction, finally returning to the bedroom in tears.
Ling Yue’s “rewards” were never free.
Each one came with something else attached.
It was like pulling a card in a mobile game—the official gives you a ten-pull, but all ten are duplicate three-star cards, and the SSR you actually want is always in the next banner.
“So, what are the side effects after drinking it?”
Feng Ling put down the crystal bottle, looked directly at Ling Yue, and asked.
“Ah, Little Feng Ling, you’re quite smart… You even know to ask about side effects.”
“The side effect is that you’ll temporarily become easier for me to detect than usual. Because all your perception signals are amplified, in the Original Blood Resonance, you’ll change from a star into a full moon. I can see which corner of the castle you’re in even with my eyes closed.”
“But right now, you’re already basically moving within my line of sight, so being detected or not doesn’t make much difference.”
Ling Yue tapped the bottle cap with her index finger and said.
Feng Ling thought about it carefully, then pulled out the stopper and downed the silvery-gray liquid in one gulp.
“Hm…”
The taste was really strange, and as it slid down her throat, it brought a slight burning sensation.
But once the liquid entered her stomach, it quickly turned into a ball of warmth, spreading from her stomach to her limbs, then gathering into a small sphere near her heart.
Then that sphere climbed up from her chest to a spot at the back of her head—exactly where the attachment point of the Primordial Blood was every time she used reverse perception.
The next moment, it gently exploded.
The sounds of the whole world amplified in an instant.
And it wasn’t just sounds.
Now she could even hear the echo of wind blowing through the tunnel of the mountain cavern outside the castle.
Now she could even feel the faint vibrations deep underground in the rock layers.
She could even distinguish at least five different types of magic residue in the air.
Most were Ling Yue’s, and a small portion were traces of unknown origins.
Hmm…
Those foreign magic residues were distributed near the tunnel entrance of the outer cavern and had been there for a while.
Okay, verification complete.
The external threat wasn’t her imagination—it was something that had been accumulating.
And the freshness of these residues increased with each batch.
That meant the frequency of inspections was increasing.
“How do you feel?”
Ling Yue sat down beside her and asked.
“Honestly… my ears can’t take it much… I can even hear the magic in the next room’s walls buzzing…”
“But speaking of which, there’s magic inside our castle walls? What’s the principle behind that? A magical version of underfloor heating?”
Feng Ling rubbed her temples and asked.
“Pretty much. Those are the magic circuit arrays that maintain the castle’s constant temperature and lighting. They need maintenance every few hundred years. The last maintenance was about three hundred years ago.”
“Three hundred years? Are they still functional?”
“They’ll last a few more hundred years.”
Feng Ling opened her mouth but then closed it.
Nine hundred years to Ling Yue was like “last month” to a human.
She was gradually getting used to that kind of thing.
But right now, she wasn’t really concerned about the magical underfloor heating in the walls.
What she truly cared about was that, from a moment ago, she had been using her enhanced perception to secretly scan the mountain cavern area outside the castle.
The trajectory of that foreign magic residue was really complicated.
And there was more than one source.
At least three.
Two of them came from the same direction, and based on the magic texture, they felt a bit like vampire magic.
The third came from a completely different direction, with a cold and hard texture—a type of magic she had never encountered before.
As for this second unfamiliar energy residue, its frequency perfectly matched the detection wave she had vaguely sensed from far away on the sofa a week ago.
That meant at least two factions were targeting Ling Yue.
One faction was sent by the vampires.
The other was some group of unknown origin.
Although she didn’t know much about these matters, she had secretly flipped through a few ancient books in the study.
One book titled “Blood Prison Chronicle” had a line of small text under the title:
“The Progenitor returns; all laws converge.”
But she hadn’t had time to read the content back then because Ling Yue had just come down from the third floor and dragged her into a round of squeezing and kneading.
As for the other faction, she had no idea who they were.
Anyway, they definitely weren’t delivery guys.
“Little Feng Ling, you’re particularly quiet today, aren’t you?”
Ling Yue put down her cup, tapped the edge of the coffee table with her finger, and asked softly.
“I’m quiet every day.”
“No, when you’re normally quiet, you’re focused on playing games. That kind of quiet includes the sound of the controller buttons and game effects.”
“The quiet you have now is the quiet of analyzing every detail in the environment.”
“There’s a processor in your brain running at high speed, isn’t there?”
As Ling Yue spoke, she leaned in and pointed lightly at Feng Ling’s temple.
Feng Ling knew she couldn’t hide much from Ling Yue.
But at least she couldn’t let her detect her core intention.
So she chose to confess a small part.
“Alright… actually, I’m curious about one thing…”
“Have other vampires come near our castle?”
Ling Yue withdrew her finger, leaned back on the sofa cushion, was silent for a moment, then asked:
“Did you sense them?”
“Yes. It’s the magic residue near the exit of this mountain cavern. It’s probably from the last week, and there are at least two or three different sources… two of them should be vampires, and the other I can’t recognize. So is there…”
Feng Ling carefully chose a way to phrase it that would least trigger a Darkening reaction before continuing:
“Is there some trouble outside?”
“No trouble.”
Ling Yue picked up the blood cup and walked out of the living room.
Her steps toward the staircase remained steady.
But at the edge of the living room, she paused for a moment.
From Feng Ling’s current angle, she could only see a small part of Ling Yue’s profile slightly turn in the shadow of the corridor, and she said:
“Just a few rats sniffing around.”
“I’ve already set up a barrier. Don’t worry about it.”
After she finished speaking, her footsteps gradually faded into the distance.