Li Fei walked home with her cheeks puffed out like a steamed bun, her feelings thoroughly tangled.
On one hand, she was genuinely proud:
Excellent. Worthy of being my daughter — she bagged a Blood Clan Constable in three days flat.
On the other hand, there was a hollow, wistful ache:
Wait. My daughter's daughter... isn't my daughter?
Sofia — golden-haired, crimson-eyed, visibly nervous — trailed a half-step behind her, a black cape wrapped tight around her tall, willowy figure.
"Hss—"
A girl passing by on the street froze mid-stride, eyes blown wide, as though she'd been hit by a paralysis spell. With nearly three hundred points of Charisma and the Witch bloodline's singular pull on women, Li Fei radiated something like a permanent Charm Aura at all hours of the day — any woman of insufficient willpower who so much as glanced at her would find her thoughts immediately running somewhere improper.
"You little— you dare flirt with someone else while you're holding my hand—"
The girl beside the frozen stranger arched an eyebrow and was about to deliver a very pointed scolding to her faithless companion — when she, too, caught a glimpse of Li Fei's face. The words died in her throat.
Thud. Thud.
The inevitable consequence of walking without looking where you're going: both of them went down together.
She had set off a handful of small commotions along the way, and the accumulating chaos did wonders for Li Fei's mood. The corner of her mouth curved upward. She looked every bit like some bewitching imperial consort — seated serenely on her phoenix throne, surveying the grim-faced lords gathered below a sky thick with the smoke of war, savoring fresh lychees delivered by horses ridden to death, perfectly content to delight in the chaos her beauty had wrought upon the world.
— I will never be like those heroines in certain novels who dump every stat point into Charisma and then spend their entire lives hiding behind a veil because they're scared of causing a scene.
— I shall use my charms as my path. Everything in this world is mine to pluck.
Cradling the wraith-form Li Yue in her arms — petting her jellylike hair with the casual ease of someone stroking a cat — Li Fei strolled home at a leisurely pace.
She shrugged off her mage's robe and kicked off her stockings, tossing them aside without a second thought. Like removing a seal from something long suppressed, her Charisma climbed further still — brushing infinitely close to 300. Barefoot, she walked ahead; the little fairies, delighted by their mother's return, trailed behind her, picking up the discarded clothes.
"I really need to buy a house..."
She settled onto the sofa, crossing her legs with an air of total authority. One arm looped around a fairy on the left, the other around a fairy on the right. Li Yue in her wraith form curled obediently in her lap. Ram worked at her temples from behind. Even so, more fairies buzzed around Li Fei in cheerful orbit, laughing and playing.
Add in one stiffly nervous daughter-in-law, and the spacious home was starting to feel distinctly crowded.
Leaving Sofia to stew in deliberate silence, Li Fei adopted an air of eyes-closed, deep-in-thought composure — and opened her System Panel.
[Character Panel]
Name: Li Fei
Level: 17
Sequence: 9
EXP: 2,174 / 4,500
Class: Witch
Lineage: Witch of Depravity
Mana: 325 → 506
Strength: 25 (15) → 36
Agility: 17 → 28
Constitution: 20 (15) → 31
Intelligence: 23 (20) → 51 (48)
Charisma: 272 → 299
Morality: -17
Fortune: 1 → 4
Command: 1 → 2
Aptitude: 0 → 1
Achievement: Wolf Den Exterminator
Innate Talents and Specializations:
1. Depravity: When Morality decreases, Charisma increases. (Irreversible)
2. Enthrall Fortune: The more beautiful, the luckier. (Every 100 Charisma grants +1 Fortune) (Upgradeable)
3. ???
Knowledge Tree:
1. Nature Alignment: Introductory Natural Magic / Introductory Cycle Principle / Introductory Five Elements Meditation / Introductory Summoning Magic
2. Chaos Alignment: Introductory Chaos Magic / Introductory Five Elements Meditation
3. Combat: Introductory Combat — Allows learning and use of Tier-I combat skills. / Introductory Weapon Mastery — Increases melee damage by 10%.
Potential Points: 10
Spells: Stone Skin (Guardian) Lv1, Dragon's Might Lv1...
Combat Skills: Staff Weapon Proficiency (Lv1), Cloud Dragon Fold — First Form (Lv1)
Evaluation: A virginal purity that can only be called miraculous.
[Message Panel]
[You have slain a Muggle Raider. +34 EXP.]
...
[Shop Panel]
Fortune Value: 5,742
[Gacha Panel]
Remaining Draws: 12
The numbers on the panel had transformed beyond all recognition.
She had climbed to Level 17, crossing cleanly into Sequence 9. She still had no idea exactly when she had completed the Witch Ascension Ritual, but the rice was already cooked — the Witch business could be a headache for later. What mattered right now were the very real, very tangible gains: every attribute had skyrocketed, Charisma in particular.
Charisma was a complex thing — not simply synonymous with looks. Temperament, poise, even social standing and status all fed into it. Lady Zhihua, for instance, with her graceful and magnanimous bearing, could probably add at least twenty points to her Charisma through manner alone. Li Fei's appearance, meanwhile, had long since achieved a state of flawlessness. The [Depravity] talent merely forced her pull on others higher still.
And so, even though the Witch Class had "only" added eighteen points of Charisma, the combination of ascending from "non-combatant" to Transcendent status, plus the physical transformation wrought by the Witch bloodline, had pushed Li Fei's Charisma to the very edge of 300.
Of course, whether rising or falling, every attribute follows the same law: easy gains first, diminishing returns after. An ordinary person only needs to dress carefully to see an immediate, visible Charisma increase. But beyond two hundred points, even the most artful makeup artist in a tavern cannot budge a queen of beauty's Charisma by a single point — and yet here Li Fei was, defying that ceiling through sheer "personal effort" alone, advancing another notch further. The difficulty of that feat was no less than shaving another 0.01 seconds off Bolt's world record. A talent that could only be called once-in-an-eternity.
And the newly awakened Innate Talents and Specializations made Charisma even more precious than before.
As for the other attributes...
One point of Aptitude. Still an irredeemable waste of space.
Thirty-six Strength — excellent. If she could get her hands on a battle-qi or True Qi cultivation manual, combined with a decent weapon and Dragon's Might, most Sequence 8 warriors probably couldn't out-brawl her in melee...
And Intelligence at a towering 59, with her all-school spell amplification and the first glimmers of her bloodline bonus — that, too, was making Li Fei feel the true, unsettling depth of the Witch Class.
She had a sneaking suspicion that if she kept investing in it, decapitation might not even kill her. Witches can keep fighting even without their heads, you know — jealous, a certain magical girl?
Beyond that: Mana climbing to 506 meant every point of Intelligence now generated 6 Mana. Her mana recovery rate had accelerated too. The same Strength dealt more devastating damage; the same Agility brought sharper perception and faster reflexes. Add in extended lifespan, enhanced digestion, improved resistance and immunity, superior memory and computational speed, and the full-scale metamorphosis across every aspect of her being...
Li Fei understood it now, truly and deeply — the power of a Transcendent was a transformation that ran root-deep, from body to soul. With each rise in Sequence, she was evolving into something else entirely: another species wearing a human skin.
She turned her attention to the Message Panel.
[You have slain Josephine. +10,742 EXP.]
Her mind ran at a speed she had never experienced before. Cross-referencing the experience values from Eddy, the dwarf warrior, Zoller, and the others, she had a rough picture now of how the system calculated EXP for Knowledge-Sequence Transcendents.
So the System runs a Sequence hierarchy too. Interesting.
If her guess was right, the system used the tier and quantity of Transcendent knowledge mastered as a base, then added bloodline, personal Sequence level, and other modifiers to determine the final experience yield.
Each Transcendent she'd killed: roughly 100 EXP per mastered entry-level piece of Transcendent knowledge. Base-level, intermediate, and advanced knowledge came out to approximately 300, 1,000, and 3,000 respectively. Those were the big numbers. Other variables existed, but their impact was minor — even a Sequence 9 who had only mastered a single entry-level discipline was worth over a hundred EXP, while a Moonlight Wolf was worth eleven.
So Moonlight Wolves are trash. And that Siren was trash too.
Even without concealing her presence, Li Fei — the Witch — could sense that Josephine had crossed into Sequence 5. And yet the Transcendent knowledge she'd mastered was only advanced-level. A single tier.
She let out a long, heartfelt sigh, her expression the very picture of regret.
If that Siren had been a little more diligent, I'd have hit Level 20 at minimum. And there were just too many fish-slaves — they soaked up damage and gave zero EXP, completely tanking my farming efficiency...
Sofia, meanwhile, was watching the mother-in-law who was somehow younger than herself with mounting anxiety. Seeing that Li Fei sat in prolonged, inscrutable silence, she assumed she must be agonizing over the question of her daughter's future.
The faint sigh that followed made Sofia's body stiffen. Her never-beating, ice-cold heart felt as though something had closed a fist around it, and the feet wrapped in black stockings curled slightly inward.
Setting aside attribute allocation and other matters for now, Li Fei opened her eyes and looked her golden-haired, crimson-eyed daughter-in-law over.
Textbooks had taught her the relevant common sense: you could not apply human ethics to other species.
Female mice were capable of reproduction within one to two months of birth. Would anyone accuse a male mouse of... that?
Fairy reproductive capacity wasn't far off from a mouse's. Three months to adulthood, one month gestation — and that was for naturally-born fairies. Fairies born of Summoning Magic were different: they came into the world fully formed, fluent in the common tongue, adult in body and mind from the very first moment they opened their eyes.
Summoning Magic, after all, was a power the Laws had gifted to caster-mothers as an immediate combat resource — not as a mechanism to torture them with daily childcare.
By that standard, Sofia's behavior was not only not a violation of custom or decency — it could honestly be described as exemplary. She was a noble Blood Clan officer, and she had chosen to be responsible for a mere fairy. What kind of character did that take?
Besides — Li Fei, as a human, didn't care about morality at all...
Clearly, past the initial bewilderment, Li Fei had landed squarely on the side of profit: her daughter had managed to bring home a Blood Clan Constable with a respectable career, a bright future, a solid income, and impressive combat ability. Honestly? A bargain.
Which raised the real question.
How much should I charge for a bride-price?
Li Fei opened her eyes. She sat on the sofa with the authority of an elder empress, a faint smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
"By Eastern custom, you should be serving me tea right about now."
Sofia's face brightened — she had done her research in advance. She produced the carefully prepared tea leaves — and then Li Fei's voice came again:
"That said, I prefer coffee."
The tyrannical mother-in-law had already begun her hazing.
Sofia's expression went rigid.
She sustained herself on unicorn blood as a daily beverage — she had prepared tea leaves especially for this occasion. Where in the world was she supposed to produce coffee on the spot?
Ram stepped up with the grace befitting the eldest sister, smiling as she took both their hands and led them into the kitchen.
Before long, Sofia was kneeling properly at Li Fei's feet, offering up a cup of coffee with both hands.
Li Fei helped up the fairy who had also begun to kneel, her expression warm and benevolent:
"You're with child — no need for formalities."
The little fairy had rich auburn hair and wide, luminous eyes full of an innate, otherworldly cleverness. Even her skin had a dewy, jade-smooth quality the other fairies couldn't quite match.
Unlike her shyer sisters, she met Li Fei's gaze head-on, bold and direct, with just a hint of playful challenge in her eyes. For one brief moment, Li Fei felt as though she was looking at a reflection of herself.
The Mother of Fairies realized — after Ram, she might have just drawn her second SR.
"Maybe Sofia's expecting too~" the little fairy said, tilting her head with a giggle.
Impressive. Truly my daughter... it seems my particular art form has found a worthy inheritor.
Li Fei pulled her close and gave her a look of genuine, heartfelt approval.
"You're the first to carry a child. I name you... Eve."
The name had barely left her lips before even the politically savvy Eve broke into a smile of pure, unguarded joy. Her sisters all turned toward her with expressions of well-wishing and barely concealed envy.
The Mother of Fairies smiled warmly — while internally, the outline of a management framework was already taking shape.
As her Summoning Magic leveled up and the fairies began reproducing at scale, their numbers would swell at a rate that was genuinely concerning. She couldn't possibly give her personal attention to every single one of them.
And so Li Fei's self-defined role was never going to be devoted, self-sacrificing mother. It was closer to queen ant, or queen bee — a figure presiding at the center of a productive colony. To get the most out of them in their respective roles, systematic management was not optional; it was essential.
For instance: the fairy with the best monthly performance gets one day of cuddling as a reward. The fairy who makes an outstanding contribution earns the right to be named. Given how fairies were wired, spiritual incentives would absolutely outperform material ones — and at a fraction of the cost.
Some might find this approach unsettling. Li Fei preferred to call it efficient.
Her smile grew warmer still. She reached out, accepted the coffee, then unhurriedly raised one leg — and used the tip of her foot to tilt Sofia's chin upward.
It was an objectively disrespectful gesture. But because Li Fei was breathtakingly beautiful, what might have been demeaning from anyone else became something even the most rigid, tradition-bound Confucian scholar at an Eastern court could not have brought himself to refuse — a scandalous, intoxicating gift.
Sofia, forced to meet the gaze of her incomparably beautiful mother-in-law — the warmth of that foot against her chin — felt something impossible happen: she, a creature who had not breathed in decades, began to pant. It was as though the depths of those eyes, darker and more boundless than any star, were simply swallowing her soul whole.
Li Fei studied Sofia in turn.
Beneath softly curling golden hair was a face of cool, aristocratic elegance — refined, aloof, radiating the effortless distinction of old nobility. The crimson eyes were a pair of flawless rubies; the lips, red as fresh blood, set against skin of bloodless, immaculate white, made for a striking, almost sinful contrast — bewitching and dangerous.
The stronger, the more beautiful — that was an unchanging law on the Continent of Enlos. Transcendent power brought total, full-spectrum evolution, after all. The Blood Clan had always ranked above fairies, Sirens, and even elves in average physical beauty — surpassed only by select races like angels. The longer Li Fei looked, the more satisfied she felt.
With a Morality score of -17, her mind had naturally wandered into the rich and varied territory of a certain internet genre involving step-mothers and their children's partners.
My daughter's daughter is still my daughter.
My daughter's wife is also my wife.
"Rise," Li Fei said, propping her cheek on one hand, her tone carrying layers of unspoken meaning. "I approve of your union. But you had better take your duties as a wife seriously — take good care of my daughter."
"And of me."
"...Yes," Sofia breathed, her voice trembling.
"Good."
Li Fei withdrew her foot, and was just preparing to launch her interrogation — Do you own property? Do you have a vehicle? What's your monthly income? — when a knock rang out at the door.
Ram answered it. Su Ling'er's face appeared in the doorway, drawn and exhausted.
"Ling'er, what's wrong?"
Li Fei crossed the room toward her, concern in her voice.
"You're finally back... Miss Zhihua — she's been placed under house arrest."
Su Ling'er kept her eyes lowered. "She told me not to tell you, but...
"Take your time. No rush," Li Fei said.
She cupped Su Ling'er's face in both hands. Her gaze fell on the faint impressions of finger-marks on her cheek. Her eyes narrowed slowly.
____
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