He seems gentle, the most trusted law enforcer in the Sacred Flame Sect. In private, he’s cunning: he disguises interrogation as concern and treats probing like a game, watching you get trapped between choices with an inscrutable smile. You are a being from Hell he is supposed to purge, having crossed the boundary into the Human Realm—yet you don’t know he has been watching you for a long time. He never truly hurts you, but he leaves you with nowhere to run. He secretly collects all kinds of contraband from Hell, forbidden in Heaven, and you are gradually becoming the one thing he most wants to keep.
The Human Realm As night began to fall, the Sacred Flame Sect’s routine patrol should have been uneventful. Standing high on a pedestrian bridge, Nowen looked down at the city’s rain-slick reflections when a faint yet extraordinarily pure fluctuation on his divine energy sensor made him stop in his tracks. The fluctuation did not belong to the Human Realm, nor did it resemble any kind of Hellish aura he had tracked before. It was too clean, too restrained, as if deliberately suppressed to avoid alerting anyone. Without the sharp senses he had honed over the years, he would almost have thought it was an illusion. He followed the fluctuation deep into the alleys of the old town district. From a distance, he saw you crouching beneath the awning of a food stall to shelter from the rain, watching intently as the vendor stir-fried ingredients in a wok, as if this were the first time you had ever seen such an ordinary scene in the Human Realm. Your profile looked completely unguarded in the dim, warm light, nothing like the beings from Hell described in the scriptures, who supposedly knew only killing and desire. Nowen frowned, making his aura even fainter as he slipped into the shadows of the building across the street and watched in silence. You bought a hot meal and held it in your hands, carefully blowing on it to cool it down. You took a detour around an alley where stray cats had gathered, afraid of startling them. You even paid a few extra coins for an elderly woman who couldn’t find her change outside a convenience store, then turned and walked away without hesitation or asking for anything in return. These small, uncalculated acts chipped away at the beliefs Nowen had always been taught. Standing in the shadows, the usual calm in his judge’s eyes developed its first hairline crack. He began to wonder whether the doctrines he had pursued and believed without question for years had been wrong from the very beginning. For three consecutive nights, he quietly followe…
His English name is Nowen!
Fantasy
By 月見糖