The silhouette of the human royal city emerged in the twilight, the bronze walls coiled in the horizon like a rusted python, the clacking sound of gears turning mixed with the murmur of black mist, even the air carried the cold hardness of metal.Silverleaf's staff whistled shrilly as it touched the walls, and the glow of the star leaves on the moonlight vines was suppressed to a feeble level, "The royal city's boundaries are infused with the resentful souls of the first kings, and specialize in repelling elven magic."
Lin Xing touched the hot maple leaf necklace around her neck, the image of her father's imprisonment repeatedly flashed in her mind.When her fingertips touched the griffin relief on the city wall, the Star Leaf Seal suddenly lit up, and the black mist seeping out from the cracks of the relief actually turned into transparent fragments of memories - she saw that when she was twelve years old, her father had knelt in front of the Sacred Tree Portrait in the middle of the night, and the Star Leaf Seal on her palm was exactly the same as the one she had at the moment.
"It turns out that father also has a contract seal ..." she whispered, "He said that mother was human, but in fact, he was protecting us."Silverleaf suddenly grabbed her hand and pulled her into the shadows.Twenty guards wearing mechanical arm armor were passing by on patrol, the joints of the arm armor were embedded with the fluorescent scales of the Elves, glowing eerily in the darkness.
"Stay close to me."Silverleaf's fingertips coalesced into tiny starbursts, human lights camouflaged with the power of the Sacred Tree's remnant pages.They passed through streets and alleys filled with gear traps, eventually stopping in front of an inverted star-leaf shaped altar.In the center of the altar hovered a translucent fragment of the boundary, below which a pool of blood soaked hundreds of elven captives, and Yue Li's portrait was hung upside down at the top of the altar, a black mist dripping vacantly from her eyes.
"The core of the Eclipsed Star Project - remodeling the Primordial Boundary with elven blood, and then borrowing your healing power to activate it."Silverleaf's voice trembled as he saw the corners of Tsukuri's portrait's mouth suddenly lift, exactly the same as the memory of her dying smile, "Be careful, every mirror here could be an entrance to the illusionary realm."
Before the words left her mouth, the ground under Lin Xing's feet suddenly turned into a mercury mirror, and in the reflection, she was wearing the fancy clothes of the elf royal family, while Silverleaf was kneeling on one knee, holding a blood-stained enchanted arrow in her hand."The Star Leaf contract is complete," the Silver Leaf in the reflection looked up, no amber light in her eyes, only the same scarlet as the king's, "Now it is time to fulfill the pact - use your blood to purify the impurity of the human royal family."
"That's not true!"Lin Xing stepped back and crashed into the bronze mirror behind him.Reflected in the mirror was Yue Li, her fingertips condensed with healing golden light, yet she wore the garb of a human queen: "Xing Ye, come home with me, the human royal family has accepted the existence of elves."Yue Li's voice was as gentle as a remembered mother, causing Lin Xing's fingertips to almost touch the mirror.
"Yue Li will not wear the embroidered patterns of the human royal family."Silverleaf suddenly pressed her shoulder, his staff making cracks in the mirror, "Her cuffs will always have the dark pattern of blue scale grass, and these visions ..." The black mist seeping out of the cracks flashed images of the king tampering with his memories in the secret room, the"In stealing her last tenderness."
The pool of blood in the center of the altar suddenly boiled, and the fluorescent scales of hundreds of elven captives were sucked into the shards of the Boundary, on which gradually emerged the outline of the Sacred Tree.Lin Xing saw his father hanging from the altar pillars, his Star Leaf Seal was having his blood extracted by a mechanical arm, and every drop of blood was transformed into black chains that wrapped around the roots of the holy tree projection.
"Father!"She broke free from Silver Leaf and rushed towards the altar, but was surrounded by seven bronze mirrors.Each mirror reflected a different "truth": Mirror 1, her mother knelt in front of the human king, exchanging the Star Leaf Seal for Lin Xing's survival; Mirror 2, Silverleaf stabbed an enchanted arrow into her heart and smiled, saying, "It's time for Moonlite's shadow to disappear"; Mirror 3, the sacred tree withered in the black mist, and the pupils of all the elvesIn mirror three, the sacred tree withers and dies in a black mist, and the pupils of all the elves turn scarlet.
"The key to the Star Leaf Pact is not seeing the truth, but believing in each other."Silverleaf's voice came from beyond the mirrors, and Lin Xing saw that he was fighting the mechanical guards, and with every extinguished star leaf glow on the Moonlight Vine Staff, a new one grew from her seal.She suddenly realized that these mirrors were devouring their trust, just like the despair she felt when the Primordial Pact was betrayed.
She closed her eyes and pressed her palm against the nearest mirror, "Silverleaf taught me that listening with my heart is truer than seeing with my eyes."Golden light seeped into the mirror, and the illusion of Yue Li in the mirror suddenly whistled, revealing the structure of the mechanical gears underneath - it turned out that all the illusions were "fog mirrors" created by the king with dark magic, weaving lies with their most cherished memories.
When the seventh mirror shattered, the altar's boundary fragments cracked.Lin Xing took the opportunity to embrace his father, and the Star Leaf Seal was pressed against his palm at the same time: "I'm sorry, I should have realized that you also have a contract seal ..." His father laughed weakly: "Your mother was the eldest daughter of the elven royal family, and I used to be a royal guard!, but betrayed the 'pureblood' concept ... Back then, Yue Li blocked our pursuers for us, and her blood stained the maple leaves of the sacred tree ..."
"Enough!"The king's bronze mask crashed down from the top of the altar, half of a knot fragment embedded in his chest, wings made of black mist and gears sprouting from his back, "Three hundred years ago my brother failed to obtain Yue Li's pure blood, now I'm going to take even more power from you bastard - the key to the Twin Born Pact!"
He raised his hand, and the black mist from the altar's blood pool transformed into a giant hand that choked Silverleaf's neck.Lin Xing saw a momentary flash of fear in Silverleaf's eyes, but not for himself - he was looking at the moonlit portrait that was about to fall from the top of the altar."Look at me!"She pressed her father's hand to the Sacred Tree projection and rushed toward Silverleaf herself, "Our contract is not the key, it is the light itself!"
The Star Leaf seal resonated with her father's, and the Sacred Tree projection suddenly manifested itself in the royal city.The roots of the tree penetrated the altar, sending the blood of the elven captives back into them, and the black misty wings of gears disintegrated in the light of the Sacred Tree.The king was horrified to realize that the shards of the knot in his chest were absorbing the golden light of the Forest Star, instead mending the cracks of the primordial pact from back in the day.
"You think you can control the Sacred Tree by extracting the elven bloodline?"Silverleaf grabbed Lin Xing's hand, and their imprints intertwined into a complete star-leaf pattern in front of the king, "What the Sacred Tree wanted was never a blood sacrifice, it was a symbiosis of the heart."As the last of the golden light infused into the shards, the moonlit portrait at the top of the altar resumed its smile, her fingertips coalescing into a true starlight maple leaf that gently landed in Silverleaf's palm.
As the illusion dissipated, light-transmitting holes in the shape of star leaves appeared in the bronze walls of the royal city, and for the first time, morning light shone into the streets and alleys that had long been shrouded in black fog.The guards who had been implanted with spell seals touched their suddenly restored free will and watched the elven scales on their arm armor emit a gentle luminescence - it turned out that the scales still retained the goodness of nature after the dark magic had faded.
"We should head back to the Sacred Tree."Lin Xing supported his father and saw that Silverleaf was whispering to the moonlit portrait.When he turned around, there was no longer a thousand years of hurt in his eyes, only the clarity he had expected when he looked at her, "Yue Li left a message in the mirror - 'The light of the Star Leaf should be like what she taught me, both illuminating the wounds of the past and warming the new shoots of the future.'"
As the returning star-tracked carriage swept over the king's city, Lin Xing looked down at the dark fog that was gradually dispersing below, and suddenly realized that his Star Leaf imprint and Silver Leaf's were casting overlapping shadows on the carriage window - it was no longer a single star and a leaf, but rather, the star's aura seeped into the leaf's veins, and the leaf's held up the star's radiance to form a whole new symbiotic pattern.
In the ruins of the altar, the king removed his shattered mask, revealing the same face as the first king, only to see for the first time the pale gold mark that had somehow surfaced in his palm.He trembled as he touched the remaining light of the sacred tree on the ground, and heard a voice that he had deliberately forgotten three hundred years ago - "Don't let hatred cover your eyes", said by Yue Li before she died, which turned out to be not a curse, but a final healing.
The moonlight poured into the sacred tree again, and the blue scale grass of the Moon Tear Lake spelled out the word "new life" this time.Silverleaf suddenly pinned the piece of starlight maple leaf left behind by Yue Li in Lin Xing's hair, this time the maple leaf was no longer an illusionary projection, but a real glow with body heat: "The next time you meet Misty Mirror, remember to-" the tips of his ears were red, but he firmly locked eyes with her."I will always have only the real you in my eyes."
Star and Leaf's carriage disappeared into the starlight, while in the streets of the human royal city, the first human child who picked up the elven scale was gently applying it to the wound of the injured stray cat.The shimmering light from the scale resembled the pair of intertwined twin stars at the very top of the Sacred Tree.