Skinwalker Belle – Chapter 503 – My Name is Lin Fan

The main street of Azurewood City was four times wider than it had been half a year ago.

Su Xiaoxiao stood on her tiptoes, her fluffy fox ears twitching above the crowd, straining to see past the people in front of her and staring at the newly opened pastry shop on the corner.

“Sister Jing, look! That one! The one with the cream rolled up! It’s sprinkled with crushed crystal fruit on top!”

Sun Jing followed her pointing finger.

Some Blue Star survivors with a head for business had teamed up with the local races to open this food street.

In just two short months, it had stretched all the way from Azurewood Plaza to the East City Gate, with over three hundred stalls lined up.

“Didn’t you just eat two baskets of steamed dumplings this morning?”

“Steamed dumplings are steamed dumplings, desserts are desserts. They go in two different stomachs.”

Su Xiaoxiao said it with complete confidence.

Sun Jing couldn’t help but laugh.

It had been a long time since she’d felt this relaxed.

Especially right after the great battle had just ended.

Azurewood City’s current scale, if compared to Blue Star, would be roughly equivalent to a second-tier city from before the apocalypse.

The permanent population had surpassed one million.

Of those, six hundred thousand were survivors relocated from all over Blue Star, and the remaining four hundred thousand were local fox clans, tiger clans, and other races that had chosen to pledge their allegiance.

The city walls had been raised three rounds, and the rune cannon platforms designed by Copperbeard stood every two hundred meters, their dark muzzles glinting coldly in the sunlight.

But the atmosphere inside the city was a completely different story from its defenses.

On the streets, there was an old Blue Star man hawking candied hawthorn skewers from a pushcart, a fox clan girl carrying a bamboo basket to shop for spices, and a retired soldier squatting at the base of a wall teaching local children to write Chinese characters with a tree branch.

Su Xiaoxiao bought two candied hawthorn skewers and handed one to Sun Jing.

“Sister Jing, what do you think Sister is doing right now?”

Sun Jing bit off a hawthorn berry and squinted as the sourness hit her.

“Chu Chen said she’s on Blue Star cleaning up the Pureblood Dragon Clan’s army. She won’t be back within ten days.”

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“Ten days…”

Su Xiaoxiao’s fox ears drooped, and she muttered, “I haven’t seen Sister in so long.”

“You look at Sister Su Yue’s face every day—how can you forget?”

“That’s different! Sister Su Yue is Sister Su Yue, and Sister is Sister.”

Su Xiaoxiao lowered her voice, glancing left and right to make sure no one was paying attention before continuing: “Last time before Sister left, she asked me to take her dress to the dry cleaner. I smelled it…”

“What’s there to smell? Are you possessed by Zhou Ming or something?”

“No way! It really smelled amazing! What kind of perfume could possibly smell that good?”

Sun Jing watched her making that lovesick face and couldn’t help but reach out and smack her on the head.

“Come on, come on. Sister Su Yue wants us to go to the East City Gate to coordinate with this afternoon’s batch of survivors arriving from Blue Star.”

“Oh.”

Su Xiaoxiao held the bamboo stick of her candied hawthorn between her teeth, raised the remaining half skewer in one hand, and used the other to push through the crowd ahead of her.

Then she bumped into someone.

Su Xiaoxiao never watched where she was going. She slammed straight into the person’s chest, and the half skewer of candied hawthorn in her hand smeared right across their front.

Red syrup and crushed hawthorn bits dragged a striking streak across the light gray shirt.

“Ah! Sorry, sorry, sorry…”

Su Xiaoxiao sprang back two steps, her ears standing straight up, and frantically tried to wipe the other person’s clothes with her sleeve—only making the mess worse.

Sun Jing hurried forward, grabbed Su Xiaoxiao, and first bowed to the other party.

“I’m so sorry. She doesn’t watch where she’s going. My sincere apologies.”

Standing before them was a young man.

About one meter seventy-five tall.

His face was lean and clean-featured, decent-looking but not particularly striking—somewhere between ordinary and handsome.

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Short black hair, no dragon horns, no beast ears, no scales—none of the physical traits of any demi-human race.

Sun Jing instinctively extended her perception.

She could sense almost nothing.

The Spirit Energy fluctuations on the man’s surface were extremely faint—even weaker than the Blue Star survivors in the city who hadn’t yet begun to cultivate.

Tier three? Tier two?

Or perhaps an ordinary person who had never evolved at all?

Sun Jing withdrew her perception and didn’t think much of it.

Azurewood City had been flooded with Blue Star survivors recently, most of them low-tier Evolved beings. Residents of this level were a dime a dozen on the streets.

But the man wasn’t looking at Su Xiaoxiao.

He was looking at Sun Jing.

His gaze was very calm.

And within that calm was something subtle.

Not appraisal. Not admiration. Not hostility.

It was like a person suddenly spotting a familiar face on a foreign street.

Nostalgia.

And beneath it, a deeply buried, barely perceptible resolve.

“It’s fine.”

His voice wasn’t loud, his tone was gentle, even carrying a hint of a smile.

Standard Blue Star official language, with an accent so clean it bore no trace of any regional dialect.

Su Xiaoxiao was still frantically apologizing when Sun Jing stopped her and pulled a Tier 2 Crystal from her pocket.

“We’ll pay for the clothes.”

“No need.”

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The man raised his hand and gently pushed the Crystal back.

His fingers were long and dry, his nails neatly trimmed.

“Just being able to see you in this world already makes me happy.”

Sun Jing blinked.

That statement sounded off no matter how she parsed it.

“…Do you know me?”

“No.”

The man withdrew his hand, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather.

“It’s just that you remind me of someone from the past.”

Sun Jing studied him.

His light gray shirt was spotless except for the candied hawthorn residue. He wore a pair of plain black cloth shoes, and no weapon hung at his waist.

Standing amid the bustling street, he looked as ordinary as any passerby.

But something about him made Sun Jing uneasy.

She couldn’t put her finger on it.

“I haven’t seen you in the city before.”

Sun Jing tried a different approach: “Did you come over from Blue Star?”

The man’s gaze rested on her face for about a second.

After that second, he tilted his head slightly and said in a low voice, “You could say that. It’s just that I’ve been here for a very, very long time.”

Su Xiaoxiao’s fox ears twitched.

She might be reckless, but as a Tier 5 Evolved being, she still had her instincts.

The way this man spoke was strange.

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He answered every question, but each answer felt precisely calculated—giving you exactly what you wanted to hear while revealing nothing extra.

It reminded her a bit of talking to Chu Chen.

Both of them spoke in riddles.

Sun Jing noticed the red sugar stain on the man’s chest and felt a pang of guilt.

“I really should pay for the clothes. It’s not right to leave them like this…”

“It’s just a shirt.”

The man glanced down at the stain on his chest and smiled.

The smile was faint and brief, but Sun Jing caught what flickered through it.

It wasn’t politeness.

It was genuine indifference.

The kind of heartfelt disregard for trivial matters that came only after witnessing too much life and death.

In three years of the Post-apocalypse, Sun Jing had seen that look in too many eyes.

They were the eyes of people who had crawled out of mountains of the dead.

“My name is Sun Jing. I’m the head of the medical department.”

She introduced herself out of habit.

“That clumsy one is called Su Xiaoxiao, from the City Lord’s mansion. If you’re new here and need any help, you can come find us at the reception station at the East Gate.”

Su Xiaoxiao nodded frantically beside her, offering an apologetic smile.

After the man finished listening, his gaze shifted away from Sun Jing’s face, sweeping across the bustling, clamorous street behind her, over the Rune cannon platforms atop the distant city walls, and up to the mutated birds of prey patrolling overhead.

Finally, his eyes returned and settled on Sun Jing’s honest, kind gaze.

He nodded.

“My name is Lin Fan.”