“The more I look at it, the more I like it. Lucy, can you give me the bottle? I want to keep it as a little collectible.”

“That won’t do. It almost hit me just now, so it should be mine. You little brat, you want everything.”

……

However, the teasing behind Brian Carter quickly shifted, and the two women stood up again, turning their attention back to the bottle. As they watched, when Lucy Harris took the bottle from the other girl’s hand again, the process caused a bit of a commotion. Lucy Harris paused, “It seems like there’s something inside.”

As she spoke, she pulled out the cork, holding the bottle in one hand and pouring its contents into the other. Out came a round, fingertip-sized pill.

The pill carried a faint, intoxicating fragrance, but this scent was buried under a much stronger medicinal aroma—the scent of Fenghua Dan. This aroma was wonderful to Brian Carter, who almost wanted to snatch it away. But after staring blankly at the pill for a few moments, Lucy Harris brought it to her nose for a sniff, glanced around, and then casually tossed the pill onto the ground. “Looks like a pill, but I don’t know what it is. Better just throw it away.”

Her companion had no objections. It was normal for someone to pick up a medicine bottle on the street—if the bottle was exquisite and beautiful, so much so that you wanted to keep it, then tossing out the pill inside was perfectly reasonable.

What adult would randomly collect unknown medicine found on the street?

So neither woman thought anything of it, but Brian Carter, who was walking by, suddenly shuddered and froze in place.

“Heh, even though it almost hit you, it’s fine. The bottle is so pretty, you really lucked out.”

“Let’s go.”

“That guy behind us… did you see how nervous he was about you? The moment you screamed, he ran right over. And when you looked at him, he blushed and ran away. He’s so handsome—aren’t you interested?”

“Go to hell.”

……

Giggling, the two women got up and walked ahead.

Brian Carter suddenly turned around, walked to where the two women had been standing, glanced around, and, following the scent, squatted down and dug the discarded Fenghua Dan out of a snowbank by the roadside.

Holding the pill up to his eyes, Brian Carter looked around again, but didn’t smell any other medicinal scent.

Only one? He hadn’t seen how many pills Lucy Harris had thrown away, so he didn’t know there was only one. At first, he thought the bottle was full.

But since she had already started tossing them, if there were more Fenghua Dan, she wouldn’t have thrown away just one and kept the rest, right? So does that mean there was only this one in the bottle?

He was still in shock when a sudden shout came from up ahead. Brian Carter looked up and saw the girl who was with Lucy Harris looking back from seven or eight steps away, smiling sweetly at him. “Handsome, we’re almost home. If you don’t have the courage to come over now, you’ll never see Lucy, this gorgeous beauty, again. I’ll let you in on a secret—her name is Lucy Harris.”

“Hey, what nonsense are you saying?”

With a girlish laugh, Lucy Harris blushed furiously and, embarrassed and annoyed, started hitting her friend. It was one thing for two women to privately discuss a handsome guy they saw on the street—just as two men might talk about a pretty girl—but to say it right in front of him?

After hitting her friend, Lucy Harris glanced at Brian Carter, blushed again, and turned to leave.

Her friend winked at Brian Carter with a laugh and walked away.

Brian Carter stood there holding the Fenghua Dan, frozen in place, until after more than ten breaths, a flash of wild joy suddenly appeared in his eyes.

It’s gone!

This time, Lucy Harris was already far away from him, but the strange compulsion that had been like a parasite in his mind had completely disappeared!

“That thing kept forcing or tempting me to kill her, promising great benefits—was it referring to this Fenghua Dan?”

“But something doesn’t add up. She picked up the Fenghua Dan halfway down the road, but the compulsion started the moment I first saw her in the supermarket, urging me to kill her. If I had given in and attacked her then, how would I have gotten the Fenghua Dan from her later?”

“I barely managed to suppress it at the time, and suffered so much just to hold back. If I hadn’t, and killed her right away, she wouldn’t have come back down this road, wouldn’t have picked up the pill here, and I wouldn’t have gotten the Fenghua Dan. So was the ‘great benefit’ not this pill? But if not, then when she picked up the bottle, the compulsion changed to ‘snatch it,’ and after I picked up the discarded Fenghua Dan, the compulsion vanished completely?”

Delighted, he looked at the pill in his hand a few more times, but then Brian Carter suddenly grew puzzled, and the feeling only deepened.

Because he really couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Frowning in deep thought, Brian Carter suddenly had a flash of inspiration and came up with a bold idea.

The ‘great benefit’ the compulsion referred to must be the Fenghua Dan, otherwise there’s no way to explain why the compulsion disappeared the moment he got the pill.

Lucy Harris picking it up was a huge stroke of luck!

This kind of luck was just like when, in his previous life, Brian Carter happened to encounter that gravely injured cultivator, which allowed him to embark on the path of cultivation.