Chapter 111
“I miss you so much, don’t keep me waiting too long.”
“——No need to bury, just burn me. You can shoot now.”
Shen Zhuo lowered his gaze. The dark void was completely silent, and only his own steady breathing could be heard.
“…No last words,” Rong Qi repeated with interest after a long pause.
Rong Qi’s hand holding the gun was as steady as a rock. He seemed to be pondering something, and after a while, he said, “It’s okay, I’ve already given you five minutes. Since you have no last words, let’s chat about something else.”
“…”
“You’ve always hidden the truth that you can evolve. At first, it was because you subconsciously remembered your mother’s last words before she died. Later, it was to maintain the false appearance of HRG’s nuclear deterrence, right?”
Shen Zhuo remained silent, his face pale and indifferent.
“If I’m not mistaken, HRG is not a talisman for humanity. On the contrary, it proves that evolution is the inevitable direction of history. All evolutionists can use HRG to safely upgrade a second time, and there’s already a gene interferon suitable for evolutionists that has successfully been developed, isn’t it?”
Shen Zhuo said wearily, “I won’t use HRG to make a deal with you. If you want to kill me, just shoot…”
His voice suddenly stopped.
Because Rong Qi stood up, the gun barrel moved from Shen Zhuo’s throat to the junction of his neck and jaw, forcing him to tilt his head back even more. The cold pressure of the gun barrel pressed against his throat.
“Don’t rush; the five minutes aren’t up yet. Answer one question first.”
“…”
Rong Qi looked down at him, carefully examining this face he had seen since childhood for the first time in so many years. His eyes flickered with a hint of deep and complex emotion:
“In human civilization, the role of ‘parents’ when destroyed by material means causes lifelong hatred that’s insurmountable, and there’s no way to resolve it. No matter what is done, it can’t be undone—is that really the case?”
The gun barrel at his throat loosened slightly; the sudden influx of air made Shen Zhuo cough, and for a moment he felt only absurdity.
A ruthless, deep schemer, who had killed countless people and was on the brink of dragging all of humanity into an endless abyss, was asking this question just before personally shooting his enemy.
Shen Zhuo found it absurd to the point of being laughable, but he was already exhausted. He barely stopped coughing, took a breath, and leaned back in his chair.
“I never guess other people’s thoughts, Rong Qi. What exactly do you want to ask? Just say it.”
Rong Qi didn’t find anything absurd or funny. He just stared down at him, his steady voice piercing the void: “If 23 years ago, Shen Ruzhen and her husband hadn’t died, what would the situation be if you met me again today?”
Shen Zhuo raised an eyebrow, his eyes full of undisguised mockery:
“Kill me first, then shoot yourself. If you’re lucky, you might be reborn 23 years ago, kneel before all the first-generation researchers and kowtow a few times, then commit suicide to apologize without a word…”
“In the netherworld, when you meet me, you’ll know what the situation is.”
Rong Qi stood there, silent for a long time, finally sighing after a while.
“Shen Zhuo, sometimes I really think your heart is made of stone.”
He paused, the gun barrel pointed at Shen Zhuo’s heart, and said gently, “Fortunately, today I can personally verify that.”
Then he unhesitatingly pulled the trigger. Bang!
—At the moment when his heart was pierced, there was no pain, only a numb coldness.
In a fraction of a millisecond, Shen Zhuo’s only thought was: In the end, he didn’t get to say goodbye to Bai Sheng.
Countless trivial matters can become irrevocable regrets at the end of life, forever unreachable.
So this is the end.
Shen Zhuo was pushed into the back of the chair by the impact; his vision darkened, his ears silent, and his whole body was numb and senseless. For several seconds, he thought he was already dead.
…But then, consciousness gradually returned, and the blood flow making his eardrums roar.
“I really thought your heart was as hard as iron, unbreakable,” Rong Qi’s amused voice came from above, “It was too wonderful; you should have seen your own expression just now—”
Shen Zhuo lowered his head; the bullet wound on his chest didn’t bleed, only emitting a faint blue glow. At the same time, his whole body felt as if it had been hit by a tranquilizer, unable to move—not even a finger.
“…What is this?” he muttered, then turned into uncontrollable rage, “What kind of mental illness do you have in your head?!”
Rong Qi snapped his fingers, and countless points of light suddenly lit up in the vast darkness, covering them like a starry sky. Upon closer inspection, they were all evolutionary sources.
A suction force suddenly seized Shen Zhuo’s heart, as if trying to pull something out of his chest—Shen Zhuo suddenly realized this was extracting the Spear of Time!
“Why should I kill you just because you can reverse the timeline?”
Rong Qi stood behind Shen Zhuo, pressing one hand on the back of the chair, leaned down, and smiled: “I can just extract the Spear of Time directly, right?”
“…”
Shen Zhuo opened his mouth, unable to make a sound.
“My integration with the evolutionary source is far beyond what Italdo could achieve; once close to 100%. Often, I was almost the evolutionary source itself. So I can use the meteorite to do many things, for example, directly refining the energy in Nielsen and, for example, making these meteorites generate suction for the Spear of Time until it finally leaves your body.”
A long spear, formed by light, sharp and magnificent, gradually appeared in front of Shen Zhuo, then slowly dissipated bit by bit in the grand suction force generated by the countless meteorites around, like trickling sand, slow but unstoppable.
“They are all cosmic-level weapons. That Bai has fully integrated the law of causality into his genes, while you’ve been resisting evolution all along. Your control over the Spear of Time is weak. At this rate, in no more than three days, the Spear of Time will completely detach. Even if your genes have the ability to reverse the timeline, you won’t be able to trigger it without this weapon anymore.”
“This is a question I should be asking you, Shen Zhuo.” Rong Qi grabbed a handful of Shen Zhuo’s disheveled black hair from behind, leaning in close to his ear, and asked softly, “Ever since you met that Bai, what has been filling your mind? If I wanted to kill you, why didn’t I do it in the command post in front of those idiots? Do you think I really wanted to listen to your five-minute-long last words just to relay them to that Bai?”
“…”
Rong Qi released his grip on the handful of hair, stood up, and looked down at Shen Zhuo’s face, pale as thin ice, with a teasing smile.
“The day I really want to kill you, I guarantee that Bai won’t even find a trace of your ashes, let alone any last words.”
He brushed past and walked into the distance. Shen Zhuo suddenly gritted his teeth and struggled fiercely, but under the combined effects of anesthesia and restraint, it was completely in vain, his wrists unable to move at all behind his back.
“Oh, right.”
Rong Qi seemed to remember something, turned around, and raised an eyebrow:
“You destroyed the Tyrant and the law of causality that I finally obtained, causing me to permanently lose the S-class ability, the Man-Eating spider. All my plans were ruined, and you also took down a very useful committee hairman…”
He raised his gun and aimed at Shen Zhuo’s throat, then slightly shifted the muzzle.
Bang!
The bullet pierced through his left shoulder, splashing an arc of blood!
The intense pain instantly overwhelmed his senses. Shen Zhuo gritted his teeth hard to suppress his gasps, cold sweat soaking his face in an instant.
“A little lesson,” Rong Qi said indifferently, “This shot was real.”
He turned and walked into the void, disappearing into the boundless darkness in the blink of an eye.
·
Above a pool of glowing meteorite liquid, Rong Qi appeared out of thin air, the spatial rift behind him closing with a swish.
—The dark void they had just been in was actually Shunsuke Noda’s space tunnel.
Only in the space tunnel could they avoid all prying eyes, and no one could detect Shen Zhuo’s presence, even with specialized search abilities.
“Mr. Rong.” Several subordinates stood respectfully by the meteorite pool, and Shunsuke Noda quickly stepped forward to report, “The person you mentioned used a secure communication to request a meeting and has been waiting in the study for a long time.”
Rong Qi made a sound of acknowledgment and walked towards the long underground corridor, pointing behind him without looking back: “Send someone in to treat our Supervisor Shen’s injuries in ten minutes.”
Shunsuke Noda was puzzled.
“Let him learn his lesson from the pain,” Rong Qi said coldly, “Next time he wants to oppose me, he should think twice.”
Passing through the winding underground building, two subordinates opened the door, and Rong Qi quickly walked into the study.
A three-dimensional projection was anxiously awaiting the study. It was the council chairman, who looked like he had found a savior upon seeing Rong Qi: “Mr. Rong, save me! That Shen Zhuo somehow discovered the matter of the Round Table Society and even found out that I leaked the secrets of the global meteorite vault. But no matter how much I think about it, I can’t figure out how he knew! Cameron is now relentlessly pursuing me. My situation is extremely dangerous. You must send someone to—”
The council chairman’s voice stopped abruptly because he saw Rong Qi walking straight to a transparent glass bottle on the bookshelf, taking out a vigorously beating heart from a jar.
It was a kind of oath ability, typically used by superiors to control spies.
The council chairman’s heart.
The council chairman was struck as if by lightning, collapsing to his knees and clutching his chest, the pain causing large beads of sweat to roll down his face: “No…you can’t…why?! I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“Oh,” Rong Qi said calmly, “Is that so?”
“I swear I didn’t leak those secrets! If everything had gone according to plan, we could have smoothly captured Shen Zhuo for the Round Table Society! I arranged everything perfectly! I don’t know how he could foresee everything, this isn’t my fault, this isn’t—”
Pain and suffocation turned his explanation into a scream, the tightly constricted pupils reflecting the image of Rong Qi crushing the heart in his hand.
“You just don’t know where you went wrong,” Rong Qi replied without any emotion.
With a squelch of flesh and blood, the heart burst into a bloody mess. That was the last scene the council chairman saw before his death.
Thud!
The body fell to the ground, eyes wide open, as blood quickly flowed from its seven orifices.
Rong Qi reached out and pressed the button to terminate the secure communication, causing the virtual projection to disappear from the floor.
“Mr. Rong,” Shunsuke Noda knocked on the door and respectfully said, “I have already sent someone with healing abilities through the space tunnel to check.”
Rong Qi nodded and casually took a piece of paper, wiping the blood off his fingers bit by bit.
The warm, metallic smell of blood floated in the air, and after a long while, he murmured as if still savoring it, “… the Spear of Time.”
Shunsuke Noda stood with his head bowed.
“The biggest mistake Italdo made was not placing both the laws of causality and the reverse timeline on Shen Zhuo alone back then… Maybe she thought a six-year-old human child couldn’t handle it.”
Rong Qi paused and said softly, “And my biggest mistake was thinking she had already thrown both of these weapons into the fifth dimension, so I didn’t even think to check what the white one’s ability was when I chose Fu Chen five years ago.”
This couldn’t really be considered Rong Qi’s fault, as Bai Sheng was very meticulous by nature. After his evolution, he had always hidden the law of causality very deeply, always handling things with a gentle approach and never getting into fights. From studying abroad to returning to Shenhai, very few people knew what his Fatal Strike ability was. Even Rong Qi only realized he had chosen the wrong target to possess five years later.
“What do we do now, Mr. Rong?” Shunsuke Noda asked, somewhat worried, “The ability is still on Shen Zhuo, even if we get the Spear of Time, we can’t use it, and that Bai Sheng must be desperately searching for our whereabouts…”
“That’s why we need to borrow some serum from Supervisor Shen at the right time.” Rong Qi raised an eyebrow and spoke.
Shunsuke Noda was stunned, then suddenly realized.
—Shen Zhuo’s S-class serum!
“The Round Table has already been taken down, right?” Rong Qi asked nonchalantly.
Speaking of this, Shunsuke Noda felt somewhat frustrated: “Cameron personally led the raid. That old man named Pardes was useless, none of them survived.”
“Fortunately, there is more than one meteorite repository on this Earth, and we have more than one Round Table following us.” Rong Qi was not surprised, casually throwing away the bloodstained paper, “Extracting the Spear of Time will take at least three days. During these three days, we need to keep all the supervision offices around the world busy; the busier the better… especially Shenhai.”
He raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly, saying indifferently, “Find something for everyone except the HRG laboratory to do.”
·
His consciousness was hazy, his mind confused, as if his soul were floating in the dark, deep sea, until a gentle light gradually lit up in the distance.
“…Shen Zhuo?” A low voice faintly called.
“Can you hear my voice, Shen Zhuo?”
“Can you come find me?”
…
The deep sea split apart with a roar. Shen Zhuo slowly opened his eyes, the world suddenly became bright, and a long wind wrapped around him, crossing thousands of miles, to see a familiar tall figure standing on the top of a high tower, with a sea of people at his feet, reaching out to him against the wind.
It was Bai Sheng.
In the dream, the soul became very light, as if it had already discarded the body, unconsciously drifting into that warm embrace, and after a long while, it sighed in a daze.
“…Sorry,” Shen Zhuo murmured, “I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t had time to say goodbye to you…”
“It doesn’t matter… It doesn’t matter.” Bai Sheng lowered his head and rubbed against his cold forehead, then spread his left hand, his palm a bloody mess, the white bones clearly visible.
The thick double-S pheromone in the blood was spreading in all directions, carrying a tyrannical, extremely powerful, and sorrowful force, spreading to every inch of land beneath their feet, covering half of Asia with the wind.
“It was I who has been calling you here,” Bai Sheng softly said.
“I can feel that you are still alive, but I haven’t found where they are hiding you yet. Can you give me a little more time?”
“…” Shen Zhuo’s consciousness was blurred, unable to respond.
“Hold on until I come to take you back, just like I once held on until you reversed the timeline to take me back; can you do that?”
The strong wind whistled and rushed into the distance. Shen Zhuo closed his eyes, his figure gradually dissipating, and the intertwined aura of the two separated.
At that moment, Bai Sheng’s pupils suddenly contracted, finally seeing the dazzling long Spear on Shen Zhuo’s chest gradually disappear like flowing sand.
“Don’t make me wait too long…” Shen Zhuo answered tiredly.
“I miss you very much; don’t make me wait too long alone.”
·
On Shenhai City’s skyline, on top of the high tower, in the roaring wind, Bai Sheng suddenly opened his cold eyes.
The vast city stretched out endlessly. He decisively drew a dagger from behind. Regardless of his left palm already being a bloody mess, he was just about to cut again when Witch Italdo rushed up and pressed down, her voice sharp with change: “Stop cutting! The pheromone is too heavy! Do you want all the evolutionists in Asia to go crazy and kneel to sleep tonight?!”
“…”
Looking down from the hundreds of meters high tower, tens of thousands of evolutionists were forced to gather on the streets, each with a fanatical, enchanted expression, and the crowd was still growing.
That was the terrifying summoning effect of the double-S pheromone; if Bai Sheng didn’t stop, he could even summon other S-classes from across Asia.
“I just saw Shen Zhuo.” Bai Sheng finally exhaled a hot breath, put away the dagger, and said hoarsely, “But I couldn’t keep him for long. That Rong guy must have locked him in a space tunnel and is trying to extract the Spear of Time from him with some method.”
