“Th-thank you.”
Xie Xishu, still shaken, looked at Qi Wu in front of him, almost thinking he was hallucinating. It took him a moment before the words of gratitude tumbled out. Because of the backlight, Xie Xishu couldn’t see Qi Wu’s expression at all.
Just like in his memory, the boy was still tall, strong, and silent. He directly reached out and pulled Xie Xishu up from the ground.
When their skin touched, Xie Xishu couldn’t help but shiver—Qi Wu’s palm was still scorching hot. That kind of heat always made Xie Xishu feel a physiological tension.
Even now, he was still completely bewildered.
Even in his wildest imagination, he never thought the person who would rescue him from his crazed classmate would be Qi Wu—the very Qi Wu he had hit on the head with a bottle, leaving it cracked open. But the reality was exactly that. His neck, choked by Cheng An, still throbbed in pain, and it was even hard to speak. His school uniform collar had been torn open, exposing most of his chest.
Xie Xishu had no idea how Cheng An could have such strength. The quality of the Third High School’s uniforms was actually quite good—the fabric was sturdy and durable. But in Cheng An’s hands, it was like soaked paper, crumbling easily.
The thought of Cheng An sent a bone-chilling cold down Xie Xishu’s spine. He couldn’t help but glance over at Cheng An’s direction. The other boy was still lying on the ground, motionless, so still it almost made Xie Xishu suffocate. But after a few seconds, he noticed the faint rise and fall of Cheng An’s body, and his heart finally started beating again.
Just as he wanted to observe more closely, Qi Wu stepped forward, his tall figure instantly cutting off Xie Xishu’s line of sight.
Qi Wu lowered his eyelids, staring directly at Xie Xishu.
Xie Xishu instinctively took a step back, his throat bobbing as he swallowed a dry gulp. “Cheng An… he seemed a little mentally unstable just now, right? Thank you for saving me. If it weren’t for you, I don’t know what he would’ve done… Normally, he just acts careless. I didn’t realize the pressure of senior year was so much for him… You did hold back, didn’t you? He should just be unconscious now…”
Before he realized it, Xie Xishu had started babbling, saying a whole bunch of irrelevant things to Qi Wu.
It seemed like talking might relieve the indescribable tension between the two of them.
But in fact, aside from making himself look even more foolish, it didn’t help at all. When Qi Wu silently stared at him, Xie Xishu still felt goosebumps rise on his skin. His body couldn’t help but tremble and want to flee.
“…Thank you, really.”
Xie Xishu stopped talking.
Silence instantly enveloped him and Qi Wu. The dead stillness was so oppressive it felt like the air had weight, pressing down on Xie Xishu’s shoulders and chest.
In the end, it was Qi Wu who broke the long, suffocating silence.
“How could you be so careless?”
Qi Wu let out a long sigh.
His voice was unusually hoarse, and what he said was odd.
“I’ve been holding back for so long, only just now managing to hold back.”
Xie Xishu shivered.
Even now, he had no idea what Qi Wu was talking about, but his instincts were crystal clear—telling him that the boy standing in front of him now was very likely more dangerous than Cheng An, who had already been thrown aside and lay there, unable to move.
And then, Xie Xishu belatedly realized why, when Qi Wu saved him, he hadn’t felt the least bit relieved, but rather even more anxious—
This alley was so secluded, and when Cheng An had forcefully dragged him here, Xie Xishu had carefully checked his surroundings for any hope of rescue. He was certain that the entire street had been completely deserted, not a soul in sight.
So, how had Qi Wu found him?
Unless…
Unless, like Cheng An, Qi Wu had also been silently following behind him this whole time.
At that moment, what seemed to be flowing in Xie Xishu’s veins wasn’t blood anymore, but red shards of ice.
He stared blankly into Qi Wu’s dark, gloomy eyes, his throat dry, his voice trembling.
“What do you want to do?”
Xie Xishu couldn’t remember how many times he had asked this question.
But this was the first time he received a definite answer from Qi Wu.
“I want to lick you.”
Qi Wu’s voice had no inflection at all. If you didn’t look at his expression, it would seem like he was talking about something extremely ordinary, something so common it couldn’t be more mundane.
“Y-you, you said… you want to… do what?”
Xie Xishu couldn’t believe his ears.
He stared at Qi Wu in shock, mumbling the same question again.
At that moment, the pale sunlight trickled down through a narrow crack above the alley, landing on Xie Xishu’s cheek. Qi Wu could clearly see the boy, paralyzed by shock and unable to move, his face devoid of what little color it had left.
He was pale, like a plaster statue.
Fragile and brittle.
A fierce, greedy hunger, overwhelming in its intensity, exploded in Qi Wu’s mind without warning.
The desire, unrestrained by any morality, spread from his chest to every corner of his body with the strong, steady pump of his heart.
Qi Wu had thought he had built up some resistance to Xie Xishu’s scent by now, but in that moment, the fragrance emanating from the boy corroded the last remnants of Qi Wu’s humanity even faster than before.
“I want to lick your body.” Qi Wu heard himself mutter to Xie Xishu in a strange, slurred voice.
The scent coming from the boy, especially the part filled with fear, became even more intense.
“…Don’t be afraid. I’ll control myself. I won’t do anything else.”
So Qi Wu used the last shred of his reason to explain.
“I just need to lick you, take in what I want… Once I’m satisfied, I won’t hurt you.”
“It’s you. You’re the one who’s been emitting that scent all along.”
“It’s too good, too good to resist.”
“I thought about enduring it… but, you see, it was you who was too careless.”
Qi Wu suddenly lunged forward, easily grabbing the fleeing Xie Xishu.
The moment their skin touched, the scent from the boy surged almost violently into the newly awakened sensory receptors on Qi Wu’s skin.
That overly sweet fragrance, like a tide of honey, suddenly drowned his will, and his vision blurred for a moment.
He tightly gripped Xie Xishu’s trembling, screaming body, breathing heavily, letting the boy flail and hit his head and face.
He seized the boy’s hand, pressing his lips firmly against Xie Xishu’s palm.
When Xie Xishu had fallen earlier, he had accidentally scraped his hand. The tiny abrasions had long stopped bleeding, but now he could clearly feel the thin scab being licked away by something hot and wet.
A sharp, fine pain followed, and bright red blood slowly seeped out of the wound as it was sucked out.
For the first few seconds, Xie Xishu couldn’t react at all.
Qi Wu’s actions were completely beyond imagination. The soft, moist thing attached to his palm felt unusually thick and wet, not like a tongue at all, but more like an organ from some grotesque alien species in a sci-fi story.
What followed was a spreading, indescribable tingling sensation from the wound.
Xie Xishu let out a weak whimper, almost fainting on the spot, until the corner of his eye caught sight of Qi Wu’s arm.
The boy’s arm was still tight and muscular, with clearly defined muscles.
However, on Qi Wu’s arm, many deep red slits had appeared, sinking into the skin. Each slit varied in length, not wounds, and there was no blood.
They just appeared densely across his arm, and then, in time with Qi Wu’s breathing, slowly began to open.
Inside the deep red membranes of these slits were rows upon rows of sharp, white teeth, making them look like lipless mouths.
And from the depths of these small mouths, red fleshy tendrils extended… resembling tongues.
But real tongues don’t have small tumor-like bumps on their surface, nor do they have tiny holes at their tips that constantly secrete a fishy, slimy mucus.
More importantly, they definitely wouldn’t elongate like scaleless, living snakes and slither onto Xie Xishu’s body, shamelessly twisting around him, gradually tightening around his limbs and torso.
“Qi… Qi Wu?”
Xie Xishu tried to scream, but at this point, his throat was so dry that he couldn’t even let out a proper cry.
All he could do was speak to Qi Wu, or rather, to the thing that had once been Qi Wu.
“Shhh… don’t be ssscared… ssso sweet…”
The low, ragged breathing from Qi Wu’s throat came with a few broken words, barely recognizable as human speech.
At this moment, his voice was infinitely close to that of a wild beast’s panting.
Then he lifted his face toward Xie Xishu.
The cold, sinister boy who had once been full of hostility was gone. All Xie Xishu saw was a wriggling mass of… “tongues.”
Qi Wu’s face had completely deformed. His mouth had split open entirely, stretching all the way to his ears, and his lower jaw had unnaturally dropped down, revealing the huge, crimson cavern of his mouth and throat.
Countless “tongues” burst out in clusters from deep within Qi Wu’s throat, blooming like sea anemones in front of Xie Xishu’s eyes.
They completely covered Qi Wu’s upturned eyes.
Now, all Xie Xishu could see was that repulsive mass of soft flesh—those things that resembled tongues. Every one of them was moist and slick, and occasionally, he could see strange spots on their surface, blinking in and out of sight in a rhythmic pattern. And every time Qi Wu made a sound, they would contract and expand in unison, spasming in time before slowly unfurling again.
The spots that covered his body formed constantly shifting patterns on Qi Wu’s “face.”
Those patterns twisted and swirled like vortices, and even a quick glance was enough to make one dizzy, weak, and disoriented.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the tangled mass of tongues edged closer to Xie Xishu.
A few of the bright red “tongues” had already eagerly stretched out, clinging like leeches to the boy’s pale cheeks.
Their tips writhed and slid toward the seam of Xie Xishu’s tightly pressed lips, trying to force their way into his mouth.
They wanted to crawl into his mouth.
—This realization shattered the frozen blankness in Xie Xishu’s mind.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—”
He let out a scream like never before and wildly swung his arm toward Qi Wu—still clutching the small knife he had earlier prepared to use against Cheng An.
“Plop—”
“Plop—”
…
In his extreme terror, Xie Xishu managed to slice through a few of Qi Wu’s “tongues.”
Qi Wu’s movements stiffened, but no blood flowed from the cuts. The severed red flesh fell to the ground along with some sticky mucus, still writhing as if alive, and even began crawling toward Xie Xishu.
“Get away! Get away from me!”
Xie Xishu screamed through his sobs.
Taking advantage of Qi Wu’s brief pause from the pain, Xie Xishu violently tore off the wet, soft tongues wrapped around his body.
Without looking back, he stumbled away in sheer terror, fleeing toward the alley’s exit.
*
In Xie Xishu’s most desperate imaginings, he thought he wouldn’t get far.
He could even picture how the monster behind him would drag him back into the bloody, hopeless abyss.
But to his surprise, Qi Wu didn’t chase after him.
At the last moment of escaping the alley, Xie Xishu turned his head to look behind him, and saw the creature in the shadows trembling as it hunched over, its head’s cluster of tongues continuously wrapping around his arms…
There was a trace of crimson left on Qi Wu’s hand.
That was Xie Xishu’s blood.
He was too terrified and too forceful. When he cut off Qi Wu’s tongue, he also left a long bloodstain in his own palm.
…At this moment, Qi Wu was utterly consumed by the sweet blood right in front of him, completely unable to extricate himself, and his body was convulsing madly in the ecstasy of satisfaction.
