Thank you @lovestoread for the Kofi.
Chapter 706: Friend
“You want to kill Dan Zhu.”
Inside the narrow elevator, grey-white smoke curled lazily upward. Through the veil of fog, Hugo’s probing gaze studied him.
“How?”
“Killing someone? Come on, how hard can it be?” Chen Cheng slouched against the wall with his usual lack of decorum, fresh blood trickling down the surface behind him, leaving a ghastly crimson trail. He gestured carelessly. “First like this, then like that, and finally — like this —”
“……”
Hugo sat on the floor without a word, his gaze carrying a calm, weighted pressure.
The other’s complete indifference left Chen Cheng feeling vaguely deflated.
“Tch. You’re really no fun.” He clicked his tongue. “Fine.”
Chen Cheng reached into his pocket. Given the severity of his wounds, he fumbled painfully for quite a while before finding what he was looking for.
It was a stack of blood-stained photographs.
He raised his hand and tossed them toward Hugo with a careless flick.
“Here.”
Hugo paused, lowered his head, and picked the photographs up from his knee.
Having spent so long pressed against Chen Cheng’s body, the photos had been stuck together by the blood soaking through his clothes. Hugo had to work at them a little before they finally came apart.
Chen Cheng’s voice drifted to his ears.
“There’s something you probably don’t know,” he said, his tone unhurried and lazy. “Our guild has a particular love for taking photographs.”
Among the top-ranked guilds, Eternal Day placed the greatest emphasis on the personal image of its members.
Not only were the majority of anchors chosen for their looks — even those who competed purely on strength and skill were, without exception, easy on the eyes.
Even Chen Cheng, as insufferable and punchable as he was in every other respect, had absolutely nothing to complain about where his face was concerned.
“As long as a photo gets taken, it gets sent out to all the relevant people as a matter of routine. My room is practically buried under this junk mail. Tch — what a bunch of brainless idiots with too much time on their hands. If you’ve got that kind of energy to waste on something this pointless, you’d be better off spending a few extra minutes mopping the floor in front of the guild hall. At least that would serve some purpose…”
Hugo listened while he flipped through the photographs, head bowed.
There weren’t many — only four in total.
They appeared to have been taken at different points in time. Some of the faces were familiar; others were strangers. Hugo thought for a long while before he could faintly recall the names of a scattered few — and nearly all of them were already dead.
That was the price of having witnessed too much death.
Face after face would layer over one another in memory, gradually fading and disappearing, until the whole process became nothing more than routine.
Though each photograph was clearly separated from the others by a considerable span of time, without exception, every single one contained the figure of Dan Zhu.
The woman’s smile was radiant, devastatingly beautiful.
No matter which corner of the frame she occupied, she seemed to carry a strange and inexplicable magnetism—something impossible to put into words—that drew the eye to her instantly and refused to let go, whether you were inside the image or looking at it from without.
“Ahem.”
Apparently realizing he had wandered off track, Chen Cheng cleared his throat and steered the conversation back.
“Anyway. I found these tucked away in a corner of her room — honestly, if they hadn’t had our guild’s insignia on them, it would’ve been nearly impossible to dig them out from that mountain of letters and gifts she keeps around.”
“So, can you guess what I noticed in these photos?”
Hugo’s gaze dropped to the photographs.
He moved his fingers aside. Beneath the smudged, incomplete bloody fingerprints, half of Dan Zhu’s face was submerged in shadow.
“No matter the interval between them, no matter where they were taken, what position, what angle—” Chen Cheng’s voice remained as nonchalant as ever, “the right side of her face is always just a shade darker than the left.”
When viewed individually, each photograph appeared completely natural, with nothing unusual about it whatsoever.
But when so many photographs—taken across wildly different spans of time, different settings, different ambient lighting, with an entirely different cast of surrounding faces—were laid side by side like this, that shadow began to stand out. Jarring. Unmistakable.
“There’s one exception, but that one’s from so far back I don’t think it’s much of a reference.”
“Besides, back when you and Dan Zhu were ‘catching up’ in the corridor,” Chen Cheng raised an eyebrow, “if I remember correctly, the entire right side of her face had already completely petrified, hadn’t it?”
Even her right eye had vanished entirely, leaving only an empty socket; a single blood-red flower blooming from within.
“So I’d say I’m at least fifty percent confident that’s the — hm… key point? Weak spot? — call it whatever you like,” Chen Cheng rolled his shoulders in a shrug, blood-soaked as he was, somehow carrying a roguish, careless ease about him — as though he didn’t particularly mind if the other fifty percent turned out to be wrong. “Either way, having something to work with is better than nothing, isn’t it…”
“That is the site of her first death.”
Hugo spoke abruptly.
Chen Cheng blinked. “…What?”
“An S-rank instance.” Hugo bit down on the last stub of his cigarette, braced one hand against the wall, and slowly straightened himself upright. He looked at Chen Cheng. Through the lazily rising smoke between them, his eyes were still and calm, without so much as a ripple. “Dan Zhu, one side of her skull pierced clean through, half her body devoured, her livestream forcibly closed, her name struck from the rankings.”
“I wasn’t in that instance. Whatever I know of it is secondhand.”
“After it ended, Ye Lin and the guild he had founded became extraordinarily active. They set a record — twenty-four instances cleared within eight consecutive weeks — a record that stands unbroken to this day. Dark Fire vaulted from eighth place on the points leaderboard straight to second. Nearly half the anchor rankings were washed clean in blood.”
As he spoke, Hugo’s voice remained low and measured, carrying almost no personal emotion of any kind.
Simple. Direct. Dripping with blood.
“After it was all over, Dan Zhu’s livestream reopened.”
With that, the first executioner stepped down from their role.
Through several more rounds of wholesale change, a second sacrifice emerged.
“…………”
Chen Cheng listened in silence, a faint shift moving through his eyes.
“So,” said Hugo, removing the cigarette that had burned down to nothing and pressing the ember out against his palm, “I think you may have found it after all.” A pause. “…A way to kill, one more time, someone who has already died.”
At that precise moment, with a soft ding, the elevator arrived at its floor.
“……”
Chen Cheng straightened up, an expression of mild surprise crossing his face.
Earlier, when things had been so desperate, he’d only been focused on hammering the close-door button. And once the elevator had started moving, his attention had been pulled in entirely different directions — so he hadn’t noticed whether he’d actually pressed a floor button at all, let alone which one.
The elevator doors slid slowly open on both sides.
Before he even had time to make out what lay beyond the doors, his sense of smell was engaged first.
A thick, cloying, almost suffocating fragrance of rotting flowers came flooding in.
Chen Cheng’s expression shifted.
He raised his head and looked up.
On the small, flickering display screen overhead, a set of ominous, blood-red numbers glowed.
“-7”.
The auction hall was unrecognizable.
Even for those long accustomed to Orange Candy’s recklessly overpowered fighting style, her every move still had the livestream audiences’ hearts lurching into their throats — this was a fighting method with no regard for defense whatsoever, nothing but pure, absolute offense.
She seemed to have no concept of the word retreat.
Yet every single time, at the very instant she was a hair’s breadth from being crushed or torn apart, she seemed to slip away at the very last possible moment.
It was agonizing to watch. No one dared look away for even a fraction of a second.
BOOM!!
Vines as thick as tree trunks came crashing down, and the ground split open in an instant.
Then, Orange Candy sprang forward like a leopard unleashed!
Light. Swift. Silent.
The corners of her mouth split wide in a grin, a crazed and bloodthirsty gleam dancing in the depths of her eyes. Moving with a momentum that defied tracking, she charged forward along the surface of the vines — and within the span of a blink, she was already upon her target —
Then everything changed.
The madness drained from her face like a tide receding. What replaced it was a hollow, bewildered blankness.
Every viewer watching their screens felt a collective lurch of dread.
No.
The side effects of age regression had struck at the worst possible moment.
The little girl’s footstep faltered. The heavy weight of the blade in her hand pulled her sideways, and she tumbled from the air — falling straight down.
She was as light as a falling leaf.
But at the very instant she was about to hit the ground, a figure suddenly flashed through from below.
Wen Ya looked up, eyes locked onto that small, rapidly-enlarging figure hurtling down from above. She stretched both arms out wide —
She caught her!!
Wen Ya clenched her teeth, cradling the back of Orange Candy’s head with one hand, letting her own body take the full impact against the ground as they rolled several meters across the floor.
The moment they stopped, before she’d even had a chance to catch her breath, she hurriedly looked down at the girl she was holding:
“Are you al—”
The rest of the words never made it out of her mouth.
A sharp, piercing shriek tore through the air. Frigid wind carrying with it a lethal, malevolent force came lancing straight toward her unprotected spine —
What happened next unfolded too fast for eyes to follow.
By the time Wen Ya registered what had occurred, she was already several meters away. The spot where she’d been lying only a second before had been skewered through by a razor-sharp vine, leaving nothing but a shattered field of broken stone. Had they not moved in time, both of them would have been run straight through.
“……” Only then did Wen Ya realize she had been holding her breath the entire time.
She exhaled in sharp, ragged gasps and turned her head to look at Orange Candy.
Orange Candy had planted her blade in the ground and used it to haul herself back upright. Blood seeped from her temple. Her gaze was cold and sharp. The split-second daze she’d had in midair looked as though it had never happened.
Whether it was an illusion or not, she seemed slightly shorter than before.
“Approximately…” the woman mused, “three-quarters of a second?”
She lifted her gaze. Looking toward Orange Candy a short distance away, the corners of her lips curved upward — slowly unfurling into a dangerous smile. Her lips parted and closed, enunciating each syllable with deliberate clarity, speaking words that carried an ill omen:
“Again.”
At that, Wen Ya seemed to recall something. She jolted and snapped her head up to look at Dan Zhu.
— “What a terrifying talent, this time reversal of yours. But how many more times can you do it?”
— “Five? Three? Two?”
— “No matter. We’ll find out soon enough.”
That was it.
Dan Zhu was in no hurry to kill them.
She was toying with her prey like a cat playing with something half-dead, watching with unhurried composure and genuine fascination as they twisted and struggled desperately to survive within her grasp, driven by a sincere and terrible curiosity…
Exactly how many more times would this formidable, raving opponent have to use her talent before she forgot everything — before she became a lost and terrified child with no knowledge of anything at all?
“…………” Wen Ya stared at that face, and a wave of profound revulsion crawled up her spine — as though an icy hand had clenched around her organs, binding them into a frozen knot.
What do they do?
What do they do?
If things continued dragging on without limit, the consequences would be unthinkable. But Su Cheng’s prophecy had pointed in the exact opposite direction—
The thought made her turn her head instinctively, looking toward where he stood, as though trying to confirm something once more.
But to her surprise, Su Cheng wasn’t looking at her.
The tarot reader was standing still, staring fixedly at something behind them — lost in thought.
Wen Ya froze and couldn’t help but follow the direction of his gaze toward the distance —
At almost the exact same moment, Dan Zhu’s footsteps halted. Her gaze snapped up, pinpointing the entrance of the auction hall with uncanny precision.
Standing there was a figure — unmistakable.
The man who had been left behind on the upper deck of the cruise ship, who by all accounts should have been as good as dead — was standing there.
One hand in his pocket, a freshly lit cigarette held between his fingers. Blood mist continued to seep ceaselessly from his body, curling and blending into the grey-white smoke around him. Even standing motionless, doing nothing at all, his presence commanded the space with an overwhelming, irresistible gravity — like a force of nature pulling all eyes toward him, whether they wanted to look or not.
“…Hugo,” said Dan Zhu, eyes narrowing. An expression that was not quite a smile played across her face.
She propped one arm up, a finger tipped with blood-red lacquer resting lightly against her cheek. “You’re actually still alive… I really thought you’d gone back to where you belong, to be with the people you should have been with all along.”
“That was the plan.”
Hugo brought the cigarette to his lips. Smoke rose. His voice was as calm as his expression. “It just got delayed.”
Dan Zhu’s eyes narrowed.
The likelihood of Hugo escaping that floor on his own was slim. Unless…
Her gaze shifted, falling on the second figure who had stepped into view half a pace behind Hugo — only just now entering the sightlines of everyone present:
“So it seems the credit belongs to you?”
Chen Cheng slung his pitch-black Tang blade over his shoulder and pulled a hollow smile. “Oh, I wouldn’t dare take the credit — after all, it’s mainly thanks to your excellent mentorship, President.”
The moment the two of them appeared, the viewership across all related anchors spiked by an entire magnitude in an instant.
It was as though a match had been struck and the enthusiasm of every onlooker ignited simultaneously.
[OHHHHHH!!]
[Holy crap, now THIS is getting interesting!!!!!]
[YESSS, legendary clash, let’s GO!]
“……”
Dan Zhu’s gaze lingered on Chen Cheng for a long moment. Her tone curved upward at the end — carrying a warmth so eerie it raised the hairs on the neck. “Letting you live last time on this ship was my mistake. I won’t be making the same one twice.”
Almost simultaneously, Su Cheng’s urgent voice rang out from nearby:
“Right!”
Hugo reacted instantly. A wall of smoke condensed in a heartbeat.
The enormous, twisting root-vines slammed into it with a thunderous crash.
The auction hall, already demolished to its limits, let out a protesting groan from its walls. Chunks of rubble, large and small, rained down from above with deafening impacts, sending clouds of dust billowing in every direction. Within the depths of the haze, shadows surged and receded — like some titanic, lurking creature half-hidden in the grey fog of the open sea.
One wrong move, and they’d be torn to shreds.
“— Over here!!” Chen Cheng whipped his head around and bellowed into the depths of the dust cloud. “There’s a decent-sized roof over here!!”
In a certain sense, that wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
Faced with lethal threats that could come from any direction, at any moment, Hugo’s smoke wall was the only reliable barrier they currently had against disaster.
Through the dense, near-impenetrable fog where visibility had dropped to almost nothing, two silhouettes came charging through — one slightly ahead of the other.
It was Su Cheng and No. 8.
“……” Chen Cheng’s gaze landed on the sorry state of the tarot reader — and even setting aside how much he disliked this competitor who had contested the last remaining spot in the top ten with him, only to surrender the advantage at the final moment — given that there were so few of them left standing, even he could only offer a pointed, loaded “tsk” before turning his head away and pointedly ignoring him.
BOOM!
Another impact.
The crushing blow struck the ground, fracturing it with a web of cracks.
The next second, from deep within the billowing smoke, a small figure shot through like a bullet.
“You are all so slow!!!!!”
The voice arrived before the person did, punching clean through the haze.
The tone was indignant — but the voice itself was bright, practically vibrating with excitement.
“Any later and you would’ve missed your chance to get the kill!!!!!”
Orange Candy came bounding in, fizzing with energy, and — out of pure habit — kicked Hugo in the shin.
Given how much shorter she’d become, she misjudged the distance. The kick grazed off the side of his trouser leg and barely connected — which was honestly fortunate, because given how thoroughly wrecked Hugo was right now, teetering on the edge of his limits, a solid hit might have genuinely knocked him off his feet.
Wen Ya arrived from behind.
“……Please be careful!!”
She watched Orange Candy’s retreating back, her expression a picture of barely-contained anxiety.
And finally —
After who knew how long apart—
Behind the smoke wall, everyone was together again.
The train had jumped its tracks, screaming forward with an unstoppable, all-consuming ferocity.
Blood-red light seeped silently through the cracks, flowing into the depths of the compartment.
It fell across the young man’s face — pale and bloodless — and was reflected in his wide, rigid, unblinking pupils: two small points of trembling red.
He did not move.
Like a specimen pinned to a display board, utterly unable to.
Wen Jianyan opened his mouth and heard himself speak.
“……Zhang Yunsheng.”
His voice was barely above a whisper, yet it struck the ear like a roll of muffled thunder.
“I didn’t expect you to still remember me.”
Not far away, the figure out of a nightmare smiled pleasantly.
“After all,” he raised one hand, holding it at a remarkably low height, “the last time we met, you were only about this tall.”
Small in stature. Thin as a rail.
Even in the dog cage, he had taken up almost no space at all.
Wen Jianyan stood frozen in place, having almost forgotten how to breathe.
The expression on the figure’s face was unchanged. All of it — completely unchanged.
His tone. His gestures. His expression.
Not a single line on his face had shifted. Even the angle of the curve at the corner of his mouth was exactly the same. It was as if the last two decades had been collapsed into a single instant — as if nothing had changed, nothing was different, as if he had never disappeared and Wen Jianyan had never escaped.
It felt as though invisible water was rising from the ground, flooding upward with terrifying speed until it submerged his mouth and nose, and something unseen in the cold, black depths below was dragging him down — down — down.
“Didn’t expect you’d grow so tall in the end. Remarkable, really.”
In that instant, everything that had occurred within those walls surged back upon him all at once — every scene piercingly vivid, achingly real.
Seven years compressed into a single second, flashing past in front of his eyes.
Beyond the train windows, the ruins stood pitch-black and jagged, like skeletal frames of bone, watching everything below with scorched, hollow eye sockets. The entire world was submerged in a blood-red light. Small bodies that would never grow any taller lay heaped upon the ground. Death had set over them like hardened wax, casting face after face in a pale, lifeless mold — their expressions uniformly blank, as though asking: Why?
“Wait, President, what is he even talking about—”
Even under circumstances like these, Blond could sense how profoundly wrong the atmosphere was. He swallowed with difficulty and turned his head.
But the next second, his voice cut out entirely.
As though something had physically shoved the words back down his throat.
Blond’s eyes went wide. He stared, dumbfounded, at Wen Jianyan standing beside him, unable to get a single word out.
The young man’s profile was bathed in a wash of ominous red light. His face held no excess expression — but his shoulders and frame were locked in a state of extreme tension, coiled as though on the verge of snapping under unbearable strain, and the hand hanging at his side was, at this very moment, faintly, uncontrollably…
Trembling.
Not far away, the figure began walking toward them.
“I honestly thought I’d never see you again,” said Zhang Yunsheng, shaking his head. His stride was steady, his tone light. The distance between them steadily shrank. “After all — you left quite a spectacular mess behind the last time. Caused us considerable trouble.”
Not only had he set fire to the orphanage and burned it to the ground, he had left irreparable damage to his vessel, forcing a prolonged period of maintenance in the aftermath — a very long time spent enduring the state of a burned body.
“But in the end, everything still fell into place, didn’t it?”
Wen Jianyan had entered the nightmare.
After that very first, foundational instance, he had finally arrived at Fukang Hospital — the place he had been slated to be taken since childhood, the destination that had only been derailed by that accidental fire — and had become, exactly as planned, The Mother of the World.
A candidate for godhood.
The figure’s gaze drifted, landing on Blond beside him. “Is this a new friend of yours?”
The instant that gaze locked onto him, Blond felt every single hair on his body stand on end.
He had never experienced anything like this before — not even the time he’d been trapped in the private compartment by the Gentleman, with his eyes about to be gouged out. The pressure the Gentleman had exerted didn’t even amount to one hundredth of what he felt now. He felt as though he were falling through ice — his entire body, beyond his control, began to shake.
Within the altered landscape of his supernatural sight, the figure before him was no longer the Gentleman’s form. What stood there instead was a black, yawning void — a hole bored into reality, like an indelible stain, bottomless and unfathomable. Even the briefest direct gaze into it made the skin crawl with visceral dread.
“Won’t you introduce us?”
The next second, Wen Jianyan moved.
Unlike the frozen stillness of a moment before, this time his movements were fast — and violent.
RRRUMBLE!!
The scorched, crumbling ruins of the orphanage rushed up at them. The train lurched across uneven ground, the compartments lurching and screaming — as if trying to fling off everything bolted to its frame: sheet metal, glass, seats, wheels — everything.
The red light died. Darkness swept in.
Under the crashing dark, Blond felt as though he’d been seized by the claws of a predator. Shaking, sweat-slicked fingers dug hard into his arm, yanking him violently backward — a sharp, biting pain — and a pale, intense face filled his vision.
The young man stared at him. His eyes were like two ghost-fires — flickering, unsteady.
His voice came out in a ragged, desperate rasp:
“Run!! NOW!!!!!”
The compartment shuddered. Light and shadow streaked past.
The Wen Jianyan before him felt like a stranger. Blond was frightened. On pure reflex, he took a step back.
But the next second, he found that his body would not move any further.
Broken masonry hammered against the train windows, filling the air with shrill, discordant noise.
“So much has changed,” said the voice from not far away, as the face that had been given human skin — and with it, expression — wore its mimicry of a smile, the darkness blooming slowly, darkening steadily, “and yet this one thing remains exactly the same as before.”
“You always did love making friends.”
No.
In Blond’s pupils, the young man’s panicked face was reflected back.
How—
He couldn’t understand what was happening.
Countless thin filaments descended from above, pinning his body in a grotesque, contorted position. They were the Gentleman’s talent — but not as he remembered it. The way they manifested was different.
They bore the same pitch-black color as their master, like streams of slow-oozing viscous liquid.
In the cold, flickering, erratic light, they writhed like nerve cells fusing together, winding tightly around his limbs, his neck, his skull — capable, it seemed, of tearing him apart with almost no effort at all.
“Come now. Comfort him.”
Through the roaring tide of blood rushing through his ears, the voice came from somewhere not far away — pleasant. Measured. Serene.
“Tell him everything is going to be alright.”
Blond heard the bones in his neck grinding together.
Crack — crack crack —
Blood pounded in his ears, eye pressure spiking to a near-unbearable level in an instant.
That voice was like something from a demon — arriving as though from an immense, impossible distance, carrying its unvarying smile, making the blood run cold.
Blood-red light fell through the fractures. The train roared. Inside the compartment, everything was cast in alternating light and shadow — brightness, darkness, brightness, darkness.
The shattered red light slid across Wen Jianyan’s face.
Like thick, viscous blood splashed onto the same spot long, long ago.
“Yes, just like when you were small —”
Blond’s eyes were stretched wide. He watched, helplessly, as the black filaments descended from above, threading straight for his eyes, his mouth, his throat — silent. Ice-cold. Lethal.
“Lie.”
“Tell your friend: ‘everything will be fine.'”
No…
The young man stumbled forward a step, one hand reaching out, as if to stop it —
NO!!!
But the descending threads ignored his wishes.
In a manner that was almost joyful, they tightened — under his helpless, stricken gaze — with vicious, leisurely precision.
One inch further, and they could end the captive’s life with ease.
Yet then, for no apparent reason —
They slipped.
As if struck by some inexplicable loss of accuracy, they veered off course — and ultimately only grazed lightly, harmlessly, across Blond’s skin.
“……?”
The expected cold darkness never came. Blond’s eyelids twitched. He opened his eyes — with an almost disbelieving expression.
The blood-red-tinted field of vision before him showed a sky of wild, impossible colors.
Everything around him seemed to be spinning, shuddering, as though he’d been plunged into a nightmare.
A single second stretched out, becoming infinite.
What… happened?…
In the haze of confusion, a shout exploded from behind him, shattering the silence:
“GET BACK!!”
The red light vanished. Darkness fell all at once.
Everything was spinning. From behind, shadow surged forward with the force of a monstrous wave — roaring, towering, consuming all in its path. Red light, phantom figures, structures, trains — all of it seemed to be violently shattered, swallowed, and erased, plunging into a state of senseless, screaming chaos.
Wen Jianyan was swept into the vortex.
He stumbled, falling into the turning dark, enveloped by the cold and the black.
“………………”
The young man dazed for two seconds, then slowly raised his head, staring into the deep of the darkness with a blank, delayed expression.
Two points of golden fire drew near.
He felt an arm — solid, immovable — against his hand. A cold chest. Everything was so familiar.
Wen Jianyan parted his lips and made a sound. “……Wu Zhu?”
The other’s voice pierced through the dark — low, restrained, resonant as a struck bell.
“Yes.”
“It’s me.”
Forehead pressed to forehead. Nose to nose.
In another section of the space now swallowed by darkness, Blond’s body swayed sideways, stumbling in the vortex. He lowered his head and stared at his own hands, and it took a full two seconds before the realization finally reached him — he didn’t know when exactly, but at some point, the threads had disappeared, and he was free again.
Instinctively, he raised his head, scanning frantically around for the cause.
Tzzt —
This time, what splattered across his face was real blood.
Warm. Thick.
Not far away, ink-dark claws cut through the air with a razor shriek, tearing open the body that had been blocking the path. Blood sprayed high — like a curtain being ripped apart.
The red light was cut into segments by the train windows. Below it, a streak of gleaming silver described a silent arc through the air — like the edge of a bird’s wing brushing past in flight — and with it came another voice, weary and long-suffering:
“Hey, could you watch yourself and not get blood on my suit — this is haute couture, you know.”
And behind them, a pale, snow-white shadow followed without a sound.
The young man moved without noise. Were you not looking for him, you would barely notice he was there at all — like a white silhouette accustomed to being overlooked and forgotten, who only occasionally, when he lifted his eyes, let the dark, abyssal depths within them crack open for a fleeting moment.
Cold lips brushed against an ear.
“…Not just me.”
The fluid darkness closed in from all sides, pressing close. A pair of arms wound around him, holding him tightly. And in his ear, he heard the steady, even heartbeat within the chest behind him.
Wen Jianyan was breathing in sharp, shallow gasps. He clung to those arms as though his life depended on it — the way a drowning person clutches driftwood — and let his head break the surface of the water, clean cold air flooding into his lungs, cutting through him like a blade.
In that moment, he was finally dragged free from the dripping depths of the nightmare.
He was awake.
“Ji Guan——” Blond’s eyes blazed with sudden, shining relief. “And Figaro… Bai Xue……!”
The one who had snatched him from the jaws of death just now — that had unmistakably been Bai Xue.
Hearing his name called, the young man hesitated, stopped walking, struggled with himself for a few seconds, and finally — with a faint, slightly awkward motion — gave a small, single nod.
“Apologies,” said Figaro, halting and drawing his curved blade elegantly back behind him, inclining his head in a slight bow. “Reversing course took some time — and I must say, that one member of your group has a truly remarkable nose — without him, there’d have been no way of knowing you’d left the control room.”
After the train car was torn away, they had not acted immediately, instead exchanging a few quick words on strategy — because what had just happened was unusual, and it was clear the situation had changed. But before they’d reached any conclusion, Wu Zhu had suddenly turned his head. Something in the air had caught his attention. Without so much as a split second of hesitation, he had turned on his heel and gone — moving at the fastest pace possible back the way they’d come.
The rest of them had no choice but to follow.
When Figaro had caught up to his side and pressed him for an explanation, the other had turned those cold eyes on him and said — “He’s bleeding.”
“Looks like,” said Figaro, “we got here just in time.”
Wu Zhu circled the human young man in his arms, eyes drifting downward, and slowly, carefully licked the blood from the corner of his temple.
Like a large animal curling its tail around one slightly smaller than itself, tending the fur where it had been wounded.
Careful. Gentle. With deliberate delicacy.
It was almost impossible to believe that these same hands had carried out such merciless slaughter just moments before — and that no more than a few short minutes separated the two.
Meanwhile, the figure who had earlier been only torn apart and not yet ground to nothing began, piece by piece, to reconstitute itself.
Zhang Yunsheng stood at a distance, watching. The expression on his face was unreadable.
“Oh, right —”
Ji Guan dropped the ink-black, blood-soaked spirit-claws. He narrowed his eyes, looking toward the entity not far away that was slowly reassembling its form beneath the blood-tinged light:
“About the question you just asked…”
“Yes. We’re his new friends.”
He curved his mouth into a cold, sharp smile and lifted his chin:
“— So what?”
