Perhaps because the pheromone disorder had finally been soothed, and perhaps because days of tightly strung nerves had finally relaxed, Lance slept more deeply that night than he had in a long time.
He seemed to fall again into the nightmare that had haunted his childhood, fleeing in panic through an endless, vast darkness.
But he was too small. Too slow. Every shadow outran him and left him behind.
He screamed desperately, hoping someone would save him, but none of the figures turned back. The only sound behind him was the steady approach of a monstrous creature.
He did not dare look back. His legs shook violently, barely able to move.
For some reason, a building appeared ahead. It was old and ruined, but in his panic he rushed blindly through an apartment entrance. The monster followed.
Too late… too late!
In despair, he hugged his arms around himself, squeezed his eyes shut, and curled on the stairs, praying fate might show him mercy.
Maybe the monster would discover him and eat him. Maybe it would mistake him for a corpse and ignore him.
He felt it walk past. He heard it knock on a door.
Inside his heart, he screamed helplessly: Don’t open it. Please, don’t open the door……
But the door opened.
He heard the family screaming as they were torn apart and devoured. Thick blood slowly ran down the stairs and stuck to his sneakers printed with Stitch.
The monster turned and stared at him, considering how to eat him. His mind was already on the verge of collapse.
“Dad… Sister……”
But nobody could save him. Nobody could reach this place. This hell belonged to him alone, and here he would be tormented until death.
He clung tightly to himself like a final piece of floating wood. At last, the monster reached for him, and he saw its horrifying, uncanny face.
Its entire body carried black mist. Its form could not be described. A scarlet ring of curse markings bound It tightly. It seemed restless. Furious.
The world before Lance became a riot of impossible colors, and his mind disintegrated with it. From an unknown place came a hollow resonance— “Pietas…” (Pity.)
“Vos estis nimis infirma…” (You are too weak.)
When he opened his eyes again, he was curled on a small floating boat, black waves rolling around him while storm clouds devoured the final trace of light.
No shore. No human voice. No hope.
Amid the endless sound of waves, he stared blankly and convulsed beyond his control.
He could not tell whether this was dream or reality. His arms were too weak even to lift the oar.
Hunger, exhaustion, and sleepiness destroyed him completely. Crying, he knelt on the boat, the rough wood grinding his knees bloody.
He gathered his final scrap of strength, put one small hand into the sea, and paddled desperately. Salt water splashed into his eyes. He did not know how long it would take to reach shore. He was too young even to think that way.
At last, when every bit of strength was gone, lightning tore down from the sky. Branching violet light illuminated his contracted pupils.
In that dazzling punishment from heaven, he finally saw what lay beneath his feet.
An inescapable mouth of the abyss. Rows upon rows of sharp teeth. A blood-red throat so deep there was no bottom.
He saw flesh caught on sharklike teeth, blood staining the sea, mottled rotting wounds, and the terror of an ancient ruler descending.
His consciousness split. His mind collapsed completely. He knew this confusion had no end, that all struggle was delusion. He would rather surrender his soul.
Then, at that moment, a pair of hands reached from the void and gently covered his eyes.
Someone lifted him into an embrace. He felt human warmth, like soft flesh sheltered inside a shell, and for the first time he was no longer without support.
“Don’t be afraid.” The voice was calm and firm, wiping despairing tears from his face.
He could not see, did not know how this person had entered the darkness, but none of that mattered. He only needed somewhere to lean.
Lance hugged his knees and curled himself into a ball, rolling into the person’s arms and carefully hiding every fingertip.
He was tiny. The other person was enormous. Like a shell, the person enclosed him and kissed his auburn hair.
“I’m here with you.” A hand stroked his sweat-soaked back.
From that day onward, every time the Outer God’s mental pollution came, Lance could sense that person’s presence. The person could not interfere, but remained with him.
In the hell belonging to Lance alone, there was a beam of light from beyond the heavens.
Until one day, Lance was no longer afraid. He stepped out from the corner where he had been cowering and looked directly into the abyss.
Night wind moved. Mist carried a deep, hazy fragrance. Golden stars filled the vast sky. He heard beautiful singing, stitching together each damaged fragment of soul, each tear in his mind.
The person said, “I have to go.”
Lance had never seen him clearly. Perhaps it was only a blurred sensation. Perhaps imagination. Schizophrenia. Delusion.
Still, Lance chased after him without stopping, breathing hard. “Where are you going?”
The person caught his hand and kissed his hair one final time. A tender voice whispered beside his ear: “To meet you. Ten thousand times over.”
The first ray of morning sunlight spilled through the window. Lance finally fell out of the violent tumble between dream and reality and opened his eyes.
For a moment, his gaze was unfocused. It had been too long. He no longer remembered that voice and was not even sure the person had ever truly existed.
Then he heard the faint sound of a phone call.
“I’m fine.”
“It was only Bolas. Come on, your son is S-rank.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I’ll come visit… during summer break… Stop changing the subject, how much does the internship pay?”
“I’m planning to buy an eight-hundred-square-meter villa. The bathroom alone needs to be a hundred.”
……
Perhaps because it was the first voice he heard after waking, Lance felt, in a daze, that Zhan Pingchuan’s voice overlapped with the one from his dream until the two became one.
He did not notice how soft and gentle his own eyes had become.
Zhan Pingchuan stood on the balcony with his back against the sliding door. His left leg was slightly bent, right leg straight, one hand tucked into his pocket, leaving a shifting strip of light between his elbow and lean waist.
Morning sunlight fell across him and cast his long shadow toward the fingertips Lance had extended from beneath the blanket.
Zhan Pingchuan raised his brows in time, shut his eyes, tilted his head, and pulled the phone away from his ear while Guild Master Zhan roared furiously from the other end.
[Eight hundred square meters?! Your father has never lived in eight hundred square meters! Are you a hippopotamus? Why do you need a hundred-square-meter bathroom?!]
“Mm-hm, mm-hm…” Zhan Pingchuan replied perfunctorily.
[And internship pay! I’m embarrassed to even talk about you. You failed to catch Ediv, but you managed to split a federal commander in half!]
“Mm-hm, mm-hm…” Zhan Pingchuan scratched his ear.
[You got no intelligence, lost the target like throwing a meat bun at a dog, and somehow learned the extravagant habits of a spoiled rich brat! Tell me, what exactly have you gained there?]
“Mm-hm, mm-hm…” Zhan Pingchuan began admiring the sunrise over Xingzhou University.
[Don’t you know how fierce competition is in the crystal-ore trading market right now? Especially that bastard Lan Wendao! He stole another major client from me last month!]
“Mm-hm, mm-hm…” Zhan Pingchuan was used to this and had already begun predicting the next curse in his father’s repertoire.
[Ptooey! Nobody surnamed Lan is any good!]
“—Hm?”
Zhan Pingchuan objected. “I disagree.”
Guild Master Zhan: “?”
His father choked, clearly never expecting his son to challenge him on the least important part of the rant.
Zhan Pingchuan spoke with perfect seriousness. “Dad, you have status. How can you casually insult an entire surname? Have you never considered what happens if your future daughter-in-law is surnamed Lan? What if your eldest grandson is surnamed Lan? Illness enters through the mouth, disaster exits from it.”
His father became incandescent with rage.
[Take your wife surnamed Lan and get the hell out together! I don’t have a son like you!]
Zhan Pingchuan teased deliberately, “What about the eldest grandson?”
His father hung up with a crack.
Zhan Pingchuan pressed his lips together to hide a laugh. He pushed against the doorframe with his back and turned, only to look up and discover Lance propped on one elbow, half sitting up in bed and watching him.
Morning light fell over Lance’s delicate features, touching his soft, moist lips. Long auburn hair spilled around him, one lock hanging over his shoulder. There was something gentle and almost divine about him.
Zhan Pingchuan abruptly thought of George Frederic Watts’s painting Choosing, the brown-haired girl holding violets and smelling a camellia—lovely and beautiful.
Lance, however, felt a faint stir of thought because he had heard the final part of Zhan Pingchuan’s conversation clearly.
Naturally, crude jokes about a daughter-in-law surnamed Lan and an eldest grandson surnamed Lan blew past his ears and were automatically discarded.
But years of sensitivity and suspicion immediately caught one keyword: status.
What had Zhan Pingchuan meant when he said his father had status?
Status in the federal government? Or among the major guilds?
Since enrollment, Zhan Pingchuan had consistently acted lazy, carefree, and irreverent. Yet judging from the precision and decisiveness with which he assassinated Bolas, he did not look untrained.
Could it be…… Zhan Pingchuan, like Lance, came from a far from ordinary background?
Then why hide it?
Perhaps Zhan Pingchuan had come to Xingzhou University with another purpose too.
Zhan Pingchuan came in from the balcony, brushed morning mist from his clothes, and casually set his phone on the table. “Awake?”
Lance closed his eyes. When he opened them again, all suspicion was gone, replaced by a trace of a smile. “Mm.”
Zhan Pingchuan’s Adam’s apple rolled. He forced his gaze away from the small split in the corner of Lance’s lip. “Cough. Class should be starting soon. I’ll wait and go with you.”
He had kissed too hard yesterday and lost control.
Really, it wasn’t his fault. He had extensive experience reviewing porn and thought he had seen through every variety of “teacher,” but this was his first time practicing in person.
Clearly, this was the sort of thing most harmed by empty theory. After watching endless identical little O “teachers” throwing back their heads and crying out, he had almost thought himself frigid.
“Okay.” Lance climbed out of bed.
They quickly washed and went to the classroom together. Blue Hub had not yet withdrawn. A grim atmosphere covered the university. News of the two commanders’ deaths had left everyone nervous and distracted from schoolwork.
Now that Zhan Pingchuan knew Ediv was dead, he had no reason to keep pretending to be a troublemaker. He was about to sit beside Lance when Tang Li, in the front row, spotted him with perfect accuracy and sprang to his feet.
Zhan Pingchuan’s heart skipped. Bad feeling.
Too late to dodge. The little O smelling of sweet pear wine rolled toward him like a wine jar.
“Zhan Pingchuan!”
Lance slowly lifted his eyes, gave Tang Li an almost imperceptible once-over, then calmly pulled his notebook from his bag.
Zhan Pingchuan improvised nonsense. “Cough. Classmate, listen. Temperatures in East Africa plunged today, Mount Kilimanjaro—”
“I’m here to give this back!” Tang Li cut him off and suddenly pulled two thousand yuan from his pocket.
Zhan Pingchuan: “?”
Lance uncapped his fountain pen with one hand and began copying the poet Alan Shapiro’s famous poem “Anger” into his notebook.
Tang Li drew a breath as if making a difficult decision. “Even if you don’t like me, I still shouldn’t have taken advantage of you and made you pay two thousand for my shumai.”
Zhan Pingchuan felt as though a violent storm had arrived, a great building tilting toward collapse while fate itself seized him by the throat.
He hurriedly raised a hand. “Wait—”
Tang Li continued guiltily, “Especially when I know your family is so poor. Your dad raised you by collecting scrap and stealing bicycles every day, and your mom died when you were young. What I did was terrible.”
Zhan Pingchuan’s vision went black, as if his lifeline had just been erased.
Lance’s pen veered sideways and ruined an entire line of writing. “……………….”