Guo Jian Chun could no longer control her own mind. Panic suddenly fluttered in her chest, her breathing became unsteady, and she kept feeling as though something was missing from her head.
It was as though many extremely important things existed that she simply could not remember no matter how hard she tried.
Decades of chaotic memories surged uncontrollably through her mind. The glittering, extravagant life she had lived in the Jiang family was suddenly shrouded in a strange, gray haze.
Guo Jian Chun even began losing track of which things were false fantasies and which were her genuine memories.
She saw herself as a fresh-faced first-year university student.
She had no flawlessly delicate skin, no thick glossy black hair, no affluent, dignified air of superiority.
She was only a thin, undernourished girl in thick black-rimmed glasses and twenty-yuan street-stall clothes. Sometimes her roommates from the big city excluded her, so she did not dare return to the dormitory and spent day and night hiding in the library with her head buried in books.
Inferior and sensitive, silent and withdrawn, she could not even outperform the classmates who bullied her academically. Her painfully narrow experience and foundation were like an unbreakable shackle cruelly limiting the upper bounds of what she could understand.
During the summer after her first year, only three days after she returned home, her father, once fond of gambling but still comparatively kind, the same father who had supported her schooling and college entrance exams… suddenly seemed to become another person. He peeled away a carefully decorated human mask and became greedy, savage, and hideous.
Her father knocked her unconscious, tied her up in the bedroom, and prepared to sell her to an older fishmonger who could not find a wife. The sale price was fifty thousand yuan, with another 6,666 yuan in “gift money” to be transferred directly into her father’s bank account afterward.
After all, she was already a university student. Everyone said she had good genes from her mother and that any children she bore would definitely be intelligent too.
So her father’s calculations had always been this precise. Spend a little money sending her to school, wait until she got into university, then sell her for more than she would have been worth with only a high-school education.
He was a gambler, and he had nearly won.
Then Guo Jian Chun deliberately dislocated the bones in her own hand, escaped with everything she had, stole all the cash in the house, and rode a slow green train for a full day and night back to school.
The furious gambler who had failed cut off every bit of financial support he had previously given her.
The money Guo Jian Chun stole was only enough to scrape by in the city. She could not pay the expensive medical-school tuition, could not afford her share of the dormitory’s summer air-conditioning bill, and did not even dare use hot water when she showered.
As the tuition deadline drew closer, she sank into the despair of being forced to drop out. She endured contempt and mockery every day, suffered nightmares and panic attacks every night after nearly being sold, and lived in constant terror.
That was when Jiang Chuan appeared.
During the most vulnerable and helpless period of her life, the Jiang family began expanding its business into the capital and lavishly invested in several buildings.
The young man surrounded by crowds on campus was handsome, elegant, and refined in speech. Smiling, he extended a lifesaving hand toward her.
Guo Jian Chun loved him obsessively. A prince high above everyone else had reached down to rescue Cinderella from suffering. Together they supported one another, overcame society’s prejudice, held a lavish grand wedding, and walked into the perfect ending of a story.
Everything had been so dreamlike and beautiful, as though a fairy tale had descended into reality. No one dared bully Jiang Chuan’s woman anymore. All the old cold mockery became flattery and envy. At last, she was living a good life. At last, she could hold her head high.
Yet now, when Guo Jian Chun looked back on that dreamlike reflection, her body began trembling uncontrollably. She covered her mouth and vomited again and again, disgust turning her hands and feet cold.
What handsome, extraordinary prince of a wealthy family? Jiang Chuan was clearly a twisted, filthy monster, an indescribable horror wrapped in the bright, polished skin of a man, slowly corroding her body and mind.
Guo Jian Chun clutched her head and screamed in despair as she watched her past self go completely insane for that monster.
She abandoned her studies entirely, obsessively hoarded every resource she could get, used every method available to suppress Jiang Chuan’s other female companions, underwent cosmetic procedures, makeup, maintenance, body sculpting, refusing to neglect a single detail… Her once ordinary but determined face became more and more beautiful and delicate, and also more and more cruel and distorted.
How had the clever, flexible brain she once possessed turned into a smooth block of tender tofu?
Rigid and rotten, stiff and hollow, beyond saving.
She became pregnant. She strangled her daughter. She handed the child’s bones to a master in Southeast Asia. She fed the Golden Child with blood.
For what?
She could use the little ghost to help Jiang Chuan kill people, secretly advance Jiang Chuan’s career, and commit filthy acts hidden so deeply that the police could never find evidence.
After all, the Golden Child was her daughter. A little ghost linked to its keeper by blood was the most obedient kind. Its resentment was not deep, and as long as it was kept fed and satisfied, the risk of backlash was actually very small.
Once Jiang Chuan experienced how useful the little ghost was, he would definitely need her. He would never be able to leave her again and might even be willing to marry her.
…As long as she could give birth to sons.
Guo Jian Chun no longer dared remember how many more insane and ugly things she had done afterward for a man and for social advancement.
Life after marrying into the Jiang family perfectly satisfied her cravings and obsession with money and power, yet also left her restless day and night, suppressed and miserable. One wrong step led to another until there was no turning back.
Because… her mother-in-law was a skeleton, her husband was a mass of rotten flesh, and the enormous Jiang household, bright and glamorous on the surface, was in truth like a horrifying cavern crawling with strange things. Day after day and night after night, she lived inside that hellish monster nest, corroded and tormented, altered and assimilated, until she finally became completely lost inside the luxury.
Looking back now, if the outermost layer of expensive skin were peeled away, the ugly form still remaining inside her looked so much like her husband’s, equally filthy, like the skeleton of an evil ghost.
Her own memories made Guo Jian Chun sick. She lay in the bloodstains and vomited up her entire lunch, stomach acid burning her throat until it felt torn apart. Then suddenly, she began laughing like a madwoman.
After being driven into madness and killing so many people, she finally seemed able to see herself clearly and recognize reality.
It turned out her entire life had been lived like a joke. She had never truly escaped that sweltering, desperate summer after her first year of university.
She had spent years in a daze, deceived in body and heart by a man and worked like a mule by the Jiang family… In the end, she could not blame Jiang Chuan for everything. She herself had been too greedy.
She had inherited her father’s viciousness and cruelty. She was an even bolder gambler against fate than he had been, stubbornly possessed by the need to follow one road all the way into darkness, never knowing restraint and never regretting anything.
Only now, as scenes from the past flashed rapidly before her eyes and her mind alternated between confusion and clarity, did Guo Jian Chun begin to feel genuine regret for the first time.
She did not regret going mad and killing people tonight. Those filthy bastards could die if they wanted. What did it have to do with her? They were not her biological sons anyway.
She regretted only that she had been so blind and stupid that she insisted on raising her biological daughter as a little ghost, then completely forgot the girl once the Jiang family no longer needed the ghost to help them work.
What made her regret it even more was that the little Golden Child hidden in the basement had already disappeared without a trace.
It was all her fault. She had never truly kept her daughter in her heart. How could she have treated her own child like this?
Unreasonable. Unbelievable. Completely deranged.
“Mommy was really wrong. Where are you?”
Guo Jian Chun confessed in a hoarse voice. Covered in blood, she lay beneath the empty altar table and wept.
Yet even while repenting… she thought only of her first child and felt overwhelming regret only for her elder daughter.
After all, Guo Jian Chun really was not a good person, and the amount of love she could give had always been limited. A baby that had died inside the womb was simply not important enough to occupy much of her thoughts.
The only reason Guo Jian Chun kept repenting like this was that her mind was dazed and unstable.
In a trance, she picked up the kitchen knife she had used to kill all her “sons.” As if possessed, she pressed the blade to the side of her neck and sawed it back and forth, cutting harder and harder into her flesh, becoming more excited the deeper she went.
When her intense regret reached its peak, Guo Jian Chun, who had always acted in extremes, naturally no longer wanted to cling to life.
Her mind burned out as though she had fallen into madness. At this moment, Guo Jian Chun was desperately determined to kill herself. She no longer cared about anything belonging to the Jiang family and would rather descend to hell immediately to atone to her daughter.
She kept sawing until half her neck was severed and her breathing stopped.
The tense movement of her arm gradually slowed. Her body temperature abruptly began dropping, and a cold, eerie chill spread across the surface of her skin.
Before the body had completely died, another unknown force took control of it and opened its eyes again.
Her pupils were deep, pure black without the slightest trace of white, like two lacquered glass beads turning stiffly as they adapted to their brand-new shell.
At the same time, a mass suicide broke out among the night-shift staff at Xinjiang City Third People’s Hospital.
The doctors and nurses on duty in obstetrics and gynecology lay hand in hand inside an empty operating room, opened every oxygen cylinder in storage, and calmly died from breathing far too much oxygen.
Every corpse wore a faint, relaxed smile.
Apparently, only half an hour later, they had been scheduled to perform a cesarean section, with the attending physician appointed by Director Guo Jian Chun leading the surgery.
When the pregnant woman received the sudden terrible news, she was so shocked and frightened that she somehow ended up giving birth on her own.
It was a round, chubby baby boy, perfectly healthy, weighing 4.3 kilograms.
＊
Only half the steelworks fire had barely been extinguished, and there were still no leads in the tragedy at the police station. No one expected such an absurd act of collective suicide to be repeated among medical staff.
There were huge numbers of inpatients and accompanying family members in obstetrics and gynecology. Some people even managed to take photographs and record video before security arrived.
Photos of the peaceful yet horrifying corpses spread and fermented across the internet like a swarm of locusts, dragging the “rumors” about police suicides into the spotlight as well.
The public-opinion response center was forced into emergency overtime, but it could no longer suppress the public’s frantic, frightened reposting and curiosity.
Xinjiang City had suffered multiple shocking murder cases over several consecutive days, without reason, motive, or warning. It was impossible to anticipate, as though the entire city had been favored by the god of death and thrown completely into chaos.
Ordinary residents watched live television and scrolled through one explosive headline after another on social platforms, unable to keep anxiety from rising inside them.
By comparison, Happiness Community in the old district had become a relatively peaceful Garden of Eden. Most of the retirees living there received news slowly and were not good with smartphones.
Song Zang’s little apartment was equally cozy.
Hot food and desserts were arranged on the table, the curtains pulled tightly shut, and two warm-yellow night-lights switched on. Eerie, intricate horror music flowed from a Bluetooth speaker, filling the room with atmosphere.
The horror movie on the projection screen was about to reach its second climax. The demon-possessed nun stared at the priest, tilted her head, and let out a soft giggle-giggle that sounded as innocent as a little baby.
Xiao Xiao Xiao especially loved horror movies. She unconsciously nibbled on a chocolate cookie, dragged a little stool to the front, and watched with complete concentration and delight.
Ye Xiao Xi sat beside the coffee table and tried to lift her soup bowl with chopsticks in hand, then suddenly realized… all the flesh had long since been dug from her left arm. It hung empty beneath her long sleeve, without enough strength to lift the bowl at all.
She froze and fell briefly into a daze, but Chen Jing Sheng quickly hugged and comforted her. Ye Xiao Xi blushed, opened her mouth, and let him feed her soup one spoonful at a time, unbearably sweet.
Young couples deeply in love became this absorbed in each other. Even if someone suddenly died behind them, they would not necessarily notice.
Yin Chen did not transform back into the little snake, nor did he give Song Zang a chance to go shower immediately.
He pulled Song Zang closer toward the giant python’s head and wrapped him tightly again.
Then he raised his wet, snow-white tail. It silently passed through the entryway and living room, knocked over the abandoned landline telephone, climbed onto the end of the sofa… and without hesitation twisted Lin Yao’s neck, dragged her into the corridor, and tore her apart piece by piece.
Crushing a human body was as simple for him as kneading a piece of soft bread into mush.
This woman had already fallen into brain death. She should have entered true eternal sleep long ago.
Yin Chen had no special motive. He was simply removing a hidden danger in passing.
Song Zang, however, was a little stunned. He watched Yin Chen’s tail, covered in scraps of flesh and grime, slowly retract. Wet scales curled and shifted before his eyes, and the movement released such a strong bloody smell that breathing became increasingly difficult.
To be honest, he could not understand what Yin Chen was doing.
If Officer Lin could not be allowed to remain, why had Yin Chen not killed her earlier? Why wait until now to silently dismember her so thoroughly?
After all, Lin Yao’s misfortune inside Happiness Community clearly had nothing to do with Xu Qing. Yin Chen had never cared whether she lived or died before.
“Is Xu Qing still alive?” Song Zang experimentally stroked the giant python’s cold head and asked softly, “How is it? Did your memories come back?”
His hand was not small, but against the enormous snake head… Song Zang looked almost like a tiny, exquisitely made doll part.
Even with his palm spread as wide as possible, it was somehow smaller than half of Yin Chen’s eye, like a tiny night star nearly invisible beneath the light of a brilliant moon.
The size difference was absurdly exaggerated, and the overwhelming pressure was suffocating.
Yin Chen still maintained the body of an enormous snake, filling the wide corridor. Most of his body could only coil and layer over itself with faint indignity, as though at any moment it might force the reinforced concrete apart and collapse the building.
But Yin Chen simply did not transform back.
At Song Zang’s question, those emotionless crimson slit pupils suddenly shifted. A cold gaze landed on Song Zang’s face, openly scrutinizing him as though calmly and indifferently evaluating something.
Song Zang’s heart twitched violently. Cold swept through his entire body, and the instinctive danger sense that had never failed him buzzed sharply inside his mind.
The next instant, his scales contracted with a piercing rasp, and the blood-covered snake tail suddenly pierced through the right side of Song Zang’s chest.
It tore through the soft, thin loungewear, passed close enough to scrape the violently beating heart, emerged from the other side of his body, paused, then leisurely drew inward by several inches.
The injury was so severe that Song Zang actually felt very little pain. His brain habitually blocked the overwhelming stimulus, leaving only the strange sensation of a foreign object invading his body, unfamiliar and vivid.
He would not die.
The snake tail had not pierced his heart directly, which meant Yin Chen had no intention of killing him. He was only deliberately doing something thrilling… Fine, then.
Song Zang could not help becoming excited. He bit his lip, held his breath, and stroked the giant python’s massive scales with trembling fair fingers, secretly coiling them around his touch several times.
He had no intention of resisting. He obediently waited for Yin Chen’s next move.
The snake tail was extremely flexible. It easily broke Song Zang’s ribs and moved through the heat of his chest cavity, almost maliciously stirring around before finally…
Inexplicably pulling out a fried skewer and presenting it to Song Zang’s mouth.
Song Zang had already been bullied into coughing up several mouthfuls of blood. Tears blurred his vision from the extreme excitement. He stared blankly at the skewer, then instinctively opened his mouth and bit off a small piece while his brain struggled to accelerate.
There seemed to be two strange things.
First, because Xu Qing had been allowed inside, Song Zang had long since placed the basin of fried skewers into system storage as a precaution.
How had Yin Chen gotten one?
Second, Song Zang knew perfectly well he was not crying. Tears had only gathered around his eyes without falling.
Only after swallowing that bite did he suddenly realize something felt wrong.
His cheeks were burning not only because he was overwhelmed, embarrassed, and excited. They were genuinely wet. Most of his face was covered in liquid, and thick drops kept running down the sides.
It looked as though he had cried violently at some unknown point, yet Song Zang himself had never noticed.
A little startled, Song Zang grew more confused. He quickly lifted a hand to touch his chin, accidentally pulling at the bloody through-and-through wound in his chest and hurting badly enough that he could not resist punching Yin Chen several times.
Yin Chen showed no resistance whatsoever. Song Zang could hit him however he pleased.
But that cold, sinister blood-red gaze remained fixed on Song Zang’s mouth. The tail holding the fried skewer moved roughly, seeming impatient as it urged him to eat and almost wanting to shove the skewer, bamboo stick and all, straight into his stomach.
Song Zang had no choice but to obediently take several more bites and swallow. Using the dim light from the living room, he focused on the liquid coating his fingers.
Bright red, mixed with tiny clots that had oxidized almost black.
It was all blood. His own blood.
Blood tears had somehow been flowing from his eyes!
As if waking from a dream, Song Zang suddenly felt how sore his eyes were, throbbing with a sharp pain that would not ease.
He glanced at Yin Chen. The stabbing pain immediately intensified, and realization struck him at once. “My Resistance is too low. Did you accidentally attack me without meaning to?”
The fried skewer at his lips moved again.
Yin Chen silently urged him to keep eating while calmly examining Song Zang’s condition. He did not deny the guess.
Song Zang could only obediently remain wrapped inside the giant python, his chest split open around a gaping wound as he accepted this very ungentle feeding.
But the more he thought, the stranger it seemed. He genuinely could not understand the logic behind Yin Chen’s behavior.
Yin Chen wanted him to replenish his Resistance so the mental damage would ease. The intention was completely kind.
Under normal circumstances, Yin Chen only needed to remind him, and Song Zang could have taken out a fried skewer himself.
Yet this bastard had said nothing, pierced straight through his chest with his tail, and even… even invaded the most private storage space belonging to another player?!
How could Yin Chen bypass the system restrictions and pull things out of someone else’s storage space? It was completely outrageous, overbearing beyond reason.
Would Song Zang ever be able to keep secrets from Yin Chen again? His thoughts were sluggish, and he could not quite identify how he felt about it. He continued eating the skewer slowly, bite by bite, while thinking in silence.
A blue interface floated before him. 【Resistance +100】 appeared again and again, but at that moment the notifications felt completely insignificant compared with Yin Chen’s glowing eyes.
The moment Song Zang stopped chewing, Yin Chen wrapped him even tighter. He could only watch as more blood was squeezed from the mangled wound, soaking his poor torn T-shirt and spilling across the giant python’s cold-colored scales.
Song Zang truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. He felt like someone who had been dragged back to the lair of a monster of another species, unable to speak its language or communicate, left weak and wounded in its care while it handled him however it pleased.
And honestly, this kind of play was rather erotic… Unfortunately, Yin Chen’s attitude and behavioral logic clearly showed that he was not deliberately flirting.
After swallowing Xu Qing, Yin Chen had gradually begun to look unfamiliar, and even more dangerous.
Song Zang finally managed to finish the fried skewer. He blinked his newly clear, moist eyes, feeling refreshed and extraordinarily excited from the huge influx of Resistance.
Ignoring his injuries, he raised both arms around the giant python’s thick body and rubbed against it with a smile. “Baby, do you want to eat something? You can just eat me alone, but the infant spirit attached to the main character in the movie is very important to my mission, okay? Please don’t eat her. I still want to wait and see her cause more trouble.”
Yin Chen gave a slight nod, apparently taking the request seriously. His wet tail squirmed into empty space and pulled out a large pile of shriveled insects that had already been dead for some time.
They came in every color and every variety and looked like the Myriad-Flower Gu refined by Xu Ming. Somehow Yin Chen had stolen an enormous number of them.
Song Zang: …
“Baby, can I fry them before I eat them?”
The cold giant python shook his head, strongly demanding that Song Zang open his mouth immediately.
Song Zang’s smile gradually disappeared. After staring him down for a long moment, he compromised with a deep breath and swallowed more than half the pile expressionlessly.
The distinctive taste of dead insects spread through his throat, almost seeming ready to pour back out between his broken ribs.
And Song Zang’s mind was perfectly clear now, his senses far too sharp. He could feel every detail of the dead insects sliding into his stomach.
These were dead bugs that had not even been fried!
Song Zang gritted his teeth and poked the soft snake flesh hidden beneath the snow-white scales. He gave a sinister laugh. “Yin Chen, try acting cool at me again. You giant pervert, I’m absolutely not letting you off tonight. Even if you drill a hole straight through my temple, I’m still going to fuck you to death in bed.”
Before he finished speaking, the coils around him tightened slightly. The icy tail dipped into his hot blood, returned to the tile floor, and quickly smeared out two English letters.
【OK.】
The curve of Song Zang’s lips froze again.
“…What does that mean? Don’t tell me you were deliberately trying to piss me off.”
Yin Chen slowly lowered his head. The terrifying snake skull, massive as a mountain, carefully pressed against the side of Song Zang’s face and rubbed against him in a clingy yet frightening way.
Song Zang felt his face being squashed out of shape. He struggled to move his head aside and asked darkly, “You remembered, didn’t you?”
Yin Chen tilted his head, followed him, then pressed close and rubbed against him again with complete entitlement and obvious intimacy.
“Yin Chen, you… you’re sick in the head, aren’t you?”
No one answered.
Instead, the crimson forked tongue slipped quietly outward, carrying the eerie coldness peculiar to a cold-blooded animal. It pushed aside the torn scraps covering Song Zang’s upper body and pressed against the still-unhealed bloody hole in his chest.
One lick, then a little pressure. Perfectly stopped bleeding.
Before Song Zang could react, Yin Chen suddenly opened his enormous blood-red mouth and took Song Zang’s entire body inside.
Song Zang’s vision spun. In the next instant, he fell into a “cave” humid with the smell of blood.
Above him hung an enormous, terrifying fang. Its venom-dampened point curved slightly inward, like a giant icicle hanging from a winter roof, capable of gutting him open in an instant and radiating an inexplicable chill.
Song Zang sat silently inside the giant python’s mouth. After several blank seconds, he belatedly realized that his entire body was □□.
Elio’s Notes: The source itself contains □□ here. The missing wording is not reconstructed.
Huh?
When exactly had he been stripped naked?