Tonight, Song Zang had practically no say in anything.
Because Yin Chen simply refused to speak to him.
Without any way to communicate verbally, every one of Song Zang’s protests was useless. He could not even run away.
Even if Song Zang truly wanted to flee, there were cameras in the elevator, and the players were still watching movies… Damn it, he seemed to have nowhere left to escape to anyway.
He could hardly pry open the python’s jaws with his bare hands, dash through the living room, and let everyone catch sight of a blood-covered, naked blur racing past.
Song Zang obediently gave in. Face flushed, he lay inside the giant python’s mouth and let that wet, scorching forked tongue wrap around him and lick him all over.
He was plenty confident in his own body, but Song Zang still did not dare think too deeply about exactly what Yin Chen was feeling right now.
A snake’s olfactory organs were located at the tip of its tongue, after all, making the tongue one of the most sensitive sensory organs in its entire body. Information and scents collected by the forked tongue would be transmitted through the oral nerves to the brain almost immediately, with incredible efficiency.
Combined with those bits of biology, it was more than enough to show exactly how improper Yin Chen’s intentions were, and just how shamelessly wicked his blatant behavior had become.
Bad thing!
The players were heatedly debating the movie protagonist’s logic, while Song Zang, wrapped up inside the venomous python’s mouth, openly avoided every pair of eyes and was silently carried all the way back to the bedroom.
He landed on the bed soaked from head to toe. Song Zang reacted quickly, yanking a blanket over himself and hurriedly checking whether the bedroom ceiling was still stable… only to meet the gaze of Yin Chen, who was rapidly shrinking.
Only then did Song Zang belatedly realize that Yin Chen had clearly been capable of changing his size whenever he wanted.
Even in the form of a colossal python, he could shrink his whole body proportionally!
So when they had been moving through the corridor and stairwell, Yin Chen had insisted on maintaining that enormous, sky-blocking beast form purely because he wanted to look cool.
Purely to look cool.
Song Zang fell speechlessly silent for a moment, stroking the cold, slick scales draped across his legs as he sank into thought.
It was quite the spectacle.
Although Yin Chen had shrunk considerably, the snow-white venomous python was still astonishingly huge, and his coiled posture looked slightly cramped.
He curled his beautiful, taut, deathly pale snake body around himself, layer after layer winding together until he nearly filled the entire double bed that should have been spacious.
At a glance, Song Zang looked as though he had sunk into a strange and horrifying sea of snake flesh, his entire body smeared with bloody venom, pitiful and helpless.
Paired with the bloody through-and-through wound in his pale skin, he looked more like the protagonist of a horror movie than anyone else.
“You only know how to bully me. I haven’t even showered yet.” Song Zang clutched the soft blanket aggrievedly, his dark lashes trembling weakly. “I’m seriously injured right now, and you don’t even feel sorry for me anymore… What if I can’t satisfy you tonight?”
Song Zang said a great deal. Yin Chen answered very little.
His cold tail dipped into sticky blood, pressed against the snow-white ceiling, and slowly wrote several large characters, his attitude somehow both aloof and enthusiastic.
【Healed.】
【All night.】
Song Zang froze, then lowered his head to inspect the hideous wound in his chest.
The terrifying hole that had originally been wide enough to fit an arm through had somehow healed by more than half without him noticing. It had faded until it was barely visible, leaving only a dull ache, and the bleeding had stopped completely.
His stark white ribs had flawlessly reset and rebuilt themselves, while the flesh and tissue that had been violently torn apart were also rapidly knitting back together.
All Yin Chen had done was swallow him into that bloody maw and shamelessly lick him all over a few times, yet Song Zang’s horrific, fatal injuries had almost vanished without a trace.
So much for only knowing how to kill and not how to save lives. Wasn’t this pretty effective? It worked even better than growth factors.
But to be fair, if Yin Chen ever truly used this method to treat someone else… Song Zang would probably chop the two of them into meat paste together, pick the battered little snake out of the mush, and simmer him into snake soup.
Some crazy ideas should not be developed too far. That was how people became lunatics. Better to stop right there.
Staring into the white python’s stern crimson slit pupils, Song Zang quietly curled his lips and realized that Yin Chen’s image in his mind had shifted ever so slightly tonight.
It was as though Yin Chen had been veiled in a layer of hazy mystery and danger. The more familiar Song Zang became with him, the more endless unknowns seemed to appear.
That was not a bad thing. Song Zang only grew more excited.
Pretending to be shy, he lowered his head and rubbed the smooth white scales between his fingers, stroking them gently as he asked in a soft voice, “Fine… You really want to do it all night?”
Yin Chen nodded. His attitude looked cold, but the determination beneath it was absolute and unquestionable.
Now that he had finally recovered the memories he had been missing, old events and new ones surged together before his eyes when he looked at Song Zang again… This unprecedented feeling was much like reuniting after a long separation.
A brief separation made reunion sweeter than a honeymoon. Naturally, Yin Chen had a great many crazed longings to make up for.
Scorching desire lay suppressed beneath his ice-cold scales, circulating through chilled veins like thick magma restlessly churning on the verge of eruption.
It had to be all night. Not a minute less. Even if Song Zang were a corpse, he would still do it.
Song Zang “reluctantly” gave in.
His mood was rarely as… turbulent as it was tonight.
Especially once the night deepened and the moon climbed above the branches. The terrifying venomous python occupying the bedroom blocked every exit so completely that Song Zang had no attention left to spare for anything else.
Originally, he had still been worried about the nun protagonist in the horror movie, who might have been possessed by an infant spirit. But whether she acted strangely afterward was something Song Zang had no way to interfere with.
Because he was in bed.
Later, he heard Chen Jing Sheng and the others shouting in alarm, along with the confused sounds of a hurried fight rising and falling just outside, close enough to touch. Song Zang still had no way to interfere.
Because he was in bed.
The shrill wails of ghosts and dead spirits, the threatening roars of unknown beasts, the chaotic crashes of pots, bowls, and furniture… Song Zang could only let all of it go in one ear and out the other.
Because of some unknown restriction, whenever Yin Chen appeared before Song Zang in a physical form that could actually be touched, he truly could not speak. At the very least, he could not produce ordinary human language.
But precisely because of that, his fixation on “catching up” with Song Zang became even stronger.
He had no intention whatsoever of letting Song Zang leave. He locked the bedroom door directly with his tail and, while he was at it, crudely snapped the handle off too.
Song Zang knew perfectly well that he ought to be focusing on the main mission, but the truth was that he did not want to leave either.
He loved Yin Chen’s cold snake tail wrapped tightly around him, the vast body that was chilled and taut yet trembling faintly, the deadly fangs that sometimes hovered over his head and sometimes brushed gently against the side of his neck, and… the intensely nonhuman sensation from a certain unspeakable part of him, together with an unprecedented illusion of hovering on the brink of death.
Song Zang had not broken his word, and he had no intention of doing so. He raised a hand crusted with dried blood, seized the venomous snake just below the head, and abruptly tightened his grip.
It was only more interesting when both of them struggled to breathe, as though they were dying at the same time.
He had endured far too many twisted, evil experiences inside the Infinite Game, too many utterly deranged encounters, yet spending a night with Yin Chen in giant-python form was something Song Zang had never before dared imagine.
Song Zang genuinely got carried away, nearly tearing open his almost-healed wound all over again.
Pain had always been fuel. Death had always been an aphrodisiac.
Neither of them slept all night.
A few bloodstained snake scales lay hidden in the wrinkled, ruined bedsheets. Some carried Song Zang’s blood, some Yin Chen’s, and the two had mixed together until no one could tell whose was whose.
Only when the first light of dawn appeared and the world gradually settled beneath the crisp calls of morning birds did everything finally quiet down.
Song Zang pushed his sweaty black hair back from his forehead and sat up to steady his heavy breathing, while Yin Chen vanished right in front of his eyes.
Before Song Zang could look for him, Yin Chen’s fairly calm, hoarse voice soon drifted eerily from the speaker of his phone, urging, “Go out and eat something. Then come back, shower, and sleep.”
Song Zang froze, then could not help muttering in an aggrieved voice, “Why do you sound… completely unaffected? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re going to make me feel like a failure.”
He asked extremely directly. The phone, however, suddenly went silent.
Song Zang was not in any hurry. Wrapped in the blanket, he shuffled toward the bedside cabinet, bent down, pulled open the drawer beneath the bed, and searched for something suitable to cover himself with.
As his movements grew wider, the thin blanket slid down his arm, abruptly exposing Song Zang’s beautiful, bare, pale back to the cool autumn morning air.
Crisscrossing bruises and red marks covered nearly every part of his body, densely climbing along the side of his neck and disappearing all the way down toward his tailbone.
Against his delicate snow-white skin, they looked even more glaring and vicious.
Powerful pythons were born experts at constricting prey. When emotions ran high, they were even more inclined to leave terrifying strangulation marks that looked like the scene of a murder.
Anyone who did not know better might think Song Zang had been brutally beaten… though in truth, it had been more like the two of them fighting each other in bed.
Song Zang found a soft, long cashmere coat and simply draped it around himself with nothing underneath, then leaned lazily against the headboard.
“Come out. Let me hold you again.” Seeing no movement from Yin Chen, Song Zang continued coaxing softly.
He desperately wanted to hold that ice-cold giant snake until all those slick scales were stained with his body heat alone. There was an especially satisfying sense of accomplishment in it.
Sometimes, it even felt better than sex.
“I’m not coming out. Right now, I want to stay away from you.”
“Hm?”
Song Zang curled his lips and gave a meaningful little laugh, choosing not to expose anything further.
He continued cuddling his phone as he wheedled, “Yin Chen, explain yourself first. Why did you bully me last night?”
Yin Chen paused, then asked with genuine confusion, “How did I bully you?”
Song Zang pointed the phone camera directly at himself and held it extremely close. “Look at the wound on my chest. It still isn’t completely healed. What if it leaves a scar as big as a bowl? What if I’m not pretty anymore? What if you start disliking me?”
Yin Chen: …
Static rose and fell from the speaker as Yin Chen replied with some helplessness, “The energy inside Xu Qing erupted all at once. I was limited by the circumstances and could only swallow part of it. Some of what escaped was absorbed by you.
“If I hadn’t pierced straight through you and immediately cut off the circulation in your body, it would have fused with you very quickly and become difficult to separate. What was I supposed to do if you suddenly developed a second personality a few days later?”
“That’s terrifying. I can absorb it too?” Song Zang was startled. At the time, he truly had not noticed a thing. All his attention had been on Yin Chen’s spectacular new form.
“Of course. I wasn’t bored enough to put a hole through your chest for no reason.”
Song Zang narrowed his eyes. “Then why did you reach into my storage space? How does that work? You scared me half to death.”
“It’s faster for me to take things directly than to communicate with you. You wouldn’t understand the principle. It has to do with the mechanism of energy dispersal.” Yin Chen’s explanation was perfectly reasoned.
But… so cold.
Aggrieved, Song Zang said, “None of that counts as a reason. You just don’t feel sorry for me anymore. You even deliberately tried to make me angry so we’d have one really intense round together. You only cared about enjoying yourself.”
“Making myself happy really was one of the reasons,” Yin Chen said with a low laugh. “Your Heartthrob System is fairly useful. None of the dispersed energy tried to escape on its own. It hid inside your body and attached itself to you… so I personally demanded it back in bed.”
“In… in bed…”
Song Zang thought for a moment, then suddenly realized Yin Chen was talking dirty.
An entire night had passed and he still had the energy to tease him!
Bad thing. Having learned his lesson, Song Zang stroked his bruised, reddened arm and said darkly, “Once my body recovers, next instance, we’re scheduling three days and three nights.”
The speaker fell silent for a long while. At last, Yin Chen answered, “Mm.”
“Promise. No backing out!”
“…Mm.”
Song Zang was satisfied.
Refreshed and full of fighting spirit, he was then relentlessly hounded by Yin Chen to go eat and shower… because Yin Chen could not stand the sticky state of his body and looked ready to personally wash him clean.
Song Zang obediently put on clothes and quietly pushed open the battered bedroom door, only to discover that there was not a single person in the living room.
Breathing sounds came through the wall from the muscular man’s room. The players seemed to be asleep, and they had very conscientiously cleaned everything up first.
That meant nothing serious had happened and there had been no deaths. Good.
The projection screen was ruined and neatly rolled up by the entryway. The trash can held quite a few shards of glass and broken ceramic bowls.
Last night’s leftovers had been wrapped in plastic and placed on the top shelf of the refrigerator. There was an untouched marbled steak and more than half a bowl of tomato-and-egg soup.
Damn it, the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall was gone. It was all Yin Chen’s fault for being too fierce last night, only feeding him dead bugs and not leaving him even a moment to eat dinner.
Song Zang regretfully shut the refrigerator and turned to find several cookies still on the coffee table. The others had probably left them especially for him.
Autumn weather was dry, so the cookies that had sat out all night were still crisp. Song Zang happily took several bites, then his brows drew together slightly.
Something was wrong. The cookies had picked up the stink of ghosts, mixed with a faint nonhuman, gamey odor.
The scents were also unusually muddled. Based on Song Zang’s past experience dealing with ghosts, at least two different kinds of spirits had appeared and lingered for a long time in his living room.
Fortunately, they did not taste bad. They just smelled unpleasant. After spending so much energy overnight, Song Zang was starving, so he did not care in the slightest and finished all of them in one go.
Snacks alone still were not enough. He went into the kitchen, turned on the stove, and cooked himself a packet of instant noodles.
They might have been instant noodles, but Song Zang prepared plenty of extras: one dried chili cut into pieces, several thick chunks of luncheon meat diced up, two eggs, and a handful of fresh bok choy.
After everything simmered briefly beneath a lid in tomato broth, he had a bowl of sweet, savory, piping-hot noodles in no time.
Yin Chen lounged against Song Zang’s computer screen and watched the entire process. His expression gradually shifted from disapproval of fried instant noodles to faint contemplation.
It looked delicious. He had never eaten it before. Separated by a screen, even the most ordinary home cooking somehow looked especially appetizing.
Unfortunately, Song Zang was possessive about food. He could casually share little desserts, but he particularly disliked anyone eating something once it had already gone into his own bowl.
Song Zang had never said this aloud, but Yin Chen understood his little quirk better than anyone.
So Yin Chen said directly, “Next time, make a bowl for me.”
“Hm? Sure, but you can’t feed me dead bugs. I only want them fried. Bully me again and I’ll cry myself to death outside your door.” Song Zang wound a bundle of noodles around his chopsticks and laid out his condition with great menace.
That taste had been even harder to tolerate than the stink of ghosts.
Yin Chen curled his lips. “Fine. Whatever you say. Finish eating and go shower.”
“Do you think I’m dirty?” The moment Song Zang sensed Yin Chen’s attitude softening, his eyes reddened and he seized on the excuse. “You’ve been bullying me nonstop these past two days. You got your memories back and started treating me even worse. Yin Chen, you really don’t feel sorry for me anymore.”
“…I was wrong.”
Yin Chen apologized blankly, unable to defend himself.
Although he did not think anything he had done last night had been a problem.
Logically, every choice had been optimal. Judging by the outcome, Song Zang had nearly made him pass out too, so it had been perfect.
But Song Zang demanded compensation in the form of labor, and Yin Chen could only accept speechlessly. Otherwise, if Song Zang started crying, he would not even know how to coax him.
And this so-called labor compensation was really just… carrying the computer into the bathroom and setting it on the highest shelf.
Song Zang’s job was to enjoy a comfortable shower, work a huge mass of white foam through his black hair, lean lazily against the wall, and watch the news as he washed.
Yin Chen’s job was to operate the computer, pull up all the trending stories on social media according to Song Zang’s instructions, scroll through them page by page, and then play the local television station’s rebroadcast.
Surfing the internet and watching TV in the shower while being able to “change channels” whenever he wanted was such unparalleled comfort that every bit of resentment Song Zang had built up completely disappeared.
The bizarre mass suicide among medical workers had spawned all kinds of explainers and conspiracy-theory videos online. Song Zang watched every one of them with relish, almost reluctant to leave the bathroom.
One blogger driven by curiosity to dig for the truth had actually uncovered several clues.
Apparently, two young nurses and one medical intern had originally been scheduled for an additional night shift and were supposed to assist together in a cesarean operation.
But sometime during the previous day, a small internal dispute had inexplicably broken out in the obstetrics department. The three would rather accept punishment from their superiors than stay. They insisted on taking leave and left the hospital early despite attempts to stop them.
All three were alive and perfectly safe. When the media found them, their faces were pale and their eyes terrified, and they firmly refused interviews.
The intern shut himself indoors, while the two young nurses went straight to the police station. Every piece of information after that was immediately sealed by the police.
Combined with that hefty 4.3-kilogram baby boy… Song Zang could see the truth at a glance.
The intern and the nurses had all been newcomers Guo Jian Chun intended to recruit and cultivate, but they had refused to participate in the internal profit chain for trafficking newborn babies and had opposed it very strongly.
And precisely because of that, the three people who had refused to help steal infants became the only survivors.
In Song Zang’s view, however, the force behind the doctors’ suicides and the one behind the police suicides were definitely not the same.
Their motives were completely different.
The force that harmed the police came from Happiness Community and indiscriminately punished anyone who stood for justice.
The force that harmed the doctors was intimately tied to child trafficking and had spared the innocent.
Who could it be? An infant spirit, a little ghost, or something even more powerful?
“Guo Jian Chun’s DNA report probably still isn’t ready. I’ll see what the police station says this afternoon. I want to go to the hospital first.
“Come to think of it, Zhang Ming died strangely too. How did he end up possessed by Guo Jian Chun’s daughter for no apparent reason? There have to be other ghosts in that hospital.”
Song Zang finally came out of the bathroom. Sitting at the head of the bed and drying his hair, he casually discussed it with Yin Chen.
“No.” To his surprise, Yin Chen flatly rejected his plan to go out.
Song Zang was puzzled. “Why? Is the hospital dangerous?”
“Not particularly, but you have to sleep now.”
“But I…”
Before Song Zang could finish, the laptop resting on his legs abruptly went black.
The last thing he remembered was the chilling whistle of something slicing through the air at incredible speed.
A cold, snow-white snake tail quietly emerged from a corner of bottomless emptiness and slammed into the back of Song Zang’s head.
Song Zang had absolutely no guard against Yin Chen’s presence, so he was knocked unconscious cleanly and immediately.
When he woke again, it was already afternoon.
Song Zang opened his eyes and discovered himself lying in bed, wrapped inside the blanket like a thick cocoon.
Looking at the bedroom ceiling Yin Chen had cleaned spotless, and then at the little white snake curled atop his forehead with its eyes closed in a doze…
Song Zang fell silent for a long moment before gritting out, “Yin Chen, you deranged, perverted domestic abuser!”
He struggled free of the blanket and was just about to grab the little snake and continue interrogating him when the system panel suddenly lit up before his eyes.
【Clear Requirement: You must make them feel happy (2/3)】
“…Hm?”
Song Zang froze, looked at Yin Chen, then at the main mission, completely baffled.
“Who got happy?”
Yin Chen opened calm crimson slit pupils, studied him for a moment, then shook his head to show that he did not know either.
Afterward, he lazily curled into a ring around Song Zang’s wrist, connecting head to tail, and closed his eyes to keep sleeping.
Song Zang paused and said nothing more. Pressing his lips together, he stared at the unusually lethargic little snake around his wrist and suddenly realized that Yin Chen still seemed slightly off.
Not only had he inexplicably insisted Song Zang go to sleep, Yin Chen himself was sleeping unusually peacefully too.
What could suddenly make Yin Chen so drowsy?
Shedding, hibernation, absorbing so much energy that he could not digest it, or some unknown injury that still had not healed and required sleep to recover?
There were simply too many possibilities. Worse, this perverted domestic abuser refused to explain a single thing to him. Damn it.
Song Zang could not investigate the truth for the moment, but he did not dare disturb Yin Chen while he slept either, so he simply let him continue resting.
Careful not to move his wrist too much, he lit up the phone packed with new-message notifications.
The moment he opened it, he found report after report from Chen Jing Sheng.
Sure enough, after being forced to sleep and waking up again, several major events had happened outside without him knowing.
Yang Mei was dead. It had happened last night without causing any disturbance.
The police officer on duty had finished his boxed meal and gone to deliver food to the detainees when he suddenly discovered that she no longer had a pulse. The forensic examination found no possibility of homicide. Her heart had simply stopped, causing sudden death, and she had gone peacefully.
That was the first matter.
Second, Guo Jian Chun’s DNA comparison report was finally out.
None of the Jiang family’s sons had any biological relationship to the Jiang couple, while their two eldest daughters had been confirmed mysteriously missing for many years, with all old records falsified to conceal the truth.
Combined with He Tao’s testimony, Guo Jian Chun was now a major suspect in child trafficking, murder, and corpse disposal. The Jiang family backing her and senior management at Xinjiang City Hospital might also be entangled in countless forms of auxiliary criminal involvement.
As the investigation escalated, frontline detectives and the special investigation team urgently deployed. They were specially authorized to carry out an armed, forceful arrest, but they still arrived too late.
The blood-soaked horror inside the Jiang residence was enough to make even seasoned veteran detectives retch.
The live-in housekeeper and every child, young and old, were dead. Their skin had been clawed open with fingernails, their throats bitten through with human teeth, their temples pierced with chopsticks, their bodies hacked into chunks of meat with kitchen knives, some brutally severed at the waist.
Such frenzied violence was beyond even the most vicious serial killers in history. It did not merely look like the work of a mentally ill patient. It looked like the frenzy of a beast that had completely lost its mind.
The police began a carpet search of the villa, uncovered the strange altar table in the basement, and found two corpses buried in the back garden.
Jiang Chuan and the old Madam Jiang were confirmed dead, leaving Guo Jian Chun as the only remaining suspect.
Yet Guo Jian Chun had somehow vanished from the villa without a trace. Security footage showed her driving home but contained no record of her leaving again.
As a wildly violent and extremely dangerous suspect, her arrest could not be delayed. The police immediately issued an online notice, placing Guo Jian Chun under an urgent nationwide manhunt.
The already-buzzing internet erupted all over again.
At the same time, evidence that the Jiang family had once conspired to conduct living-foundation sacrifices beneath their buildings, along with high-resolution PDF copies of their development contracts, suddenly spread online thousands upon thousands of times.
Chen Jing Sheng had been watching the news and seized the opportunity to upload everything anonymously at exactly the right moment.
Song Zang read it all with great enjoyment.
Who would have thought this mercenary actually knew how to play the game? Song Zang had not even needed to lift a finger. One perfectly timed strike had smashed the Jiang family straight into the mud.
Song Zang set the groggy little snake on his lap, scrolled through his phone, and looked for ideas among the netizens’ theories.
Since he had nothing better to do, he casually wrote an opening chapter commissioned by his wealthy lady patron and sent it by private message to Guo Jian Chun’s online account.
It was only a tiny test.
Unexpectedly, less than half a minute after the document was sent, Guo Jian Chun replied.
【Wealthy Lady Gives Birth to Eighteen Treasures at Once: Sir, thank you. Thank you, I love you, thank you, I love you.】
It was an extremely strange reply. The wording was mechanical and stiff, yet saturated with emotion that made no sense.
Song Zang’s heart tightened. He rapidly traced her IP address on the computer.
Still in Xinjiang City. The device’s exact location was identical to yesterday.
Guo Jian Chun still had not left the villa?!