Chapter 123: Never Submit

Yang Yi dug into the soft earth with a shovel and dropped a few mustard green seeds. The original vegetable patch was too small and the variety of crops too limited, so Yang Yi planned to open up a new plot so Miranda wouldn't have to work so hard in the future.

From last night until now, she had been thinking about the paintings she saw in Thomas's studio.

But that revelation was like floaters in the eye; the more you tried to focus on it, the faster it vanished, yet when you stopped paying attention, it drifted right before your eyes.

"Hi, Frisa, are you planting vegetables? I can help." Dylan, Perla's older brother, walked over. He was a sixteen-year-old boy with blond hair and blue eyes, his eyebrows and eyelashes also golden, and when he smiled, he revealed small tiger teeth, looking both cute and beautiful.

Whenever Yang Yi saw these young Western boys, she couldn't help but sigh; their most beautiful blooming season seemed to be at this age, and once that time passed, they suddenly seemed weathered and aged.

Dylan was grateful that Yang Yi had saved Perla and was also very interested in her awakened abilities, so whenever he wasn't in class recently, he liked to come find Yang Yi. Perhaps boys of this age were too enamored with Awakened ones; seeing one right there in front of him, he just couldn't let go.

"Alright, thank you." Yang Yi handed him the shovel and, like any elder in Xia Country, couldn't help but adopt an elder's demeanor to ask questions: "Not in class today? What grade are you in? Are the courses difficult? Do you have a girlfriend?"

Dylan felt a bit uncomfortable with this interrogative conversation but didn't show impatience. "No..."

"Why? You're so cute." Yang Yi smiled at the big boy.

"They all say I'm cute, but they're not interested in me." Dylan shrugged.

"Oh..." Yang Yi looked at him in confusion. "It's truly a huge difference in aesthetics. A boy who is both cute and beautiful like you is especially popular over there!"

Dylan grinned and tilted his face up. "Frisa, do you like my type too?"

Yang Yi was stunned for a moment; this little guy had actually turned the tables.

"No, she doesn't. She likes the tall, handsome, muscular type!" Thomas said with ambiguous meaning. He wore a black silk robe, held a cup of coffee in his right hand, and leaned against the wall listening to them talk.

Dylan tilted his head to look at him once, then turned to ask Yang Yi, "Frisa, is that true?"

Yang Yi's face flushed with embarrassment and she didn't want to answer. She said to Thomas, "Don't talk nonsense in front of children!"

Thomas raised one eyebrow high. "What? Isn't it true? That day when you watched that actor's advertisement, you looked very immersed..."

Dylan, refusing to lose, said, "But Frisa is an Easterner. She just said that over there they like my type!"

Yang Yi felt a bit of a headache.

She thought of Chris, cleared her throat, and said, "Alright, I do like that type!" With that, she quickly lowered her head and dropped the seeds into the dug holes.

It was clearly just teasing, but after she admitted it, Thomas actually felt it was no longer interesting. He finished the coffee in his cup in one gulp and was about to leave.

An accident struck suddenly, like thunder flashing in a cloudless sky, breaking the peace of the moment.

"Frisa, what's wrong?" Dylan shouted.

Thomas immediately turned around. In the instant he saw her figure, he had a hallucination, as if he saw a huge black hole vortex slowly rotating.

Yang Yi crouched on the soft mud, her whole body trembling uncontrollably.

A familiar hunger struck suddenly; this long-lost sensation almost made Yang Yi fall headfirst into the dirt.

One second she was joking lightly and happily, the next her whole body was in excruciating pain, as if steel needles were drilling out from between her bones, as if countless insects were sucking her marrow, as if ten thousand knives were flaying her skin, as if a pot of boiling hot oil was being poured into her brain.

The summer breeze blew past, and every gust seemed to dissolve bone and devour flesh; she supported herself with her hands, and the soft earth beneath her palms also seemed covered in barbs.

Pain alone would have been bearable. The most unbearable thing was the heart-scratching, ear-picking hunger, as if a starving beast was rolling, struggling, and howling in her stomach, its cage of confinement broken and dilapidated, teetering on the edge, ready to shatter completely under one fierce strike.

Since absorbing the Life Source on the Yellow Sand Planet last time, the depth she fell into grew deeper and deeper; this hunger was more unbearable than any previous withdrawal from poison.

Her whole body shivered, yet she retained a shred of consciousness: there were others nearby. If she couldn't suppress this hunger, the consequences... would be unimaginable...

She forced herself to straighten her waist, trying not to make her expression too ugly, and her voice was hoarse: "I'm a bit unwell. I want to go rest for a while."

She suppressed it with all her might; beneath her light words lay a sealed ferocious beast.

Dylan stepped forward to support her, but she shoved him away.

Thomas dropped his coffee cup and rushed forward quickly. "What's wrong?" Thomas looked at the cold sweat seeping from her forehead and her constantly shivering body, and a thought formed in his mind that made him angry: Had someone injected her with some kind of drug?

She ignored the two of them and stumbled, running wildly toward the forest. The most important thing now was to get far away from the crowd and endure this period alone, otherwise... otherwise... everyone in the village would become dried corpses!

Yang Yi had lost her sharp perception. In her blur, she saw Thomas chasing up. A low growl pressed out of her throat. "... Stay away from me... The beast... will get out of the cage... I will hurt you... Get lost!"

Saying this, she suddenly accelerated, instantly leaving Thomas far behind.

Taking advantage of the last shred of sanity, she kept running deeper into the forest, trying to stay as far from the village as possible. She didn't know how long she ran before her brain finally lost perception of the outside world and the ability to think; she was drowned by hunger and pain.

Just as she was about to fall into unconsciousness, she seemed to hear a cold sneer. It was an indifferent, arrogant, disdainful sneer, the sneer of a god looking down from on high at an insect scrambling desperately before fate.

Yang Yi suddenly woke from the pain and shouted ferociously, "Is it you? It must be you, I know it's you! You stinking insect, arrogant parasite! Since childhood you've occupied my body, made me autistic, you ruined my childhood and made me abandoned by my mother! Now you want to ruin my life too! Do you think I'm afraid of you? No! Come on, come on! It's just hunger? Just pain? Just addiction?"

"I tell you, it's not enough! This pain is not enough! Dismember me! Grind me into meat paste! Then let a million venomous snakes gnaw at my heart, let ten million maggots suck my brain! Grind me into dust! Crush my bones and scatter my ashes! Only then is it enough! Only then is it enough! Hurt me! Destroy me! Humiliate me! Use all your means to torture me! I—will never submit! Never—!"

This was a desperate roar bursting from the depths of her chest, tempered a thousand times within her body, and squeezed out through her throat.

Thomas, chasing hard behind, stood panting not far away, his steps halted by shock.

What kind of painful resistance was this? What kind of desperate declaration of war was this?

He seemed to see a blade of grass declaring war on the entire biting winter, he seemed to see a sapling struggling against the ten thousand heavy mountains pressing down on it, he seemed to see an ordinary Earthling shouting defiance at the will of the entire universe.

Her slender figure trembled incessantly; blood seeped from her eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, from every pore on her entire body, as if her internal organs were being churned to pieces by a nameless force.

For a moment, he stood frozen in place, not out of fear, but shocked by the immense, unyielding, and hard will contained within that fragile body. He had never seen or felt such power in anyone before, to the extent that he had always believed it was an abstract, non-physical concept, like a human wish or a self-expectation.

But at this moment, he truly saw it.

He remembered Yang Yi's desperate confession to him that morning. He didn't know what kind of story or past lay behind this girl with a fragile appearance, but at this moment he believed he fully understood her.

Like the last trembling autumn leaf in a biting cold wind, a strong gust blew past, and her slender figure crashed down with a boom.

Before falling, the painting by Thomas flashed before her eyes.