Chapter 360: The Rational Evangelist

The fresh blood gushing from Yan Ming's severed arm lasted less than two seconds.

Su Ming saw clearly—on the wound where the shoulder was cleanly cut at the root, flesh and blood were writhing at a speed that defied biological logic.

Layers upon layers of pink, wet granulation tissue surged from the cut surface, each strand twisting and stretching in the air as if it possessed its own consciousness.

They tangled, fused, tore, and regrew, so fast that the naked eye could see bundles of muscle fibers weaving into shape.

The white tips of the bones pierced out of the flesh, pulling outward segment by segment, while the cartilage at the joints emitted bubbling sounds.

Su Ming's stomach flipped.

It wasn't nausea.

It was alertness.

Yan Ming was half‑kneeling on the ground, his ghost‑blue pupils noticeably dimmer, but after the initial turbulence his expression gradually steadied, even taking on the brief, sigh‑like relaxation a defendant feels during a courtroom recess.

He was watching Su Ming.

Su Ming was also watching him.

Both knew that after the Absolute Court collapsed, Yan Ming could not match Su Ming in close‑quarters combat. The Time Marrow Worm's time‑control ability, combined with crushing combat experience, meant that if the fight continued, there would be only one outcome.

So Yan Ming chose not to keep fighting.

He chose to run.

His movements were crisp and decisive. The body, whose right arm was regenerating, suddenly fell backward, its back striking the floor‑to‑ceiling glass window that filled the wall behind the judgment seat.

The sound of tempered glass shattering exploded through the courtroom.

Shards sprayed everywhere, mixed with night wind and high‑altitude currents that poured in. Su Ming saw the hem of Yan Ming's suit flutter briefly in the glass fissure, then the whole figure vanished beyond the window frame.

This was the 27th floor.

Su Ming took three strides to the window, the broken glass creaking under his combat boots.

Below, Honghai City's night lights glittered; wind poured in through the shattered window, ruffling the fragments of hair on his forehead. Yan Ming's silhouette had already fallen dozens of floors, the deep‑blue suit outlining a human shape that was rapidly distancing itself in free fall.

But he didn't die on impact.

Su Ming saw—when Yan Ming fell to roughly the height of the 12th floor, a gray‑white force field spread out from beneath him, abruptly slowing his descent. It wasn't flight; it resembled the residual rules of the Absolute Court supporting his body like a massive air cushion.

In mid‑air Yan Ming adjusted his posture; the newly regenerated right arm was only half‑formed, its bones sheathed in a thin pink membrane, fingers incomplete. Yet his foot had already stepped onto the decorative ledge of the opposite office building's exterior wall, and his body slid down along the glass curtain wall.

Su Ming pressed his right hand against his wrist.

The Time Marrow Worm pulsed once.

Then he leapt down.

Wind roared into his ears. During the fall Su Ming activated time‑slow, and the surrounding world decelerated—air‑molecule trajectories became visible to the naked eye, and the keyboard clacks of overtime office workers across the building stretched into a low, drawn‑out hum.

He saw Yan Ming's position clearly.

About sixty meters below, Yan Ming was moving along the exterior wall's maintenance platform toward the south‑side multi‑level garage.

Su Ming tucked his limbs to reduce drag, precisely adjusting his falling trajectory in the time‑slow state. The grip fibers on his soles screeched against an exposed Reinforced Steel Bar, giving him a sideways thrust that shortened the straight‑line distance to Yan Ming.

Thirty meters.

Twenty meters.

Fifteen meters.

Then Yan Ming turned his head.

Those ghost‑blue pupils locked onto the falling Su Ming in the night wind, the granulation on the severed arm writhing wildly as it accelerated regeneration—yet he did not attack.

He said a sentence.

Not with his mouth.

But with an anomalous power.

Yan Ming's sound wave bypassed physical transmission limits, detonating directly on the inner wall of Su Ming's skull; each word rang as clearly as if a megaphone were pressed against his eardrum.

"I once, like you, believed in humanity!"

"Twelve years, Su Ming. I have been in this system for twelve years," Yan Ming's sound wave echoed in his head, bearing the resonant frequency unique to that anomalous power, acting directly on the prefrontal cortex. "Each time I told myself to hold on a little longer. To endure a little more. The law will give an answer. Justice is merely late, never absent."

Su Ming's falling speed slowed by half a beat.

He didn't voluntarily decelerate—it was Yan Ming's mental interference affecting his motor nerves.

"What happened next?" Yan Ming's tone shifted, from the judge's solemnity to a more personal, vulnerable timbre, almost the fatigue one shows while drinking alone late at night. "Later I discovered that, in this world, the saying 'good people get no reward' isn't a cynical anti‑inspirational line—it's an objective fact."

The scene flickered.

A memory fragment not his own flashed in Su Ming's mind—black‑and‑white, cold‑toned. A young lawyer in a cheap suit stood at the courthouse entrance, clutching a stack of rejected petitions, his face full of resentment and confusion.

That was Yan Ming in his youth.

The memory fragment was quickly replaced by another scene.

A taxi driver's wife knelt before him, crying and calling him a useless lawyer. Behind her, her husband, sentenced to seven years, was being escorted by bailiffs to a prison transport.

Then it changed again.

In a rundown office, Yan Ming hammered out denunciation letters at a computer screen, the dates jumping from 2035 to 2036, then to 2038. The ashtray on the desk filled and was emptied repeatedly. One denunciation after another was sent out.

The replies always followed the same format: After investigation, the issue you reported is unfounded.

Su Ming bit his molar, forcibly severing the mental resonance.

But Yan Ming's final words still pierced through.

"Su Ming—"

The voice carried a smile.

"When the Federation treats you as a discard, and those you saved turn on you—"

"Lord Sai Men will reserve a place for you."

The sentence echoed with no reverberation.

Before Su Ming's consciousness was completely cut off, it sank precisely into a corner he unwillingly wished to touch.

A previous life.

Apartment building.

When the neighbors divided his stored supplies, the faces he was far from familiar with were full of what they took for granted.

Su Ming hit the ground.

He bent his knees, absorbed the impact, and steadied himself. The movement was seamless, textbook‑perfect.

He looked up toward the south.

Yan Ming's aura had already vanished into the dense buildings of Honghai City's southern district; the half‑regenerated right arm and the lingering Absolute Court Rules were enough for him to hide in the city's cracks for a few days.

He couldn't catch up.

Su Ming stood where he was; the night wind brushed his face, flipping the stray hair on his forehead backward.

His eyes were as deep and empty as two dry wells.

Half a minute later, he turned and returned to the court building.

Jia Shan had already recovered from the suppressive "detention" strike; it crouched in a corner of the lobby, its body of compound eyes scanning the surroundings nervously, the cracks on its keratinous carapace still healing slowly. Seeing Su Ming enter, it instinctively tucked its neck back a little.

Su Ming ignored it.

He glanced around the courtroom.

Two bodies twisted into braids still held the posture of death; the blood had dried, and the blackened hue was glaring under the fluorescent lights.

Qian Jingzhi lay on the ground, his crotch soaked in a large wet patch, already fainted to death. The other judges and chief prosecutors suppressed by Yan Ming were sprawled haphazardly on the floor, some convulsing, some dry heaving.

Not a single person looked at him.

Or rather, no one dared to look at him.

Su Ming walked to the center of the courtroom, lowered his head to glance at the dent left by the destroyed judge's bench, and remained silent for a few seconds.

Then he picked up the Communicator.

"Logistics team, coordinates: Honghai City High Court. Send a cleaning squad over."

The Communicator crackled for a moment, the other side evidently confirming the coordinates.

Su Ming waited two seconds, then added, "Also, update the file: Gospel Church's Weird Manipulator Yan Ming, Rules-type domain 'Absolute Court'. Upgrade mental interference, spatial rewriting, thought‑kinetic suppression, and threat assessment to quasi‑A."

He paused briefly.

"Request a global warrant."

A confirmation reply came through the Communicator.

Su Ming turned off the Communicator, lowered his head to glance at his right wrist. The Time Marrow Worm lay quietly beneath the skin, its pulse normal.

He gestured toward Jia Shan.

"Let's go."

Jia Shan rolled and crawled to keep up, a third of its compound eyes covertly watching Su Ming's expression.

Two beings—precisely, a person and a monster—walked out of the court building.

Outside the door lay Honghai City's night, and in the distance the rotors of a helicopter drew nearer.

Su Ming did not look back.

Federal Weird Investigation Bureau Headquarters.

Wei Gong set the Thermal Cup in his hand down.

The tea had cooled. He did not refill it.

On the holographic screen before him, Su Ming's transmitted battle report scrolled in text.

Frame‑by‑frame reconstructed combat recorder footage was arranged beneath the report, one segment showing Yan Ming's trial of Su Ming inside the Absolute Court.

Wei Gong's gaze lingered on the line in the report that read, "Retains full sanity after becoming a Mutated Entity," for a long while.

His graying eyebrows knit together inch by inch.

He switched the report back to the first page and reread Su Ming's assessment of Yan Ming's abilities.

Rules-type domain.

Mental interference.

Autonomous regeneration.

Retain personality.

Four keywords—each alone enough to cause a headache—combined, they form a complete piece of bad news.

The previous Gospel Church Mutated Entities, whether Du Yan or the pitiful insects turned into Bone Spike monsters by the Seed in the slums, shared one trait—they were purely physical deformities, with diminished cognition, no strategy, essentially no different from rabid dogs.

But Yan Ming was different.

He swallowed the Seed, changed; his arm could regenerate, and he devised an entire set of Rules domains capable of sealing space, sanctioning violence, and reading memories—yet he still described humans as "selfish," quoted penal code articles, and read a judgment aloud before killing.

He was still a person.

A sober, faithful person wielding monster power.

No different from a Weird Manipulator, but his position was far more dangerous than that of Chen Shao, another Weird Manipulator.

That is the most terrifying.

Wei Gong slowly stood up and walked to the window.

Outside the window was the interior courtyard of the Investigation Bureau headquarters; it was late night, a few emergency lights still glowed, casting the puddles on the lawn into shards of silver.

His back remained perfectly straight, the collar of his Zhongshan suit buttoned meticulously. Yet the face reflected in the glass had aged several years since three months ago—deeper eye sockets, more pronounced cheekbones, temples already white as bone.

The remaining cold tea in the Thermal Cup swayed at the bottom.

"A Gospel Church follower who can retain high sanity..."

His voice was so low that only he could hear it.

On the distant eastern horizon, the first hint of dawn had not yet appeared. The city lay shrouded in dim night, streetlights stringing together fragile lines of light.

Between those gaps of light, how many Yan Ming are awakening?

And how many people will, in the future, be unable to resist that Seed's temptation?