Chapter 395: Is the feeling at this moment also fake?

—Two characters fell into the darkness, with no echo.

Mo Shu's expression underwent a very brief freeze.

"...... Ha?"

Her reaction was lighter than Jiang Yuan had expected. Even her tone carried a hint of amusement, the kind of smile you give a friend after a not‑very‑funny joke, just to save face.

But the panic in her eyes could not be feigned.

"What are you saying?"

Mo Shu patted Jiang Yuan's shoulder with the uninjured hand, the force small, her fingertips lingering on his shoulder before withdrawing.

"Big brother, you must be exhausted. Cutting more than three hundred Fake Persons in two hours, it's understandable your mind is foggy, but at least choose a reliable way to speak."

She shifted aside, trying to stand, and her knee struck a fragment of a Fake Person's broken shell on the floor, producing a crisp crack.

"Stop messing around, quickly contact logistics to collect—"

"Mo Shu."

Jiang Yuan did not move.

He crouched in place, back arched, both hands hanging at his knees.

Mo Shu's words were swallowed back.

She finally saw Jiang Yuan's eyes clearly.

They were not laughing. Not the petty provocation after a joke waiting for your reaction. Those two eyes were absurdly red, the whites covered with countless blood vessels, and the thing inside the pupils she could not name.

She only knew that such a gaze was nothing like what a person has when joking.

There was no wind in the Corridor, but the hairs on Mo Shu's back stood up.

"You...... are serious?" Her voice finally could not help but start trembling.

Jiang Yuan gave no answer. He slipped his right hand into his pocket, feeling the icy sphere, his fingers clenched, released, then clenched again.

Then he withdrew his hand.

The True Sight Eye was gripped in his palm, light leaking through the gaps of his fingers, casting several slender beams in the dark Corridor.

Jiang Yuan extended his hand before Mo Shu.

His five fingers spread.

The True Sight Eye lay at the exact center of his palm, its surface light patterns rotating slowly, emitting a radiance that belonged to no artificial light source.

"Take it."

Mo Shu instinctively recoiled a step. Not out of fear of the object, but of Jiang Yuan's expression at that moment. From Chicago to now she had seen Jiang Yuan's decisive killing in a battlefield, had seen his face so calm in the face of Weird that it seemed inhuman, yet she had never seen him display this conduct.

It was as if someone were taking his bones out one by one, yet not allowing him to cry out in pain.

"What exactly—"

"Take it." Jiang Yuan repeated, his voice hoarse and rough, each syllable dragging a ragged edge.

Mo Shu hesitated for two seconds, then extended her left hand to receive the True Sight Eye.

The moment the sphere entered her hand, a chill spread from her fingertips to her wrist, then crawled up her forearm. Mo Shu instinctively tightened her fingers, and the rotation speed of the light pattern quickened a turn.

Jiang Yuan stared at her face.

"The Chicago battle."

His voice was pressed low, almost whispering.

"Your tactical protective suit was torn, do you remember?"

Mo Shu's almond eyes blinked twice.

"...... I remember."

"What about that protective suit?"

Mo Shu paused.

"What?"

"That damaged protective suit." Jiang Yuan's lips trembled, yet each word he uttered was excessively clear, "In the equipment recovery list, there is no scrapped record of that damaged protective suit."

Mo Shu's mouth opened slightly, but no sound came.

The True Sight Eye brightened a few more degrees in her palm.

Its radiance cancelled cognitive contamination, and Mo Shu's memory began to show unbridgeable logical gaps.

"And you told me, after arriving in Chicago, you spent three hours in the temporary camp's tent playing a mobile game and earned a season skin." Jiang Yuan's gaze locked onto her face, "But the camp's communication logs show that the network signal in the entire controlled zone was cut off that night."

Mo Shu's pupils contracted.

Not the kind of contraction caused by fear.

Something was misaligned in her mind.

Like the first crack appearing on an otherwise intact mirror—still unbroken, yet the light passing through began to refract at a wrong angle.

"That night......"

Her voice slowed, no longer the usual sweet tone and rapid pace.

"That night I...... in the tent......"

Pause.

Three seconds. Five seconds.

Mo Shu's brow furrowed, not the usual coquettish little crease, but a muscle group tightening uncontrollably.

"I was in the tent......"

The True Sight Eye's light suddenly surged by one level.

Beams burst from her palm, striking the walls on both sides of the Corridor, illuminating every cement crack in fine detail. That light was not ordinary illumination—it possessed a penetrating quality, passing through skin, through muscle, through the fabricated coordinates woven into the cognitive system, reaching the deepest layer.

Mo Shu's body jerked upright.

Her eyeball trembled rapidly within her socket, at an unnaturally fast frequency, like a monitor refreshing frame after frame of a corrupted image.

"I was playing a game in the tent... no... what color was the tent? Army green? No, it was gray... still not right... the tent... where is the tent..."

Her breathing became erratic.

The rate of her chest rise and fall suddenly jumped from a normal sixteen breaths per minute to over thirty, and the sound of her breathing became short and rapid, like a fish flung onto the shore.

"My tactical protective suit... got torn... and then I... and then..."

The fissure expanded.

It wasn't one or two; it spread like a spiderweb from the center outward in all directions. Behind each crack lay a blank segment of memory, a hazy void that no image could fill.

She recalled, after evacuating Chicago, being in the Medical Team's tent where a nurse was applying medicine to her, her back burning with pain. But the nurse's face was blurred, she couldn't remember what the tent's door curtain looked like, nor how she left the tent after the medication—nothing, that segment of the timeline ended mid‑air, with no village ahead nor shop behind.

She tried to grasp more memories.

The first day on the job at the Investigation Bureau.

Blank.

What was the name of her partner on the first combat mission?

Blank.

Parents. Hometown. What was the name of the dog she raised in childhood?

All blank.

It's not that she forgot.

It's that those slots have never held anything.

Mo Shu let out a short, sharp scream, clutching her head with both hands. The True Sight Eye slipped out between her fingers, clattering onto the Corridor floor, its light tracing an irregular arc on the cement.

"No... no, no, no—"

She crouched down, curling into a ball, ten fingers digging into her chestnut‑colored short hair, the bones of her fingers straining to white.

Her whole body trembled.

The shaking was so intense that even the wall she leaned against quivered slightly.

Jiang Yuan did not go to help her.

He couldn't.

Because he still had one final task unfinished.

He crouched in front of Mo Shu, his hands reaching for the tactical jacket wrapped around her right arm. When his fingers made contact, his hand shook violently.

The jacket's fabric tore open.

Beneath lay Mo Shu's right forearm, from just below the elbow at the four‑finger width down to the wrist, the wound torn open by a Fake Person's Bone Spike was still oozing fluid.

The light reflected from the True Sight Eye on the ground hit the wound at just the right angle.

Mo Shu lowered her head.

The wound was gaping open. Muscle fibers curled outward, the edges uneven.

But what seeped from those torn tissues was not blood.

It was white.

A viscous, white, fluffy substance dotted with fine signal noise; when it met the air its edges sprouted gray specks and it evaporated slowly.

It was identical to what formed when the Fake Person debris in the Corridor evaporated.

Mo Shu stared at her own arm.

The light in her almond eyes dimmed point by point.

It wasn't a gradual dimming. It was as if someone unscrewed the bulb from its socket, a complete, unyielding extinction.

"No..."

Her voice changed. It was no longer sweet, lively, and affable. It became a hoarse, trembling breath sound squeezed from deep in her throat, dry, quivering, so thin it was about to snap.

"Impossible."

She stepped back.

Her back pressed against the cold cement wall, and she could move no further.

"I'm not a monster... I'm not... that..."

She lowered her head to look at her own hands.

Ten fingers, under the silvery light, were so white they were translucent; beneath the nail plates, the nail beds faintly showed something writhing. She had never noticed before, and could never have noticed.

But the afterglow from the True Sight Eye struck, turning those "capillaries" in her fingers into gray‑white filaments.

Dense and countless, stretching from the fingertips all the way to the palm.

Mo Shu's hand began to shake, from the fingertips to the wrist, from the wrist to the elbow, then spreading through her entire body.

Jiang Yuan stood opposite her, less than half a meter separating the two.

He tilted his head back, looking at her.

This was the cruelest thing he had done tonight, even more ruthless than chopping up three hundred eighty‑five Fake Persons combined.

Mo Shu's tears slid from the corners of her eyes, tracing her cheeks, and dripping onto the collar of her combat uniform.

The tears were transparent.

They were not white.

Jiang Yuan didn't know why. Perhaps the Fake Persons' tears were simulated more realistically than blood, or perhaps her tear glands were the part of her body most akin to a human's.

But that no longer mattered.

Mo Shu lifted her head, her almond eyes, already blurred from crying and still glistening with tears, fixed on him.

Her lips moved several times before she managed to push out a complete sentence.

"So I was fake."

The sound shattered into formless fragments, and there was a long pause between each word.

"Then now...... at this very moment......"

She glanced at her wound, still oozing white, fluffy substance, and then looked at Jiang Yuan before her.

"These feelings at this very moment...... are they also simulated?"

The Corridor fell silent.

No one answered her.

The True Sight Eye lay on the ground, its light patterns still rotating slowly, illuminating the small patch of cement between the two, covered with gray‑white debris.

Jiang Yuan's lips twitched a few times.

He wanted to say something.

But his throat seemed filled with shattered glass, each word being torn to a bloody, indistinct mess as it tried to emerge.

In the end, nothing came out.

In the darkness.

Only the two breaths remained, one rapid and chaotic, the other almost suffocating.