Chapter 396: Please Kill Me

The darkness in the Corridor wraps the two people together.

Jiang Yuan wants to speak, but his lips only dry‑crack and open‑close twice, producing no sound.

He stares into Mo Shu's eyes; the light in those almond eyes shatters, breaking into debris on the ground that cannot be reassembled.

"Are these feelings at this very moment also simulated?"

The words keep echoing. Not an echo in his ears, but in his mind, turning over and over; each turn wears another layer off his nerves.

Chicago.

He remembers Chicago.

In the underground tunnel the lights went out, the Spider Humanoid's claw sounds surged from all directions, that sharp hissing could literally peel a person's scalp off the bone.

His batch of Poker Cards is exhausted, his left knee trapped, unable to move.

Mo Shu charges in from the side.

She doesn't call his name, says no extra words, fires three shots clearing the Spider Humanoid attacking him, then grabs his collar and drags him backward.

She, about 1.6 meters tall, drags a fully armed man weighing nearly one hundred eighty jin, rolling and crawling as she runs.

He remembers her breathing.

Heavy, rapid, with a few uncontainable painful groans in between—later he learns her right shoulder was dislocated, and she pulled him hard.

There was a second time. In another mission, half‑dazed he leans against the cabin wall, Mo Shu stuffs all her compressed rations into his pocket, saying "I'm not hungry, I just stole two pieces of chocolate."

He believed her then.

Later, reading the evacuation report, he learns the helicopter's supplies were destroyed before takeoff, there was no chocolate. She was hungry for a full eleven hours.

Third time.

After his mission ended he ran a three‑day fever, consciousness intermittent. A few times he woke to see a silhouette curled on the bedside chair, chestnut short hair, head tilted on the chair back, mouth slightly open, sleeping terribly.

When he becomes conscious, he finds a bowl of congee on the nightstand. Cold. Next to it a sticky note with crooked handwriting:

"I have an urgent mission to go out~ If the congee is warm, drink it; if cold, reheat it yourself, the microwave is at the second door left from the Nurse Station— you, Mo Shu sis"

Followed by a cute emoticon.

He drinks it.

The congee is sweet.

The temperature of that bowl, the crooked note, and her defenseless side face perched on the chair back—all surge back.

Jiang Yuan's tears slam onto his knee.

Not a drop or two, but sheets upon sheets flow down, unstoppable, unwipeable.

Shadow Ghost buzzes madly in his mind, trying to suppress heart rate, adrenaline, all runaway physiological metrics, but they surge too violently, breaching every dam, flooding each dried riverbed.

He cannot cry out.

His mouth is open, throat muscles contract violently, yet no sound emerges. Air is drawn in then stuck midway, blocked in his chest, neither out nor down.

Stifling.

From inside outward, each rib is being forced open.

Mo Shu looks at him.

She has never seen Jiang Yuan cry.

He is Shadow Lord. The Federation's Strongest Yujie. Master of the Shadow Legion. Conqueror of the Weird Domain. Everyone adds an "Iron" before his name—Iron Man, Iron Heart, Iron Gall.

Now this Iron Man crouches before her, both hands covering his face, shoulders trembling, his whole body shaking like a sifter.

Something clenches Mo Shu's heart hard.

Her left hand lifts. Five fingers extend toward Jiang Yuan, fingertips less than ten centimeters from his hair.

She wants to touch his head.

She had done this before. Whenever Jiang Yuan was injured or in a bad mood, she would reach out to rub his hair, then say "Good little Jiang Yuan, sister's here." Jiang Yuan would each time shyly pull her hand away, his ears turning red enough to bleed.

The fingers keep reaching forward.

Then they stop.

About three centimeters from Jiang Yuan's hair.

Mo Shu's gaze lands on her own hand.

The afterglow of the True Sight eye still circles on the ground, light filaments sweep across her fingertips, those gray‑white thread‑like things hidden beneath the nail beds float up clearly.

Her fingers retract.

So unnaturally fast, as if burned.

Five fingers curl into the palm, forming a fist, the fist slides into the sleeve, the sleeve tucked behind. She pulls into the corner, legs together, knees against chin, folding into the smallest bundle.

"I'm sorry."

The voice is very soft. Not her usual way of speaking. No sweetness, no vigor, no playful rising intonation.

Withered, gray.

"I almost touched you."

Jiang Yuan's hand drops from his face. He sees Mo Shu curled in the corner, both hands hidden behind, face buried between knees, shoulders trembling.

That trembling is different from his.

He is leaking outward because he can't hold it; she is desperately pressing inward.

Jiang Yuan's chest is suddenly struck by something.

Not a physical impact. It's something deeper, more primal, that even Shadow Ghost cannot classify or handle.

Mo Shu's trembling reminds him of civilians in war zones, stripped of all dignity and belonging, curled in a corner waiting for death.

"Jiang Yuan."

Mo Shu lifts her head.

Her face was covered with tears and ash, chestnut‑colored short hair clung messily to her cheeks, lacking the usual carefully curved style. Her apricot eyes were blood‑red, and the skin at the corners of her eyes was slightly wrinkled from the soaking tears.

She looked at him, her lips moving a few times.

Then she smiled.

That smile was uglier than crying. The corners of her mouth were turned up, the dimples appeared, but every muscle was stiff, the forced curve crooked and twisted, like a painting that had been mashed and then flattened.

"Kill me."

"You're the last one on the list; you have to tick it off."

She lowered her head, glanced at the hand hidden behind her, slowly drew out her right hand and spread it. In the palm, the gray‑white filaments writhed in the dim light, like parasites beneath the skin.

Mo Shu's voice shattered into fragments, "Can I take advantage of still feeling like Mo Shu?"

"Don't let that thing survive, and then kill me someday."

"But if the one who kills me is my beloved, world‑saving hero… I'd gladly accept it."

The Corridor fell silent. So silent that even the two of their breaths vanished.

Jiang Yuan's heart rate was soaring.

One hundred two. One hundred four. One hundred seven.

The Shadow Ghost's suppression mechanism was shattered by the onslaught. It emitted a sharp alarm inside his skull, a sound ordinary people cannot hear, but Jiang Yuan could—a screech like a metal plate being bent, stabbing his temples incessantly.

One hundred eight.

One hundred nine.

Two hundred.

The Shadow Ghost could no longer be restrained at all.

Its suppressive ability has a ceiling. It can handle physical pain, combat fear, life‑and‑death pressure, but there is one thing whose limits it cannot cross.

Emotion.

A pure, untainted emotional shock that surges from the deepest part of the soul.

This is not a realm that can be completely suppressed.

Jiang Yuan's heart hammered madly in his chest, each beat shaking his vision. He heard his blood rushing through his vessels, so fast that even the vessel walls buzzed with vibration.

Then he heard another sound.

Very faint.

Coming from the left ear bone.

A high‑frequency whine that only an overloaded electronic component would emit.

Cognitive Shielding Device.

The precision instrument personally calibrated by "You Ling", designed to block the cognitive feedback when seeing through a Fake Person, was now violently vibrating against Jiang Yuan's ear bone.

The red indicator light lit up.

It wasn't the faint green of normal operation, but an overload warning red light, flashing faster and faster until it formed a continuous red line.

The red glow reflected on the Corridor's walls, flickering on and off.

Pa.

That word isn't precise. More accurately, it was a short, crisp sound—a mix of shattering glass and burnt circuitry.

A crack opened in the Cognitive Shielding Device's casing, and a thin white wisp of smoke seeped out, carrying the burnt‑circuit board odor. The red indicator flashed one last time and went out.

The whole device fell off Jiang Yuan's ear bone, spun half a circle in the air, bounced twice off the cement floor, and rolled beneath the base of the wall.

Completely scrapped.

—When Jiang Yuan realized in terror that all this was happening, it had already occurred.

The air in the Corridor changed in that instant.

Not a metaphor. A literal physical change.

Jiang Yuan's exhaled breath turned to white mist. In a fraction of a second, the temperature dropped sharply from normal, chilling his exposed skin into gooseflesh and causing a thin layer of white frost to form on the Corridor's cement walls.

The True Sight Eye still lay on the ground.

Its light pattern suddenly stopped rotating.

Then it began to spin in the opposite direction. The speed increased, the glow grew brighter, turning from a soft radiance into a sharp white light, and the shadows on the wall continuously twisted and warped.

Bidirectional sensing.

Xu Shangdong's words exploded in Jiang Yuan's mind:

"The perception of seeing through a Fake Person is bidirectional. When you see it, it also perceives you. The purpose of the shielding device is to cut off that two‑way channel."

At that moment, Mo Shu's complexion changed, and her body suddenly leaned backward.

It wasn't her own movement. Something from within her body—through the gaps in her bones, the fissures in her muscles, and the depths of every gray‑white structure masquerading as human tissue—was forcibly awakened.

A pressure that belongs to no living thing burst from within her, weighty enough that Jiang Yuan's knees bent instantly.

The True Sight Eye on the ground spun wildly, its beam illuminating Mo Shu's surrounding human shell into translucence—beneath the skin were not bones and vessels but dense gray‑white filamentous structures stretching from her crown to her toes, like an inverted tree.

Mo Shu's mouth emitted a sound.

It wasn't her voice.

It was a reverberation of hundreds, thousands of voices layered together—male, female, old, young, high, low, coarse, fine—all mingled, pouring out of her distorted mouth.

At the far end of the Corridor, the burnt‑out light tube exploded, scattering glass shards across the floor. The white frost on the wall thickened visibly, and moisture in the air crystallized into ice, hovering in the half‑meter gap between the two, refracting the True Sight Eye's white light.

Jiang Yuan knelt trembling in place.

He looked up at the figure before him, being torn from within by some deeper rule.

Mo Shu's right hand remained spread.

The gray‑white filaments in the palm no longer writhed.

They were growing.