Chapter 404: The Alienated in the Crowd

Jiang Yuan's five-finger closing motion had no excess.

A 160-jin middle-aged man was lifted off the ground with one hand.

His feet dangled, kicking, one shoe flew off. The polo shirt's collar was twisted out of shape, digging into the flesh on both sides of his neck, his face changing from flushed to purplish.

What he choked was not the Adam's apple, but the entire neck root above the clavicle; the force of his five fingers was terrifyingly precise, lodged exactly in a position that wouldn't cause immediate suffocation but made escape impossible.

Surgical-level precision.

The surrounding crowd stepped back one step.

Just one step.

Then—

"Damn! He made a move!"

"Did you get it? Did you get it!"

"Official killing!!"

That step back didn't become a second step. Phones were held higher. Selfie sticks extended farther. Hundreds to thousands of glowing screens were aimed at Jiang Yuan's face, aimed at the middle-aged man lifted midair.

Fear took up only half a second.

The rest was pure excitement.

A Huang Mao young man squeezed out from the rear of the crowd, his phone thrust to less than a meter away, the livestream's barrage casting a pallid light across his face.

"Folks! First-hand footage! The Investigation Bureau is choking a civilian's neck in the street!"

His voice trembled, but not from fear; it was the tremor from an adrenaline surge that made him shake with excitement.

"Share! Share it all! Let the world see these executioners——"

The rest of his words were drowned out.

More voices rose up, layer upon layer.

"Let him go!" "Violent law enforcement!" "Fascist!"

Someone began to push forward.

Not toward the cordon, but toward Jiang Yuan.

They wanted a closer shot, more explosive footage, more traffic.

Jiang Yuan stood in place, holding the 160-jin middle-aged man aloft.

His hand was steady.

Saliva dripped from the lifted man's chin, his lips turned outward, he squeezed out two indistinct words: "Let...... let go......"

Jiang Yuan didn't look at him.

Jiang Yuan was looking at those phone screens.

The screens reflected his own face. His body was soaked in black blood, the left shoulder armor half-shattered, bangs stuck to his forehead, the visible eye bloodshot.

Like someone who had crawled out of a grave.

The barrage on the screens rolled wildly.

"Kill him!"

"The Mystic Enforcer is indeed a violence machine!"

"The Gospel Church is right, these people are lackeys who monopolize power!"

"Laughable, choking someone you can't beat—actually works."

He threw the middle-aged man to the ground.

The man smashed into the asphalt, bounced once, clutched his neck and coughed violently, rolling twice before crawling to the back of the crowd.

No one helped him. Everyone skirted around him, continuing to hold up their phones and move forward.

Jiang Yuan's left hand hung at his side.

A fresh white scar cut across the surface of his charred Hand Ring.

His fingers were trembling.

Shouts, slogans, and phone shutter sounds continued to pour into his ears.

Jiang Yuan closed his eyes briefly.

Then opened them again.

The look in those eyes was different.

The shadow beneath his feet moved.

Not a sway from wind. It was an internal surge, silent and soundless, like asphalt heated to its limit bubbling, cracking, boiling.

Black shadow spread outward from Jiang Yuan as the center.

One meter.

Three meters.

Ten meters.

The speed wasn't fast, but the covered area was terrifyingly extensive. Every crack in the asphalt, every gap between the stones, was filled with flowing blackness.

Those at the front felt something odd underfoot.

A female college student holding a phone lowered her head to glance at the ground.

The shadow beneath her feet was moving.

It wasn't her own shadow.

It was the ground itself moving.

Black liquid substance seeped from the gaps in her shoe soles, crawling up the shoe uppers; the icy sensation made every hair on her leg stand on end.

"What, what——"

The words were left unfinished.

Two inches away on the road beneath her feet, a hand reached out.

Pitch‑black. Semi‑transparent. The five finger joints were distinct, and the Nail's position was a sharp black blade.

The hand gripped a similarly black, gleaming curved blade, its edge hovering beside the female college student's ankle. It didn't touch her, but the distance was close enough for her to feel the chill radiating from the metal—or something even colder than metal.

Then a second hand. A third. The tenth.

The entire street erupted.

It wasn't an explosion. No sound, no fragments. Hundreds of humanoid black silhouettes shot straight up from every inch of shadow.

They wore tattered cloaks formed from Shadow, their hollow faces featureless, with two pools of eerie blue ghost‑flame burning where the eyes should be. Each Shadow Soldier clutched a differently shaped black blade—curved knife, spear, serrated short sword—all pointed in the same direction.

The crowd.

The cold of the blade's edge pressed directly against the skin.

The curved knife rested on the neck. The spear tip pressed against the back of the head. The short sword's serrations rested on the pulsating great artery in the shoulder pit. Precise. Each weapon was accurate to the millimeter, as if they knew human anatomy like the back of their hand.

The noisy chants of over three thousand people were sucked out in a fraction of a second.

In their place came an absolute silence.

Even breathing ceased.

No one dared to breathe.

The Huang Mao youngster holding a selfie stick still had his mouth open, preserving the "family" shape from the previous second. Yet his pupils had contracted to needle‑point size, because a black curved blade lay across his Adam's apple, its surface reflecting his distorted face.

His phone slipped from his hand.

The screen faced upward as it hit the ground, and the live feed captured a sea of black soldiers and bleak blue ghost‑flames. A few bullet comments flooded in, then the entire stream froze—not due to server issues, but because every viewer simultaneously forgot to type.

Jiang Yuan stood at the very center of the battlefield.

He lifted his left hand, placing two fingers just above his brow bone, then brushed downward.

His pupils changed.

His irises faded from deep brown to a translucent gray‑white. When the True Sight eye activated, there were no visual or sound effects—only Jiang Yuan knew—that among the three thousand plus humanoid silhouettes before him, something was off.

His gaze swept across.

Slowly. Row by row.

Ordinary people appeared normal under True Sight: stable heat signatures, clear body outlines.

But a few were different.

In the middle left of the crowd, a middle‑aged man in a sanitation uniform had normal surface temperature, a terrified expression, even trembling. He looked no different from those beside him.

Yet under the True Sight filter, his chest cavity held no heart.

It was a mass of writhing crimson flesh nodules.

Vessels radiated from that nodule, spreading through the vascular network to the limbs, forming a second circulatory system beneath the skin. Over seventy percent of the person had been replaced from the inside, leaving only an intact layer of human skin on the outside to maintain the final disguise.

Jiang Yuan's gaze moved on.

The second. On the crowd's right flank, the "high‑school girl" who had first rushed forward to tear the barbed wire.

The same crimson flesh nodule. The same subdermal replacement.

The third. The fourth. The fifth.

Scattered throughout the crowd, not clustered but placed with meticulous intent—all lodged at the critical nodes of highest crowd density. Some were right beside the most agitated groups, others stood next to the circle where the chants were the loudest.

With rhythm.

Jiang Yuan counted them clearly.

Eight.

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile, but a cold, bone‑deep sarcasm.

"So that's how it is."

The two words squeezed out of his throat, so low that only he could hear them.

The next second, he swept his hand forward.

Eight Shadows shot up from the ground, moving so fast the naked eye couldn't track them. Eight "people" were simultaneously yanked from the crowd, like prey snagged on a fishing line, their feet never touching the ground as they were dragged to the open space before Jiang Yuan and slammed onto the asphalt.

Those nearby screamed and fled to either side.

This time they truly retreated. Since a Shadow Soldier's blade still rested on their necks, the retreat was limited, but everyone strained to pull their chins back.

Jiang Yuan stepped forward.

The Spinal Sword slid out from behind him, its bone‑white blade flickering with dark‑purple flame patterns.

He said nothing.

The sword fell.

The sanitation worker's right arm was cleanly severed at the shoulder.

The wound bled not a drop.

Not a single drop.

From the wound surged a dense tangle of crimson flesh nodules, writhing, growing, trying to reconnect, like the two ends of a cut earthworm instinctively seeking each other.

The whole scene was so quiet one could hear the faint "sizzle" of the nodules growing.

The Huang Mao youngster who first shouted "official murder" stared at the surging red nodules, his pupils dilated to the maximum. His lips quivered three times, emitting a breathy sound.

"This… this isn't human…"

Not human.

Never human.

Jiang Yuan planted a foot on the sanitation worker's back, pressing the Spinal Sword down, pinning the foe to the ground. The remaining seven Mutated Entities thrashed, their crimson subdermal patterns fully exposed; some had already begun mutating—spines arched, joints reversed, mouths split to the ears, revealing three rows of interlocking bony fangs.

But the Shadow Soldier's blade was faster.

Eight curved blades fell simultaneously, cutting off limbs, removing joints, and reducing every flesh that tried to swell and mutate to the barest remnants.

Crimson flesh buds writhed madly on the cut surface of the remnants. No blood. Only nonhuman, nauseating proliferating tissue.

Across the whole street, more than three thousand ordinary people stared at the scene.

Seeing those "comrades" who ten minutes earlier had shouted slogans alongside them, pushed riot shields, and charged the quarantine zone, now revealed under the blade light a core that was never human.

Phones fell to the ground. No one picked them up.

The hand holding the cardboard drooped. The ink on the board had dried, and the six characters "We have the right to evolve" hung crookedly in mid‑air.

Jiang Yuan turned around.

He faced the still‑airborne phone cameras— the live stream continued, and hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide were watching this footage.

His voice was not loud.

His throat was hoarse to the point of barely speaking, each syllable carrying the coarse, burnt‑out texture of a scorched trachea.

But in the absolute silence created by the Shadow Legion, the voice carried far.

"You've been deceived."

A pause.

"Those who fanned the flames beside you, led you to rush into the Weird Domain to die—"

He pointed with the Spinal Sword at the pile of still‑writhing crimson remnants on the ground.

"Not human. Never was."

No one spoke.

Even the wind ceased.

Jiang Yuan planted the Spinal Sword upright before him, tip down, and halted it into the ground.

His voice grew lower and lower, the final words almost grinding out from between his teeth.

"From now on—dare not step over the warning line again."

The Spinal Sword sank another inch.

The tip embedded in the asphalt, radiating cracks fanning out from the entry point.

"This is the outcome."

No one moved.

Seventeen seconds of absolute silence persisted.

Then the crowd began to retreat. Not step by step, but dispersing like a receding tide. Some ran, some walked, some stumbled yet got up and kept running. The cardboard was scattered on the ground, the banner trampled underfoot, and the loudspeaker rolled into the Sewer.

The riot of more than three thousand people dissolved.

Jiang Yuan stood in the empty middle of the street. The Shadow Legion slowly withdrew the shadows beneath his feet; hundreds of black blades finally struck the ground together, emitting a dull resonance, then turned into black mist and vanished.

He sheathed the sword.

L's voice came through the earpiece.

"Jiang Yuan, your feed is being live‑streamed simultaneously on thirty‑seven platforms worldwide. Real‑time viewership… 140 million."

He did not reply.

He lacked the strength to answer.

Five thousand kilometers away, the Federal Weird Investigation Bureau headquarters.

On the screen in the top‑level decision‑making conference room, Jiang Yuan's footage on the empty street was frozen and enlarged.

Eleven Senior Executives were present, and none spoke.

Three of them had turned ashen.

Wei Gong sat at the far end of the long table, his hands folded on the surface.

The elder stared at the screen for a long time.

Watching the young man in the footage, drenched in blood, amidst shattered glass and trampled cardboard.

Then he stood up.

The chair leg scraped the floor, producing a short, sharp screech.

Everyone's gaze converged at once.

Wei Gong's voice was light, his speech even half a beat slower than usual.

"Notify the liaison officers of each nation."

He pushed the teacup on the table aside, freeing enough space to place a holographic projector.

"Within two hours, convene a global senior holographic conference."