After dinner, Xu Chi originally wanted to wait for Wen Ling and leave together. He had something he wanted to say to her, but the moment Wen Ling finished eating, she picked up her tray, lowered her head, and left. She was so fast that Xu Chi couldn’t even catch up.
A colleague at the next table also draped an arm over him and stopped him, speaking in a lazy tone laced with mockery and disdain, with an air of superiority.
“Brother Xu, don’t get involved with her. She, well, isn’t clean.”
Xu Chi gave him a cold look. “What do you mean by clean? Does dying in the Uninhabited Zone count as clean?”
People in the city always thought they were superior to those outside the city, and they mocked them by calling it the Uninhabited Zone.
Xu Chi picked up his tray and left without looking back.
When he got back to his workstation, he didn’t see Wen Ling appear until the end of the workday.
Wen Ling could be considered the classic white lotus character that appears in every novel, TV drama, and manga. At first she was a white lotus, but later, after suffering all kinds of darkness, betrayal, and pain, she was completely assimilated and darkened, becoming a major villain.
Wen Ling played that role in this manga.
She had a pure and beautiful face, and her personality was hopelessly naive. Although she came from a terrible background, she always believed in love and kindness, believing that one day she would escape the Sin District.
Only when reality was repeatedly shoved in front of her, destroying everything she had and shattering all her hopes, prospects, and expectations, driving her toward a dead end, did she finally lose hope for the world, become ruthless and cruel, and turn into the person she had once hated the most.
Without feelings or desires, with nothing but destruction and death.
Wen Ling had no superpower. She was born in the Sin District. Since childhood, she had been abused by her parents and locked in the house. Occasionally, neighbors would feel sorry for her and stuff food through a hole in the wall, but that still couldn’t save her. She was even grateful for that and never resented her parents. When she was six or seven, her tiny body would step onto a stool to cook for her parents.
Later, one time, her parents were caught stealing and beaten to death in prison. She stayed home alone, starving for four days, until people from the management bureau opened the door and she learned the news.
She had originally been meant to be taken away. On the surface, orphans were supposed to be sent to orphanages, but in reality, children in orphanages became the easiest commodities to dispose of. Their fates were unknown, and many ended up like You Chumu, taken away as experimental subjects.
On the way there, a riot broke out, and everyone in the car died. Wen Ling was taken away by one of the rioters, an old grandma, and from then on, she lived with that grandma.
She was only eight then. Now she was twenty-four, and the grandma was already seventy-six and suffering from severe lung cancer.
She needed a lot of money to treat the grandma and to give her better medical resources. For that reason, she began begging people in all kinds of ways. At first, she sold photos, but that wasn’t nearly enough money, so she began begging people to keep her.
Even getting into Tianke, she had begged Tianke’s higher-ups for it, using her body as the price.
To her, nothing was more important than the grandma.
In the original novel, Wen Ling’s begging to be kept was the first step in her tragic life. The people she went to were all lowlifes; the first was Cheng Zhangwen. If not for the fact that Cheng Zhangwen later wandered the streets and vanished without a trace, he would definitely have been the first person Wen Ling wanted to kill.
…It was a little annoying. Xu Chi would rather not know about other people’s lives. He still couldn’t be indifferent to other people’s tragedies, but everyone around him was tragic. He wasn’t a savior, and he had never planned to save everyone; he couldn’t even be sure he could take care of himself.
The biggest villain in the whole book was living with him.
Thinking about it that way, he was now arguably one of the most tragic people in the whole book…
He found Wen Ling’s Twitter on his phone, sent her a message, and then packed up and went home.
Before he even opened the door, the person inside sensed him and opened it first. Xu Chi didn’t know what had happened, but the smiling face that had been greeting him suddenly darkened. The change was as quick as a stage trick, so fast it was hard to describe, and a little frightening.
Xu Chi: “…”
Xu Chi: “What’s wrong?”
You Chumu’s gaze fell on Xu Chi’s collar, then on his shoulder. He tilted his head slightly as if thinking about something. His eyes, with so much of the white showing, made him look, when he wasn’t smiling, very much like a venomous snake or a cat’s pupils. It was creepy.
“Nothing. Go take a shower, brother.”
He said nothing else.
Xu Chi didn’t understand.
Two days passed peacefully, and nothing happened. The only change was that the new bed Xu Chi had bought arrived. He cleared out the storage room and finally didn’t have to sleep on the sofa anymore.
You Chumu was very well-behaved. Every day after work, he stayed with Xu Chi, and before Xu Chi got off work, he waited for him at home.
The only unusual thing was that during those two days, Wen Ling never appeared.
She hadn’t even replied to his message.
In the original manga, the original host Xu Chi had always been very quiet. No one liked him, and they only gave him cold looks. Only Wen Ling would smile at him when she saw him and occasionally help him.
Deep down, Wen Ling was a very kind girl.
But kindness cannot survive in this world.
On Friday, when the workday ended, Xu Chi had just walked out through the revolving glass door when his phone vibrated. Unlike an ordinary message vibration, it was one long buzz and one short buzz.
Xu Chi picked up his phone and pressed the power button. Anyone else seeing the screen would only think the phone was broken… the screen was completely garbled. In reality, this was a recently created private Morse code used to transmit messages.
The colors and grid patterns on the garbled screen each represented different words.
Xu Chi tapped the screen a few times, and the garbled display condensed into a sentence…
『New task: Tonight, 8th Street, Red Lotus Club, the person whose right hand bears seven stars.』
Xu Chi’s first reaction on seeing the task was: seven stars on the right hand… what if there was more than one person whose right hand bore seven stars? What if he mistook the person?
His second reaction was: What is this? This has to be a mistake, right? There wasn’t such a plot in the original manga, was there? Wasn’t Xu Chi’s next task supposed to be arranged so he would leave Salt City undercover? Why was there now an extra mission to kill this person whose right hand bore seven stars?
His third reaction was: …he remembered. The person whose right hand bore seven stars… the left-hand man of Salt City’s crown prince, He Shou… was Qin Shen.
…Were the higher-ups insane? Sending him to kill Qin Shen? Everyone in Salt City knew how much He Shou valued Qin Shen. Did the higher-ups not want to keep operating in Salt City anymore? How could that be? Most of their resources were in Salt City.
…So, were they deliberately provoking He Shou?
Xu Chi calmed down a little. An impulsive thought flashed through his mind: throw this phone away. Murder? How could he possibly commit murder? He was a model student. He didn’t do illegal things.
Even if… even if this world wasn’t his original world, his heart was still in his original world.
So the question was: to be or not to be.
How could that be? This wasn’t the peaceful world he came from. Did he still expect to survive cleanly? He was dreaming.
So now he was being forced into a dark torrent?…
Xu Chi stood motionless in place for more than five minutes. When footsteps sounded behind him, he still didn’t turn around. He even eerily remembered those footsteps…
Yu Sui’an.