Once Meng Chao finished speaking, the underground space sank into dead silence.

  After a long time, Bai Shan sighed wearily and smiled bitterly. “It would have been better if I didn’t attack you. Then, you wouldn’t have been able to prove anything.”


  “That’s impossible,” Meng Chao said. “If I had been uninjured, you would have weighed the pros and cons and chosen not to attack. You’d have held yourself back.

  “That’s why I meticulously pretended to be dying, as if I’d be a goner if you just stabbed me. How could you possibly resist such temptation?

  “You didn’t know what exactly Ms. Mulian had told me and what I would tell if I ran into Wild Wolf. In that sort of situation, the safest and simplest choice was to kill me to silence me.”


  Bai Shan thought about it and said, “Indeed, I could only kill you to silence you. But I shouldn’t have acted based on what I thought was the best excuse and told Wild Wolf that I saw you killing Ms. Mulian.

  “If I had made my statement a little more ambiguous, perhaps I wouldn’t have exposed myself so soon.”


  “That’s impossible. If you hadn’t seen me killing Ms. Mulian, would there have been a need for you to chase me for my life?” Meng Chao said. “Let’s say that you had run into me doing some shady deal in secret. If so, you should have captured me alive and interrogated me for everything I knew, including Ms. Mulian’s whereabouts, not trying to kill me with every move you made.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve planned out every detail carefully. No matter what, you wouldn’t have been able to offer an explanation that could allow you to get out of this situation.”


  Bai Shan sighed and smiled bitterly. “Meng Chao…… Meng Chao, as expected of the superhuman who has been growing in power the fastest over the past two years. It’s no wonder why those people told me that while Man-eating Shark Zhou Chong has the highest cultivation realm in the hunting squad sent into Leprosy Village to destroy the Deification Capsule pharmacy, the one who is the most difficult to deal with might be you, even though you just entered Heaven Realm.

  “I was told not to underestimate you, and if I saw you, I had to do everything in my power to kill you. I did as told, but I still fell into your trap.”


  Meng Chao’s eyes sparkled intensely. “Are you admitting that you’re working together with the robbers outside, the ones who created the Deification Capsules, and the ones who disguised themselves as secret police?”


  “Things have already progressed to this state. Does it matter if I admit it or not?” Bai Shan smiled sadly.

  “Why?” Wild Wolf’s eyes seemed to have turned into two burning crystals. He took a heavy step forward and hissed, “Bai Shan, why did you betray me, Wild Wolves, and all of Leprosy Village? Did you know that the monsters might be behind those robbers?!”


  “I didn’t know in the beginning,” Bai Shan said airily. “I managed to figure it out later, but it didn’t matter anymore.”


  “Didn’t matter?” Wild Wolf was so angry that he laughed. “Bai Shan, we knew each other for decades, but right now, it’s like this is the first time I finally saw your true self. So, to you, being the claw of the monsters is something that doesn’t matter?”


  Bai Shan spoke calmly, as if she was a walking corpse. “Then, tell me, why can’t we become the claws of monsters? Even if monsters really occupied Dragon City, what would it matter?”


  “Monsters eat people. Once monsters completely occupy Dragon City, they will eat all humans. Isn’t that something you’re supposed to be concerned about?!” Meng Chao could not help but shout.

  He just could not understand Bai Shan’s thoughts.

  Could it be that the Vortex’s mind attacks were already so strong that they would twist and destroy a person’s rationality while letting them retain a perfectly calm and normal appearance?

  “Yes. Monsters have to eat. Being swallowed by a huge mouth and having your flesh as well as bones ground to dust must be pretty bad.” Bai Shan smiled, then cast a dark gaze at Wild Wolf. Suddenly, she asked something seemingly unrelated, “Wild Wolf, do you remember my mother?”


  Wild Wolf, Zhang Tie, Meng Chao, A’Ji, Ms. Mulian, the Wild Wolves, and everyone else were stunned.

  Bai Shan looked lost. Her gaze was no longer focused. She seemed to have traveled to the past and was lost in a memory from a long time ago. She mumbled, “My mother was like most of the adults in Leprosy Village. She worked in an illegal workshop creating unique weapons. Every day, she had to handle monster materials and crystals that were highly radioactive, polluted, and poisonous.

  “Since we’re born with a third eye on our foreheads, we can see light and colors normal people can’t see. We can tell the slight differences in different monster bodily fluids and choose the strongest acid and poison.

  “So, my mother was sent to the poison refinement workshop. Her duty was to carefully smear the monsters’ poisonous bodily fluids into the runic symbol groves carved into weapons and ammunition. She had to make sure that it was done evenly before coating other layers of poison so that the weapon’s damage would be maximized.

  “It was a very dangerous and painful job.

  “The stronger the poison and acid is, the more permeable it is. No matter how many layers of protective clothes and how many layers of gloves you wear, the poison will still permeate through the molecules of the cloth and invade your blood, muscles, nerves, and bones.

  “Besides, to ensure the quality of the poison refinement, my mother had to retain the agility of her fingers. That meant that she couldn’t wear gloves that gave the best protection since they were the thickest and clumsiest in the market.

  “Sometimes, the workshop received major deals that demanded really high quality. My mother couldn’t wear gloves during those times and had to work barehanded, like she was doing embroidery.

  “The long and hard work made poison accumulate in my mother’s body nonstop. It was like billions of maggots that ate through her body.

  “My mother was a quiet person, or rather, she was tormented so much by the task of surviving that she was barely breathing. She did not have much interest in talking and laughing.

  “Since I could remember, there were three sounds that I heard from my mother—coughing, moaning, and knocking that came from her using her fists to tap her joints. Oh, there was also a fourth. It’s the cracking that came from her joints.

  “My mother told me that human joints are like the gears of machines. If they go rusty and can’t move, they might become better if you knock them a little with a hammer.

  “I couldn’t understand it when I was young, and I really thought that my mother was some superhuman machine. She could do everything.

  “Unfortunately, you can’t get rid of the rust with just a hammer alone, much less make a rusty machine as shiny as a new one.

  “No matter how much my mother coughed, moaned, and used her fists to tap her joints, her body didn’t recover and she just kept deteriorating.

  “Slowly, my mother’s teeth fell off. Her dental nerves were exposed, and just swallowing her saliva hurt her so much that she cried.

  “Later, her spine failed her as well. Her back kept bending lower. Every day, it would lower by a few degrees. From a tall and beautiful woman, she turned into a hunchbacked monster that looked like a prawn.

  “I was terrified for my mother when she was in this state, but she smiled and comforted me that she was fine. She even said that in her current state, it was easier for her to lean over the table and work. She could continue smearing poison on more weapons.

  “Some time later, her eyes failed her as well.

  “The visual power of our third eye is 300% times stronger than that of normal people. Our vision, range, and ability to decipher color is stronger than that of many superhumans.

  “But as she worked for an extended period of time in an environment full of poison, her third eye got corroded, and it looked like it had a layer of white film covering it. Her vision became increasingly blurry, and even when she was walking home, she often knocked into things, which left her body badly bruised.

  “Once she got really weak, she could not get enough food and medicine. At that time, Ms. Mulian had yet to grow up and awaken to her amazing healing abilities, so no one was around to help relieve my mother of her pain. She never recovered from her bruises, and they turned from green to purple, and from purple to black. At that time, even if she was my mother, I thought she looked really ugly.

  “In the end, in the morning she lost her sight, she opened her eyes wide one final time and groped around blindly to reach the illegal workshop she had been working in her entire life.

  “What happened next was something she could do even without her eyes.

  “She found a whole pot of monster poison used to coat weapons and bullets, opened the lid, and drank everything.

  “She died just like the countless other villagers who couldn’t endure the torture anymore. There were six other adults from the same illegal workshop who died like her that year.

  “This is something unremarkable.

  “The only thing that left a deep impression on me was that when we cremated my mother, we noticed that her bones had a phosphorus color that reminded us of crystals. They let out cracking sounds and released colorful sparks. My mother was ugly when she was alive, but when she died, she turned into beautiful fireworks.

  “In truth, the fatal properties contained in all sorts of bodily fluids from monsters and crystal powder had stuffed my mother’s bones full long ago. In the superhumans’ lingo, my mother’s bones could be called spirit bones, right? Ha! Haha!”


  Bai Shan curled up her lips and released a broken and sad laughter.

  “Bai Shan, I know that you’re pained over your mother’s death, and you were never able to overcome your grief even after so many years,” Wild Wolf said gravely. “But what does that have to do with you joining the monsters’ side?”


  “Ever since my mother turned into fireworks and died, I’ve been contemplating two questions.”


  All three of Bai Shan’s eyes remained fixed on one spot. She said in a dazed fashion, “My mother worked daily in the illegal workshop and was continuously corroded by poison and acid. Slowly, her flesh, blood, nerves, bones, and organs were eaten away. Here’s my first question, Wild Wolf. Is having your body slowly rot away worse than being swallowed in one bite by a monster?”


  “That’s……” Wild Wolf fell silent.

  Bai Shan smiled and said, “If your answer isn’t rotting away for decades, seeing that your children have no hope in changing their fates and would die in the same way as you did a few years later, then, right from the start, if a monster snuck into Leprosy Village and killed my mother instantly, wouldn’t it have relieved my mother of her pain?

  “If that’s really the case, tell me, should I hate the monster or should I thank it?”