Tainted

Qin Zhilu‍​​​⁠‍​‌⁠⁠⁠‌​⁠​‌​‌‍⁠⁠​‌⁠ chose the safe house closest to the ice coffin from the Black Tower’s list. It was a decommissioned garrison hut, a tiny wooden house divided into three sections by partitions. Jiang Xiao and Sienna stood guard in the outermost room, Kaos was in the middle boiling water for noodles, while Qin Zhilu sat down on the floor of the innermost room, offering his heavily injured arm to An Yu. “It’s up to you.”

He closed his eyes to rest without waiting for An Yu’s reply. An Yu had no choice but to start undoing the bandages.

Ten-plus hours had passed. The polymer materials should have helped align the wound, but Qin Zhilu had carved out the necrotized flesh too deeply before. When the bandages came off, the wound split open again, and blood dripped down his arm.

An Yu quickly pulled out Billy’s medicine jar. He had only just dabbed a bit near the wound when he felt Qin Zhilu’s arm tense. The bright red granulation tissue inside the wound trembled uncontrollably.

“It’s fine,” Qin Zhilu said deeply with his eyes closed. “Just apply the medicine.”

An Yu didn’t say a word, making his movements even lighter. The room was silent. He held his breath, meticulously applying medicine to the horrific wound, with only the Commander’s breathing in his ears. When enduring the pain, even that steady breath would tremble.

The bandages were soaked through. An Yu was about to untie the one around his own neck, but Qin Zhilu suddenly opened his eyes.

“Keep yours on,” he said. “The neck is a vital point. Since you’ve put on protective gear, don’t take it off lightly. It’s bad luck.”

This was the first time An Yu had heard Qin Zhilu speak of luck. He paused before saying, “But the last bandage is dirty. It will cause infection.”

Qin Zhilu looked past him toward the doorway. Kaos was standing in the shadows, holding a military medkit hesitantly. Qin Zhilu stared at him for a moment, then closed his eyes again. “My subordinate’s hands are too heavy. You do it.”

An Yu frowned but stood up to let Kaos take his seat. He stood behind Kaos, watching him bandage Qin Zhilu. Ordinary gauze pressed against the wound was soaked in blood instantly, but Kaos was clearly used to this in the military. He used hemostatic spray to dampen clean gauze repeatedly, pressing firmly on the wound. Once the bleeding slowed, he applied surgical tape to align the skin, pulled it tight, and rapidly wrapped it with layers of bandages.

“It’s done, sir,” he whispered, gathering the thick stack of gauze stained with Qin Zhilu’s blood in his hand.

Qin Zhilu opened his eyes and glanced at it. “My blood is a high-level aberrant contaminant. You’d best not touch it. Dispose of it according to the military protocol for infectious materials.”

Kaos nodded. “Please rest assured.”

An Yu watched him walk out with the gauze. He suddenly remembered back in the cult activity center, Kaos had knelt on the platform using a rag to scrub the blood Qin Zhilu had dripped onto the floor below. But back then, Qin Zhilu hadn’t warned him that it was his blood.

An Yu walked back to Qin Zhilu’s side and whispered, “Do you suspect him, Commander?”

Qin Zhilu said nonchalantly, “I only let him bandage me.”

“You said my hands were too heavy,” An Yu frowned reflexively. “Is that true? I was being very light.” Back when Ling Qiu had bruises from training, An Yu had changed his medicine for years, and Ling Qiu had never said his hands were heavy.

Qin Zhilu didn’t speak. He just looked at him, his dark eyes gradually softening into a look of slight helplessness. He beckoned An Yu closer. “Come here.”

An Yu was already very close. He could only sit on the floor nearly touching him.

“Stay by my side, don’t wander off.” Qin Zhilu leaned back against the wall with a weary sigh. “Your movements are too light. At the rate you were bandaging, I would’ve bled to death.”

“Huh?” An Yu was dazed, replying almost instinctively, “I’m sorry, I was afraid of hurting you…”

Qin Zhilu let out a low “Mhm” from his throat. “I know.”

Outside, Kaos started the fireplace, and the room soon grew warm. An Yu shed the two heavy overcoats he was wearing. Qin Zhilu glanced at him and suddenly frowned. “What happened to your waist?”

The thin white shirt was torn on both sides, with small flecks of blood seeping through.

“Oh.” An Yu lifted the hem of his shirt. “I got scraped by something during the brawl at the mining plant. I didn’t see what it was.”

There were large, bright-red abrasions on both sides of his waist. The wounds were shallow but extensive, and several wooden splinters were embedded in the skin. Against his overly pale and slender waist, the sight was somewhat startling.

An Yu saw Qin Zhilu’s brow furrow tightly. “It didn’t even hurt, it’s fine,” An Yu said. He checked his terminal; his survival value had recovered to over 90%. His body seemed so accustomed to living on the brink of death that it had become desensitized to minor injuries like this.

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Qin Zhilu smiled. “I’m not looking down on you. I just think you should take fewer missions.”

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“Huh? What money?” An Yu froze for a second before remembering. He asked with surprise and hesitation, “You still remember that? I thought…” His voice trailed off. “I thought you wouldn’t ask for it back.”

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“Just pay me back when we return,” Qin Zhilu said softly, almost as if talking to himself. “If the ice coffin is a remnant of the Mysterious Advent, then District 99 is likely the fuse that could ignite the world’s descent into heat death. If we pinch out this fuse, humanity will have much more peace in the future. Biological mutations will still exist, after all, those are established phenomena, but Super-aberrants likely won’t appear so frequently. The Protectors in the Spire are sufficient to handle them. Optimistically, if humans and Protectors remain strong and persistent, perhaps in decades, centuries, or millennia, the existing mutant genes will be gradually purged, and order will be rebuilt in the long river of time.”

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An Yu froze. His heart felt as though it had been pierced by something sharp, leaving him momentarily speechless. After a long while, he murmured, “And what about you?”

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“I played with them a few times when I was bored in the divination room,” Qin Zhilu said casually. “These two cards seem to have an affinity with me. No matter how many times I shuffle, these are the ones I draw.”

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An Yu felt the Commander’s words held a deeper meaning, but he had no reply. He watched as Qin Zhilu gently pushed open the small, narrow window of the wooden hut, staring at the howling snowstorm outside. He whispered, “Has it not grown stronger yet?”

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An Yu froze. His gaze suddenly landed on Qin Zhilu’s perfectly bandaged arm, and he snapped his head toward the outer room.

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An Yu turned his head slightly and whispered tentatively, “Commander?”

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“The first time we asked Kaos if he’d had the dreams, he used anger to evade the question. When we discovered that almost everyone in District 99 had been affected, he went to the activity room and ‘confessed’ by pretending to make a phone call. It was a clever disguise because it made us lower our guard.”

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“Sienna said that while she was hiding, District 99’s believers were frantically attacking her. You see, he is doing the same thing now. To be precise, he isn’t attacking her; he’s provoking her, desperate for her to strike him. He knows he lacks the ability to devour Sienna and me raw, so he wants to do what the entity in District 95 did: obtain our ‘infinite chaos’ first.”

“From start to finish, he has only been doing two things. First, using your weakness to kill you. Order restrains Chaos; he knows you are a massive threat. Then, finding a way to obtain Sienna’s and my chaotic genes. Only if Sienna and I both use ourselves to infect him can he become something with a higher chaos level than us and lead the Chaotic Reaction.”

“He truly knows too much. That’s why I suspect he is more advanced than the entity in District 95. If measured by mysterious fragments, Sienna is a fragment of Chaos, whereas he might possess a bit of both Chaos and Cognition—or perhaps the Cognition from Eye on the parchment was passed to him.”

Qin Zhilu’s breath hit the back of An Yu’s ear, making the old scar there itch. An Yu felt a chill down his spine. “You’re already certain…”

“Almost. What truly made up my mind was back in the activity room. He is a soldier; he shouldn’t have forgotten that he personally cleaned up Wendt’s blood not long ago. He came to the room to report an anomaly, the horror at the mining plant was so extreme, yet he was in a hurry to kneel and scrub that blood first, then illegally pocketed the rag stained with my blood.”

An Yu slowly turned his head, looking at the howling frost outside. “But if he obtained so much nourishment, why hasn’t the snowstorm grown stronger…”

“Perhaps he is very patient, or perhaps I’m entirely wrong.” Qin Zhilu leaned his weight into An Yu’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “I will wait until tonight.”

An Yu asked, “And if the snowstorm still hasn’t grown stronger by then…”

“If it still hasn’t… I’m sorry, but you will see me slaughter the innocent.”

“Better to kill by mistake.” Qin Zhilu’s tone grew even heavier. “Because we cannot afford any loss.”

The snowstorm from outside whistled in, splashing against An Yu’s profile. He shivered in the cold. After a long time, his golden pupils narrowed in wind, and he nodded softly. “Fine. Then, Commander, let me do it.”

“No need.” Qin Zhilu’s cold fingers gently stroked the old scar behind An Yu’s ear.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered. “The year I was sixteen, I sensed the Genetic Entropy fluctuations in my father and mother. I purged them immediately.”

“I saw that in your memories,” An Yu said. “Later, it was confirmed they were indeed in a latent aberrant phase. General Qin Zheng’s entropy was 25, Lady Tang Ru’s was 20, and your sister’s, was only 12.”

“Mhm.”

The wind roared outside. Qin Zhilu’s voice behind An Yu grew even lighter, as if being carried away.

“But back then, I actually hadn’t detected anything wrong with Zhishi’s Genetic Entropy. 12, it was too early. No one could have detected it.”

“I just felt that she was highly likely to be in a latent aberrant phase. I bet that she had already mutated.”

An Yu’s back went rigid. He snapped his head around, only to see those eyes go completely dark, like a mournful and unfathomable black sea.

“I knew Zhishi. Becoming an aberrant would have caused her more pain than death. Her spirit would have been destroyed by it; she would loathe herself, and she would loathe me too.”

“So, that was also something I couldn’t afford to lose.”

“I would rather kill by mistake.”

Author’s Note:

Snowflake fragments
[Qin Zhilu (2/4)]
Cannot be Pure

No one wants to be tainted by sin.

No one wants to kill the innocent.

Everyone longs for a life of ease, but many times, there is no choice.

I once asked if I could walk with a pure heart.

Unfortunately, fate said: Impossible.