“Are you… acting spoiled?”

After the⁠⁠‌​​⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌⁠‌⁠​⁠ structural supports were detonated, the building collapsed into a pile of rebar and rubble in the blink of an eye.

The garrison was responsible for clearing the ground. The soil from twenty-seven years ago had long been corroded and ruined; they dug downward for over two hours before suddenly hitting an obstruction.

“It looks like ice! A massive block of it!” The soldier waved for help, and in a flash, the group pried up the final layer of the foundation.

Buried beneath the small building was a slab of solid ice, roughly the size of the house’s footprint, resembling a gargantuan ice coffin. The coffin was filled with a macabre, vibrant red; the colors slithered slowly through the ice as if possessed by a life of their own. As the fierce midday sun beat down, a faint golden halo refracted around the edges of the frozen structure.

“Human.” Qin Zhilu traced the contours of the ice in the air with his finger. “This is a human-shaped ice coffin.”

“This is what Colonel Disf was trying to hide. It really does look like that drawing; no wonder the Colonel went mad the moment he received it.” Jiang Xiao frowned in confusion. “But why exactly is this thing so terrifying? It—”

His words were abruptly cut off. Jiang Xiao’s red pupils trembled as he looked toward the edge of the coffin.

The soldier who had first unearthed it had crouched down without permission to tap on the ice. However, when his knuckles struck the surface, they made no sound. Before the eyes of the crowd, his flesh and bone began to deform rapidly upon contact. He didn’t even have time to cry out; within seconds, he merged into the ice layer like a fluid and vanished without a trace.

The soldiers’ faces turned ashen. An Yu looked up and noticed someone staring fixedly at the coffin, as if possessed.

A sudden jolt of intuition hit him. He shouted, “Don’t look directly at it!”

The others turned their heads in a daze, with slow reactions. But the man staring at the coffin remained oblivious. Just as the person beside him reached out to tap his shoulder, blood began to seep from every pore of his body. His frame fell stiffly forward onto the ice and was instantaneously swallowed.

A deathly silence fell.

The soldiers immediately averted their eyes. An older officer standing next to Kaos clamped a hand over the young man’s eyes and forced him to turn away, hissing a rebuke: “Don’t look! Didn’t you see what happened to him?”

Kaos stood rigid and shaking, tears streaming down into the officer’s palm. He hoarsely muttered, “My father… he couldn’t already be…”

“He wouldn’t be. Wasn’t this just dug up?” Sienna looked at him coldly. “Colonel Disf kept this horrific thing hidden for twenty-seven years; in a sense, he is like its master. He didn’t die by this thing twenty-seven years ago, and he certainly won’t now.”

As she mused, she forcefully stamped the snow off her boots. “I wonder how deep this thing goes, and if it’s connected to the mining plant through the bedrock.”

Kaos suddenly shoved the bystander away, glaring at her with bloodshot eyes. “What are you implying?!”

“It’s not an implication, it’s a logical deduction.” Sienna’s expression was placid. “If it connects to everything in District 99 through the deep underground, then your father has been siphoning the chaos of District 99 through this very thing.”

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In the split second before his point-to-point shift, he felt a chill at the small of his back, as if a hand had lifted his overcoat. In that moment, his nerves nearly exploded.

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Qin Zhilu retracted his short blade with a grim expression. The soldier who had tried to push An Yu into the ice coffin had already collapsed stiffly and been consumed.

Don't scrape

Don't copy

An Yu stared at the empty patch of ground where the man had stood moments ago, his breath coming in shallow gasps.

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Through the thin fabric of his clothes, the chill made An Yu shiver. But as Qin Zhilu gripped his coat, An Yu miraculously found himself calming down.

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His dark eyes swept over the others without a ripple of emotion. The other soldiers were deathly pale, every single one of them. It took a minute or two before someone finally reacted, ushering everyone back to stay far away from An Yu.

Don't scrape

Don't copy

“Yes, sir.”

Sienna let out a cold laugh. “The others can go back to the base, but Kaos can stay. After all, that’s Colonel Disf; unless he runs out of people in District 99, he probably wouldn’t have the heart to let his own son lead the charge to his death.”

Upon hearing this, Kaos’s recently calmed expression turned ferocious again. He yanked his service pistol from his waist and chambered a round, pointing it straight at Sienna. “You!”

“Enough!” His teammates blocked his gun. “We’ll do it that way. You stay and follow the Commanders. Keep in touch with the squad.”

Qin Zhilu had zero interest in intervening in the friction between him and Sienna. Having finished his instructions, he turned to leave. As they brushed past each other, An Yu whispered, “Commander, the Super-aberrant’s logic is a bit strange.”

The thousand-man siege at the factory hadn’t succeeded, yet this time the Super-aberrant used only one man to ambush them, sparing the other twenty-odd soldiers. This sequence of actions seemed like it was intentionally protecting someone in the garrison. But everyone knew Kaos was his child; even if he had only left Kaos behind just now, Kaos wouldn’t have been blamed for it.

An Yu suddenly looked back. His golden eyes swept over Kaos’s face. The young second lieutenant’s face was full of humiliation, glaring hatefully at Sienna.

“An Yu,” Qin Zhilu suddenly called him.

An Yu turned back quickly, only to see Qin Zhilu pulling up the sleeve of his left arm, revealing bandages soaked in fresh blood.

“I lost so much blood in the divination room that it dripped through the floorboards to the first floor, and it still hasn’t fully stopped.” Qin Zhilu’s expression was calm, as if he were discussing something as mundane as eating or sleeping. “Find a place to rest in a bit and help me re-apply the medicine and bandages.”

“Uh…” An Yu blinked, pointing at himself. “You want me to help you?”

Qin Zhilu stopped in his tracks. “Don’t want to?”

“No.” An Yu shook his head, bewildered. “It’s just that you’ve always handled your wounds yourself. Why suddenly…”

Qin Zhilu glanced at him expressionlessly.

“It hurts a little.”

An Yu was even more confused. He hurriedly looked away to hide the bafflement in his eyes, but his heart felt inexplicably troubled.

After a long while, he couldn’t help it; he turned back to look at Qin Zhilu. “Are you… acting spoiled?”

“Why would you think that?” Qin Zhilu arched an eyebrow, then shifted the tone. “Are you going to help or not?”

“I’ll help,” An Yu nodded quickly. “I’ll help…”

Qin Zhilu gave a snort of a laugh, finally letting it drop. He walked a few more steps, then glanced back casually. “If you won’t help, I’ll just call Kaos over. He’s not much for big feats, but he’d likely make a qualified orderly.”