In the Yuewan Mountain Range, inside that sky cage bound by heavy chains.
The monster maid was still working hard, chugging along with her duties. Lately, she had even taken on a side job as a cook. The cleaning up here was just too easy anyway, since the place barely gathered any dust.
But the six-winged angel seemed to have entered his shedding season. He shed tons of feathers every day. When she first saw it, her mouth fell wide open, her five hands twitching in panic. She was terrified that Lou Ting might end up completely bald at such a young age. She had even sneaked off to talk to Wen Yuxian about it, asking him if, as a maid, she should buy some hair-growth bath products for her shedding boss.
Wen Yuxian: …
Lou Ting: “Someone beloved by God like me would never have to deal with your pathetic problems. You should worry about whether your own boyfriend is going bald first.”
Zhang Simiao grumbled in her head. My puppy would never go bald!
“Pick up all my feathers and put them away carefully.”
And just like that, Zhang Simiao got another task added to her day: feather collector.
As she picked up the very last feather, ending her shift for the day, she was about to head to bed when she noticed her boss standing by the window, staring off in a certain direction.
Curious, she opened another hidden screen to look out. Far, far away, she could see dark, churning clouds that carried an ominous vibe.
What was that? It was too far to tell.
“She seems to be over there,” Lou Ting muttered under his breath.
“Hearing this, Zhang Simiao started waving her hands around.”
[Miss Long Jin should be working right now.]
They all knew that the undergraduates of the Twelve Zodiac Academy were required to assist the Tribunal Division in keeping the peace. Jing Pei often helped them out with cases.
“The enemy feels pretty dangerous,” Lou Ting added.
[But Miss Long Jin will definitely find a way.]
“That goes without saying. She has been blessed by God, possessing a unique, noble character that doesn’t need to be judged by me. Naturally, no filthy creature can touch her.” Despite his words, his brow furrowed, looking quite worried.
“Zhang Simiao quickly got alert and signed with her five hands: [You can’t sneak out again!]”
Last time he ran off, the old madam almost passed out from shock when she found out. Lou Ting’s mother, Lou Ningzhou, had rushed over in a panic. The way they treated it like a major disaster scared Zhang Simiao half to death. Only then did she realize what a massive uproar Lou Ting’s escape could cause. She had to keep a close eye on him; she couldn’t let this boss and savior of hers run wild again.
But Lou Ting paid her no attention. Suddenly, he felt a familiar, thrilling sensation. His gaze locked onto that distant direction. His God seemed to have descended right there, making his feathers flare in pure excitement.
“No… impossible! This is impossible! Madman! She’s an absolute madman, she’s definitely not normal… Yes, she’s sick, she’s a psychopath…”
“Qiao Ming’s eyes darted around as he shook all over. He refused to accept it. He had never seen anything like this in his life. It felt like everything he believed in shattered in an instant. Just by pointing one finger, Jing Pei had brought his whole world crashing down.”
His dark heart felt like it had been sliced open by a sharp blade, oozing foul, pitch-black blood.
Qiao Ming was born in a rural village. He had a frail, sickly older sister. His parents had poured everything they had into her, and Qiao Ming was only born to serve as a match for her medical treatments.
But their hopes were dashed. Qiao Ming turned out to be an very high-purity Siren Atavist. His body was packed with atavist cells, none of which his sister could ever use.
Unlike his sister, he was healthy but ugly. Because of his strong atavist blood, he was born with several mouths all over his body, covered in ugly scales and marks. Each mouth had sharp, razor-like teeth. When the villagers saw him out of curiosity, they all gasped in shock. ‘So scary, what kind of creature is that?’
“Is this really an atavist? He looks like a deformed baby. The atavists I see on TV don’t look like this at all.”
“I heard he’ll look better when he grows up.”
“Ugh, so disgusting. I’m leaving, I’m gonna throw up my dinner.”
The mouth on his neck was born with the ability to speak guiding words, easily coaxing his parents into giving him everything, completely ignoring his sister and anything else.
But since he was so young, this guiding voice couldn’t last very long. Once he got what he wanted, his parents would snap back to reality. And every time they woke up, their faces would look really dark.
When he was five, his mother was cooking. He was hungry, so the mouth on his neck called out to her. But that time, the kitchen caught fire. The entire house burned down, and his sister was burned to death in her bed.
His sister’s death took away whatever spirit his parents had left. It seemed they began to hate Qiao Ming, treating him like he was invisible, barely keeping him alive until he was old enough to be dumped at the Twelve Zodiac Academy. The villagers were also terrified of him, avoiding him like the plague whenever they saw him. Naturally, the kids refused to play with him, and some of the bolder ones even threw rocks at him from a distance.
“Monster! Go away!”
“He has black magic, he’ll steal our things! Stay away from him!”
He hated those children, envying them. So he used his ability to hypnotize their parents. From then on, those adults treated him like their actual son, giving him all the best things and all their love, while beating and cursing their real children. During that time, left neglected by their parents, those fragile children died one by one in various accidents.
Since his birth, he had never known what real love felt like. This fake affection was as addictive as a drug. Yet he never expected that when those adults woke up in the middle of the night and saw the bodies of their own children, the hatred they felt for him would be far thicker and more violent than that fake love.
So, one night while Qiao Ming was asleep, his parents opened the front door, letting the neighbors slip inside. A rope was thrown around his neck, and hands pinned his limbs down. He woke up gasping for air, staring into twisted, terrifying faces filled with pure hatred.
Qiao Ming felt like he had been living in a swamp since birth, with countless hands reaching out to hold him down. He never stopped hating. He hated his parents, his dead sister, every villager, the entire world, his own hideous face, and most of all, he hated that out of so many people, not a single person had ever reached out to pull him up.
Even though he could now perfectly control his atavist power, hiding those ugly mouths, scales, and markings, and ensuring those hypnotized by him would never wake up without his permission, his heart still bled foul, black blood whenever he recalled the past.
So he believed, like a religion, that no one in this world could ever walk away from a painful past. It was a wound that could never heal. Therefore, no matter how many people he killed, how many happy lives he ruined, or if he even destroyed the entire world, it was completely justified. The world owed him.
But Jing Pei’s existence proved him entirely wrong.
Even though he refused to believe it, the door to his room slowly creaked open.
Jing Pei strolled inside, step by step.
“You think reaching this room means you’ve won?!” Qiao Ming’s eyes were bloodshot. At this moment, his hatred and jealousy toward Jing Pei reached an absolute peak, as if she were a nemesis he had to destroy at all costs.
“So what if your mind is very strong?” Qiao Ming sneered as figures began squeezing out from the surrounding walls, surrounding Jing Pei. They were his ten squad members.
The “Despair Labyrinth” was an almost invincible ability, but because of what happened twenty years ago, Qiao Ming had still prepared a backup plan. He had gone to great lengths to find these squad members from all over the world, whose abilities could blend into his maze to act as his bodyguards.
During the activation of the Despair Labyrinth, all his atavist power was used to construct the maze and its stages. He couldn’t leave this room, leaving him with zero self-defense capabilities.
“I could kill you ten times, you weakling!’ Qiao Ming said with venom.”
His squad members were quite special. In the real world, their individual powers weren’t that great, but inside his maze, they underwent a massive transformation. Together with Qiao Ming, they formed a highly dependent, singular unit.
Outside the maze, Jing Pei hadn’t seemed particularly powerful. At most, her movements were tricky and unpredictable, which was the only reason she had managed to claw his face. But to Qiao Ming and his crew, that looked like she was simply lacking raw strength and had to rely on cheap tricks to catch him off guard. Real powerhouses didn’t need to overthink like that.
But Jing Pei didn’t show the panic Qiao Ming wanted. She merely smiled, untying the hair tie securing her glove, pulling off the bulky leather glove to reveal her fair, flawless hand.
“Wanna guess why I was wearing gloves?” Jing Pei stuffed the gloves into her pocket and winked. In an instant, her charming black eyes shifted into commanding, golden-green dragon pupils. At the same time, a dangerous aura, completely different from before, radiated from her body.
It was like a wild beast throwing off its muzzle.
Qiao Ming’s instincts screamed in panic.
The dark fog had completely enveloped the once-bright estate, erasing every bit of warmth and beauty from his memory, leaving only gloom and desolation.
Qiu Fa was covered in wounds. The solid illusion clones of the Qiu family surrounded him, striking without mercy, just as brave and powerful as he remembered.
These people were the most beautiful memories of his life. Born as the young heir of the Qiu family, he had been pampered by the entire clan, growing up surrounded by love.
How the massacre of the Qiu family happened, or what exactly went down, he had no memory of. That part of his brain felt like it had been completely snipped away. So, the only real pain he remembered was from his time in prison. The pampered young master had fallen from heaven to the mud overnight, beaten, kicked, and stepped on, forced to eat spoiled food and drink dirty water…
But none of those hardships compared to one single realization: he no longer had a home.
A single thought brought enough pain to drown out everything he suffered in prison, making those memories fade like ripples on water.
Just as Qiao Ming had guessed, even if they were only illusions, it was too difficult for him to strike them down.
But.
“Let’s end this,” Qiu Fa said, pain flashing in his eyes as he looked at them.
If this were the past, he might have actually died here from guilt, self-blame, and regret, just as Qiao Ming planned. But things were different now. The information broker had given him his answer. He knew from Yuan Qing that he wasn’t the one who killed his family. The blood and flesh beneath his fingernails were from his desperate attempt to save them.
He closed his eyes, no longer looking. As the illusions lunged at him again, he stopped holding back.
He killed the solid illusions one by one, watching them collapse to the ground. Soon, the remaining clones began using voices to mess with his head.
“Son! Son, what are you doing?”
“Xiao Fa, don’t do this! We’re your family!”
“Little Tiger…”
Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Before long, every single illusion was dead.
In the heavy, thick silence of the darkness, the woman on the ground opened her eyes, speaking softly with immense tenderness: “You’ve grown up.”
Qiu Fa’s fists clenched tight, his steps halting, but he didn’t look back. “I will find the killer, and they will pay in blood!”
The illusions shattered, vanishing into thin air. The fog swirled and gathered, forming a three-meter-tall black gatekeeper that reached its hand out toward him.
So what if Qiu Fa had killed those illusions? Since he had failed the clear conditions, the game’s gatekeeper wasn’t going to let him go.
“Let’s see if there really is an unbeatable demon in this world,” Qiu Fa muttered, his face cold as he directed all his built-up rage toward the gatekeeper.
But something strange happened. Every single attack he threw vanished the moment it made contact, just like when he had punched the walls of the maze earlier.
All his attacks failed, yet the gatekeeper’s strikes landed solidly on him. Just as the report said, this was an unbeatable demon because you couldn’t even touch it.
The chaos in Bubble 109 had woken up everyone who understood the gravity of tomorrow’s conference. Inside the organization’s meeting room, shareholders wearing various masks gathered, watching the live stream on the massive screen.
“Shi Gang lost!”
“What’s there to fear? We still have Qiao Ming. He’s way better than that brute Shi Gang.”
“Look, the hurricane wall is getting unstable. Qiu Fa is definitely going to lose!”
“Haha! We kept him around back then just for experiments, and look at him now, a tiger we raised to bite our own hands!”
“Don’t celebrate too early. I think it’s hard to tell. Qiu Fa’s atavist purity seems even higher than Qiao Ming’s. He’s a natural disaster among natural disasters.”
“No matter how the fight ends, we still win.”
Hearing this, they just looked at the countdown in the bottom left corner, the numbers ticking down.
10:01… 10:00… 09:59… 09:58…
Just ten minutes left before Bubble 109 would be torn from this giant glass globe. The tear would form a singularity, destroying everything inside. That was a force completely beyond human rescue; even the strongest atavist couldn’t stop it.
“But Qiao Ming is one of our major fighters. We’ve already lost Shi Gang; we can’t lose him too,” another major shareholder pointed out. Their attention had been glued to Shi Gang earlier, but now that they realized who Qiao Ming was, they knew he was even more dangerous.
Natural-disaster-level, high-purity atavists were very rare worldwide. The organization had spent years searching the globe just to gather ten squad captains. Shi Gang was already gone, and Qiao Ming’s magical-type abilities were very useful. Losing him would be a massive waste.
“Don’t worry, we’ve already thought of that. Just in case, the boss has sent people to retrieve Captain Qiao. If we could save him twenty years ago, we can do it again today,” the host said with a smile.
Inside the sealed room, Qiao Ming’s face was very pale. He and Jing Pei were now surrounded by a small hurricane wall. Inside the wall lay his squad members, sliced to pieces.
“When I saw them playing like this, I wanted to try it out. It’s really handy,” Jing Pei chuckled, blood dripping from her dragon claws.
“You… who on earth are you?” Qiao Ming backed away in terror, staring at her claws. What kind of creature did those belong to? He had never seen such an atavist, yet they looked vaguely familiar, as if he had seen them somewhere before.
“Take a guess,” Jing Pei stepped closer. She wasn’t worried about Qiao Ming figuring out she was a dragon, since he had no idea she was the information broker, and the chance of this reaching Qiu Fa’s ears was practically zero.
Of course, it was better if he didn’t know at all. Jing Pei had no intention of letting Qiao Ming leave this place alive.
With the shredding wind of the hurricane wall right behind him, Qiao Ming had nowhere to run. He never expected this woman to have been hiding her strength. Her power made him wonder if she was also an very high-purity atavist.
But he couldn’t just deactivate his ability and run. Because Qiu Fa had failed the hidden stage, his gatekeeper had to kill him for the game to officially end and for the ability to be recalled. This was a hard restriction of his power. He had never thought much of this restriction before, but today, meeting this woman, the grim reaper’s scythe was already resting on his neck.
“You think killing me means you win?!” To buy time, Qiao Ming began spilling everything: “What do you think we came here for? We’ve already set a bomb in Bubble 109. It’s about to be destroyed, and this country will face a massive earthquake! You’re with Qiu Fa, so you must be from the Tribunal Division too. If you don’t want to watch a hundred thousand people die, you’d better stop wasting time with me. Get out through the door you came in, and you can leave the maze!”
But the woman didn’t show a hint of panic. She kept walking toward him. “You think I don’t know that?”
“What?”
“Not only do I know you’re here to destroy Bubble 109, but I also know that machine doesn’t need three hours to do it anymore. Why else do you think I provoked you into opening the hidden stage?”
While clearing the stages with Qiu Fa, Jing Pei had figured out what was wrong.
Why did the researchers wait until the bubble was about to lock before entering to input instructions? Why did Qiao Ming stand by while Qiu Fa fought Shi Gang, only stepping in after Shi Gang died? And inside his ultimate move, why did he target her first? Was it really just because she clawed his face?
No. It was because he didn’t need to kill Qiu Fa to complete the mission. Why didn’t he need to? Because it wouldn’t take three hours for Bubble 109 to tear. All he had to do was stall for time. There was no need to take unnecessary risks. Whether Shi Gang lived or died didn’t matter.
So, the remaining time had to be very short.
In her original draft, she had written three hours, but now it had changed. Jing Pei had every reason to suspect that her rebellious plot had secretly meddled with the story.
The question was, how short had it become?
Qiao Ming suddenly snapped awake. He had been so blinded by rage that he forgot his main goal was to stall them, not fight them.
How much time was left?
He raised his arm without thinking to check his watch, which had a countdown timer. It showed 05:01.
Before he could think, his hand was suddenly severed, landing right in Jing Pei’s grasp.
Seeing the time, Jing Pei couldn’t help but swear in her head. Cutting three hours down to one and a half? You really outdid yourself! You’re trying to kill me!
Suffering from the agonizing pain of his severed hand, blood spraying everywhere, Qiao Ming realized he couldn’t escape. He spat fiercely, “With those hundred thousand people dying with me… No, once this happens, even more people will die. Having so many people die with me, my death won’t be in vain!”
“I’m sending you on your way right now!” Jing Pei grabbed his neck.
“Let me tell you, my maze will still exist even after I die! My gatekeeper is made of my obsession, and as long as my obsession lives, the maze will never disappear! You’ll never find the entrance to Bubble 109 in such a short time!” Qiao Ming laughed hysterically. “Go ahead and kill me! Hahaha—”
Suddenly, the maze shook violently, cutting his laughter short.
What… what the hell was happening now?!
“So that’s how it is,” Qiu Fa muttered, spitting out some blood and wiping his chin. He looked at the gatekeeper in front of him. “The more you’re attacked, the stronger you get, because you absorb other people’s atavist power for yourself. That’s the secret to why you’re unbeatable.”
“Since you love other people’s things so much,” Qiu Fa suddenly grinned, the blood on his face making him look wild and menacing, “then you can have all of it.”
In an instant, an overwhelming surge of atavist power exploded from his body, rushing toward the gatekeeper. Just like before, the gatekeeper greedily sucked all the incoming force into its body.
At the same time, the unstable hurricane wall moved. The massive wall began swirling like a vortex, rising into the sky before crashing down right onto the gatekeeper.
The thick black fog wrapping around the maze was blown wide open, surging outward like a massive tidal wave.
“This!”
“What’s going on in there…”
The people outside were stunned, raising their hands to block the biting wind and cold fog that made their hair and clothes fly wildly.
The atavist power poured into the gatekeeper like a vast, bottomless ocean. Its body grew larger and larger. At first, it absorbed the energy happily, but soon, its movements showed signs of pain. It began struggling, as if saying it couldn’t take any more, that it was about to burst and needed to stop.
Yet the atavist power continued to pour into its body without stopping.
“Ah…” The gatekeeper actually let out a cry of agony, and the entire maze began to shake and tremble, on the verge of collapsing.
“Madmen… you’re all madmen…” Realizing what was happening, Qiao Ming’s face turned very grim.
A smile played on Jing Pei’s lips. So reliable, Director Qiu.
She looked at Qiao Ming and suddenly said, “Qiao Ming, did you know? You actually once had the very thing you wanted most.”
Qiao Ming looked at her in despair and confusion.
“When you were born, you were hideous, and everyone found you disgusting, calling you a deformed baby. But someone held you and said: ‘He’s not deformed, he’s a treasure from heaven. He’s going to grow up to protect our country, and you’ll all be protected by him’;
“When your guiding voice made you eat all the food in the house, someone said: ‘He’s still small and doesn’t know any better, he just eats by instinct. Don’t blame him, I can just eat less, it won’t kill me’;
“In the winter, that person knitted a scarf for you. In the summer, they bought you ice cream, curiously feeding every single mouth you had…”
“Shut up, what nonsense are you talking about?!” Qiao Ming screamed in rage. “What do you know? How dare you make up—”
“But when you grew up, you only cared about how your parents favored her. You kept feeling bitter because you thought you were just born to cure her illness, and that her kindness was just showing off.”
Qiao Ming stiffened, suddenly losing his voice.
“And then, you intentionally watched the fire burn, letting her die in it.”
“You… you… you’re lying…”
“Even when she died, she was still worried about you.”
Qiao Ming’s body trembled violently. Even though he wanted to scream that she was lying, long-forgotten memories began flooding back out of control.
It seemed… there really had been someone like that. Someone who had held him tight when he was cold, carrying the faint, bitter scent of medicine, muttering in a soft, gentle voice. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but it made him feel so safe.
“No… impossible… impossible…” He forgot to struggle, tears streaming down his face, though whether from the choking grip or the memories, he didn’t know.
“Your eyes can only see the mud at your feet, never the hand reaching out to pull you up. What kind of salvation do you want? Go repent in hell.”
As Jing Pei snapped his neck, the gatekeeper’s body finally burst. With a long, agonizing roar, the Despair Labyrinth shattered like glass, completely vanishing.
