Chapter 10 – Parting Ways

The fish-scale necklace was far too crudely made, cheap, and simple. One glance was enough to tell that it couldn’t possibly belong to Ning Weichen.

The three people present were rendered speechless, all of them completely baffled by the situation.

How were they supposed to believe that the heir to a global financial conglomerate would steal something? Yet the necklace really was hanging around his neck.

When Butler Li entered the conference room holding a sheet of paper, this was the stalemate that greeted him. His eyebrow twitched uncontrollably.

Ye Sheng wasn’t accustomed to being too close to others, but whenever he came into contact with Ning Weichen, the distance between them somehow always crossed the boundary he had established for his own safety.

He looked away and released the necklace, intending to return to his seat.

But as he withdrew his hand, Ning Weichen gently caught his wrist.

“Then name your price.” The accused gave him a flawless smile.

Ning Weichen maintained his posture with one hand supporting his chin, the corners of his lips curved into an inscrutable smile.

“I like this necklace very much, sir. Let’s settle this privately. Name your price. A few million?”

Ye Sheng: “……”

Ye Sheng, who had been tormented by poverty since childhood: “…………”

He had to admit that, for a moment, he was actually tempted. He could barely hold on to his anger.

Ning Weichen tapped Ye Sheng’s wrist bone in a flirtatious, intimate manner. After watching him for a moment, he suddenly blinked and spoke softly, acting cute.

“I’m sorry. Don’t be angry. I was only joking just now.”

Perhaps the offer of several million had left Ye Sheng dazed, because when he saw Ning Weichen behaving so sweetly, he actually thought he looked rather attractive.

That was probably the power of money.

Ning Weichen leisurely pried Ye Sheng’s fingers open. Still wearing that obedient smile, he leaned closer. In an instant, a crisp, cold, decadent fragrance enveloped Ye Sheng, leaving him nowhere to escape.

His breath brushed Ye Sheng’s cheek like a caress. With his lips against Ye Sheng’s ear, he spoke loudly enough for the entire conference room to hear.

“Besides, isn’t calling us friends a little too distant? Gege, you’re my…”

There was no discernible emotion in the words he enunciated one at a time, his voice cool and callous.

“…partner in crime.”

“……”

Before Ye Sheng could push him away with an expressionless face, Ning Weichen had already released his hand decisively and settled elegantly back into his seat.

“My apologies. A personal dispute between this gentleman and me delayed us for a moment.” Ning Weichen smiled brightly and looked toward the three people opposite him, his tone casual.

“Continue.”

“I took him into Carriage 44. What happened next?”

Xu Qing clearly didn’t want to deal with Ning Weichen. He replied stiffly, “The next question is for Mr. Ye.”

Ning Weichen smiled faintly. “Oh. It seems it isn’t my turn to be questioned yet.”

Xu Qing returned his gaze to Ye Sheng.

“We questioned the people in Carriage 17. You left alone at eleven that night. Where did you go?”

“To look for something.”

“What?”

“I had forgotten something there.”

Xu Qing’s tone grew harsher. “What did you forget?!”

Ye Sheng frowned slightly.

At that moment, Butler Li approached with the paper and a pen. Bending down, he handed them to Ning Weichen and said gently, “Young Master, your private physician, Mr. Andrew, has just sent me a questionnaire regarding your physical condition. He needs you to complete it and return it to him now.”

Expressionless, Ning Weichen accepted the pen and questionnaire and began filling it out right there in the conference room. Leaning back in his chair, he held the pen between his long, pale fingers and lowered his eyes, rapidly checking boxes and writing answers as he skimmed through the questionnaire.

Beside Ye Sheng came the soft scratching of Ning Weichen’s pen against the paper. His handwriting was sharp and swift, making it obvious that he was in a bad mood.

Everyone in the conference room was now looking at Ye Sheng.

The baby-faced young man, Cheng Fa, Xu Qing, and Butler Li, whose gaze held a deeper significance.

Strictly speaking, the Bureau of the Unnatural wasn’t a government agency. It belonged to a global organization. Mysterious, unusual, cold, and merciless, its officers enforced the law without any concern for the opinions of ordinary citizens. They were, to some degree, lacking in human compassion.

Xu Qing said, “Ye Sheng, what exactly happened on the night of the twenty-seventh?”

Ye Sheng’s impatience grew increasingly severe.

He rapidly analyzed the situation. If he honestly told them about encountering Fetus Girl in the mirror, it would inevitably implicate everything that happened afterward, including the talismans, the app on his phone, and Corpse Stitcher’s needle.

Even if he found flawless explanations for all of those things, a single question such as, “Why were you so calm when you encountered an aberration?” would leave him speechless and draw the Bureau of the Unnatural’s attention.

In this supernatural incident, he had to behave like a normal person.

But how should a normal person behave right now?

Break down, cry, panic, and speak incoherently?

He couldn’t do it.

He had no acting ability whatsoever.

Ye Sheng bit his lip.

It was something he liked to do whenever he felt irritated.

Perhaps he had been wrong from the very beginning.

Xu Qing noticed Ye Sheng’s unease, and his eyes grew colder.

“Ye Sheng, you are now involved in an extremely serious aberration incident. If you refuse to answer truthfully or attempt to conceal the facts, we will arrest you on behalf of the global organization.”

Ye Sheng quickly organized the sequence of events in his mind. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and said indifferently, “On the night of the twenty-seventh, I went to Carriage 44 to look for something. Then I heard a baby crying. Soon afterward, a monster stitched together from human organs ran out of the restroom and tried to kill me. The restroom door was open, and I watched a female ghost stitch a ghost infant into her stomach. Once the infant was sewn inside, the crying stopped, and the monster outside suddenly stopped moving. That was how I survived. After that…”

His tongue stiffened.

“Ning Weichen arrived.”

He pictured the scene between them in his mind and continued impassively.

“He demanded to know what had happened, but I was too frightened to speak. Then all of you arrived.”

Ye Sheng raised his head, his pitch-black eyes like glass beads submerged in water.

“Officer Xu, the thing I went to Carriage 44 to retrieve on the night of the twenty-seventh was that necklace. The fish-scale necklace.”

Yes.

That was everything that had happened to him on the night of the twenty-seventh, from beginning to end, cause and consequence alike.

Xu Qing frowned deeply and stared fixedly at him.

“Ye Sheng, was this your first encounter with an unnatural situation?”

Just as expected…

Suppressing the hostility inside him, Ye Sheng was about to answer when a sharp pain suddenly tore through his throat. His mouth and throat had already been injured when he swallowed the younger sister, and that long explanation must have aggravated the wounds.

The metallic sweetness of blood immediately filled his mouth. The searing pain made Ye Sheng’s already pale face turn even whiter.

Xu Qing’s eyes abruptly sharpened.

During their investigations of aberration incidents, virtually no “ordinary person” who remained calm in the midst of disaster turned out to be an innocent victim.

That was especially true when the incident involved Master Storyteller, the aberrant and unpredictable ruler of the Seventh Category in the Empire of Monsters. Even more absurdly, a C-level aberration had killed an A-level aberration in Carriage 44, something that should have been impossible.

The circumstances surrounding this young man’s involvement were especially strange.

Xu Qing raised his voice, which brimmed with cold fury.

“Ye Sheng! I’m giving you one final opportunity! If you continue lying, we will—”

Tap.

Ning Weichen suddenly set down his fountain pen. It was unclear whether he had finished the questionnaire or simply no longer intended to complete it.

The sound wasn’t loud, yet Xu Qing’s words stopped abruptly.

The entire conference room fell silent.

Ye Sheng lowered his head, his brows tightly furrowed. His mouth was full of blood, and the scorching pain in his throat cut so deeply that he couldn’t utter a single word.

Ning Weichen casually handed the paper to Butler Li, who was waiting beside him. Then he looked up and gave Xu Qing an elegant, appropriate smile.

“Everything he said is true.”

Everyone stared at him in astonishment.

Ning Weichen smiled pleasantly, possessing a bewitching brilliance beneath the lights.

“Gentlemen, I was also involved in what happened on the night of the twenty-seventh, and Deformed Fetus was originally my mission. Why not ask me directly?”

Cheng Fa, who sat in the center, finally moved. He passed the documents in his hand across the long table to Ning Weichen.

“This is the information the General Bureau has obtained regarding Deformed Fetus. Young Master Ning may review it first.”

Ning Weichen raised an eyebrow, accepted the documents, and began reading through them at extraordinary speed.

Cheng Fa said, “After you reported the mission’s failure on June 24, the General Bureau responded immediately and began tracking Deformed Fetus’s presence throughout Yin Mountain. However, we failed to locate it.”

“Under normal circumstances, the supernatural fluctuation level of an A-level aberration should be extremely high. The only possible reason Tianshu was unable to detect it is that Deformed Fetus’s power had been divided.”

“Deformed Fetus belongs to the Seventh Category. We suspect this was Master Storyteller’s work.”

“Master Storyteller’s ability is the Postscript: ‘Urban Legends Become Reality.’ We believe that, in order to smuggle Deformed Fetus away without detection by Tianshu, Master Storyteller divided its power and reduced its supernatural fluctuation level before it was born.”

The baby-faced young man, who had remained silent on the right, turned his computer screen toward Ning Weichen and continued.

“Thanks to your assistance, Mr. Andrew contacted us on the night of the twenty-fifth. That allowed us to successfully apprehend the smuggler and Deformed Fetus in Carriage 44.”

“We discovered that the smuggler was Li Jianyang, a wanted murderer with no previous history of contact with aberrations. On his phone, we found the ‘forum’ and confirmed that the transaction had taken place within the Empire of Monsters. Unfortunately, by the time we discovered it, the entrance to the Empire of Monsters had already disappeared without a trace.”

The baby-faced young man opened another image. It showed an infant girl lying inside a transparent rectangular container. Her entire body was red and wrinkled, and she appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

He pressed his lips together and said with some embarrassment, “We apologize. Due to our negligence, Deformed Fetus escaped through a train window while being transported back to the Bureau of the Unnatural.”

“After that, the General Bureau detected Master Storyteller’s presence, and we were immediately deployed.”

“You were involved in the incident last night, so I would like to ask…”

He directly voiced the strangest and most inexplicable question from the previous night.

“Do you know why Deformed Fetus appeared inside Corpse Stitcher’s stomach?”

Both Cheng Fa and the baby-faced young man spoke quietly, their seriousness tinged with respect.

Although their organization answered to the world rather than any one country, they remained constrained and deferential in Ning Weichen’s presence.

Ye Sheng could no longer clearly hear what they were saying. His ears were ringing, and the pain made his entire body tremble. Cold sweat seeped from his skin. After he forcibly swallowed the blood in his throat, a strange sensation also spread through his abdomen.

After listening to them, Ning Weichen turned his head.

“Butler Li.”

Butler Li stepped forward. “Young Master.”

“Take him downstairs first.”

Ning Weichen didn’t specify whom he meant, but everyone present understood.

Butler Li smiled. “Of course.”

He walked courteously to Ye Sheng and bent down with a benevolent smile.

“Sir, you aren’t feeling well. Let us go downstairs so you can rest.”

His voice was thoughtful and kind, like that of a caring elder.

Ye Sheng didn’t want to remain there anyway. Suppressing his discomfort, he forced himself to stand and walked out.

From the moment Ye Sheng stood until he left and closed the conference-room door, Ning Weichen never once looked back.

He set down the documents. Beneath his black hair, his eyes were distant and his profile cold. As the Ning family’s heir, he seemed born to command absolute control over any negotiating table.

Once the door closed, Ning Weichen ran his tongue over his teeth. His peach-blossom eyes curved with amusement as he looked at the three people opposite him, his crimson lips lifting into a smile.

He said:

“Yes, I know. I did it.”

***

“Sir, please drink some water.”

Ye Sheng sat on the reception-room sofa while Butler Li gently offered him a cup of water.

Ye Sheng pressed his lips together. Some of the blood in his mouth had seeped out and stained his lower lip red, lending his cold face an eerily beautiful quality.

He regarded Butler Li warily and made no move to drink.

Butler Li’s gaze remained as benevolent as though he were speaking to a younger member of his own family.

“Sir, you don’t need to be nervous. The young master instructed me to bring you downstairs so that I could treat your injuries. There is medicine in the water. You will feel better after drinking it.”

Hostility, suspicion, distrust of kindness, and the infinite magnification of malice had been carved into Ye Sheng’s soul.

He knew those instincts were wrong and that he needed to change them. But he felt far too ill to restrain himself now, and none of the cold sharpness left his eyes.

Butler Li sighed.

“Sir, please don’t make this difficult for me. If I truly intended to harm you, I wouldn’t need to use such a troublesome method.”

Only then did Ye Sheng lower his gaze and accept the paper cup. Expressionless, he drained it in one gulp.

The warm water really did seem to contain medicine, something that definitely couldn’t be purchased on the market. The cooling liquid gradually soothed the tearing pain in his throat.

His stomach still felt uncomfortable, but it was bearable now.

“You should take a shower,” Butler Li said. “Injuries caused by aberrations are unusual and can carry traces of corrupt matter. Washing yourself may help you feel better.”

Ye Sheng couldn’t be bothered to explain that his injuries were in his throat and inside his body.

But he was genuinely exhausted and didn’t want to remain with Ning Weichen’s smiling tiger of a butler. Taking a shower was preferable to talking to the old man.

He stood and followed Butler Li into the adjacent bathroom.

After turning on the shower, Ye Sheng allowed ice-cold water to pour over his head.

He wasn’t particularly afraid of pain.

In fact, whenever pain became intense enough to interfere with his ability to think calmly, he was accustomed to using even greater pain to regain his composure.

Cold water streamed over his eyelashes, nose, lips, and chin. It washed away the blood on his body and the exhaustion of the entire journey.

Before long, Ye Sheng turned off the shower and punched the wall.

He thought:

His peaceful life was gone.

Ye Sheng remained standing in the bathroom for a long time.

Eventually, Butler Li knocked on the door.

“Sir, I’ve prepared some clothes for you. I’ll leave them outside.”

After speaking, he left.

Ye Sheng brought the clothes inside. It was a lightweight, pale-brown, long-sleeved shirt. After changing, he casually rubbed his hair with a towel and walked out.

He had spent approximately half an hour in the bathroom. When he returned to the reception room, Ning Weichen had already left the conference room and was sitting on the sofa.

Ye Sheng: “……”

Ye Sheng didn’t feel like speaking.

Ignoring Ning Weichen, he went to pour himself some water because he was thirsty.

The expensive, fitted pale-brown shirt made the young man’s skin appear even paler. When he bent down, it revealed the taut line of his waist, while his black trousers emphasized the perfection of his proportions.

However, the intense hostility and world-weariness surrounding him ruined the outfit’s gentleness.

As Ye Sheng drank, Ning Weichen’s cool voice reached him.

“Don’t you have anything you want to say to me?”

Ye Sheng’s lips twitched as he turned around, cup in hand.

Ning Weichen chuckled and rose from the sofa. He was slightly taller than Ye Sheng, making his presence intensely oppressive.

But Ye Sheng didn’t so much as flinch as he held Ning Weichen’s gaze.

If he had known that boarding Train 1444 would involve this much trouble, he would rather have walked the entire impossible distance from Yin Mountain to Huai City than set foot aboard that damned train.

Ning Weichen watched him calmly for a moment before saying, “Let’s go.”

Ye Sheng: “???”

Without looking back, Ning Weichen headed outside.

“Come.”

Ye Sheng followed him out in confusion. Butler Li was already waiting outside with his suitcase.

Ye Sheng glanced around but didn’t see a single person from the Bureau of the Unnatural.

Beyond the reception center was a broad street dotted with streetlights.

An obviously expensive car was parked along the roadside, with someone resembling a bodyguard waiting beside its door.

Ye Sheng stood in the middle of the road with his suitcase like a sleepwalker, utterly bewildered.

That was it?

“The Bureau of the Unnatural won’t contact you again,” Ning Weichen said indifferently.

Ye Sheng frowned and looked up.

“Give me the train ticket.”

Ye Sheng froze, then immediately understood what he meant. He took out the ticket Ning Weichen had given him, the one bearing Ning Weichen’s contact information.

Ning Weichen accepted the ticket and held it between two fingers, a faint, unreadable smile crossing his face.

Tall and slender, his features were bathed in the moon’s pale, indifferent light. His fingers traced the line of numbers as he calmly said, “My actual contact information is protected by several layers of encryption. These numbers only worked while we were aboard the train.”

“Once we got off, there was never supposed to be any further contact between us.”

Ye Sheng said nothing.

Beneath Huai City’s hazy midnight lights and moonlight, Ning Weichen raised the ticket and lightly touched it to his lips.

There was something uniquely intimate about everything he did. Even now, the gesture resembled a lingering farewell kiss as his inscrutable peach-blossom eyes remained fixed on Ye Sheng.

“Why do I like you so much, Ye Sheng?”

Ning Weichen bent closer and chuckled softly.

“You’re the first person who’s ever made me angry without paying a price for it.”

He tore the ticket apart and leaned close to Ye Sheng’s ear. His thin lips remained tightly pressed together for a long moment before finally curving into a smile. His voice was soft and gentle.

“Baby, now I can truly congratulate you.”

“I hope you enjoy university.”

With that, Ning Weichen turned away without the slightest hesitation. He crossed the steps on his long legs and walked toward the car.

Butler Li and the bodyguard were already standing beside it, holding the rear door open for him.

Ning Weichen’s behavior left Ye Sheng somewhat dazed, but he vaguely understood what he meant—

The Bureau of the Unnatural wouldn’t contact him.

Ning Weichen wouldn’t see him again either.

Every derailed, unstable, and chaotic event would disappear from his life.

His life would continue according to plan. Nothing would change.

He had thought he was trapped with no way out, only for another path to suddenly open before him?!

The cold wind cleared his mind. Gripping the handle of his suitcase, Ye Sheng breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, as though compelled by some unseen force, he spoke.

Perhaps this was the first time he had called Ning Weichen’s name so calmly, without any emotion whatsoever.

“Ning Weichen.”

Ye Sheng raised his head, the stars, moonlight, and cold wind tangling within his dark eyes.

“Did we know each other before?”

It wasn’t a question. He already knew the answer.

Ning Weichen’s hand rested on the car door. His body stilled. Upon hearing Ye Sheng’s words, his adam’s apple moved before he chuckled softly.

“Yes. We did.”

The night wind carried his final words toward Ye Sheng.

“The next time we meet, I’ll tell you what our relationship used to be.”

The car door closed.

“If there is a next time.”