Chapter 155#

The Hunt 06#

“But Commander An Fei hasn’t recovered yet — I still wanted to say a few more words to him.” Bai Song said.

Windsor smiled and draped an arm around Bai Song’s shoulders, steering him away from the room. “It’s late. We really should be going,” Windsor said.

Murphy, however, showed no particular inclination to leave.

“Is there something being said that we aren’t allowed to hear?” Murphy said coldly, his gaze sweeping over the late-night desserts Yu Fei Chen had brought back as he spoke, as though suspecting poison had already been slipped into them.

“He rarely eats this sort of thing,” Murphy said.

After examining them one by one, Murphy slid a slice of cherry cake toward An Fei and said gently: “Try this one.”

An Fei said: “Thank you.”

His tone was refined and courteous, but he made no move to touch the cake. When the dessert plate was pushed to within close reach, he even shifted back almost imperceptibly, as though unwilling to have too much contact with people.

He was not so different from his usual self, and this set Murphy somewhat at ease.

But then Murphy noticed An Fei look toward Yu Fei Chen again.

Under An Fei’s gaze, Yu Fei Chen picked up the dessert plate, took up a silver fork, speared a piece, and held it to An Fei’s lips.

An Fei ate it obediently. The gentle curve of his lashes made plain his pleasure.

Murphy: “……?”

After the first piece came a second — every piece that Yu Fei Chen brought to his lips An Fei accepted without refusal, swallowing it down with quiet, unhurried composure.

Murphy watched An Fei in bewilderment. Could the resonance really have affected him so deeply that he had become a puppet, content to be handled at will?

With that thought, Murphy also speared a piece of pastry and held it out to An Fei.

Not only did An Fei not eat it — he tilted himself slightly toward Yu Fei Chen, as though the pastry on Murphy’s fork were poisoned.

“He won’t be able to finish everything,” Yu Fei Chen said. “You’re welcome to take a box home when you leave.”

Windsor and Bai Song, who had already left the room and were walking down the corridor, heard the door, turned back, and saw Cleric Murphy emerge from within — his bearing utterly crestfallen, thin lips pressed tight, eyes rimmed with red, as though he had just suffered some unspeakable humiliation.

There was a gift-boxed set of pastries in his hand.

Windsor said amiably: “Mr. Vincent, your painting is still inside.”

Murphy: “……There’s no particular reason to take it.”

“Well then,” Windsor ventured carefully: “Good night?”

Murphy’s figure swayed, teetering on the verge of collapse, and slowly receded into the distance.

Inside the room, An Fei was not merely being fed.

Occasionally, he would pass something he liked to Yu Fei Chen — and it was only in those moments that Yu Fei Chen became truly aware that this person did, in fact, have hands.

Outside the window, the inverted clock’s hour hand crept slowly past twelve. Through the intermittent good-night broadcasts, the fire at the distant department store grew gradually smaller, and the street lamps dimmed one by one. The thick darkness swallowed the city whole, and the hunt seemed to have reached a pause.

When Yu Fei Chen left the bedside to draw the curtains, An Fei seemed unsettled — his gaze followed Yu Fei Chen the entire way, until he returned to his side.

And so Yu Fei Chen understood: even though An Fei appeared to be in reasonably good condition at the moment, he was still standing at the boundary between resonance and reality. The chaotic scenes of the past surrounded him like an abyss, while the one truly real world felt instead like a fleeting illusion, here one moment and gone the next.

The lights were out. The only source of light in the room was a single candle on the bedside table, set in a weeping-angel candlestick.

In the dimness, it was as though everything beyond was shut out, and only two souls remained, facing each other.

Yu Fei Chen did not tell stories the way Murphy had, to try to stir this person’s awareness of reality.

He looked directly into An Fei’s eyes, the two of them close enough to touch.

Something in those frost-blue eyes seemed to dissolve, like a pool of still water giving way. In the darkness, An Fei embraced him again. The tips of his hair grazed the skin of his neck.

This kind of gesture was beyond what the chief god was capable of. Under the influence of the resonance, unable to distinguish reality from the past, his mind and awareness now more closely resembled his former self — not the chief god of the Eternal Day he had become afterward.

Yu Fei Chen said: “Are you in pain?”

An Fei shook his head.

A torment capable of shattering a person’s mind in a single second — he had endured it for days, and still did not find it painful. Yu Fei Chen said: “I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”

An Fei laughed softly.

“I was hiding from you.” The trailing syllable carried a faint, playful lilt.

Yu Fei Chen: “……”

He had known it.

Yu Fei Chen: “Why?”

“Everyone says…… that gods cannot be defeated.” An Fei said.

His voice was pressed so low it was like a snowflake dissolving at the tip of a branch — no one but the person directly before him could have caught it.

“I didn’t want…… to let you all see.”

Before believers and subjects, a god must always be powerful. Always merciful.

Yu Fei Chen: “And you didn’t want me to see, either?”

An Fei laughed again.

“I’m not afraid.” He said near Yu Fei Chen’s ear: “I knew you would find me.”

Yu Fei Chen’s fingers threaded through soft strands of hair. He closed his hand around them, like cupping a handful of moonlight.

In the silence, he suddenly asked: “How long have we known each other?”

An Fei startled. Within the vacant drift of his expression, a glimmer of clarity finally surfaced. He blinked slowly.

“A very long time.”

In the end, his answer was as indistinct as ever — indistinct as a sigh.

Yu Fei Chen was quiet for a long time.

The candle burned on in silence. The drifting, fragmented state settled over An Fei once more.

An Fei said: “Xiao Yu.”

Yu Fei Chen: “Mm.”

“Xiao Yu.” An Fei said slowly: “In the beginning, I was very sad.”

“I could no longer turn back — but whether what I was doing was right or wrong, there was no one left in the world who could tell me.”

Yu Fei Chen listened to every word. He knew that An Fei was speaking of those blood-soaked roads he had walked at the very beginning of becoming a god.

“At the beginning, when the world had just come into being, I didn’t know how to use those powers — and those powers didn’t heed my commands, either.” He closed his eyes against Yu Fei Chen’s shoulder.

“In those days, I merged myself completely with them.”

“When someone among my people grieved or suffered, that suffering would also occur within my heart. When someone was hurt, the same sensation would appear in my body. This was my curse, and I knew it.”

“But,” his voice dropped until it was barely continuous, “it hurt so much, Xiao Yu.”

“But…… it doesn’t matter, I’m used to it now.”

“And besides, you came to find me.”

“I am not in pain.”

He was still answering Yu Fei Chen’s first question — are you in pain?

Yu Fei Chen turned his face toward him. In the candlelight, he saw that above the faintly reddened rims of those eyes, a single tear seemed to merge with the teardrop mole before rolling slowly down An Fei’s calm face.

He said he was not in pain.

But his tears were saying: why did it take you so long to find me.

At the moment their gazes met, An Fei’s voice finally began to tremble.

“It’s been so long……”

You were gone, for so long.

So long that I even forgot how to grieve.

Yu Fei Chen wiped those tears away, like lifting shattered crystal from a tangle of thorns.

But once outside his embrace, no form of touch could make An Fei feel safe. In the darkness, his body pressed closer, his fingers groping blindly across Yu Fei Chen, pulling him near — like a drowning person seizing the only thing that floats.

“Xiao Yu……” His restless breath fell against Yu Fei Chen’s ear, on the very edge of breaking apart and being lost.

Yu Fei Chen did not know who, exactly, An Fei was calling out to.

He did not know, either, whether he himself had ever forgotten something.

But in the moment An Fei’s tears fell, he knew that his heart had long since been bound in heavy chains — chains branded with an eternal name, belonging to the one and only god of this world.

He gripped An Fei’s shoulders with the force An Fei had silently asked for — as though he intended to crush them.

Then he pressed him back against the soft leather headboard and leaned in close.

An Fei sank into it, and looked up at him with a faint, hazy confusion.

He received only a familiar voice asking a question in a cold, flat tone.

“Was it always like this?”

An Fei had no idea what this person meant. He wanted to ask — and the next instant was swallowed by a kiss, boundless and prolonged and desperate, that drowned out everything.

As though there were no more reality. No more illusion.

In the eternal night, in the fog, there was nothing at all.

Only the two of them.

When closeness reached its limit, destruction seemed the only way forward.

Only by grinding body and soul alike into fragments smaller than dust — only when those fragments mixed together, no longer distinct from each other — could eternal stillness be found.

If there were any method in this world capable of achieving that, Yu Fei Chen was certain he would pursue it.

At the final moment, he pressed his hand hard over An Fei’s mouth and nose, blocking out every last trace of air.

An Fei was crying. His body shook violently in Yu Fei Chen’s hold; he strained with all his strength to push that arm away, yet could not move it even a fraction.

At last every ounce of strength left him. His soul was flung skyward; even his life seemed to be drawn out of him — complete blankness, complete terror.

——And also complete rebirth.

Clean and empty.

The moment Yu Fei Chen let go, An Fei was soaked through, gasping in great heaving breaths, his body convulsing in waves, unable even to curl his fingers and grasp hold of anything.

Yu Fei Chen watched An Fei. In the dim light, a bead of sweat surfaced and traced down into the defined lines of his chest. In the instant An Fei had been suffocating, his own heart had been pounding wildly too — as though he had walked alongside him through it.

When An Fei’s breathing had finally settled somewhat, consciousness trickling back, his first words were: “You——”

His voice was desperately faint, his tone desperately terrible. After that single word, he stopped speaking, reached for the blanket beside him, and pulled it over his own face.

That he hadn’t drawn a blade and killed someone — Yu Fei Chen felt An Fei’s temper really was something else…… admirable.

Though that gesture made it perfectly clear: Don’t let me see your face again.

The sky had begun to lighten. Dawn threaded a hairline of pale light through the gap in the curtains. The bedside lamp clicked on, and the scene that met the eye was one of complete disarray.

Ten minutes later, An Fei finally sat up, swaying, and leaned back against the headboard.

Beside him was an iced fruit juice with a glass straw, though he no longer had the strength even to drink — he held it in his hand, using it to cool down.

Yu Fei Chen passed him a silk dressing gown to drape over his shoulders, which covered over, at least partially, the evidence of everything.

——Though his own state was not particularly better.

Yu Fei Chen: “Back with us?”

If even this level of sensation could not restore the feeling of the real world, there was perhaps nothing in existence that could bring An Fei back. Pain, despair, danger — those things he had long since made peace with.

An Fei answered by setting down his glass with a heavy thud. The bottom of the cup struck the wooden tabletop with a crisp crack.

That he hadn’t thrown it at him was already beyond Yu Fei Chen’s expectations.

Yu Fei Chen reached out and waved a hand in front of An Fei’s eyes.

An Fei looked back at him, unhurried and cool.

“How do you feel right now?”

An Fei did not answer.

That’s a problem.

He still didn’t seem to have fully come back.