With his hands tucked into the pockets of his trench coat, Yaxiu looked out toward the skyline swallowed by the steel jungle. The bare branches, stripped of their withered leaves, hung heavy with snow.
Up ahead stood a bookstore. Yaxiu cast a glance toward it, his gaze lingering on a poster for a moment.
In the poster, an enigmatic figure dressed in dark gothic attire sat poised on a high stool. With head lowered and hands grasping a chain, the figure's age and gender were impossible to discern. Behind her sat hundreds of spectral giants perched on spiky benches, their bodies festering and their expressions filled with terror. Without exception, manacles bound both their hands and feet, and the chains from every pair of restraints converged into one, linking directly to the chain held in the mysterious figure's hands.
*Spectre Manual*: In this world, there is always unprovoked evil, and always demons who turn against the righteous path.
Yaxiu looked away, thinking that this surprisingly suited Weixi's true persona. After all, she really did possess the Soul Lock God.
*Weixi is an evil person, a demon draped in human skin,* he repeated silently to himself.
Having lost a quarter of his mind, Yaxiu vaguely sensed that he was missing a great deal of his memories, and everything concerning Weixi had been erased entirely.
He had forgotten everything about her; every trace of her in his mind was deleted. Even though Yaxiu had noticed the baffling gaps in his recollection, he had no way to fit Weixi into those damaged fragments... nor did he know what role she had actually played in his past.
Yet he couldn't speak of it. If word got out that he had sold a quarter of his mind in Hell, the Sword Princess and the others would never allow him to keep taking risks in the Six Hells. He actually knew the girls hadn't truly bought his claims; at the very least, they certainly didn't believe that scavenging in Hell carried zero risk.
It was only because Yaxiu insisted on putting on a brave face, and appeared unharmed on the surface, that they were willing to humor him.
Fortunately, he was the only one who could enter Hell, and fortunately, what he had sold was his intangible mind. Otherwise, Yaxiu wouldn't be the only one fretting over this.
It wasn't that Yaxiu didn't want to rely on the girls—aside from the transaction involving his mind, he had told them nearly the entire truth. But for matters where they were fated to be helpless, what point was there in speaking up, other than needlessly adding to their self-blame and worry?
Venturing into the Six Hells was unavoidable, and selling off a piece of his mind in a moment of crisis had been the only choice. Besides seething at their own powerlessness in reality, what else could the girls do?
Back in the Cage of All Stars, on the night he chased that speeding train, Yaxiu had chewed over those four words—powerless to do anything—time and time again... If he could truly lean on them, Yaxiu would never sacrifice himself alone just to wallow in self-pity; he had no love for melodrama. But if the burden couldn't be shared, the anguish ought to belong to him alone. After all, he couldn't very well risk his life in the Six Hells only to come back to reality and have to soothe the emotions of the Sword Princess and the others, could he?
Yaxiu felt like a terminally ill patient: going to Hell was joining Dead Frenzy to fight the disease, while returning to reality was relying on the Sword Princess and the others to nurse his body and mind.
Yet compared to selling a quarter of his mind, Weixi was the true source of Yaxiu's current distress.
With his knowledge of Weixi reduced to a blank slate, Yaxiu had no choice but to drop subtle hints and probe others about her. Besides the Sword Princess, he had also secretly questioned the Witch and Silver Lantern over the past two days, but the attitude among the three was surprisingly unanimous.
Exploiting the Spectre Prophet was fine.
Toying with the demon maid was fine too.
But trusting Weixi was absolutely out of the question.
The Witch had used the Gospel God to help Yaxiu search Weixi's past records. Even though it was merely the tip of the iceberg extracted from the *Spectre Manual*, the atrocities detailed within were shocking enough.
"Slaughtering the living to refine souls" was Weixi's path of cultivation, as well as her most heinous crime. Even the most wretched necromancer merely killed people for their corpses, whereas Weixi not only annihilated her enemies, but also refined their souls, harnessing the desperate energy that erupted from their agony as casting materials. Not only were the dead souls unable to return to Hell, they could not find release even after being tortured to the very end.
To borrow a famous line from the *Spectre Manual*: *Death is not the end of despair, but the beginning of a nightmare.*
Silver Lantern hadn't told Yaxiu much. She had only mentioned a minor detail in a quiet moment of intimacy between them: though the apocalypse of Senluo and her own sacrifice were primarily due to the three gods—White Dove, Fire Cat, and Blue Bird—that didn't stop her from feeling utter revulsion toward Weixi.
She couldn't blame the three gods for seeking Senluo's destruction out of pure despair, but Weixi had come solely out of selfish desire to seize the gods. Not only had that demon spurred the arrival of doomsday, she had nearly killed the two of them on the eighteenth floor of the Silent Spiral!
Were it not for Yaxiu's absolute control over Weixi, coupled with Weixi's immense value and the immense help she had provided him—if even one of those three conditions had been missing, Silver Lantern would never have allowed Weixi to go on living.
"I don't mind serving you together with her," Weise had said in a soft, sweet voice last night, cradling Yaxiu in her arms.
Of course, Weixi wasn't made entirely of evil deeds, or else she wouldn't have been allowed to stay by their side. At least during the period when Yaxiu dominated her, Weixi had indeed aided him considerably—such as dealing with the Hell secret poison, formulating the plan to break through the Cage of All Stars, and assisting with the demigod promotion ceremony... Her experiences sharing life and death with him were no fewer than those of his other operators.
That was why Yaxiu felt so downcast.
The way to manage Weixi was simple: treat her purely as a dangerous tool. Use her when needed, destroy her when she was of no use, and remember that any feelings directed toward her would become a vulnerability she could use to corrode her shackles... She wasn't human; she was a heartless natural disaster, a chaotic demon, a synonym for cruelty.
One could tell from the attitude of the others that Yaxiu had managed Weixi in the exact same manner before: a wariness mingled with fear, treading with meticulous caution while harboring the resolve to perish together if necessary. There were people in this world who, the more you understood them, the stronger your urge to kill them grew.
And yet, Yaxiu had lost those memories.
Vigilance, apprehension, deathly resolve—all those complicated emotions had been bundled up with his memories and sold to Dead Frenzy. In Yaxiu's heart, only a single, simple emotion remained—one he was unwilling to admit, yet utterly helpless against.
In front of the traffic light, Yaxiu let out a quiet sigh, exhaling a puff of white mist as he crossed the street alongside the flow of pedestrians.
Across the street on the sidewalk was an open-air cafe. Yaxiu glanced at it, immediately raising an eyebrow, and walked over to greet the person sitting there. "What are you doing here?"
Felix held a cup of hot coffee in her hands, sipping it in tiny gulps, but it still seemed too hot, and she couldn't help sticking out her tongue to blow on it. Looking up at Yaxiu, she said, "Slacking off. Didn't feel like walking anymore."
"Did your route take you past here too?"
"Yeah." Felix pulled a map from her navy blue trench coat, looked at it, and said, "See? My search zone overlaps with yours right here."
Yaxiu nodded, then gazed out at the traffic weaving through the wind and snow, lost in thought. Felix paid him no heed either. Her nose twitched as she caught the scent of baked goods wafting from inside the cafe. Looking around, she raised a hand and called out, "One molten lava cake, please."
"Do they have sweet drinks here?" Yaxiu suddenly asked. "Something with no bitterness at all."
Felix gave him a look. "Only sweet milk fits what you're asking for... Are you a kid? You can't even drink coffee?"
"One sweet milk, and one molten lava cake." Yaxiu didn't care in the slightest about being called childish. Sitting down across from Felix, he tapped his fingers lightly against the wooden table, rested his cheek on his left hand, and stared blankly at the drifting snowflakes.
After a long silence, once the drinks and desserts had been served, Felix said faintly, "If you don't feel like talking, could you sit at the next table? This is pretty awkward for me..."
Yaxiu wrestled with himself for quite a while before finally making up his mind. "I want to ask you a question."
"I really wouldn't mind if you went to the next table..."
"If there's someone whose values and behavior disgust you, someone you find completely unacceptable from the bottom of your heart," Yaxiu said, prodding the molten lava cake with his spoon, "yet for some reason you find yourself liking them anyway... what would you do?"
Felix cupped her coffee mug with both hands, blinking her eyes at him, struck entirely speechless.
Chapter 1075