Prison Is Home

"Being back in prison feels just like being home." Yaxiu tapped the iron bars and sighed. "Though the living conditions here are way worse than Shattered Lake." "This is only a detention cell, so of course it's nothing special," Igola said. "I've seen documentaries. Gospel's prisons are even more luxurious than Blood Moon's, and they don't have the Blood Moon Trial. You can look forward to that." "That's good. As long as the prison meals have Lalafell, I'm satisfied." Listening to their aimless chatter, Annan arched an eyebrow. "You don't seem particularly concerned about your situation?" "Sigh, who could have guessed you had a Sanctuary Sorcerer for a mother, Miss? How could we possibly worry?" Yaxiu spread his hands. "Indeed," Igola chimed in. "According to my understanding of 'parents,' even if your mother wouldn't lay down her life for you, she would at least grant most of your requests. Shielding us falls well within the scope of parental duty." "That's hard to say." Everyone turned to look at Lisi. Staring down into her little mirror, her legs swinging back and forth, she murmured, "Not all parents love their children..." Then their gazes shifted back to Yaxiu, their eyes laced with mild reproach. Yaxiu bared his teeth at them in response. This was his first time being a father, too! Lisi hadn't faced a single life-or-death crisis under his watch all these days, which proved he was doing his absolute best, all right? Yaxiu would never forget the few days his father had looked after him when he was little. It had been wilder than a rollercoaster ride... There was still a photo in the family album of Yaxiu playing on the parallel bars. Aside from Yaxiu being shorter than a fire hydrant in the picture, there was nothing wrong with it. "If you divide all parents in the world into ninety-nine percent who care for their children and one percent who don't, then Qinna belongs to the kind who wishes her child had no emotions at all, serving as nothing more than her puppet on strings," Annan said, making a seemingly absurd claim. "If you're counting on her shielding you for my sake, you might as well hope Banjie could pique her lust." Everyone turned their eyes toward the youthful, adorable butler boy. Banjie sighed. "Miss, I know seeing Madame Qinna puts you in a foul mood, but insulting me is one thing. You shouldn't insult your mother." "I didn't insult her," Annan said. "Wasn't Father pretty much the same type as you?" Banjie replied, "Even so, you shouldn't insult me." Yaxiu asked curiously, "Miss, your mother is an elf, but you're a human?" "Did you forget? Once reproductive isolation was broken, a child conceived between different races is a random toss-up. The Doran family's human genes beat out Sennheiser's elven blood," Annan said indifferently. "Qinna wished she could stretch my ears out just to prove Sennheiser genetic material was superior." Igola asked, "Is your relationship with your mother that bad?" "Our relationship is far from being described as 'good or bad'—it's still stuck at 'present or absent.' I have no desire to recount my worthless childhood to you, nor do I intend to feed your sympathy with tears and blood. All you need to know is that the old woman has no concept of family. The only thing she cares about is the Sennheiser name." Annan sneered. "I would rather beg my aunt than have anything to do with her. In fact, running into her just now was our first meeting in nearly a decade... Look, Qinna was quite warm toward me." She pointed at her swollen, bruised cheek. Because the sorcery manacles restricted her sorcery power, she was unable to heal the injury left by her mother's high-heeled boot. Yaxiu and Igola exchanged a glance, the same look passing between them. Annan's nose twitched. "I smell you criticizing me in your heads..." "Has your nose been modified like Harvey's too?" Yaxiu quipped. "Harvey is sensitive to corpses, but you can't tolerate unspoken thoughts?" The Purple Moth sneered. "You're not secretly thinking that Qinna actually cares about me, that she's just a mother who doesn't know how to express her feelings, and that there are just a lot of misunderstandings between us... are you?" Igola and Yaxiu blinked, caught red-handed by the young mistress. "I didn't even console myself with such boring fantasies when I was six," Annan said calmly. "Back then, I used to wonder if I was the reincarnation of some god, and that Qinna treated me that way only to foster my growth and breed my hatred, so that in the end she could serve as the sacrifice guiding me to slay my own mother, free myself from malice, transcend mortal sight, and ascend Gospel's ladder... Not going to lie, that sort of power-fantasy melodrama genuinely brought a shred of solace to my young heart." "I advise you not to hold any expectations for that old woman," the young mistress said, closing her eyes. "That's advice from someone who's lived it." With family matters like this, nobody else had room to speak. Only Igola wore a look that said 'just as I thought'—as a 'Blood Moonist' who utterly disdained the institution of the family, he felt the relationship between Annan and her mother was only natural. "Cough, hack, hack!" Harvey, who had been lying on the iron-framed bunk the entire time, suddenly woke up in a fit of violent coughing. Clutching his head, he sat up with a bizarre expression on his face—at once euphoric and haggard. Picking at a hangnail on his finger, he asked, "Don't you feel it?" "Feel what?" The necromancer pointed at his head. "Excess dopamine secretion... All five receptors in my brain are constantly being stimulated by dopamine. If this continues, the threshold will rise to a dangerous level. I always have to moderate myself when smoking or taking sugar, because once your threshold goes up, it never comes down. "Look, I don't feel a thing tearing off this hangnail. It actually feels kind of good; the pain turns entirely into pleasure." The necromancer showed his hands. "Purple Moth, your face doesn't hurt either, does it? It just feels pleasantly cool... Has this city lost its mind?" Even the necromancer thought this city was absurd. Yet Yaxiu and the others hadn't noticed anything abnormal. If pressed, feeling so relaxed and at ease right after being thrown into a detention cell was indeed somewhat strange. Still, given his past experiences, it was hard for Yaxiu to muster any real terror over the fact that he had been arrested. He could no longer tell whether it stemmed from inner confidence or because the mist was simply too comforting. "Mm, I didn't expect a smoking addict to be the first to notice something wrong..." Annan said. "Then again, someone like you, who habitually numbs himself with hallucinogenic pheromones, is more attuned to hormonal shifts in the body than ordinary people. If this is a frog in slowly boiling water, then you, Mr. Harvey, have already been scalded before, so you can sense the changes in temperature much better. "But just as I explained earlier, Fanmula is simply that kind of city. The Beauty Mist envelops every corner, keeping everyone in a bright, cheerful mood at all times. That is Fanmula's 'heritage.'" Banjie explained, "Azula is a new city that developed over the past two centuries, applying all the latest technological achievements invented across Gospel Country. You could call it the empire's most developed and advanced city. The other first-tier cities might not be as advanced as Azula, but they retain the cultural heritage left behind by hundreds, even thousands of years of growth." "Heritage?" The necromancer actually chuckled. "If the threshold keeps rising, don't tell me you don't know what will happen? Relentless pleasure only ever leads to a brutal end." "What happens?" Lisi asked curiously. "Suppose a human is a machine, and pleasure is the start button," Harvey said. "Normally, an average person might press it four or five times a day. The little bits of joy scattered through daily life keep our machine slowly chugging along. "Meanwhile, for the people living in this city, their pleasure button is being pressed over and over by this fog without stopping. Granted, that dramatically boosts the operational efficiency of the human machine, but machines suffer wear and tear, and buttons rust. A rising threshold means the button has rusted and become harder to press. "When the threshold reaches a certain point..." "The button can't be pressed down at all anymore," Igola finished. "And then the machine known as a human completely fails to start." "According to my senses, anyone living in this city would have their mind completely destroyed within a year, rusting away into a toy that can't turn at all." Harvey looked slightly puzzled as well. "Yet the people out on the streets seemed to be living and working just fine..." "Your reasoning is basically sound," Annan said. "However, sorcerers themselves are a bunch of miracle-manufacturing machines that defy common sense. "The button might rust, but wouldn't regularly applying some lubricant solve the problem?" Yaxiu asked, "What lubricant?" "Fighting poison with poison." Touching her bruised, swollen cheek, the young mistress's voice was laced with utter disdain. "A pleasure far more intense and manic than the Beauty Mist, than dopamine, than any hallucinogenic drug— "Love and family."