The closer he got to Zhou Jiao’s scent, the more excited he became, his throat growing dry with thirst.
Even his skin felt parched with hunger, craving to be pressed tightly against hers. But what he wanted even more was to grip the back of her head like before, to madly suck on her lips, tongue, and saliva.
It had been less than ten minutes since he let her go, and yet he missed her so intensely that his scalp tingled.
Jiang Lian’s thoughts were as impulsive as ever.
Now, he no longer wanted to kill Zhou Jiao.
He only wanted to capture her, inhale her scent, kiss her, press against her lower lip, and drink in her saliva.
So when he followed her scent to its source—only to discover that it was just a piece of clothing draped over someone else—a terrifying rage nearly shattered all his restraint.
—That someone else turned out to be one of the small-time thugs who had been stalking Zhou Jiao earlier.
They were the local tyrants of this street, specializing in kidnapping white-collar workers like Zhou Jiao and delivering them to black-market clinics for “organ harvesting”.
If they were lucky, they could extract high-grade chips and healthy hearts, livers, spleens, lungs, and kidneys.
If they were unlucky, they could at least saw off a few intact limbs.
Yet, just as they lured Zhou Jiao into the alley, they caught a glimpse of a shadow descending from above—
Bang! Bang!
Zhou Jiao fired two taser shots, dropping two men instantly. Then, with a swift scissor kick, she locked her legs around one thug’s neck in a clean, precise move.
The man felt a boneless, snake-like coil tighten around his throat. Before he could even scream, a horrifying crack rang out as his larynx snapped.
The other gang members roared in fury, rushing forward to rescue him, but Zhou Jiao’s movements were as fluid as a specter.
She tightened her legs around her victim’s throat, while simultaneously arching her body backward, gracefully dodging an incoming strike.
Bang! Bang!
She fired two more shots, dropping another two thugs.
As her body shifted, the man caught in her scissor lock turned red, then purple, his breath becoming shallow and ragged.
In the end, the thugs were either foaming at the mouth from taser shocks or beaten black and blue by Zhou Jiao’s relentless kicks.
The worst-off among them—the one Jiang Lian had found—had taken her devastating scissor kick and lay on the ground gasping for ten minutes before regaining his breath.
But before he could crawl away, a hand seized his collar.
“…!”
The thug had never seen Jiang Lian before, had no idea he wasn’t human.
Yet the moment their eyes met, a bone-deep chill rushed up from his feet, an instinctive terror detonating in his brain.
This fear was not like being chased by the cops.
It was pure, biological horror—like a frog caught in a snake’s gaze, a gazelle trapped under a cheetah’s stare, a river fish frozen beneath an eagle’s shadow.
Faced with those lethal eyes, the thug’s mind went blank, his body trembling uncontrollably as he pleaded in a stuttering voice:
“D-Don’t kill me… Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you… Please, just don’t kill me…”
Seeing Jiang Lian staring at his clothes, realization dawned on him immediately.
He knew Jiang Lian was after that woman—and so, he spilled everything like a broken dam:
“S-She ran that way…! I—I didn’t want her clothes, but she seemed to be running from someone and forced me to swap outfits with her…!”
He hesitated for a second, then grumbled under his breath:
“Don’t be fooled by her pretty face—she’s a complete psycho…!”
“She didn’t just make me swap clothes—she forced me to drink her blood…!”
At the mere memory, the thug dry-heaved violently:
“Urgh… Bro, do you think she has AIDS…?”
Before the last syllable had even left his lips, he felt an icy gaze stab through him—
The sheer coldness in Jiang Lian’s expression made every hair on his body stand on end.
His voice faltered, trembling:
“D-Did I say something wrong…?”
Jiang Lian did not answer.
He simply stared at him with an unfathomably terrifying gaze.
The thug could feel it—a chilling wave of dread crawling up his spine, climbing vertebra by vertebra.
“I-I-I… I was just talking nonsense…!”
He scrambled to correct himself:
“Her blood is perfectly clean! Healthy! Delicious! I swear—I’ve been in this business for years, nobody knows this stuff better than me—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a crack echoed in the air.
His neck snapped.
That was the last sound he heard in this world.
—Zhou Jiao had made this man drink her blood.
Jiang Lian slowly straightened, his expression eerily calm, yet his facial muscles twitched at an alarming frequency.
For a few seconds, his face was even stretched open by the frenzied writhing of his tentacles, leaving behind tiny cracks.
His entire being looked utterly terrifying.
There was no killing intent, no rage, no negative emotions of any kind.
Yet, just looking at him would make anyone instinctively recoil in fear.
Jiang Lian couldn’t put into words what he was feeling.
It was yet another unfamiliar sensation.
Unlike the tingling numbness he had felt before, this time, it was a sharp, stinging ache, like countless fine needles piercing his heart, so agitating that not even killing could ease it.
Without realizing it, restless, frenzied tentacles had begun to emerge from his body, filling the narrow, claustrophobic alley with an oppressive, bone-chilling aura.
This almost never happened.
He only lost control of his tentacles when his emotions became too extreme.
But ever since tasting Zhou Jiao’s saliva, he had been in a constant state of emotional turmoil.
Just like now—
To escape him, she had dressed this man in her clothes and fed him her own blood.
—It was just a temporary measure.
She had successfully deceived him and proven her value.
By all logic, he should have felt pleased about that.
And yet—
His eyes were tinged with red, his chest burned like raging fire, and his murderous intent surged uncontrollably.
He hated the way she had proven herself.
—She belonged to him.
Every drop of blood, every piece of flesh, every breath she took—
Was his.
His!
The fact that she had escaped his pursuit in this manner irritated him even more than the truth of her weakness and insignificance.
Why?
What exactly was this unbearable frustration?
How could he find the answer?
Jiang Lian’s expression turned dark and menacing.
He didn’t even bother retracting his tentacles—he simply followed the lingering scent of Zhou Jiao and chased after her.
But soon, his expression became even more terrifying.
Zhou Jiao used the same trick again, scattering her clothes everywhere.
To confuse his sense of smell, she even swapped outfits with a prostitute—someone who entertained hundreds of clients daily, both men and women, her entire body covered in the scents of strangers.
The mere thought of Zhou Jiao wearing such clothes made Jiang Lian’s eyes flicker with madness, his emotions shifting in an almost deranged frenzy.
He didn’t want to play this game anymore.
He wanted to end it.
However, the right to stop the game was not in his hands.
He couldn’t find Zhou Jiao, and he couldn’t reach her.
Every time he followed her scent, all he found was another discarded piece of clothing—or something stained with her blood.
To win, she resorted to any means necessary, showing no mercy toward herself, recklessly spilling her own blood without hesitation.
As time passed, Jiang Lian’s expression shifted from cold brutality, to dark, twisted rage, to the madness of a lunatic, and finally, to something tinged with an indescribable fear.
Zhou Jiao was just a normal human.
Even though his tentacles were inside her, she was still just human.
At this rate—she would die.
“…Do you think bleeding out will kill you?” He muttered to himself, every word dripping with a chilling, sinister edge.
“You won’t die.”
By now, he had completely forgotten that this had started as a hunt.
—Zhou Jiao cannot die.
He must find her.
Immediately.
But he couldn’t.
No matter what he did—he couldn’t find her.
Each time, they barely missed each other.
Once, he caught her scent from just a hundred meters away.
That was the closest he had ever been to her scent.
In that moment, the tentacles inside him trembled with ecstasy, their frenzied buzzing almost dizzying him.
Yet when he rushed over—
He discovered that it was only another piece of clothing carrying her scent.
In the blink of an eye, three days had passed.
She had tricked him again and again using this method.
Every time, he could smell her—but never see her.
What drove him even more insane was that over the past three days, her scent had been tainted with the presence of many strangers.
Layer upon layer of frustration and agitation stacked within him, until his expression twisted into something more savage and terrifying than ever before.
A small-time thug spotted him standing in an alley, gripping a piece of clothing, and hatched a devious idea.
He walked over and patted Jiang Lian’s shoulder:
“What are you standing around for, man? Need me to take you somewhere fun?”
And then—
He witnessed the most horrifying sight of his life.
Jiang Lian’s body remained perfectly still, but his head twisted 180 degrees, turning to look at him in a way that completely defied human anatomy.
Half of his face was cold, sharp, and unnervingly beautiful, its features defined with razor-edged precision.
But the other half—
The other half of his face twitched violently, as if something beneath his skin was writhing in frenzy, straining to burst through at any moment.
“…The fuck is this thing…?”
The thug stumbled back in terror, his breath hitching.
His hand instinctively reached for the gun at his waist.
Sensing the intent to attack, the other half of Jiang Lian’s face suddenly split open.
A grotesque tentacle burst out, carrying an icy malice, and instantly strangled the thug’s throat, snapping his cervical vertebrae.
The thug’s body went limp, his mouth foaming as he collapsed onto the ground.
Yet, the tentacle did not retract.
Jiang Lian no longer had any desire to maintain his human form.
He stood motionless, allowing countless tentacles to emerge from his body, spreading outward like festering mold, corroding the walls and neon lights around him, emitting a low, droning hum so piercing it could drive one to madness.
“Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao…”
—He had accepted the fact that she was small and fragile.
“Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao…”
—He had accepted the fact that he was agitated beyond reason over a mere human.
“Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao, Zhou Jiao…”
—He would not let her run anymore.
Three days had passed.
The game was over.
Come back to me.
He had to see her.
Immediately.