Pei Ran struggled to lift her arm and wrote on the virtual screen:
【Because it’s on your way?】
Shige Ye did not answer. He tilted his head slightly, using his pitch-black eyes to scrutinize Pei Ran.
He was still holding that comic-style fountain pen, subconsciously tapping the notebook with the pen cap in a leisurely manner, as if he had truly come over just to chat out of boredom.
If Pei Ran hadn’t seen with her own eyes how he had killed three people in the blink of an eye, she might have believed him.
Shige Ye put down the pen, raised his hand, and continued writing:
【Being on the way isn’t the main reason. I originally planned to take you along and explain on the way. But now, I’m in a great mood, and on a whim, I changed my mind.】
After finishing, his gaze returned to Pei Ran, but instead of looking at her face, his eyes trailed downward from her waist, inch by inch, until they landed on her legs.
Pei Ran felt a chill run down her spine.
Could it be that W was actually right? Had he really won the bet?
Shige Ye’s eyes lingered on Pei Ran’s legs, motionless, deep in thought.
From the moment he first saw her on the street just now, he had already set his sights on her.
At that time, his mind was filled with only one thought:
He had to eat her.
She looked extremely healthy, with skills far beyond ordinary, and especially those legs—agile, powerful, more than satisfactory.
When it came to eating, Shige Ye was always extremely picky.
In recent years, whenever he had the opportunity to eat this kind of meat, he would only eat the gastrocnemius muscle of the calf. The meat was tender yet had a slight elasticity, giving it a pleasant chewiness—he liked it very much. (TL: Oh he meant LITERALLY)
Sometimes, he would also eat the soleus muscle, but only occasionally when he was in a particularly good mood. As for the rest of the human body, he had no interest at all.
His family had always tacitly accepted his peculiar dietary preferences. After all, he wasn’t the only one in the family with an eating disorder of this kind.
Every now and then, someone would procure a stray person from the dark corners of the city for him—especially in this slum, where nearly everyone was engaged in illegal activities. The disappearance of one or two nobodies whom no one would miss wasn’t something anyone cared about.
But deep inside, Shige Ye still preferred young, fresh, and healthy flesh.
Unfortunately, such things were difficult to come by.
Everything changed about two months ago.
One night, out of nowhere, a faint green light appeared in the air and then merged into his body.
Since that day, Shige Ye discovered that he had gained a special ability—whatever he drew in his comics could, to a certain extent, become reality.
During that period, he experimented daily and found that this ability had its limitations. Some scenarios worked, while others didn’t—especially overly fantastical elements, which were completely impossible to manifest.
But it was enough.
He suddenly realized that with this green light, with this special ability, he no longer had to rely on others to obtain fresh ingredients—even while sitting in a wheelchair.
All he had to do was move his pen.
The pen tip glided across the paper, outlining contours and writing a simple line of narration.
With just the lift of a hand, those who once relied on their two healthy legs to run, jump, and move about with boundless energy would succumb to his godlike power, collapsing limply onto the ground, never to rise again.
They were like fresh fish placed on a cutting board, able to flop only a few times before succumbing. And he, Shige Ye, even with half his body paralyzed, could still exert complete control and butcher them as he pleased.
Recently, he had taken a liking to sashimi.
Tender, juicy, and steaming hot.
Personally killing the fish, peeling back the skin, and slicing the flesh—far more interesting than waiting for someone else to serve it up.
After spending the entire day searching for antique cars, he was utterly exhausted. She was the perfect lunch that heaven had delivered to him.
Shige Ye, without a change in expression, clipped the steel pen onto the black leather notebook, then reached under his seat cushion and pulled out a dagger.
The dagger, much like his own attire, was exquisitely crafted. Its handle was wrapped in the leather of some unknown animal, its design classical, the groove for draining blood intricately carved with fine patterns. The blade gleamed with a cold, sharp light.
The moment Pei Ran saw the dagger in his hand, she immediately struggled to retreat.
But she was far too weak. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t move far at all—far slower than Shige Ye, who was seated in a wheelchair.
Shige Ye tapped the control panel on the wheelchair’s armrest, instantly closing the distance.
He leaned down, his pale, slender fingers reaching forward and gripping Pei Ran’s hair in a deathly hold.
All he had to do was steady her head, then slide the dagger lightly across her neck.
Then, the warm blood would spurt out, the fish would thrash violently, convulse, and finally—go still.
It would be a bit messy. But compared to the incredible rush of pleasure that surged upward at the moment of the kill, a little blood was nothing. He had plenty of clothes with him—changing into another set was no trouble at all.
Shige Ye was right about one thing.
His body was frail beyond measure, but at this moment, Pei Ran was even weaker—too weak to resist, unable to avoid his grasp.
However, she still had the strength to raise a hand.
At the brink of life and death, Pei Ran did not hesitate. She stretched out her hand and pressed down on the control panel of Shige Ye’s wheelchair.
The icons on the wheelchair’s touchscreen control panel were clear. She had watched him operate it several times today.
The row of arrows pointing backward meant reverse. If held down, it would accelerate.
Pei Ran tapped the backward icon and dragged the speed control all the way to the maximum.
This wheelchair was custom-made for Shige Ye—it was his second pair of legs, responding with precision, reacting swiftly, moving freely. He had always been extremely satisfied with it.
Now, he suddenly realized—being too sensitive wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
With just a single swipe of the control panel, the wheelchair shot backward like a cannonball, blasting off at full speed and slamming into a pile of crates with a thunderous “Bang!”
Shige Ye, seated in his wheelchair, had always maintained an elegant posture. Neither his waist nor legs were secured with any unsightly restraints. He had been leaning forward to grab Pei Ran’s hair, and with nothing but the friction of the seat to hold him in place, he couldn’t withstand such a sudden acceleration.
He was flung forward, tumbling straight out of the wheelchair.
As he fell, he was still gripping Pei Ran’s hair.
She was yanked down with him, crashing onto the ground.
Now, both of them were sprawled on the ground.
One with a body too weak to move, the other half-paralyzed.
Shige Ye had never taken Pei Ran too seriously. No matter how skilled she was, in the face of his godlike ability, she should have had no chance to fight back.
He had never expected that even when she was completely drained of strength, she would still pull off such an absurd maneuver.
When he fell, his instincts kicked in, and he let go to protect himself. The dagger in his hand flew out.
Seeing that he was now weaponless, Pei Ran seized the moment before he could react. With all the strength she had left, she lunged for the bracelet on his wrist.
The bracelet was highly elastic—one pull, and it snapped right off. She flung it aside.
Without the bracelet, he couldn’t summon anyone for help. And he couldn’t call out either—this was the Silent Zone; making a sound meant instant death.
She could only pray that the noise from the wheelchair crashing into the crates hadn’t drawn any attention.
Shige Ye was momentarily dazed from the fall but quickly snapped back to his senses.
The dagger had landed far away, but something else was much closer—the black leather notebook. It had been flung aside when he tumbled from the wheelchair.
Shige Ye immediately propped up his upper body with his arms, dragging his paralyzed lower half as he struggled to crawl forward.
He had been meticulously cared for his entire life, never needing to lift a finger for daily necessities. His upper body was frail, and from the waist down, his entire lower half was like dead weight—completely motionless. Crawling was a grueling effort.
Pei Ran was also crawling, using both her hands and feet to drag herself toward the notebook.
Her mind raced.
Shige Ye’s green light always flowed from his palm. It must be stored within his body at all times. Since he was able to release it now, why wasn’t he simply drawing on the dusty ground or writing a few words to kill her on the spot? Why was he so desperate to get his black leather notebook?
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to—it was that he couldn’t.
Did he need that specific notebook? Or was it the comic-style fountain pen clipped to it? Or did he have to draw on paper for his ability to work?
She absolutely couldn’t let him get his hands on that notebook or pen.
Pei Ran had full control of her limbs, but her body was so weak that she couldn’t muster any strength. Shige Ye, on the other hand, had no problem with his upper body, but his lower half was like a deadweight stone.
Both of them were physically impaired in their own ways—like two oversized caterpillars, writhing across the dusty ground, desperately crawling forward.
Shige Ye was closer.
At last, he reached it.
He snatched up the black leather notebook, tore off the steel pen clipped to its cover, and flipped to a blank page.
A droplet of green light seeped from his palm, trickling down his fingers and into the pen’s tip. Without hesitation, he started drawing.
His drawing skills were extraordinary. And at this moment—when it was a matter of life and death—he drew even faster than usual. With just a few strokes, he had already outlined the figure of a girl with a ponytail, lying on the ground.
In her mind, Pei Ran screamed, “W!!”
W responded immediately, “I’m here.”
At the same time, Shige Ye was scribbling a line of hasty, scrawled text on the paper:
【The tape loosened.】
His pitch-black eyes were filled with murderous intent.
Never in his entire life had anyone made him this utterly humiliated.
And worst of all—it was the kind of humiliation that fully exposed his physical weakness.
He wanted to watch her die.
To make her die, to blow her up, to shatter her into dust.
Shige Ye’s pen tip swiped across the paper, instantly adding a round speech bubble next to the drawn girl’s head.
As long as he wrote even a single word inside that bubble, she would be doomed.
However, Pei Ran was struggling forward, crawling almost as fast as he was. She had already reached his side.
Too close.
If someone was too close to the one who spoke, they would also be caught in the explosion. Shige Ye knew this well—aside from that mother and daughter, he had already used this method to efficiently dispose of several people.
If she exploded now, he’d be dragged down with her.
Shige Ye forcefully suppressed his rage, changed tactics, and swiftly scribbled over the speech bubble, erasing it. He was about to write something else instead.
Pei Ran knew exactly what he was planning—either he would write her to death or paralyze her completely again.
It all happened in an instant.
Pei Ran ordered W in her mind: “Speak right next to Shige Ye’s ear! Use your maximum volume! As loud as possible! Insanely loud!!”
—
Second floor, third room on the left.
The room was empty, the door wide open, and the metal sphere sat casually on a table near the entrance.
W kept an ear on the noises outside while raising his unstable mechanical arm, struggling to insert the activation component into his own system.
But he couldn’t see it.
His folding arm wobbled unsteadily, making precise alignment impossible—he kept missing the interface, failing over and over.
Pei Ran was downstairs, in who knew what kind of danger. W tried his best to keep his arm steady, recalculating the angle, adjusting for the offset, and attempting again and again.
Suddenly, Pei Ran’s voice rang through his system.
For the first time, she sounded desperate.
She wanted him to speak in Shige Ye’s ear at full volume. Immediately.
No problem.
Shige Ye was a Silent One, making direct communication with him effortless. If Pei Ran was making such an urgent request, the situation had to be critical.
And as an AI, W wasn’t bound by human biological limits. If she wanted “loud,” he could make it louder than she could ever imagine.
“BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ————”
Downstairs.
Shige Ye was just about to put pen to paper when—
A deafening explosion of sound erupted right next to his ear.
It was impossibly close, as if someone had stuck a loudspeaker directly into his eardrum.
The sheer volume was the loudest, most terrifying noise he had ever heard in his life.
Not just loud—the frequency was also unbelievably high, like a knife stabbing straight into his ear canal.
The pain in his eardrums was excruciating.
Caught completely off guard, Shige Ye instinctively clutched his head.
Meanwhile, Pei Ran, still crawling: Huh??
That… was way more intense than what she had intended.
Her original plan was for W to speak suddenly in Shige Ye’s ear, just enough to distract him—in this utterly silent environment, a sudden voice should have been enough to make him hesitate with his pen, giving her a second or two to act.
According to W, she should be able to speak directly into Shige Ye’s mind herself, but she had never tried it before. And in such a life-or-death moment, it was safer to let W handle it.
Besides, W had mentioned that he could amplify his volume to extreme levels—loud enough to make a human’s ears unable to handle it.
W had completed the task far better than she had expected—way better.
This method was risky—if Shige Ye made a sound, she would have only three seconds to escape beyond a one-meter radius. But in a moment where life and death were separated by mere inches, she had no choice but to take the risk.
Luckily, Shige Ye was in too much pain, clutching his head in silence.
She had already crawled close enough. Taking advantage of his distraction, she reached out and snatched the comic-style fountain pen from his grasp.
To Pei Ran’s surprise, the moment Shige Ye lost his grip on the pen, that tiny green light didn’t disappear.
It hovered at the pen tip, trembling slightly, like a droplet of water suspended in midair.
Shige Ye’s pen had been stolen—panic shot through him.
Ignoring the piercing pain in his ears, he immediately reached out to snatch it back.
“BZZZZZZZZZ————!!”
But this time, the noise was even louder.
Not just stabbing into his ears—it felt like a drill burrowing straight into his skull.
Meanwhile, Pei Ran had already grabbed both the pen and the black leather notebook from the ground, using every bit of strength left in her body to crawl away.
Shige Ye, dragging his paralyzed lower half, stretched his arm as far as it could go and managed to grab the hem of her jacket.
If he wanted it so badly, then she’d give it to him.
Pei Ran wriggled out of her jacket, slipping free and crawling even farther away.
She glanced at the notebook.
The page still held a rough sketch of a girl with a ponytail, lying on the ground.
And that green light was still at the pen tip.
Without hesitation, Pei Ran quickly scratched out the words 【The tape loosened.】
In its place, she wrote:
【Recovered quickly. Body suddenly returned to normal.】
She had noticed that every time Shige Ye finished drawing, he had a habit of twirling the pen—just like she instinctively added a period when writing in her mind, as if it finalized the command.
So Pei Ran twirled the pen.
At that moment, it was as if her entire body’s blocked meridians had suddenly been cleared.
The weakness vanished.
Her strength returned.
She had used his green light to write a command—and it actually worked.
Through the earsplitting, brain-shattering noise, Shige Ye suddenly saw something that made his blood freeze.
The girl, who had been crawling on the ground just like him moments ago—
Suddenly propped herself up.
Her movements were fluid, swift, effortless.
As if nothing had ever happened, Pei Ran stood up.