Sticky, damp, impossible to tear apart
///
Zhou Jiao was actually quite surprised that Jiang Lian let her go.
During their confrontation, she appeared incomparably calm, but in reality, she was always ready to aim the electromagnetic gun at her own temple.
She had thought she would have to lose half her life—only when she was on the verge of death would he let her leave.
Who would have thought that he merely stared at her with an ice-cold, terrifying gaze for a long time?
Because his gaze was too horrifying, an overwhelming chill pressed down on her, crashing over her like a tidal wave, stabbing into the seams of her bones like steel needles.
For a few seconds, she thought he was about to dismantle her, tear her apart, devour her—using all kinds of cruel and violent methods to make her stay.
Her entire body tensed, fully prepared for him to seize her by the throat.
But in the next moment, he withdrew the tentacle blocking the escape passage.
At that instant, Zhou Jiao was momentarily stunned by his gaze.
…Rather than calling him an omnipotent, lofty “god,” it would be more fitting to say he was a wild beast—one that had been tamed and then abandoned.
Zhou Jiao retracted her gaze and walked toward the escape boat without looking back.
Yet, for a brief moment, her heart went numb, as if struck by an electric current from his gaze, an aching, swelling sensation shooting straight to her central nervous system.
Lowering her head, she started the escape boat while taking a deep breath, forcing herself to steady her slightly weakened limbs.
This feeling—was it excitement or fear?
Was it the sense of accomplishment from taming a beast, or the thrill of making someone in power lower their head?
At that moment, she suddenly realized—these past days, all her intense emotions seemed to be because of him.
No prey would stay with its predator.
But no prey would be like her, either—completely immersing herself in the cold-blooded pursuit of a top-tier predator, savoring the exhilarating sensation of having her life hanging by a thread.
Zhou Jiao frowned slightly.
She pushed the escape boat to its maximum speed, letting the water spray and the waves surge.
She did not allow herself to think further.
Too dangerous.
—Not that Jiang Lian was dangerous, but that this relationship made her feel in danger.
A predator and its prey, a superior and an inferior.
An unknown “god” and an ordinary person.
Staying away from him was the right choice.
However, no matter how far the escape boat sped away, she could always feel that faint magnetic pull from Jiang Lian’s direction.
As if asking her: Can you really give up such a unique experience?
Can you ever find this same kind of excitement, thrill, danger, and intensity in someone else?
In this world, is there a second person who would take that leap with you from a hundred-meter-high building?
The sea wind crashed against her eardrums, roaring in her ears.
The sensation of speeding across the water—was nowhere near as exhilarating as confronting Jiang Lian.
Unknowingly, her emotional threshold had been raised to a very high level by Jiang Lian.
Zhou Jiao closed her eyes briefly, then turned the steering wheel, sending a splash of waves flying. She found a dock, parked, and walked straight toward a high-tech storage locker that could be found everywhere on the streets.
Perhaps fearing that she would only fall into a deep coma after verifying the payment, the company had kept its word.
Ten minutes later, a drone delivered 100,000 New Yen, a military-grade mask, a scent suppressor, and an optical camouflage suit.
Zhou Jiao didn’t use the company’s scent suppressor—who knew what was inside that thing?
She casually stuffed everything into the backpack that the high-tech company had provided, turned around, and rented a motorcycle. Revving the throttle, she sped toward the airport on the skyline.
—
In the blink of an eye, two months had passed.
Zhou Jiao had settled down in California.
The law and order in California was even more of a mess than in Yucheng—almost every night, there were thieves trying to pry open her door.
One time, she was running late for work and decided to take a shortcut for once, following the navigation system into a narrow alley. Who would have thought that as soon as she stepped in, a group of thugs would close in on her from both ends?
They held knives, crowbars, and police tasers they had stolen from some officers, looking at her with sinister intent.
A scar-faced man stepped forward, grinning at her. “Little lady, we’ve already figured out where you work, and our hacker even found out how much you make every month.”
“Right now, you have two choices—hand over all your money,” Scarface flicked his tongue against his teeth with a smirk, “or, we take you to that clinic over there and harvest as many healthy organs as we can—”
Before he could finish his threat, Zhou Jiao cut him off with an indifferent tone. “I choose the third option.”
Scarface’s expression darkened. “I didn’t give you a third option!”
Zhou Jiao quickly scanned her surroundings and retreated a step without a trace, her back completely exposed to one of the thugs behind her.
The thug beside her thought she had been scared stiff and immediately burst into jeering laughter.
But the next second, their laughter choked in their throats—
Zhou Jiao drove her elbow backward with force, slamming it right into the gut of the thug behind her.
The thug felt as if a heavy rock had smashed into his stomach. He couldn’t even scream before Zhou Jiao snatched the police taser from his hand in one swift motion. The next moment, she kicked him straight into the group of thugs!
—Boom!
The thugs were knocked into a tangled heap, their formation completely thrown into chaos.
Scarface was furious. “You bitch in a suit! If I don’t chop you into pieces today, I might as well quit this business! Get her, boys!”
Zhou Jiao didn’t respond.
Her combat skills were leagues ahead of these thugs with their cheap cybernetic implants. Moreover, back in her time at the Special Bureau, the weapons she used most often were police tasers and Taser guns—this was her battlefield.
A group of burly thugs was beaten into a miserable mess, heads bleeding, wailing in pain, their bodies convulsing uncontrollably from the electric shocks.
In the end, Scarface couldn’t take it anymore—his eyes rolled back from the taser shocks, his eyeballs nearly popping out of their sockets. Trembling, he pleaded,
“Big Sis, Big Sis, we surrender! We surrender! Please, let us go… We won’t ever mess with you again!”
Zhou Jiao nodded but didn’t turn off the taser.
Scarface’s face turned pale as he recalled the agony of being electrocuted. He carefully asked, “…What else do you want us to do?”
Zhou Jiao said, “Hand over all your money.”
Scarface was stunned for a second.
Wasn’t she supposed to be a proper, law-abiding white-collar worker? Why did she rob them more professionally than they did?
Scarface asked, holding onto his last shred of dignity, “You mean… you want us to hand over our money?”
Zhou Jiao responded with a simple “Mhm,” then added, “Either give me the money, or line up at the clinic next door and donate as many kidneys as you have.”
Scarface: “………………”
He finally understood—they had run into another predator preying on predators.
That day, Zhou Jiao was late for work and got severely reprimanded by her boss, losing 500 bucks. However, she had extorted 10,000 New Yen from the gangsters, so her mood remained fairly pleasant.
The only regret was that this method of making money could only be used once. After this incident, the thugs in the area would likely never dare to go near her again.
—
At her workstation, Zhou Jiao sat with an expression of cold indifference and laziness, eyes filled with boredom.
Her job had no technical depth—she did all kinds of tasks, yet none deeply enough to understand anything. It was as if she were a disposable worker, one who could be thrown under the bus at any moment.
To be honest, the only reason she took this job was because of that last part—the constant, lurking danger of being framed as a scapegoat.
But after two months, aside from her boss being stingy, he was unexpectedly kind, and the work environment was unusually harmonious.
One of her coworkers even asked if she wanted a protein supplement, saying he had a relative who worked at an insect protein extraction factory and could bring her some—guaranteed to be made from real locusts.
She smiled and declined.
—
Another week passed just like that.
Although Zhou Jiao always appeared calm and composed—falling asleep within ten minutes of lying in bed at night—she could feel something inside her twisting, cracking apart.
A mind that had experienced extreme thrill could no longer be content with an ordinary, mundane life.
Nine-to-five. Standing on the street, looking around, everything was so peaceful—so peaceful it was maddening.
The corporate giants were brewing an earth-shattering conspiracy, trying to manipulate people’s thoughts with chips and big data, turning them into slaves of money, mere cogs in the machine of life—reduced to a cycle of debt, consumption, work, and repayment.
But this grand conspiracy, no matter how terrifying it sounded, ultimately translated into nothing more than an ordinary, unremarkable life for each individual.
More than once, Zhou Jiao thought about quitting her job at the small company to become a mercenary or a netrunner. It wouldn’t be respectable, and the pay would be pitiful, but at least it would be dangerous and exhilarating.
But in the end, she suppressed the urge.
Not because she thought those jobs were beneath her, but because—there was no point.
From the moment she leaped off that rooftop, she had successfully tightened the noose around Jiang Lian’s neck—but she had also pushed her own emotional threshold to its absolute limit.
Emotions are not like water; they have no fixed boiling point.
Every time they reach a boiling point, they are merely borrowing against the next thrill.
No matter how dangerous or exciting mercenary work was, it could never surpass the intensity Jiang Lian had given her.
Even if she repeated the same scene with him—leaping once more—it would never again electrify her nerves in the same way.
Let alone the fact that she couldn’t even see Jiang Lian now.
If Zhou Jiao didn’t know for certain that Jiang Lian had no concept of playing hard to get, she might have thought that he let her go because he knew she would struggle to return to a normal life—patiently waiting for her to walk into his trap of her own volition.
Zhou Jiao lowered her gaze. Her face remained emotionless, but her fingers trembled ever so slightly.
—The thought that Jiang Lian might be watching her from the shadows, tracking her every move, sent an uncontrollable thrill surging through her.
She knew this thought was wrong.
It was abnormal.
And extremely dangerous.
—In that case, why did you fight so desperately to escape in the first place?
Because when she was in Jiang Lian’s hands, there was a real possibility that she would lose her personality and thoughts, becoming nothing more than an empty husk without a soul.
If Jiang Lian hadn’t shown that particular gaze in the escape passage, then no matter how much she craved the thrill he gave her, she would never have wanted to see him again.
But that gaze made her feel—if she just pulled the noose a little tighter, she could completely tame him.
These past days, though she hadn’t suffered from insomnia, she had constantly dreamed of that company building, transformed into a grotesque, flesh-like nest.
The moment she appeared, the massive and eerie flesh nest would begin writhing frantically, splitting and extending countless purple-black tentacles, reaching for her from above and below—like damp, slick serpents slithering toward their prey, overcome with ecstatic hunger.
It was a scene that provoked a deep, visceral discomfort.
Cold. Sticky. Abnormal. Revolting.
Yet Zhou Jiao’s heart pounded wildly, her scalp tingling.
She was like someone staring into the abyss—knowing full well that it was bottomless, yet still stepping closer and closer, wanting to see what lurked in the depths of the darkness.
When she woke up, Zhou Jiao turned the blinds, sat by the window, and lit a cigarette.
The nightscape of California presented a striking contrast—on one side, the dark, uneven skyline of the slums, where the river running through it shimmered with a faintly toxic blue-black hue; on the other, towering, grand buildings illuminated by a sea of neon signs.
The neon lights flickered and danced, casting shifting glows into her room.
She closed her eyes, took a slow drag, and leaned against the wall, exhaling toward the ceiling.
White smoke curled upward.
Just then, a holographic advertisement began playing midair, projecting the image of a garishly dressed Japanese beauty in a lavish kimono, strolling past her window.
For a brief moment, the white smoke turned into colored mist.
Zhou Jiao’s cold, sharp features became hazy and indistinct within the swirling colors.
She refused to admit that she had developed any particular feelings for Jiang Lian.
But there was one thing she was willing to acknowledge—and had no choice but to acknowledge—
Only Jiang Lian could pull her out of the monotony of this dull and lifeless existence.
He was cold-blooded, bizarre, terrifying—not only a dangerously unknown entity, but also a being with an extremely deranged personality.
He was unpredictable, uncontrollable—yet he fiercely attracted her.
Even though she had fled to a city eight thousand kilometers away, she could still feel that terrifying pull, as if countless thread-like filaments, as thin as fungal mycelium, connected them—sticky, damp, impossible to tear apart.
However—
Though she needed him to shatter her stagnant life, she would never take the initiative to seek him out.
She would never offer him goodwill first.
Monsters don’t play at “hard to get.”
But she does.