PSW - Chapter 145

Chapter 145

This was the first time Si Haotian had ever been so wretched, so miserable, so close to death. His eyeballs seemed to bulge from the strain, veins popped on his forehead, and his eyes were webbed with crimson threads, making him look utterly terrifying.

Too terrifying. This person was too terrifying. How did she do it? How could she be this strong? Was she really human? Was… was she… was she really… human!?

Feeling the gradually increasing pressure on his chest, Si Haotian, with bloodshot eyes, stared at the golden python's crystal core that Zheng Yi was casually toying with in her hand. He gasped, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, and finally spoke, "Meteor fragment… what is that?"

"That bottle of powder you took, where did it come from?"

Powder? Si Haotian was slightly dazed. The pressure on his chest eased as the person withdrew her foot, no longer trampling him so humiliatingly. But Si Haotian didn't get up. Or rather, his entire body was in excruciating pain, making movement extremely difficult. He lay on his back, closing his eyes for a moment. "You're after that thing? Ha, but why should I tell you?"

"You killed my golden python, killed so many, so many of my companions… Why should I tell you anything? Are you going to let me go?" Si Haotian burst out laughing, which pulled at his wounds, causing him to cough twice and spit out a few more mouthfuls of blood. He had expected to see emotions like anger or annoyance on Zheng Yi's face, but after his laughter died down, he realized the woman's expression hadn't changed at all. She just watched him calmly with those dark eyes, as if he were the clown.

In those dark eyes, he felt himself become incredibly small, incredibly insignificant. He was like dust, like an ant, as if no matter how he acted, he couldn't garner even a sliver of her attention.

"You want to leave?" Zheng Yi waited until his smile froze and he fell silent before she asked.

Before Si Haotian could answer, her expression instantly became lively and gentle. She gazed at him with deep affection and tenderness, even crouching down to close the distance between them. "My dear~ You might not know this, but sometimes, death is a luxury~"

Healing energy poured into Si Haotian's body. His pain and wounds recovered rapidly, and a gentle warmth enveloped him. Just as he was momentarily dazed by the healing, an icy chill instantly covered his legs. When blood from his femoral arteries spurted high into the air, his slightly numb brain slowly registered what had happened.

The intense pain made him howl in agony, but before he could even move, his two severed thighs were controlled and pressed back against the stumps. Healing energy was released again, striving to reconnect the flesh and broken bones.

Si Haotian no longer had any energy to spare for the tide of mutated beasts. The moment his ability vanished and the beasts could no longer hear his call, Zheng Yi's invisible and terrifying mental power spread out!

An unspeakable terror, a suppression and fear that seeped into their very souls and bones. This time, the numerous mutated beasts followed their instincts. They no longer attacked the ability users or swarmed Zheng Yi, but scattered and fled in all directions.

Once the mutated beasts retreated, Yu Yinan stopped incinerating them with large-scale flames. She retracted her ability and hurried toward Zheng Yi.

"Jiejie, could you please deal with the ability users here?" Zheng Yi didn't turn around. She watched Si Haotian's reaction as several high-pressure water blades formed above his body, controlled to spin and move before his eyes. After he was healed for a moment, a blade would randomly slash down. Her voice was sweet, tinged with a hint of apology. "I'll probably be busy for a while, so I'll leave that side to you, Jiejie~"

"If anyone tries to attack you, don't hesitate. Just kill them."

There weren't actually many people in Yongdu.

"Okay," Yu Yinan agreed. She glanced briefly at Si Haotian, who was glowing with healing light, then changed direction and walked toward the ability users who were still fighting, though one side had already lost its will to battle. Did the ability users working for Si Haotian need to be killed? Yu Yinan didn't want to get involved in that. She only wanted to know if anyone here had seen the Xia siblings and where they had gone. And also…

To spread the word about Zheng Yi.

Yongdu… with such a massive horde of mutated beasts, what had this place experienced under that man's rule? Had he managed to protect the few humans in the city, or was he… "raising pigs"?

Yu Yinan swallowed a Stamina Recovery Pill, and a massive wall of fire erupted, directly splitting the battlefield.

The moment she intervened, the battle between the ability users stopped. After all, the situation was clear: the winds of change were blowing in Yongdu.

Even the mutated golden python had been killed with ease. Although they didn't know what the powerful woman was discussing with Si Haotian, judging by the current situation… these two were clearly people they couldn't afford to provoke.

"You're finally here! You have no idea how despicable that man is!" As soon as Yu Yinan approached, before she could even ask anything, an ability user dropped to his knees with a thud, prostrating himself at her feet, wailing loudly about his suffering and denouncing the man's evil deeds.

According to them, Si Haotian had emerged shortly after the second great rain. No one knew when he had become an ability user, but he first revealed his powers not long after that rain.

The golden python hadn't been so enormous at first; it was just a small, weak mutated python that liked to coil around Si Haotian. As far as they knew, Si Haotian had enjoyed keeping reptiles as pets before the apocalypse. Besides the python, he also had other breeds of pet snakes, as well as pet spiders and lizards. But after the apocalypse, the only one that mutated and survived to accompany him was this golden python.

Oh, and the cockroaches that used to be "little snacks" for his spiders, and the pinky mice used to feed his pet snakes and spiders.

As for Si Haotian's ability…

"My ability… is the Voice of Life… I can… listen to their hearts, communicate and interact with them. I can grant them power, and I can also draw power from them." He was no longer lying on his back but prostrating on the ground in a wretched state. A magic circle of golden ripples had appeared on the ground where he lay. A dazzling holy light shone down, like a blessing from a celestial god, or like the Holy Mother descending to save the world.

Si Haotian's fingers dug deep into the ground. Under the constant healing, not a single wound remained, only the lingering bloodstains and his agonized howls proved the horrific pain he was enduring. He tremblingly revealed his ability, watching in despair as a high-pressure water blade lightly chopped off his arm. The instant blood splattered, the healing circle beneath him pieced his body back together again.

He wished he could instantly throw away his severed arm to prevent it from reattaching. But Zheng Yi clearly wouldn't give him that chance, only torturing him repeatedly. "Please, I'll talk, I'm willing to talk… That powder was…"

Every time he tried to say who gave him the powder, a ball of water would forcefully seal his mouth and pour into it, denying him any chance to speak. Her seemingly normal smile became like that of a demon from hell. "Shh~ I never force anyone~ You can tell me later. Just hold on a little longer."

"I admire your backbone."

"All the ordinary people were killed… except for women under thirty… All the men, all the elderly, he fed them all as snacks to that snake… and that centipede."

"He liked to toy with ordinary people. He would lock them in small cages, then put one or two mutated snakes inside to torture them to death, bit by bit."

"Ability users? Ability users couldn't escape either… He killed all the weak ones. He didn't allow any mental-type ability users to exist in Yongdu, so he killed them all… and fed their bodies to the golden python."

"Survive? We usually… it wasn't our turn to eat the bodies of our own kind… I didn't want to… none of us wanted to eat… He divided all the corpses among his pets… We… we… our food was…" The ability user who said this had a look of disgust on his face. He couldn't help but gag for a moment before forcing himself to continue speaking to Yu Yinan. "Rats, cockroaches… and some other bugs I don't know, all sorts of bugs he caught. Luckily, we have fire ability users here, so we didn't have to eat them raw…"

"…He… he wasn't really interested in women… but he… he would force us… force all the male ability users to mate every day… just like breeding his pets. If we refused… he would dismember us in front of everyone and feed us to the golden python piece by piece."

"During the extreme cold, he casually killed a woman who wasn't pregnant and cooked her into a large pot of meat soup… He forced all of us to drink a bowl… Yes, I drank it… I drank it… retch… If you didn't drink, you'd die… sob…"

Listening to all this, Yu Yinan no longer knew what kind of expression she was wearing. It was probably a mixture of numbness and disgust. She looked at the ability users crying before her. They were genuinely disgusted and felt guilty about it, but they had made this choice in order to survive.

Yu Yinan lowered her gaze slightly. After they had sobbed and intermittently recounted many more of Si Haotian's evil deeds, she finally asked, "Did a pair of siblings ever come here? Xia Cheng and Xia Sheng. Their abilities are transformation-based. The sister turns into a robot, and the brother turns into a Shining Beauty."

The ability users, still crying and lost in their emotions, looked at one another. After a long while, one of them spoke up hesitantly, "I remember! I remember those two, they came here!" Their abilities were too unique; once seen, they were hard to forget.

"But, they seem to have disappeared a long time ago? I don't know when, but after a certain day, they vanished from Yongdu. It seems… let me think… I…" The person furrowed his brow, trying his best to recall some information to please the powerful woman before him. "Ah! It might be related to that Strange Person! I can't remember the exact time, but it was before this recent extreme cold. A very strange person came to Yongdu. He was very strong. Si Haotian fought him, but for some reason, they didn't continue. That Strange Person stayed in Yongdu for a few days, and Si Haotian seemed to have hosted him very enthusiastically."

"After that Strange Person left, the siblings disappeared!"

"He gave it to me! I don't know where he is… He said he couldn't remember his name. He wore a black coat and was wrapped up very tightly… He's a mutated zombie! He has intelligence, but he seems to have lost some of his memories!"

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