Chapter 14: Is It Redemption?
Even as a child, he had gray hair and those unreadable green eyes.
However, lacking the skill for disguise he acquired in adulthood, his tender eyes still revealed some human emotions.
An extreme hatred and a ruthless drive to survive.
“Bite him! Bite him!!”
“This batch of pollution entities is so weak. Change them for a high-level batch.”
“He really can survive. Five days without food or water and he can still fight pollution entities. The bastard really has a tough life.”
On the viewing platform, the faces of the little brutes made Chi Wan physically ill. While eating pastries and fruits carefully prepared by servants, they cruelly discussed methods to torture him.
“Chop off one of his arms, then throw him back in!” screamed the chubby leader of the brats.
Behind him, a butler in a suit spoke in a low, respectful voice:
“We cannot do that, Young Master. Although this lowlife is illegitimate, he still has half the Master’s blood. If we really sever his arm, it will be hard to explain.”
“Is there no other way?”
“We can break it first, then reset it for him later.”
“Good idea. Do it quickly!”
Sensing something bad was about to happen, Chi Wan began to break out in a cold sweat.
Sure enough, the butler sent someone to break young Qi Ye’s arm before throwing him back into the beast cage.
This time, there were even more pollution entities.
“Let’s see how he survives this. Father won’t blame us if he dies at the hands of pollution entities!”
“Hahahaha, look at him! He got stabbed by a pollution entity!”
The boys’ mocking laughter cut into Chi Wan’s ears like a saw, making her afraid to look at the scene in the arena.
Even through her peripheral vision, she could feel his intense pain and his plea for help.
But no one saved him.
Amidst a cheer that erupted after an unknown amount of time, Chi Wan paled and gathered the courage to look. She saw young Qi Ye collapsed in a pool of blood.
His body was covered in lacerations from the pollution entities.
“Is he dead? Throw him out.”
“Don’t rush. Lock him up. If Father asks, just say he didn’t know what was good for him and insisted on playing with the pollution entities in the arena until he played himself to death.”
“He’s just an illegitimate son. His lowly mother is dead, and Father doesn’t care about him at all. Putting him here was just to give me a toy. If he dies, he dies.”
Seeming bored, the little brutes chatted and left.
Qi Ye, looking like a broken rag doll in the pool of blood, was thrown into a dungeon by the butler’s men.
In the dark, damp dungeon, he lay on the ground without a trace of life.
Chi Wan pounded on the transparent barrier, shouting his name loudly.
Qi Ye.
But he couldn’t hear her voice at all.
In an instant, Chi Wan felt desperate and powerless.
Isn’t he one of the male leads?
Aren’t protagonists supposed to be invincible, powerful, and sail through life smoothly?
Why is his childhood so dark?
In this moment, Chi Wan profoundly realized that this was a real world.
Novels only write about one in ten thousand aspects of a world; they don’t write about the pain behind the power or the thorns on the road to success.
But Chi Wan wouldn’t admit defeat.
She tried to manipulate her Mental Power.
Even though in this virtual world, her Mental Power had no sensation.
She forced herself to follow muscle memory, manipulating the imperceptible Mental Power in an attempt to destroy this world.
She tried until she was sweating profusely, until every muscle in her body was tight with tension.
She watched helplessly as time passed, second by second. She watched the butler bring a coroner team into the dungeon.
She watched the servants whispering:
“Tortured for three years, he finally breathed his last.”
“Living was just suffering. Death is better.”
“Look how thin he is. Eating food that even dogs wouldn’t eat every day, he looks so many years younger than children his age.”
“He had a tough life. If it were me, I wouldn’t have lasted a week.”
“With such good physical quality, if he had lasted until sixteen, he might have awakened as a Sentinel. Pity sixteen was too far away for him.”
Even the servants, whose hearts had long hardened from seeing such scenes, couldn’t help but sigh with pity.
Chi Wan didn’t dare listen closely to their conversation. Her mind was entirely focused on how to break this situation.
“Deceased: Qi Ye, illegitimate son of the Qi family, age 11. Two hundred and thirty-one wounds on the body, left arm dislocated, long-term malnutrition…”
“Idiot! Who asked you to record these things!”
“Sorry, Head Steward Gao. I will rewrite it.”
…
After countless attempts and failures, Chi Wan watched helplessly as Qi Ye was loaded onto the corpse transport vehicle like a dead body.
In this moment, she broke down.
After smashing her fist heavily against the barrier one last time, she shouted his name with a sobbing voice:
“Qi Ye!”
…
Then the world collapsed completely. A massive surge of Mental Power, like a tidal wave, expelled the entire hallucinogenic fog!
All Sentinels trapped in the fog woke up.
“Guide Chi Wan!”
“Guide Chi Wan, you… you…”
When Chi Wan opened her eyes again, she saw the hallucinogenic fog completely dissipating behind the glass defensive wall.
Li Su withdrew his gaze from Chi Wan, unable to control the shock in his eyes.
But clearly, they didn’t have time to discuss anything now.
All the Sentinels charged in.
The high-level pollution entity was already dead.
The hallucinogenic fog had been shattered by Chi Wan’s Mental Power, and he died from the backlash.
All Sentinels immediately began clearing the massive pollution source behind him.
The pollution source was fully five or six meters wide and went over ten meters deep into the ground. It was a black, tumor-like object covered in bizarre patterns, with extremely dense pollution fog flowing from it continuously.
To clear such a pollution source, it had to be completely dug out and destroyed.
While the Sentinels were busy destroying the source, Chi Wan whispered to a nearby Guide:
“Hello, may I ask, how long did I take just now?”
After all, in Qi Ye’s memory, she had struggled for at least a day.
The Guide was made somewhat uncomfortable by Chi Wan’s polite tone and quickly replied:
“Very fast. Less than three minutes!”
Chi Wan thanked her, then noticed a diary on the chest of the dead high-level pollution entity.
Curious, she opened it.
Only then did she discover that before being polluted, this entity was codenamed 073, a Sentinel of the mining zone guard team.
After Planet A-73 suffered the massive invasion of pollution entities, he and all the Sentinels of the guard team hid here.
After holding out for a week, they still hadn’t received any rescue.
Starving to the extreme, his companions unanimously decided to eat him first, as he had a disabled leg.
They tied him up here and intended to dismember him.
Just minutes before they used their knives, a high-level pollution entity invaded, planted the pollution source, and polluted all the Sentinels.
And he, due to his intense resentment, evolved. He became a high-level pollution entity, even mutating an ability, and successfully replaced that high-level pollution entity to guard this pollution source.
At the end of the diary was his twisted handwriting:
I like becoming a pollution entity, because I hate all of humanity.
—073
Reading this, Chi Wan’s heart skipped a beat.
She thought of Qi Ye’s painful memories she had just witnessed and couldn’t help but wonder.
Does he hate humanity because of those experiences?
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice someone approaching.
When she finally snapped out of it and realized she was enveloped by a large shadow, Chi Wan looked up.
She met a pair of obscure green eyes.
She didn’t know if it was her illusion, but she felt these eyes held some different emotions than before.
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