Chapter 24
"If you were given thousands of fragments—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—I wouldn't be surprised if you broke through that limit faster than expected. The Cancer plague in your body… it's not just a curse, Miss Poison. It's also a machine that never stops working."
Ling Xu nodded slowly, then suddenly her eyes narrowed, staring at Huan Zheng with a sharper gaze than usual.
Not a suspicious gaze, but one that tried to read something hidden behind the lazy mask that was beginning to crack.
"But before that, I want to know one thing, Huan Zheng," she said, her voice suddenly heavier, deeper, like water flowing into a trench with no visible bottom.
"In that tavern, you almost blew yourself up. You almost killed both of us. Why? What made someone like you—a member of the three Wheels of Cultivation, a being who has reached the Thirty-Second Level of the Supernatural Star—choose to die together with your enemies instead of continuing to live?"
Huan Zheng fell silent.
For a moment, only the sound of water droplets from the cave ceiling could be heard, falling into a small puddle on the stone floor with a "tick… tick… tick…" like an hourglass measuring time that was never enough.
Then, Huan Zheng took a breath—a long breath, one that felt like emptying all the air from his lungs at once, followed by a subtle tremor throughout his body, a tremor he could not hide despite trying hard to remain calm.
"Because I've already lost someone," he finally answered, his voice soft, almost a whisper, and between his words, Ling Xu could hear something wet, something breaking, something that sounded like a sob held at the edge of his throat.
"Someone very close to me. Someone that… I couldn't save. I let them die. Or maybe—I was the one who caused their death. I don't know anymore. What I do know is, after that loss, I made a promise to myself: there would never be anyone I care about again. There would never be anyone I let get close. Because if I lose them once more, if I have to feel that pain for a second time…."
He paused, swallowing as if forcing down a thorn lodged in his throat, then continued in a voice barely audible.
"Then there would be no point in me continuing to live. There would be no point in bearing the title of The Lazy One, no point in idling away my life, if the people who made life feel light are no longer by my side."
Ling Xu did not ask further.
She did not ask whether that person was alive or dead, did not ask where they were now, did not ask why Huan Zheng had not searched for or saved them.
She simply sat in silence, letting those words settle in her chest like pebbles dropped into a well—no echo, no great ripple, just sinking quietly to the bottom, becoming part of a wound that might never truly heal.
Haaah!!
Several days passed after that conversation—how many, no one knew, because inside the cave, time felt like honey flowing slowly across a cold surface—and at some point, whether morning or night, no one could tell, Huan Zheng, who had been sitting at the cave's entrance watching the distant waves, suddenly turned toward Ling Xu, who was adjusting her robe inside the cave.
"You look much healthier, Miss Poison," he said, his brows slightly furrowed, not out of suspicion, but genuine curiosity.
"The last time I woke up, you were lying there with wounds all over your body. Now you're moving as if you were never injured at all."
Ling Xu smiled.
A strangely bright smile, one she had never shown during the months she had traveled with Huan Zheng, a smile that made her white, vein-patterned hair look like a glowing crown within the dark cave.
"Perfectly healthy, Huan Zheng," she replied, stretching both her arms upward like a cat that had just woken up.
"Not a single injury left. My wounds have completely healed. There aren't even any scars."
Huan Zheng nodded slowly upon hearing Ling Xu's answer, but in his mind, his inner voice began to murmur.
Not with an ordinary tone, but with something heavier, deeper, like an old bell tolling in a dark underground chamber where dust fell from a cracked ceiling.
"Her recovery is too fast," he muttered, his lazy eyes suddenly narrowing, looking at Ling Xu with a gaze that was no longer just curiosity, but suspicion creeping like roots through cracked soil.
"Too fast for a Singular Star Goddess. Too fast for a being whose body had just exploded into a mass of flesh a meter tall."
He recalled the moment in the tavern—the moment when Ling Xu's body transformed, when that grayish-green mass of flesh rose, pulsed, exploded, and spread the Cancer plague throughout the entire ocean city without exception.
In his mind, the image resurfaced—the figure of the old man in tattered robes that Ling Xu had once spoken about; the man who, in the cave, handed over a complete Humanity Star before disappearing like dust carried away by the wind.
"All this time, I thought that old man was the God of the Vast Cosmos," Huan Zheng continued in his thoughts, his inner voice growing colder, more analytical, like a detective piecing together scattered fragments of a puzzle.
"But now… now I'm no longer sure. Because the aura I felt from the explosion of the Cancer plague—that same aura clings to the 51 fragments of the Humanity Star that Ling Xu possesses. Not merely a divine aura. Not an aura of hope and destruction in any noble sense. But an aura… of misery. A cold misery. A silent misery. A misery that can only come from one source: the Cancer plague itself."
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting that horrifying conclusion sink into his chest like a stone dropped into a bottomless abyss.
"That old man," he murmured deeper, his inner voice nearly a whisper, like someone reciting a forbidden incantation, "was not the reincarnation of any great god. He was a manifestation of the Cancer plague. The plague that once made the entire universe tremble. The plague that did not care about cultivation levels. The plague that forced me, The Silent One, and The Singer to hide in the deepest cave at the edge of the universe for months, just to avoid being infected."
He opened his eyes, looking at Ling Xu, who was still smiling brightly before him—the girl with white, vein-patterned hair, unaware that inside Huan Zheng's mind, a long debate was unfolding between fear and curiosity, between the urge to flee and the desire to stay.
"But why? Why did the Cancer plague choose Ling Xu? Why give a Humanity Star to a lowly goddess who has nothing but resentment and rare white hair?Was Ling Xu just a coincidence? Or was she—"
Huan Zheng stopped, swallowing as if forcing down a thorn stuck in his throat.
"… Was she created from the very beginning to become the host of that Cancer plague?"
To be continued…