Editor: Junyans
Amidst the chaos created by Xia Tian, Bai Jingan escaped from the battlefield.
He found a damaged car, opened the door, broke the driver’s neck, and shot the co-pilot in the head before sitting in the driver’s seat.
He left the main road, and while passing by a restaurant billboard, someone in the adjacent lane noticed him. Bai Jingan fired two shots, killing him and the driver. Throughout these actions, his expression remained emotionless, his eyes seemingly frozen, devoid of any glimmer.
His movements went unnoticed amidst the commotion caused by Xia Tian. Meanwhile, the hunters acted systematically, following the continuous commands issued over the tactical channel, with everyone’s attention focused on capturing the bloody God of War.
Bai Jingan drove the car to the east of the battlefield. The nearest building was a toy city owned by the Floating Gold Group. The structure was extravagant and brightly colored, like a skyscraper made of candy.
He entered the barricade, bypassed the security, and followed the driveway downwards. Around the twentieth floor, there would be a corridor leading to the lower road.
For a while, vibrant and sweet colors enveloped him, with smiling cartoon models visible everywhere. As the local personnel had already been evacuated due to the hunt, numerous faces with eager smiles were facing the void, making the entire building resemble a hollow stomach eagerly waiting to be filled.
Inside the seized armored vehicle, he could hear internal communication filled with tactical language. In an excited and bloodthirsty tone, they were discussing how to trap Xia Tian and how to capture him without killing him. For them, this was a celebratory hunt.
In the end, Xia Tian made a big commotion just as he said.
He indiscriminately blew up a large area of roads and armored vehicles around him. In a situation with no way out, he forcefully charged forward.
At the last moment, the road closed, and countless huge gray teeth devoured their prey. They looked nothing like roads but rather like tentacles or fangs mutated from the city.
Next, Bai Jingan witnessed a series of massive explosions where Xia Tian was located. The fangs shattered, smashing down to crush the road below. Xia Tian’s van surged forward amidst a blaze of flames.
Chaos erupted on the hunters’ internal communication channel. Someone exclaimed, “Is he crazy?”
“There’s nothing ahead!”
“Repeat, we must capture him alive—”
Though far away, Bai Jingan felt like he saw Xia Tian’s appearance.
He was severely injured. In the impact just now, a steel rod from a bridge pierced the engine and impaled his abdomen. It was a fatal injury. There was blood everywhere inside the van. But at this moment, no one was around him to say that he needed a hemostatic injection. He stared straight ahead, as if the wound didn’t exist. He relied solely on the gleam in his eyes and the hope strong enough to incinerate him to persevere.
Bai Jingan heard someone shouting in the internal communication, “Doesn’t he know that it’s a dead end?”
Of course, he knew, Bai Jingan thought, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment and just drove the van towards the dead end.
In that instant, the battered van rushed out of the chaotic gray fangs and into the abyss and sunlight as if it could take flight.
But then the huge floating shuttle above moved.
The dark behemoth cast a miraculous tractor beam, fixing the van in the air like a solitary specimen.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Bai Jingan hoped that, in the final moments, Xia Tian had lost consciousness. But he was probably still awake, unable to move in the car, watching himself slowly ascend and inexorably engulfed by the ginormous entity above.
Bai Jingan stood in the lobby of the toy building on the twentieth floor, staring at the scene where the floating shuttle swallowed Xia Tian’s van… The entrance closed, and nothing could be seen.
Bai Jingan hijacked the car and only learned when he opened the tactical channel that the people from Iceberg called this operation “Hunting the God of War.” The words were filled with a bloody excitement, as if they were playing a violent game.
They created a god, only to destroy it.
But Xia Tian is just a young man from the Lower City, Bai Jingan thought. He lost his family, was abused and tortured, and then sold to the Floating Gold Group by the local official.
But now, he was just a prey hunted down by the world. After cornering him, they found pleasure in tormenting him and then annihilating him.
Bai Jingan looked at his reflection in the glass window. He was wearing a black uniform that had just been taken off a corpse. He looked nothing like himself, resembling a malevolent spirit that had crawled out from the depths of hell.
The firelight reflected in his eyes, where a world forever frozen in the darkness of the massacre lay—bleeding, burning, overflowing with hatred, yet as frozen as ice.
The massive hunt has been successful. The God of War had been captured, and the main course was about to be served.
This greedy, disgusting hell and garbage dump should be thoroughly burned!
Bai Jingan found that he was shaking and had a severe headache, but he didn’t care. He just took a breath and turned his attention back to the car’s radio.
On the radio, people on the tactical channel were shouting. They had noticed his absence and were searching for him.
Expressionless, he accessed satellite images, locked onto the floating shuttle that took Xia Tian away, and rapidly planned each step in his mind. The plan was brutal and undoubtedly insane, almost impossible. After all, the one devouring Xia Tian wasn’t just anyone but the gods at the top of the world’s food chain!
In the dark corners of his mind, the man trapped among countless rotting corpses spoke in a crazy and wintry tone, “I don’t care.”
He didn’t care about the consequences or how many would die. He was determined to retrieve Xia Tian.
No matter the cost!
Xia Tian knew he wouldn’t live much longer, and his family shared the same belief—except for Dee Dee, who hadn’t outgrown her hero fantasies.
His elder sister had been concerned about his mental state, fearing he would chase after the dignified life he imagined and never return. Eventually, even his corpse would end up in someone else’s belly, lost forever.
He had assured her he would do everything to survive, but she didn’t trust him at all.
Now, she has been gone for a long time.
Xia Tian had kept his promise, giving his all, but her distrust was justified; he kept stirring up trouble and making enemies. For him, his enemy was just that—enemy, even if it was the whole world.
In a daze, Xia Tian felt countless people surrounding him, some shouting that he must stay alive, while others injected him with something—perhaps a new type of nanomedical drug?
After several gatherings and rendezvous, the floating shuttle smoothly descended. For a while, he sensed the doctors retreating, replaced by others emerging from the depths of the shadows, encircling him and staring.
Unable to open his eyes or move, Xia Tian heard someone laugh, a light and malicious laughter.
“It was tough enough,” the man said.
Half-asleep, Xia Tian felt someone touching him, someone… stroking his hair, inserting fingers deep into the roots of his hair, biting and relishing it like sharp teeth. A part of him was terrified and wanted desperately to hide, but there was nothing he could do.
Someone pulled up his hair to expose the back of his neck, and a voice said, “You need to tie him up with a stronger chain.”
Xia Tian drifted into a drowsy sleep, feeling like he was falling into an inverted abyss.
At some point, he felt a pang of pain as something probed in, as if… as if the tongue of some creature entered through the back of his neck, sucking on his brain matter.
Suddenly, darkness turned into an array of vivid colors, with hues potent enough to devour, and the world became a hallucinogenic soup, boiling aimlessly, endlessly dividing and consuming him.
He heard his own moans, which were unfamiliar, like the helpless whimpers of a small animal.
He tried hard to swallow his voice, and the fang-like hand stroked his hair and said, “Good boy.”
When Xia Tian woke up, he found himself lying on a large bed.
The light was bright and gathered around him.
He moved a little, but the terrible headache made him feel like vomiting. He subconsciously touched the back of his neck, certain he had undergone some kind of surgery. He found no scars though. The Upper City procedures never left any external traces, except that the punishment chip had leveled up.
It gripped him, like a spider with countless slender legs.
Xia Tian tried to estimate how long he had been unconscious, but he had no clue. He had completely lost track of time. The wound on his lower abdomen, not the kind you could treat with a home first aid kit, had also vanished. The elites of the Upper City were patient and wanted him to be lively on the dining table.
He sat up—he was physically in excellent condition—and noticed he was still wearing his previous clothes, covered in blood and lacerated from the crash. His denim jacket lay nearby. He was barefoot, with no sign of shoes. All his hidden weapons were gone, and the Marshmallow wasn’t around.
He surveyed the surroundings—no use pretending to be dazed—this was approximately a 90-square-meter room, entirely painted in an elegant deep red color, decorated with gold, silver, and black. The bedsheets, furniture, and decorations were all exquisite, meticulously crafted, reflecting top-notch aesthetics. Every detail seemed to have some ancient historical origin, showcasing a high level of taste.
The ceiling formed an elegant arch with built-in lights, all illuminating him.
The room was warm, yet there was something about it that chilled people to the very core.
He didn’t see any doors or windows, but there were large statues with a strange style on the entire wall opposite. Burning-like patterns decorated the corners of the wall, and they bent and hung down, like a fence. Xia Tian suddenly realized what it was… It was a cage.
Red, black, gold, and silver—the opulence theme permeated its every detail.
They had prepared this for him. A cage to confine a god.
He got off the bed and slowly walked over to examine the statue.
It seemed to be cast from wrought iron, decorating the cage-themed room. Its overall form is harsh and eerie, emanating a bloody and hungry aura, as if it had devoured many people.
He halted, noticing a stylized screaming human face, in agony and bereft of personal will, with empty eye sockets filled with pure hopelessness staring back at him.
Then, he saw more.
The entire wall was carved with the entangled bodies and faces of countless tortured people, fused by painfully twisted lines, and their limbs deformed to form spikes, rings, or railings——
After watching for a while, Xia Tian suddenly realized what it was—it was a torture rack.
He had heard people talk about it before but had never seen one.
Those who spoke of it vividly described how even the toughest bones would shatter on this thing, turning into soft, juicy pulp, completely devoted to serving the master.
Xia Tian stared at those spikes, rings, and protrusions, wondering what they were all for. Then, a wave of nausea hit him. He couldn’t hold back and bent over, dry heaving, but nothing came out.
He thought this couldn’t be something new; this twisted rack had undoubtedly hosted countless people like him, who must have screamed, succumbed, and broken under the gory “art” of the Upper City.
“Welcome to the Guest Show,” a voice said.
Xia Tian tensed but didn’t move. This was the meticulously arranged center of the stage, surrounded by countless cameras, like a dense web covering him, observing every detail.
“Today, after a fierce battle, we finally captured the bloody God of War, locked him in a cage, and placed him on everyone’s dining table,” The voice continued, sounding very close, but omnipresent.
Xia Tian didn’t recognize this voice, but perhaps he had encountered it at some banquet. In a place like this, everyone who smiled at you might be someone who would eat you.
“After a democratic vote, we have decided to engage in an ancient, extremely refined, and artistic activity—first, we shall ‘tame,'” the voice continued.
It wasn’t addressing Xia Tian but rather speaking to someone outside the room—or perhaps those at a more distant terminal. The person spoke like Xia Tian didn’t exist.
“This will be a process of breaking a person’s will. This project is most suitable for resilient and wild prey,” the narrator said. “When placed on the torture rack, breaking the bones of His Excellency, the War God, will surely be particularly thrilling!”
Xia Tian listened quietly, lowering his head. He clenched and then released his fist. His hands were cold, as if blood couldn’t reach his fingertips.
He thought of Bai Jingan.
Thinking about the man at this moment served no purpose. In this world, you can’t rely on anyone. You had to either carve out a bloody path on your own or silently die in the dirty shadows of the city, becoming one among the piled-up mountains of corrupt flesh.
He was prepared for everything.
Yet the image of that person emerged clearly, like a small light in this land of darkness and despair. He wondered, what is he doing?
Did he manage to escape?
Is he still thinking about how to save me?
Will I be able to return home in my lifetime?
oh God…i’m scared