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Bai Jingan instinctively took a step back, clenching his fists as if to defend himself against something.
He glared at the ornate snake-like storage device that was nestled among the company’s, sponsors’, and fans’ gifts, feeling like he had just stepped into a void, where the real world had transformed into a dazzling, malicious hell.
He took a deep breath, reached out and picked up the storage device. The snake squirmed in his hand, and he gripped it tightly, exerting much more force than necessary.
He turned and walked back into the living room, where he saw Xia Tian sitting on the sofa, checking the security system of the house. Seeing him enter, Xia Tian looked up immediately, probably having been paying attention to his movements the whole time.
Wearing a dark blue shirt that matched his hair tie quite well, he sat amidst a pile of screens, integrating the jumbled information.
“What is it?” Xia Tian asked.
“Nothing,” Bai Jingan said. “Just a show of force, I guess.”
With a nonchalant air, he took out the storage device and tossed it onto the table.
Xia Tian jumped up from the sofa abruptly and took two stumbling steps backward, nearly falling over.
His whole body tensed, his hand instinctively reaching for his gun. He didn’t actually draw it, just gripped the handle tightly. Realizing his overreaction, he took a deep breath and composed himself.
Earlier, while scouring online information, Xia Tian had used his newfound authority to block every single ad for the Guest Show. They were just too much to bear, and he’d retreated to the sanctuary of the temple, unable to even look at them for a single moment longer.
If he wanted to survive in this cruel world, Bai Jingan knew he had to turn away and pretend not to care, to seal the abyss deep within his soul and feign indifference. After doing that, only embers of hatred and fury remained, fueling his determination to live on and make those bastards pay.
And so, he steeled himself once more.
He wanted to say something—make a joke or something—but at that moment, the storage device actually automatically connected to Xia Tian’s terminal on the table.
The video suddenly popped up. It was that nightmarish intercourse.
Holographic video, with detailed enhancement.
On the video, Xia Tian pressed against him, the lines from his shoulder to waist smooth and full of killing intent and the scars on his back still brutal, making him look incomplete but extremely sexy. His own legs were wrapped around Xia Tian’s waist, his body writhing and tense, covered in finger marks, hickeys, and bite marks. Xia Tian’s hand was pressed against the sharp edge of the bedpost, with the wound deep enough to see the bone, the blood making the whole thing as brutal as a battlefield.
Their lower bodies were joined together, engaging in sexual intercourse.
At that moment, Bai Jingan’s mind went blank. The sound effects were top-notch. The sound of impact, panting, and squelching noises could be heard in the living room. He also heard himself crying, but Xia Tian made no sound.
Memories forcibly suppressed deep in his mind exploded, sweeping everything away. The memory of that moment was crystal clear—the feeling of being invaded, the feverish desire…
Staggering back two steps, Xia Tian stood in the corner of the living room, clutching his gun. He looked like he was about to charge forward and kill something, but also like he couldn’t move a single fingertip, that any movement would shatter him completely.
In the video, Bai Jingan’s mind had completely collapsed. His eyes were full of frantic fear, but his body was completely open, trembling from the invasion of another person.
He heard himself saying in a broken tone, “I’m going to kill them… I’m going to kill them all…”
He was cursing, moaning, crying and pleading.
Xia Tian’s face remained impassive throughout the video, devoid of any emotional flicker. He fucked him steadily, looking sexy and deadly, but it seemed as if his soul had been drained by those people.
Meanwhile, underneath Xia Tian, he nervously repeated these sentences, his mind completely shattered and his body swaying under the impact of another person. The most hidden and darkest things in his soul were exposed under the sunlight of the Upper City.
He heard himself utter a name, a mournful and desperate cry as if his soul was broken, “Xiao Sang—”
At that moment, Bai Jingan was ice-cold all over. Goosebumps appeared all over his body, and shivers snaked from his spine to his brain. He found himself standing once again in the depths of the abyss of his heart.
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.
He… had almost nothing left, just a little fragment of flesh at the core of hell, which had been rotting away and trying to hide, but was forcibly exposed.
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Suddenly, Xia Tian, standing in the corner of the room, raised his gun and fired at the storage device.
Glass shattered, but the serpent-looking device seemed unaffected. The horrifying holographic scene of intercourse still continued in the living room. Xia Tian fired again, almost without pause, targeting his personal terminal.
The phone splintered and almost completely evaporated by the energy blast, and finally, the scene of intercourse disappeared.
The room descended into deathly silence.
Xia Tian gripped his gun tightly, glaring at the remnants of his phone. The multi-colored snake-looking storage device slithered through the broken glass. At any moment, it could connect to another terminal and continue broadcasting that nightmarish scene.
For now, the broadcasting of the holographic video had stopped. The area where the video had played was now a scene of miserable wreckage, almost as if a vortex had formed there. It was scorching, obscene, and terrifying, filled with intense corrosiveness.
Xia Tian glared viciously at the storage device, clearly contemplating how to destroy it completely.
Bai Jingan bent down to pick it up. He turned to look at Xia Tian, who quickly took a step back.
Bai Jingan stopped moving. That searing vortex still lingered there.
There was no way to restore things to their original state.
The abyss was right there, vast and unknown. Untouchable.
Bai Jingan took a breath and put the storage device into his pocket, while Xia Tian stared at it intently.
In the wreckage of the living room, Xia Tian looked cold and angry, like an evil spirit from hell. He himself was a fragment; this was the place he was most familiar with.
“I… need to see this,” Bai Jingan said to Xia Tian. “I need to know what I said during my final mental breakdown.”
Xia Tian, who had retreated completely to the corner of the wall, looked at him.
He opened his mouth to say something but no sound came out. Finally, he nodded and tried to force a smile at Bai Jingan.
He stood by the window, outside of which was a sea of poppies, burning under the sunlight like patches of bright red blood. His face was pale and he was clutching the gun tightly as he stood at the edge of the ruined living room with his whole body tense, as if he might break at any given moment.
Bai Jingan grabbed the storage device and headed back to his room. The company villa’s living room was still bathed in light, but the floor was a sleek, dark color that seemed to swallow any light that hit it. The whole place felt strangely muted, all the vibrant and bright colors sapped away.
He felt Xia Tian watching him from behind, as if it were his last chance to see him.
At noon, Xia Tian sent a message through the room system, asking Bai Jingan if he wanted to come out for lunch.
Bai Jing’an thought that the other person probably didn’t even dare to approach his room.
His eyes were glued to the video of that nightmarish incident, obsessively searching frame by frame for any trace of his past.
In the fragmented flashbacks triggered by the powerful drugs of the Upper City, he was back in the bilge of hell, reliving the last thing the virus left him.
That festering pit of despair remained there, dark and bottomless, a place he couldn’t bear to look. It was simply beyond his capacity.
Yet, a part of him was still trapped there, his former self reduced to shreds and remnants, abandoned in the maw of damnation. What had he said? What had he done? Who had he known? He had to know.
In that fierce anger, this desire was incredibly clear. It was himself. He couldn’t escape himself.
He had to remember.
He stared coldly at his utterly broken self, adjusting the audio track and analyzing the lip movements—what had he said? What was that last shred of memory?
In the end, he had been there… surviving for a long time. He must have been a formidable fighter, but no one could have protected him. He must have once been optimistic, but in that hell on earth, day after day… he must have watched in despair as his loved ones, friends, everyone he held dear died before his eyes, unable to save a single one…
In the end, his entire homeland was lost, becoming a feast for the revelry of those people.
His whole body vibrating, he turned to look at Xia Tian.
In the video, he climaxed a second time under that man’s penis, which was so humiliating it was enough to make one break down. Xia Tian stopped moving and lowered his head. His shoulder blades constricted like a pair of broken wings, bearing immense pain.
Bai Jingan knew how much willpower it took to stop at that moment, but his actions were always orderly, never crossing the line. This was never about satisfying desire; it was a brutal battle on the battlefield of desire.
It was a mad act of sex, but their movements were still restrained, focused solely on achieving their goal.
Bai Jingan saw himself struggling messily, his eyes filled with frenzied hatred and desire. He heard himself uttering expletives and sobbing. He was beyond irrational and miserable.
Xia Tian always pinned him down firmly. At one point, the man tremblingly stroked his hair with blood-covered hands, although he knew nothing could provide comfort.
Unlike the frenzied sex, he saw Xia Tian carefully leaning in, gently kissing his forehead again and again.
Xia Tian didn’t speak, his pupils dark and seemingly sunk to the underbelly of hell, yet his actions were cautious.
Bai Jingan closed his eyes.
He heard his own whimpers, pleas, and cusses in the video, while Xia Tian never made any sound.
He opened his eyes and reached out to touch Xia Tian’s face in the hologram. The man showed no expression as he pressed down on him, but even in such a situation, he still looked like a protector.
Bai Jingan left the room. Having cleaned up the living room and prepared lunch, Xia Tian was sitting at the dining table, playing with a cotton candy machine. He had removed the bandages to test his hand’s recovery.
As he saw Bai Jingan emerge, he raised his head to look at him and offered a small, tentative smile. His hair was tied up with that same cartoon hair tie, and under the sunlight, he looked beautiful like he belonged there. He was the gentlest person he had ever met.
He remembered seeing some promotional images of the Guest Show before. Aside from the big scenes of explosions and escapes, most of them featured… Xia Tian in the cage.
They made it extremely erotic, as if all his struggles, anger, charisma… his long hair, his smile, his tears when in extreme pain, the radiant and proud essence of his being were things for others’ enjoyment.
The Guest Show videos sold like crazy. Besides the parts about rebellion and passion, he knew what many people actually used those videos for.
If his most agonizing experiences were still on display for the pleasure of the privileged, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, Xia Tian’s had already been commodified, reduced to the mere ingredients—food, alcohol and hallucinogens—of lavish parties for the Upper City’s most affluent.
Bai Jingan felt a strong desire to walk over, use all his strength to hold him, ruffle his hair, and tell him everything would be okay.
He also wanted to pin him against the wall, threaten him, force him to admit how much he was hurting, make him cry, and strip off his shirt to see how much the whip marks on his back had healed—
To pretend that all those horrific memories, the trembling, the humiliation, the fear, and the twisted desires didn’t exist, that they were fine, that nothing had been taken from them.
The desire burned so intensely in his soul that he unrealistically wanted to threaten and kill something, to destroy the world, just to restore everything to the way it was. To see them as they once were, devoid of resentment, engaging in playful banter. To reclaim the life he had so painstakingly pieced together.
But he couldn’t do that. Threats wouldn’t achieve anything.
And he knew he would never again casually tell Xia Tian to take off his clothes, nor would Xia Tian kiss him in jest anymore.
He would never forget the sensation of Xia Tian’s lips and teeth, nor would he forget how he liked to bite in bed, sometimes biting so hard it hurt, yet it was still exhilarating.
He wouldn’t forget the sensation of their bodies joining together, the shape of his… penis, the feeling of it when it was inside him, his gentle kisses amidst the passion. And the fire of desire in his eyes… when he looked at him so tenderly.
The abyss was right there.
Bai Jingan decided to restore everything to the way it was, no matter what.
He couldn’t bring up those times again. He thought with a reckless obsession, don’t reach out and touch him again.
I absolutely must not touch him again.
Until everything gets restored.
At that moment, the doorbell chimed.
The first reaction of the two Killing Show megastars was to grab their guns and immediately prepare for any enemy, their awkwardness instantly replaced by a sudden desire for slaughter.
But then they realized it was just the doorbell ringing and they needed to find out what was going on.
Bai Jingan quickly pulled up the floating screen and activated the camera. They saw a large crowd outside, who seemed to be reporters and did not look like they were looking for trouble.
However, it was hard to say for sure. They exchanged glances before Xia Tian, gun in hand, approached the door. Bai Jingan followed closely behind, ready to support him.
Xia Tian opened the door and was instantly engulfed by the flash of cameras. In a split second, all the reporters were firing questions at him. Xia Tian stood expressionless, his hands clasped behind his back, his gun hidden, showing no intention of answering.
Bai Jingan tried to make out what these people were asking when suddenly, the man at the front, whom Bai Jingan thought looked familiar, but couldn’t remember where he had seen him before, spoke up.
He was smiling confidently.
He said, “Gentlemen, we’re from the Floating City Police Department. There’s been a murder case, and we’d like both of you to come back and assist with the investigation.”
At that moment, Bai Jingan remembered who he was—the head of the police department in the main city.
He had followed this case a while back and recalled seeing this person’s photo at that time. But then he noticed that the police were going all out to hype up the case with media coverage, and the developments were getting increasingly bloody, so he stopped paying attention.
Now, obviously—with journalists in tow—they were preparing for a sudden attack. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have arrived unannounced.
“We already have evidence,” said a younger police officer behind him, the one who had asked for their alibi after the second round of matches before the Guest Show began.
He looked more like he was communicating with the reporters than talking to them.
“Since you guys dared to do it, let’s not waste time with questions. Come back to the station with us,” he said.
Xia Tian stared coldly at them, his face radiating hostility in front of countless cameras. Bai Jingan noticed him tightening his grip on the gun.
“We’re having dinner,” Xia Tian said.
“Both of you, we know what you have done. You’re in big trouble…” the lead officer said.
“Then let me finish my meal first,” Xia Tian replied.
He didn’t even bother hiding the gun anymore; instead, he held it in his hand, looking as though he had a lot of pent-up anger.
The journalists erupted in excitement again, and the lead officer seemed a bit at a loss—Killing Show contestants weren’t easy to apprehend as their homes were usually like arsenals—but the smell of gunpowder made him particularly excited. He said, “Don’t think you’re a ‘God of War’—”
Xia Tian slammed the door shut.
The midday sun seemed to cast no light on him at all. Exhausted and utterly enraged, he glared at the closed door. He could still hear the commotion outside. Those people only wanted to elicit more reactions from him. Every photo and every news snippet related to the God of War could send click-through rates soaring. These people were ravenous for more, devouring his every move.
Then Xia Tian turned his head and gave Bai Jingan a smile.
“Let’s go eat,” he said.
Bai Jingan nodded and put away the gun.
He didn’t feel hungry, but he wanted to go back to the kitchen with Xia Tian and have their lunch.
We are in big trouble, he thought, but he also felt a slight sense of relief. They would once again ignore the abyss in their hearts and face everything as comrades.
They…must be just comrades.
Ugh. This just breaks my heart. At this point I don’t even expect for them to have a happy ending. I just want their suffering to end. I hope the author at least gives them an ending that allows them to get their revenge in a satisfactory way while keeping their humanity and restoring their relationship.
As always, thanks for the translation.
I want them to be happy….