Elsewhere.
Biotech Division.
The atmosphere in the office was tight and silent. Only soft footsteps and stifled breaths could be heard.
Everyone held their breath, crowding around a 3D holographic projection, eyes locked on the eerie blue image being projected.
The moment Zhou Jiao slapped Jiang Lian across the head, everyone felt their scalps tingle and hearts stop. Some nearly threw up on the spot from sheer anxiety.
They all knew Jiang Lian liked Zhou Jiao—but how much? Enough to give up destroying the world? That was a mystery.
And even if he did like her that much, would a slap send him into a murderous frenzy?
After all, he wasn't human. You couldn't predict him with human logic.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, a massive and terrifying shadow loomed ever closer. The sky looked like thick, black oil—ready to spill down and smother everything at any second.
Tension hung in the air like a live wire. Everyone waited on edge for Jiang Lian's response.
In the holographic image, Jiang Lian appeared to pause, his brows knitting together as he glanced at the bloody hole in his chest.
The moment his heart was pushed back into place, the gushing wound closed up on its own.
He gave it a cold glance, then lowered his head and whispered something in Zhou Jiao's ear. His expression was... less than pleasant.
Thank God.
No rage, no rampage—yet. Everyone silently exhaled.
All she had to do now was kiss him, soothe him a little, and everything would be fine...
But in the next second, Zhou Jiao smacked him again, this time with a grim expression of her own.
Arms crossed, she jerked her chin toward the window—a clear, commanding gesture.
Biotech researchers had spent years analyzing Jiang Lian's behavior in excruciating detail. They knew he held an instinctive contempt and rejection of humankind.
This contempt was written into his very biology—irreversible, unerasable.
Like how a wolf would never stop itself from tearing out a lamb's throat, Jiang Lian would never see humans as equals.
Aside from when he posed undercover in the Bureau, he rarely bothered speaking to humans. When he gave commands, it was through some incomprehensible method that directly manipulated their subconscious.
If not for the company's real-time bio-monitoring, they wouldn't even know their minds had been tampered with.
So how could such a terrifying being, who scorned humanity, possibly obey a human's order after being slapped—twice?
Gasps rippled through the office. Everyone's face had gone pale.
Someone cursed Zhou Jiao out loud. How could she be so arrogant? Did she not realize that every move she made affected the fate of all humankind?
But then, they remembered—she was a diagnosed antisocial personality.
No sense of guilt, no concept of responsibility.
If they'd known one day, the fate of the entire world would rest in the hands of someone like her, the company would never have launched the War Machine Program.
Yes, the rumors online were true.
Alongside the "Genesis Project," launched to prepare for potential corporate wars, Biotech had also launched the War Machine Program: randomly selecting couples undergoing assisted reproduction and modifying their embryos' genes.
Those embryos had a high probability of growing into highly intelligent sociopaths—or, in some cases, cold-blooded psychopaths.
Either way, they would be raised to join the company—as agents, soldiers, assassins, snipers… cogs in a vast, merciless corporate empire.
If they had foreseen Zhou Jiao's future entanglement with a terrifying non-human entity, they would've programmed her to be a kind, gentle woman who loved life—not a remorseless killer engineered for war.
The atmosphere grew even more suffocating.
Everyone silently prayed for a miracle.
But deep down, they all knew—miracles didn't happen.
Not unless Jiang Lian truly loved Zhou Jiao.
And how could a supreme, inhuman being possibly love a human?
Then it happened.
A miracle.
Jiang Lian's face remained grim, but slowly—bit by bit—he began to retract his tentacles.
The appendages that had engulfed the entire city began to dissolve, to shrink, to reverse—like an asphalt tide ebbing back into the tall, elegant frame of Jiang Lian.
Throughout the process, his gaze remained terrifyingly cold, like he could lash out again at any moment and reduce the city to ash.
But he didn't.
Dozens of seconds ticked by. All the tentacles were gone.
A wave of relieved exhales swept through the office, but no one dared relax. Eyes stayed glued to the 3D projection, waiting for Jiang Lian's next move.
Jiang Lian turned toward Zhou Jiao.
They couldn't see his expression—only that he lifted a thumb and gently wiped the corner of his mouth.
Then Zhou Jiao smiled, curled her finger at him.
And the unspeakable, godlike being—like an obedient pet—came to her, nearly desperate to kiss her lips.
Everyone froze. Before they could process what had happened, the 3D image blinked out.
Jiang Lian's possessiveness had always been deranged and obsessive.
If he didn't want her seen, no device on Earth could capture her image.
·
Zhou Jiao had never interfered in other people's lives—not out of apathy, but because she didn't feel entitled to.
Yes, the world was corrupt, filthy, disgusting. But people lived in it. She had no right to decide their fate.
When the trolley came barreling down the tracks, she would walk away. She would never pull the lever.
Yet it was precisely this cold detachment—this inhuman apathy—that ended up saving countless lives.
She was created to be a weapon. A machine for killing.
Now she stepped out of the office building and looked up at the sky, now clear again. Bittersweet emotions surged within her.
If not for Jiang Lian, forcing her to choose between saving or destroying the world…
She might never have figured out who she truly was.
She had always thought she was clear-eyed—fully aware of her own twisted desires, never hiding from them, never ashamed.
But only now did she realize she'd been avoiding that one sentence from her parents:
"Be a good person."
Until this moment, she believed sociopaths could never change.
But Jiang Lian had awakened her humanity. Forced her to see herself clearly.
She wanted to be a good person.
How strange. Loving a monster hadn't turned her into one.
Instead, it had helped her slowly become human again.
At that moment, Jiang Lian walked up behind her and embraced her from behind.
The grand plan he'd painstakingly come up with had been rejected. His expression was dark and irritable—it would be a long time before he could think of anything equally perfect.
But she still let him kiss her like a predator would.
He wanted to refuse. To prove that he'd conquered the predatory instincts of his past.
But subtle body language didn't lie.
—The moment Zhou Jiao said those words, his pupils dilated, his Adam's apple bobbed sharply, and an overwhelming hunger surged within him like a tidal wave.
She tilted her head ever so slightly.
And he couldn't hold back anymore—he kissed her.
His lips were still ice-cold, but the kiss was terrifyingly intense, bordering on violent, as his mouth devoured hers with a feverish urgency.
Zhou Jiao's scalp tingled from how fiercely he kissed her, and she immediately regretted inviting him to kiss her like a predator.
His tongue was a cold, slender, amorphous mass—something between liquid and muscle—capable of morphing into grotesque shapes, even sprouting countless fine filaments to brush across her tongue.
It was not what you'd call a pleasant kiss.
But his expression gradually softened, and she figured she could tolerate it just a little longer.
Ten minutes later, Zhou Jiao had had enough. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back.
"That's enough!"
Between their parted lips, a translucent strand of saliva stretched and dripped down.
Jiang Lian's eyes darkened. He reached out and caught the droplet on his fingertip.
A faint crack shimmered across his skin.
His Adam's apple rolled once, and he let out an audible gulp.
"…"
Zhou Jiao's eye twitched.
Typical.
Even if he had finally learned empathy—the core of human emotion—it didn't change the fact that, deep down, he was still not human.
Honestly? She kind of liked that.
She could already picture what their future held: thrilling, chaotic, never boring.
The only thing she was grateful for?
Other than kissing, Jiang Lian didn't know how to do anything else.
His love for her was terrifyingly pure.
Even his desire was terrifyingly pure—aside from his bottomless possessiveness, there was nothing vulgar or carnal about it.
Zhou Jiao had no intention of teaching him.
She'd rather wait for him to figure it out himself.
That would be way more fun.
·
A catastrophe that nearly ended the world had quietly been averted.
Araki Isao slumped in his chair, exhaling deeply in relief… only to feel dread creeping back in.
Why had Jiang Lian suddenly decided to destroy the world?
What was the trigger?
He had to find out. If they wanted to avoid a similar apocalypse next time, identifying the cause was critical.
Araki gathered all the data he could, pieced it together, analyzed every angle—
And he finally found the answer.
...Only to wish he never had.
Because if Jiang Lian ever developed the ability to read human thoughts, he would absolutely annihilate anyone who knew this.
Who could've guessed that this unfathomable, incomprehensible supreme being had wanted to destroy the world because—
He'd bought a gift for the one he loved, someone else gave it to her first, and she got framed for it.
That was it. That tiny, stupid, human thing triggered the apocalypse.
"…"
Araki stared into the void, deadpan.
How was he supposed to face Jiang Lian ever again?
What if he accidentally laughed out loud? That'd be the end of him.
The only thing he could do now for this divine being...
Was erase every single trace of this incident, down to the last byte.
If too many people found out, Jiang Lian might decide to wipe the slate clean—again.
·
After Jiang Lian and Zhou Jiao got together, he offered to give her the entire biotech company.
Zhou Jiao immediately refused.
Was he kidding? Senior executives at Biotech regularly worked 85-hour days. She'd have to be out of her mind to become CEO.
If it was just a symbolic gesture, even more pointless.
Even Jiang Lian, after taking over, had his entire identity dug up and dissected—
Well, the identity of the original Jiang Lian, anyway.
His godlike power to influence human subconsciousness and distort electromagnetic signals still couldn't stop gossip-hungry civilians from digging into his past.
She wasn't about to let the media comb through her entire life story.
And she definitely didn't want them digging up her parents' deaths just to turn them into trauma-porn content.
Her humanity was slowly regrowing, tender and fragile.
Seeing those things again would hurt in ways she couldn't describe.
Jiang Lian dropped the idea of the gift and went back to being his lazy, underperforming CEO self.
As Zhou Jiao had expected, life with him was intense.
Something nerve-wracking happened almost every day.
Their relationship no longer felt like walking a tightrope—
It was the tightrope.
Her nerves had become the tightrope he danced across.
Still, she found herself enjoying it.
That constant edge-of-disaster feeling?
Exhilarating.
Until one day—
She got the surprise of a lifetime.
That day, she came home from work (to the mansion that had once belonged to Biotech's former CEO, Fujiwara Osamu—she still didn't know where that poor bastard had been dumped), and the moment she opened the front door—
She froze.
The living room was crawling with dense, slimy, writhing black-red tendrils, radiating a wet, bone-chilling aura.
For a moment, she honestly thought she'd opened the refrigerator by mistake.
The grand, luxurious villa now resembled some kind of grotesque lab specimen—
Its walls coated in layers of pulsating, membranous flesh, expanding and contracting with eerie, synchronized heartbeats and alien buzzing sounds.
It looked like the lair of some colossal, crawling horror…
Or a yawning abyss splitting open to devour mankind whole.
Zhou Jiao's lips twitched.
She closed the door with a click.
"Jiang Lian—what the hell are you doing now?"
Amid this nightmare landscape, Jiang Lian was calmly sitting on the sofa.
One hand propped against his forehead, eyes narrowed, he looked slightly annoyed—and oddly satisfied—as he watched the TV screen across from him.
"I figured out how to make it up to you," he said.
Zhou Jiao: "?"
Jiang Lian turned to look at her.
A glint of male pride and something darker—like a serpent's envy—flickered in his eyes.
After a pause, he said slowly,
"We've been together long enough that you should know what I'm capable of."
"No matter how many children you want, I can make it happen."
"If you want the entire planet to be your descendants—"
"I can arrange that."
Zhou Jiao felt her soul seize up like it had been shoved inside one of those writhing tendrils.
She knew better than to apply human logic to Jiang Lian.
She even wanted to try reacting with gratitude—maybe put on a touched expression.
But she just couldn't hold it in.
From between clenched teeth, one cold syllable escaped:
"...Get out."