Chapter 91
Ling Xu fell silent.
Huan Zheng's words still echoed in her mind like a bell struck repeatedly in a dark underground chamber—if you, as its vessel, cannot control, let alone maximize the potential of the Cancer plague, then you are merely delivering your own death willingly—and for a moment, the flame in her third eye, which had burned steadily like war drums, began to flicker.
It was no longer stable, no longer certain, because she knew—she knew with absolute certainty—that Huan Zheng was not lying, that he was not exaggerating, that he was speaking a truth she had long avoided because it was too painful to face.
But when she saw Huan Zheng begin to step forward—not with his usual lazy stride, but with firm, measured steps that declared he had made a decision and would not turn back—Ling Xu instinctively turned.
Her body, light from having let go of everything she had once built and choosing emptiness, shot forward like a shadow.
In an instant, she stood before Huan Zheng, both hands raised, pressing against his chest with a force not strong enough to harm him, but enough to halt his steps.
"Don't, Huan Zheng," she said, her voice no longer cold as when she threatened The Silent One, no longer irritated as when she demanded he let go of her, but breaking, wet, like harp strings snapping in the middle of the most beautiful melody.
And behind the white bandages wrapped around her head, behind the hollow sockets where her eyes once were, behind everything she had sacrificed to reach this point—something wet began to gather.
Not tears, because she had lost both her eyes, and without eyes, there could be no tears.
There was only pain—pain with no outlet, pain that settled in her chest, rotting, rotting, rotting.
"Don't take my place. Don't sacrifice yourself for me. I won't be able to live if you die, Huan Zheng. I won't be able to breathe if you leave. I won't be able to—"
With a gentle yet certain motion—a motion he had never shown to anyone, not to The Singer who embraced him every night, not to The Silent One who once sat beside him in the bamboo pavilion, not to anyone except the white-bandaged girl standing before him with trembling hands pressed against his chest—Huan Zheng raised both hands.
He grasped Ling Xu's shoulders with a pressure neither too strong nor too soft, just enough to make her realize he was not joking, not trying to play the hero.
He was simply doing what he had to do, as he always had since the moment they met—when he chose to stay by her side even though he could have left at any time.
Then, with an even gentler motion, more careful still—like an older brother stroking the hair of a crying younger sibling, like a lover wiping away the tears of their grieving partner, like someone about to part for the last time and wanting to remember every strand of hair, every curve of a face, every small detail once taken for granted—he caressed Ling Xu's hair.
White hair threaded with flowing veins of color like rivers across untouched snow, hair that was once tangled and dry but now soft and radiant, hair that had borne silent witness to every death and rebirth, every tear and laughter, every step forward and backward they had taken together over the years.
"There are many things, Ling Xu, that you have never known about me. Not because I deliberately hid them, not because I didn't trust you, but because—"
He stopped, drawing a long breath.
A breath that felt as though it expelled all the air from his lungs at once, followed by a faint tremor throughout his body—a tremor that revealed he did not want to say this, that he would rather remain the lazy man sleeping on an ox cart and yawning at the wrong moments, that he did not want to remember who he once was, before he chose to forget.
"… Because I hoped the time would never come when I had to remember again."
Hooooh!!
"But that time has come, Ling Xu," Huan Zheng continued.
And when he withdrew his hand from her hair, when he looked into her third eye with a gaze he had never shown anyone—a gaze that was honest, bare, revealing that behind the mask of laziness he had worn for years lay a man who carried secrets older than the universe itself—the air around them changed.
It grew heavier, denser, more absolute—like the stillness before a storm that never truly arrives because the storm is already here, within Huan Zheng, since the very beginning, since before he was born, since before time was named by the first being who dared define passing seconds.
"The reason I am the one suited to face The Silent One—not you, not The Singer, not anyone—is because I… am, in truth, the Devourer of Adaptation."
And the moment those words left his lips, from Huan Zheng's eyes—eyes that had always been half-lidded in laziness, used only for yawning and scratching an itch that was never there, eyes that had never shown anything but boredom and indifference—there began to radiate the symbolism of all sets that ultimately formed Aleph.
Even those beyond reach, such as Rank into Rank, Reinhardt, and the Berkeley cardinal—cardinals whose mere names had once caused humanity to faint, because their minds were never designed to grasp the infinite, let alone the unimaginable.
And among all the symbols emanating from his eyes, something shaped like a staircase appeared—a staircase with no end, no beginning, whose steps were infinite cardinals, each step containing a cardinal greater than the one below it.
And above all cardinals that any being could conceive—even The Singer—there were still more steps above, and above those, and above those again, endlessly, without limit, without end.
This staircase continuously inflated all the cardinals radiating from Huan Zheng's eyes to a level where the Berkeley cardinal—once considered the peak of all peaks by the mathematicians of the universe—was nothing more than an atom within the total expansion of that endless staircase.
Dust in the wind.
A grain of sand in a boundless desert.
A drop of water in a bottomless ocean.
Huan Zheng slowly released Ling Xu's shoulders.
His fingers, still warm from their final touch upon her white, color-threaded hair, moved to the side, then behind—like a swimmer cutting through water to turn, like a dancer finishing their final motion with grace even without music.
And when his body, which had been facing Ling Xu, turned one hundred and eighty degrees—facing The Silent One, facing the soul of the God of the Vast Cosmos still standing in the distance, facing the enemy who had orchestrated the destruction of entire civilizations simply because his love was rejected—he did not transform into a majestic figure like a hero of legend.
He did not summon a radiant sword or a golden cloak billowing in the wind.
He remained as he always was.
Slouched shoulders, hands in his pockets, eyes half-lidded like someone who had just woken up and still wasn't sure whether he truly wanted to be awake.
To be continued…