Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The First Commandment of the Stranger
“Fake? An evil spirit?”
Yang Jia’s voice, which seemed somewhat mysterious and languid, jolted Xiao Xiao’s consciousness awake, bringing with it a bone-chilling coldness as if he had plunged into an icy lake.
Yet the Yang Jia before his eyes, that mysterious and aloof girl, merely looked into his eyes and spoke softly: “Don’t you feel that everyone around you has suddenly developed an inexplicable yet intense hatred toward you?”
“Don’t you feel like they all wish they could kill you and eat you?”
“……”
Xiao Xiao suddenly looked at her with some horror, and inexplicably felt a surge of gratitude in his heart.
Because this woman had precisely articulated the feeling he had just experienced.
But right after that, Yang Jia let out a soft sigh and said, “I can tell you, all of that was real.”
“Just now in the room, the hatred they showed toward you was real. If you had left the room even a moment later, they would have killed you—that’s also real.”
“……”
At this moment, Xiao Xiao felt a slight tingling sensation on his scalp, and the world behind him seemed to crumble silently.
After a long while, he asked in a low voice: “Why?”
“The reason is simple.”
A wisp of smoke with a faint hint of mint drifted past Yang Jia’s face as she spoke softly:
“Everything and everyone around us only appears the same as in your memory on the surface. They have long since been replaced with false monsters without your knowledge.”
“You no longer fit into this world, like a nail stuck inside a clock.”
“This world despises you, hates you, and wants to kill you completely…”
“…”
Xiao Xiao couldn’t describe how he felt hearing these words. He simply stared blankly at Yang Jia, her calm and beautiful face giving him an overwhelming sense of madness.
“I…”
He had countless questions he wanted to ask, but Yang Jia quickly stood up, placing her palm on his shoulder and whispering in his ear: “Don’t speak, they’re coming.”
Xiao Xiao’s mind was still filled with confusion, and his heart gave an inexplicable start.
In the corridor, Jiang Cheng was already walking over with a smile. He, who had just been looking at himself with that eerie gaze, now seemed like a completely different person, his face full of smiles as he said:
“I was wondering why you two have been away for so long without coming back. Turns out you were here whispering to each other.”
“Can you let me hear what you two are talking about?”
“……”
Xiao Xiao’s heart was now filled with vigilance, but Yang Jia had already answered with a relaxed smile: “We were just chatting about something interesting.”
Jiang Cheng glanced at Yang Jia, then looked toward Xiao Xiao, his expression seeming somewhat displeased. He simply smiled and waved his hand, saying, “Alright, alright, everyone has been waiting long enough.”
But as he spoke, he suddenly turned his head to look at Xiao Xiao and said, “Yang Jia, you go back first. I have something to discuss with Xiao Xiao.”
In the instant he turned his head, a sinister glint seemed to flash across the depths of his eyes.
This instantly put Xiao Xiao on guard. He instinctively looked toward Yang Jia, and of course didn’t want her to leave. But to his surprise, she simply nodded obediently and turned to go.
In the instant she turned around, she suddenly leaned close to Xiao Xiao’s ear and said quickly: “The first commandment for strangers: never let yourself appear weak.”
“If you don’t want to be killed by him, you can only kill him.”
“……”
“Kill him?”
Xiao Xiao was frightened by those few words, looking at Yang Jia with some alarm.
But Yang Jia had already turned and left, her face still wearing an expression of complete normalcy.
It was Jiang Cheng who had seen the expression on Yang Jia’s face as she whispered that sentence past Xiao Xiao’s ear, and it seemed this made him feel extremely displeased.
Watching Yang Jia leave, the faint smile that had been on his face suddenly vanished.
When he turned to look at Xiao Xiao, his eyes were already filled with coldness and fury. He suddenly grabbed Xiao Xiao by the arm and dragged him into the bathroom.
Gripping Xiao Xiao’s arm, he exerted force abruptly, slamming Xiao Xiao against the bathroom wall. The glass mirror shattered with a crash, and fragments scattered across the floor.
His voice carried a twisted and venomous chill: “You deserve it?”
“You…”
Xiao Xiao was caught off guard, pressed against the wall, and instinctively panicked, asking uncertainly: “What’s wrong with you?”
“Everyone knows this gathering was called together because I met Yang Jia.”
“Everyone knows I like Yang Jia.”
“Everyone knows Yang Jia is mine, and you dare compete with me for her? You dare look at her? You dare go outside and whisper to her?”
“……”
Jiang Cheng roared with a cold expression, his anger causing the veins on his forehead to bulge like earthworms, twisting and writhing. In that instant, Xiao Xiao felt an intense threat emanating from him. That undisguised fury filled him with an uncontrollable sense of panic. He could feel Jiang Cheng’s anger erupting without restraint, spider-web-like blood vessels rapidly spreading across his entire eyeballs.
He was consumed with such rage, his hatred and malice bursting forth as if tangible, the force so violent that his mouth suddenly split open.
Both corners of his mouth were torn apart by the twisted muscular force, and then his chest suddenly shattered into pieces. His body surface, like a cracked eggshell, erupted with twisted tentacles extending from within.
At the top were circular suckers and backward-facing barbed spines, writhing and dripping with strands of viscous fluid.
“You worthless garbage with no ambition, you deserve to die in your bedroom…”
In a slurred and venomous voice, one of Jiang Cheng’s slimy arms—or rather, tentacles—covered in barbed spines, viciously thrust toward Xiao Xiao’s chest.
In that moment, Xiao Xiao suddenly widened his eyes.
He stared at that disgusting and terrifying tentacle drilling toward his heart, and the tension instantly reached its peak. He felt as if all the blood in his body was being squeezed into his brain by an invisible force.
The panic that had accumulated for so long erupted in this moment, and it came with overwhelming force, more intense than any panic he had ever experienced.
“Is this real, or an illusion?”
“He… has turned into a monster?”
“……”
Accompanied by a sharp headache and dizziness, he felt everything around him slow down.
Only the angry and fragmented face of Jiang Cheng before his eyes, and the tentacles writhing and emerging from his body, and that arm containing inhuman power.
How could this be……
How could he encounter something so absurd and nightmarish?
He couldn’t understand why, but he felt his heartbeat was unusually clear, yet the intervals between each beat seemed to stretch infinitely.
Ever since he had endured the panic that had troubled him for four years and made efforts to adapt to the sensation of these dissociative episodes, he often experienced this feeling.
The more tense he became, the slower everything around him seemed to move, nearly coming to a halt.
In the same second, he could contemplate far more things and perceive far more information, as if the world had come to a standstill and only his thoughts were running in explosive overdrive.
In the past, this sensation had brought only pain and torment, but now it seemed to serve some unexpected purpose.
His thoughts ran in explosive overload.
What took others a long time to figure out, he accomplished in less than a second.
……
……
“The Jiang Cheng before my eyes has turned into a monster, and he is filled with hatred toward me. He wants to… kill me.”
“Should I run away?”
“No, I can’t escape. The monster is too close to me.”
“So, if I want to protect myself, then there’s only one method left…”
Xiao Xiao recalled Yang Jia’s whispered words from just moments ago: “To survive, you have no choice but to kill him.”
Killing was naturally not a good thing. Xiao Xiao had never even killed a chicken in his entire life, let alone a person. But the thing before him was a monster, and it was hurting him. What other choice did he have?
So he quickly moved on to the crucial question: how to kill it?
As this doubt flashed through his mind, Xiao Xiao’s thoughts exploded into overdrive, desperately capturing every detail around him. In this slow-motion moment where time seemed nearly frozen, he saw Jiang Cheng’s split skin and hideous flesh and tentacles, saw the unknown tissue within his body, and at the center of his cracked form, that dark red heart slowly expanding and compressing blood.
From the corner of his eye, he also saw glittering fragments on the ground—shards of the mirror that had shattered when Jiang Cheng was pushed against it.
A plan gradually emerged in my mind.
……
……
“Bang!”
Jiang Cheng, consumed by fury, transformed his arm into a tentacle and struck viciously at Xiao Xiao’s chest.
The speed was already quite alarming, but he hadn’t expected that just as his tentacle lashed forward, Xiao Xiao’s body, pinned against the wall, suddenly lurched to the side and crouched down.
The tentacle instantly struck the bathroom’s ceramic tile wall, and fragments of tile scattered and flew in all directions.
Jiang Cheng was somewhat taken aback, unable to imagine how Xiao Xiao, who was panicked and weak with no means of resistance, could have evaded this blow. But he immediately shrieked, and more tentacles writhed forward to seize Xiao Xiao.
Xiao Xiao, who had dodged the first whip strike, moved with surprising speed… no, not speed, but precision.
He had thought it through many times and observed for a long time, making his movements efficient, decisive, and precise.
As he crouched down to evade the whip strike, his hand was already reaching toward the ground, grasping a long, blade-sharp shard of mirror.
He had even deliberately selected one that was long enough and sharp enough.
Before the tentacle on Jiang Cheng’s body could lash out at him again, he gripped the mirror shard, rose to his feet, and drove it downward toward his chest in one fluid motion.
“Shhk!”
Xiao Xiao’s wrist pierced through the slimy tentacle and thrust into the exposed cavity of Jiang Cheng’s chest, the sharp mirror shard driving directly into his wildly pounding heart.
That heart was like leather, seemingly more resilient than imagined, but Xiao Xiao had poured all his strength into this strike, driving the shard a full ten centimeters deep into his heart.
The tentacles that Jiang Cheng was wielding suddenly became limp and soft.
He staggered backward, and in his face that had split so that the two eyes were no longer aligned vertically, there was an unexpected and terrified gleam.
Xiao Xiao gripped the mirror shards stained with fresh blood tightly, staring at him with an unwavering gaze.
He took a deep breath, then crouched down again and drove the knife viciously into the heart once more.
Two stabs.