Chapter 361 - 2.0
There was a flash of hunger in the injured man’s eyes, but it wasn’t for food.
The look he gave Rouxi was raw, sharp, and almost childlike in its desire. Then something darker moved beneath it, an eager heat that made Yuche’s fingers flex against the metal. The man looked at Rouxi through the flowers and vines like he had found warmth after freezing, water after thirst, meat after starvation.
The one thing he had spent his entire life looking for.
And for Yuche, that was a killing offense.
But before he could do anything, the stranger then dropped his gaze back to the cement beneath his feet.
His shoulders hunched forward even as his twisted hands curled against the road. His voice broke when he spoke, soft and ruined and shaped for pity.
"Please," the man begged. "Help me. I need help."
Yuche almost laughed.
He had seen his fair share of con men in his previous life as the head of a successful triad. But this guy was really trying to sell it.
If only he had taken the time to study his Mark before now, he would have used that voice on anyone else but Yuche’s woman.
In fact, Old Chen’s face had already changed, twisting with pity and the desire to help him. His mouth had tightened with the helpless guilt of a man who still believed suffering deserved a second chance and then some. One of the workers even shifted forward before Old Chen caught him by the sleeve and held him back, though even that looked more like fear of the wall than understanding of the thing crouched in front of it.
Rouxi looked at the stranger like he was last week’s rotten food, complete with white maggots squirming over it.
Yuche’s mood improved a little.
"Your hands are backward," Rouxi pointed out, her voice complete devoid of emotion. He was going to have to put her down for a nap when this was all said and done. Zhenlan was all powerful, he could take control for an hour without burning the world down.
Probably.
Hopefully.
Where was he anyway?
Shaking his head, Yuche saw the moment the man had flinched as if Rouxi had hit him. "They hurt," he whined, holding up the misshapen appendages for her inspection.
"So I assumed," scoffed Rouxi, lifting a single, glorious eyebrow as she stared down her nose at the man. "Most people don’t put on their arms backward in the morning.
"Please," he whispered again, his voice hitting that perfect note that demanded sympathy. "I won’t hurt you. I can’t hurt you. I’m human."
Rouxi yawned loudly, her jaw practically cracking with the move.
It wasn’t polite or lady-like by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, she hadn’t even covered her mouth when she did it. Instead, it was wide, exhausted, and completely unimpressed over the pne man play going on in front of her.
Lingyun covered his mouth, but the laugh still escaped around his fingers. Chenghai did not look amused. Zhenlan, who Yuche had finally noticed and who had been standing close to the metal-threaded roots with his attention fixed on the stranger’s shoulder, only lowered his gaze to the marks curling beneath the torn collar of the man’s shirt.
Yuche saw them a second later.
Whorls twisted over the stranger’s skin, uneven circles pressed deep enough to distort the flesh around them. They weren’t just surface wounds or intricate tattoos. Instead, it looked like the skin had grown around the pattern, pulled inward and puckered in places, as if something inside him had turned in slow circles until the body learned the shape.
The wall hated those marks.
Rouxi noticed too. Sleep left her face in a slow, unpleasant way. "Move your shirt," she sneered. AH, she was more awake now, and really, really not happy about it.
The stranger hesitated, but Rouxi wasn’t having any of it. The vines nearest his hand slid a finger-length deeper into the road, ready to do Rouxi’s will if the man fought her any more on it.
After all, it was a simple command.
So, he moved.
It was awkward, there was no denying that. With hands that should not have worked at all, he dragged the torn cloth away from his shoulder. The whorls continued down across his chest, disappearing beneath dirt, blood, and the ruined edge of his shirt. They pulsed once when the air touched them.
Old Chen sucked in a breath, pity clouding his vision, but Rouxi only smiled.
Yuche knew that smile. She was about to do something, and no one was going to be happy about it.
Well, almost no one. Lingyun would do whatever she asked of him. Then again, so would Yuche.
"There you are," she purred. "I don’t know if you are the 2.0 version, or if you just lost that much weight. But it’s so nice to see you again..."
The stranger’s head jerked up before he could stop himself, and for one bare instant, the begging vanished from his face, and the thing underneath looked back at her.
The metal under Yuche’s hand answered with a low hum and the stranger’s eyes snapped toward him.
The con man wasn’t startled so much as evaluating Yuche for treats in the same way Yuche had evaluated him just moments before.
After all, like recognized like.
Yuche pressed his palm flat against the metal and let his power move through the wall in a thin, controlled thread. The flowers snapped shut all at once. The vines tightened around the old gate line, and the man on the road folded forward with a wet sound caught between pain and pleasure.
Rouxi’s smile faded.
"Interesting," Zhenlan said quietly.
"No," Rouxi replied, watching the man claw at the road with backward hands. "Interesting is when there is a plot twist in the middle of my drama and you find out that the bitch isn’t actually the bitch. This is just fucking inconvenient."
Lingyun’s fire rose higher. "Can inconvenient burn?"
"Eventually," she replied, slowing nodding her head. But her eyes were saying something else entirely.
The man lifted his head again, his breath coming out fast and hard. The broken softness returned to his voice so fast that Yuche wanted to cut it out of him just to see what sound came next.
"I escaped," he whispered. "Please. It took me. It took all of us."
Rouxi tilted her head. "What took you?"
The stranger’s gaze flicked toward the road behind him, then back to her. His tongue touched his lip again, quick this time, nervous or eager or both.
"It ate them," he said. "It ate everyone."
Old Chen went very still while Yuche kept his hand on the wall and watched the stranger watch Rouxi from beneath lowered lashes.
The man was not trembling because he feared death.
He was trembling because he had found the treasure he had been sent to find.
Rouxi must have understood it at the same moment, because she stepped closer to the barrier and the entire wall leaned with her.
The stranger’s breath hitched.
"It’s still out there," he whispered, his voice soft and enticing. He wanted her to come closer. He really thought he would be able to take Rouxi away from her own house against her will.
Rouxi looked at his twisted limbs, the whorls under his skin, and the hunger he could not quite hide whenever her plants moved.
"Good," she said. "Then I suggest you start talking before I decide you are more useful to me as fertilizer."