Chapter 208 – There’s Always Someone Who’ll Talk

To be honest, Song Cheng didn’t really care what Yu Sheng had asked for—after all, they’d “cooperated” so many times now that he fully understood the Bureau Chief’s attitude toward Yu Sheng. His only worry was that the amount of food was a bit excessive and might make someone sick, but after watching Hu Li strip a chicken leg down to bare bone in three bites, even that last concern evaporated.

It was actually Yu Sheng who felt embarrassed. When the skewers were brought over, he gave Song Cheng an awkward glance. “You’re really just handing it over? You’re not even going to question it?”

“As long as you don’t roast me on the grill, we’re fine,” Captain Song said with a perfectly serious expression, doing his best to ignore the sounds of Hu Li demolishing skewers beside them. “The Special Operations Bureau has always taken a practical approach…”

Yu Sheng chuckled, casually swept all the other alchemical materials he’d requested into Hu Li’s tail, and strode over to the Angel Cultists’ corpses.

These cultists hadn’t been dead for very long. By estimation, the frenzied “self-sacrifice” ritual had taken place just the previous night, and Yu Sheng believed his Speaking with the Dead ability should work quite well on such “fresh” corpses.

He sliced open the palm of one of the cultists. Blood that hadn’t fully coagulated seeped slowly from the wound.

He drew a light breath, reached out to touch the cooling blood, and murmured to himself, “Come on, let’s have a chat.”

In an instant, the stagnant, faded world of the dead descended.

Everything around him turned to monotone shades of black, white, and gray. The entire room sank into silence. The cold blood established a temporary channel, and Yu Sheng felt a moment of disorientation. Once his vision stabilized, he saw that the Angel Cultist lying on the mortuary slab had already opened his eyes—hollow and rigid—and was staring directly at him.

The alien gaze was bone-chilling.

“I…” A hoarse, guttural mumble emerged from the cultist’s throat, like a hollow echo reverberating inside an empty shell. “I should have returned… to the Lord’s embrace…”

“I don’t know where dead people are supposed to go, but right now you’ve been stopped by me,” Yu Sheng said with a smile, watching the speaking husk. “You sacrificed yourself to An-Ka-Ai-La—what for?”

As if the name “An-Ka-Ai-La” had triggered some kind of stimulus, the dazed husk suddenly snapped its eyes wide open. It stared fixedly at Yu Sheng, seemingly trying to discern who exactly stood before it, or perhaps trying to comprehend what had happened to itself. But the chaos of death encroached upon it, and after several seconds of desperate struggle, the cultist’s most intense thoughts and memories from before death finally threw open their doors to Yu Sheng—

“Ah, we heard the Lord’s voice… His child is finally about to awaken. We offered Him guidance… The time of fulfillment has arrived.”

The dead man struggled to sit upright. In this faded, silent world of the afterlife, he looked into Yu Sheng’s eyes—and then his mouth suddenly split into a grin.

The corpse burst into grotesque, terrifying laughter, as though it had suddenly understood something. Its mouth stretched wider and wider until it tore through its own cheeks, tore through its own skull. A hoarse, piercing noise erupted from its chest cavity—

“Ah, I know who you are—you’ve touched that sacred umbilical cord, you appeared in the Lord’s Dreamscape… His murmuring whispers have already outlined your fate… Hahahaha, there were signs all along! You’re one step too late! Poor wretches, poor wretches! You arrived too late! Hahahaha… We’re not here, we… are no longer here…”

The laughing corpse convulsed violently, then collapsed back down amid the manic noise. Its unsettling laughter and screams echoed in Yu Sheng’s ears like some malicious curse. Yu Sheng listened in shock, but before he could ask anything further, the fallen corpse burst into flames—pale fire consumed the husk in the blink of an eye. Then, one after another, the bodies on the other mortuary slabs also erupted into fierce conflagrations.

In the monotone, deathly-still world of black, white, and gray, every Angel Cultist’s body was burning. Yu Sheng looked around in astonishment, watching the ignited corpses convulse. They screamed in the flames, cackled madly, shouted the name of An-Ka-Ai-La, shouted about umbilical cords and omens of awakening, along with many other sentences that no human could possibly comprehend—pure noise. And then, all at once, every sound vanished.

The roaring pale flames dissipated from Yu Sheng’s vision as though they had never existed.

Color returned. Yu Sheng blinked and found himself back in the normal Real World. The Angel Cultists’ corpses still lay quietly on the mortuary slabs, looking entirely unchanged.

But when he tried slicing open another corpse’s palm, tried to initiate Speaking with the Dead with a second Angel Cultist, he heard only a brief, hollow whistle.

It was as though some “thing” within these husks had vanished. When those pale flames had ignited moments ago, whatever residual “souls” remained in all the Angel Cultists’ corpses had departed this place.

Song Cheng walked over from nearby, his expression slightly tense. “What happened? Did the ritual fail?”

“…No, the ritual succeeded,” Yu Sheng steadied himself, temporarily suppressing the chaotic thoughts swirling in his mind, and spoke rapidly. “But they said a lot of deranged things, and it didn’t sound right to me…”

He relayed everything he’d heard during the Speaking with the Dead to the Special Operations Bureau captain standing before him, including the fact that he could no longer establish “communication” with any of the other cultist corpses.

Song Cheng’s brow gradually knotted into deep furrows, his expression growing exceptionally grave. “The ‘Lord’s’ child is about to awaken? And they ‘offered guidance’? And they said we’re one step too late…”

He muttered to himself. After a while, Ailin suddenly spoke up from beside them. “Why not go check on the Angel Cultist whose mental defenses we breached before? See if we can get anything more out of him.”

Yu Sheng and Song Cheng exchanged a quick glance, then nodded simultaneously.

The group (including the now well-fed fox) swiftly left the mortuary and headed for the area where the Angel Cultist was being held. When they passed through the gate and the light barrier receded, Yu Sheng once again laid eyes on the bald man he’d “reasoned with” several times before.

The man looked even thinner than last time, his spirit somewhat listless, yet he still sat ramrod straight in the room—as if even now, he was straining with everything he had to maintain the last shred of pride befitting a “servant of the Emissary.”

But when Yu Sheng appeared in the room, the bald cultist’s face clearly betrayed surprise and even a flicker of alarm.

“I’m back,” Yu Sheng said without any pleasantries, walking over and sitting directly on the bed opposite the man. “So—cooperate willingly, or do we go through the whole routine?”

“What routine?” The bald man instinctively averted his gaze, but then immediately turned back, staring calmly into Yu Sheng’s eyes.

“The routine where you act all defiant, then I beat you up, you stay defiant, I beat you up again—after several rounds you declare yourself unbroken, but then this doll beside me burrows into your brain and digs out whatever secrets are left in your memories,” Yu Sheng said casually. “You should know by now that the mental barrier you were so proud of is already riddled with holes. If Ailin got in once, she can get in countless times. The only question is whether you want to take a few extra beatings first. Personally, I don’t care either way—if you prefer the full routine, you can go ahead and adjust your expression now.”

The bald cultist clearly hadn’t expected Yu Sheng to be so blunt this time. His expression shifted several times, but in the end, he shook his head.

“Do as you please. I have no more secrets. You’re welcome to use every method at your disposal, and this cursed doll can turn my consciousness inside out and search it thoroughly—death or torture, I’m prepared for either.”

Yu Sheng stared hard into the man’s eyes. He found them perfectly calm.

The calm didn’t seem feigned.

“Do you know that your comrades are all dead?” Yu Sheng said abruptly. “We found their hiding place—all dead, every last one of them.”

The Angel Cultist’s expression finally changed, just slightly.

But there was not a trace of grief or wavering in that change. Instead, it carried a strange, inexplicable joy and serenity.

They remained locked in this standoff for several minutes before Yu Sheng finally heard the Angel Cultist let out a muffled murmur. “Ah, so the vessel has finally matured…”

Yu Sheng’s heart lurched. He lunged forward and seized the man by the collar. “What did you just say? What do you mean, ‘the vessel has finally matured’?”

But this time, the Angel Cultist showed no trace of tension or fear. He had achieved a state of true, absolute calm. Facing Yu Sheng’s gaze, the depths of his eyes even flickered with faint mockery. He moved his lips, silently mouthing the words: “Goodbye—”

The next second, Yu Sheng felt the body in his grip suddenly go limp and heavy. The man’s life force vanished in the blink of an eye, as though someone had simply flipped a switch from “alive” to “dead.” This Angel Cultist—held under layer upon layer of restraints and surveillance—had just died right before his eyes.

Song Cheng’s stunned voice burst from the ceiling-mounted monitor. “Huh?! What just happened?!”

Yu Sheng frowned. Without bothering to respond to Song Cheng, he pulled out a small knife, slashed a wound on the freshly dead cultist’s arm, grabbed hold, and immediately began—

The black-white-gray world of the dead descended in an instant. The just-deceased Angel Cultist opened his eyes in bewilderment, and upon seeing Yu Sheng before him, he was clearly dazed.

Evidently, a person who had only just died responded far more vividly during Speaking with the Dead than corpses that had been dead for a long time—at the very least, the expressions were decidedly more “human.”

Yu Sheng stared the man down, still gripping his collar as he continued the question. “You weren’t finished. What does ‘the vessel has finally matured’ mean?”

The Angel Cultist blinked, seemingly grasping at last what had just happened.

“…Fuck.”

He said.

(End of Chapter)