Chapter 112

“What?”

The window was not closed, and the wind on the top floor howled even more fiercely. Clouds pressed against the window edge, lightning like cracks crawled across the sky, followed by the muffled rumble of thunder rolling over. Horne directly closed the window and drew the curtains to block out the suffocatingly humid air from outside, along with the gray-black sky.

Both sat on the sofa. Horne leaned back halfway, his expression dim, his heart constantly conflicted and struggling. Hels checked if he had any other injuries.

“No other places. I didn’t self-harm.” Horne’s tone was very calm. He withdrew his arm, took a deep breath, and slowly said, “The fate community is a mass of black dynamic particle matter, seeming to have a bit of green light. I can’t remember clearly.”

After he said this, Hels’s movements suddenly stopped completely. His gaze shifted from Horne’s body to his face, and he slowly sat up straight.

Horne spoke very slowly but very clearly: “I’ve always had some questions I couldn’t figure out. I woke up in the Tower District, and the place I woke was where that mass of black particle matter was. I didn’t know what happened and kept fleeing until I felt a bit safer. Only then did I start thinking about these things.”

“Why do I always survive? Why was my hibernation pod in the tower?” Horne closed his eyes as countless memories exploded like a spiderweb. “That mass of black matter was very much like a heart, pulsing. That room only had this matter. Leaving the room led to a corridor, opposite was an elevator—not the kind we’re used to, but a disk on the ground with what seemed like infinite space around it. I was too scared then and didn’t look closely at what that place really was.”

Horne’s hand sketched a model in mid-air. His memories plunged into the river of time, gradually recalling the scene of his escape back then.

After exiting the disk elevator, he was outdoors. He didn’t know where he was. He saw high walls, saw gates, and instinctively fled. He was very panicked, only wanting to find something familiar in this strange world, but soon a recon drone locked onto him, and he fled all the way.

Despite his suspicions, he had no clues and found no traces.

Hels remained silent. His gaze did not fall on Horne but furrowed his brows, staring at something nonexistent, as if pondering this matter too.

His complexion was still unhealthily pale, unchanged since the Underground Base’s destruction.

The noise in the air amplified endlessly. Horne looked at his bandaged wrist, which he could no longer unwrap to check if the wound had healed, but he really wanted to know the reason.

“And the reason we escaped the Obelisk illusion.”

He wavered, suspected, because only one reason could perfectly explain everything.

Hels pondered for a moment, gently grasped Horne’s hand, and said softly, “That means the fate community accepted your frequency. You two can resonate, or you satisfied some harmonic. If so, we’ve solved the final puzzle. The one who can destroy the fate community is you. We don’t even need to wait to capture the Hermit’s frequency or use Homan’s frequency tuner.”

Horne stared motionlessly at Hels. The other’s eyes held only determination and gentleness, with some worry. His palm slowly tightened, and he took a deep breath to suppress that nauseous feeling.

“Hels, do you understand what I mean?”

Hels gently rubbed his hand to relax him a bit, his tone extremely calm: “I know what you’re saying, Horne. You truly experienced your life. What Jia Lan said was just information—information is one-sided. Even if there are coincidences, don’t apply them to yourself, okay?”

“You think it’s coincidence that I fully know what the fate community looks like, that I’ve been inside and come out? What I saw was exactly that corridor from the surveillance, without any distortion?” Horne raised his volume a bit, his ending tone trembling. Even so, he tried his best to hold himself back, gripping Hels’s hand tightly. “Do you know what this means?”

Fresh air flowed slowly, carrying a woody scent, blowing between the silent pair.

That hand was actually trembling, trying hard to stay calm. Hels sat closer, patted the back of Horne’s hand, then cupped Horne’s head, forcing him to meet his eyes, foreheads touching. His voice was extremely soft: “I know.”

“Horne, you remember them, right? General Al, General Yaro. You remember how you met Han Ya and Wen Yu, how you came to like cheese, the people you helped, and that night in the snowfield when you met me—you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

Fingers gently brushed over the skin of his face, cool warmth inching across, bit by bit soothing the unease.

They were all real life experiences. He had formed unbreakable bonds with many people in this world, so his self-assumed reason didn’t hold.

Horne let his chaotic thoughts stop. He closed his eyes, gripped Hels’s wrist, and proactively hugged him.

Hearts pressed together, beats resonating. Hels rhythmically patted Horne’s back lightly, feeling the slightly rapid breathing of the man in his arms right by his ear.

“If it’s true, I’d rather…” Horne said, but what he’d rather be remained unsaid.

His chin rested in the other’s neck hollow, smelling the familiar scent. Waves of temperature infected him, and he gradually calmed.

These were unprovable matters. If he was, he would still continue along his current life path. As Hels said, he had truly lived his life, so he should know who he was.

Whenever alien-related matters came up, he was always so impulsive and uneasy, often unable to think calmly.

The long embrace lasted until the fresh air stopped. Outside turned from grayish-blue to complete night, everything quieting down.

Hels even suspected Horne had fallen asleep leaning on him.

“Hels.” Horne suddenly called.

“Hm?”

Horne pushed him away and instead looked seriously at the man before him, asking word by word: “That year, I was at the Control Tower. What happened after?”

Horne felt he surely hadn’t died. With Hels’s personality, he wouldn’t have let him be buried under the Control Tower, so there must be more information.

“After…” Hels hadn’t expected Horne to ask this. He paused, his hand drooping powerlessly. Out of Horne’s sight, his arm stiffened, fingers digging into the sofa, fingertips white, five indentations, the pain in his eyes deeply hidden. “After, I brought you back.”

The extremely suppressed low tone was like each extra word stabbed a knife through his heart.

“What about the government and Military District people?”

“All dead.”

“Dead…” Horne softly repeated, then quickly continued, “Then why didn’t I die? And my hiberna…”

He didn’t finish. Horne’s downward gaze caught the folds on the sofa.

Those were deep marks gripped with extreme force.

Hels’s arm was taut.

Horne opened his mouth, the latter words halting abruptly. He blanked for a moment, shifted his gaze to look outside the window. A few seconds later, he calmed and said to himself: “So, I was still alive then. You sent me to the hibernation pod to use its repair function to treat me? Then you cooperated with Bai Yin until you both entered hibernation pods.”

Horne pieced together his logic chain. If he wasn’t the Hermit, this was the only explanation: After he entered the hibernation pod, Hels, Han Ya, and Wen Yu should have entered around the same time, but Hels didn’t know his wound repair progress or when he’d wake, so he had to wake early and wait alone until 12 years passed.

Hels neither refuted, acknowledged, nor denied Horne’s guess. He just lowered his head and reached out again, fingers gently touching Horne’s skin, tender as handling the most precious treasure.

Horne nodded lightly: “I understand.”

He hugged Hels again proactively, like before when they often watched the aurora from rooftops together—arms around the waist, head buried in the collar. Just breathing, just staying, was entirely enough.

Hels hugged very tightly, almost rubbing Horne entirely into his embrace. Only after a long time did he murmur by his ear, “Sorry,” his voice somewhat hoarse.

“No sorry.” Horne said softly. “Don’t leave me.”

Neither moved, just leaning like this, able to hear the echo of each other’s heartbeats.

Horne did not conceal this experience. He reported it truthfully to the Thunder Pavilion. After You Wenjie learned of it, he first looked suspiciously at Hels, but Hels gave no response.

You Wenjie turned back and told Horne their plan: one team to the East District, another to the West District. Hels would first go with Horne to find the Hermit or protect him entering under the Obelisk, then Horne would venture alone into the long corridor. It would be a major battle.

As for the time, Jia Lan believed if the Hermit set the final day for its appearance, it would only arrive at the Hermit Lab then. Now, less than half a month remained.

By this logic, the Hermit was like a prophet, knowing when what would happen and who would be where. That meant fate was determined.

Horne didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t wait until the last moment to act. Fortunately, he roughly remembered the Hermit Lab’s location.

Learning from last time, Horne took the room’s emergency flashlight—he would go alone once more, before humanity’s final assault and before the Hermit’s set return time, to find traces of the Hermit and dispel his inner doubts.

This time, he prepared more things.

–

Marsh-like air breathed into his lungs, thick and humid, soil fermenting.

Boom—a muffled thunderclap, gale winds rising, clouds pressing the daytime city near night, icy wind piercing to the bone.

Horne originally just wanted to go next door to find Hels first, then sneak into the tower to the Hermit Lab. But after knocking for a long time with no answer, he checked the terminal. The red dot was, as expected, in the Slum.

The Slum was as usual. At night and early morning, vagrants gathered here. The vast plaza was filled with tents, rotten rags and bamboo poles crawling everywhere. Almost through the screen, one could smell the sour stench inside—filthy and overturned, soil wet and dark, as if water could be squeezed out by hand. Rags fluttered violently in the wind; unbound ones were blown into the air.

Aside from the open plaza and a few crooked abandoned houses nearby, there was nothing here.

Horne stared at the densely packed screens in the monitoring room, pondering for a moment.

“Colonel, Ains left very early yesterday and hasn’t come today.” The on-duty technician said to Horne.

“Mm.” Horne responded. He hadn’t come to find Ains anyway, just happened to want to use the recon drone surveillance to check the Slum. As for Ains, he hadn’t had time yesterday to mind her. He didn’t know how she handled the conflict with Homan afterward—or if she just left.

Thinking of Ains, Horne sighed silently, planning to find her and talk after returning from the Tower District.

The Slum surveillance yielded nothing. He straightened to leave when his casual glance froze.

A fleeting image from a recon drone showed a street corner connecting to the residential area. A familiar figure in a white sweater, long hair pinned up, carrying an equipment bag, stood at the intersection looking around.

Ains?

She appeared in the surveillance feed. On the screen, she silently squatted down, her figure especially tiny in the recon drone’s view. Wind tousled her stray hairs wildly. The drone passed overhead, and her figure shifted out of frame.

Horne didn’t move. He waited a while, and sure enough, a few minutes later, this drone’s view returned.

She was speaking now, though what she said wasn’t clear. Several ordinary residents stood before her. She held her computer device for them to see. The few people waved their hands repeatedly and retreated.

In this imminent storm weather, what was she doing outside?

Horne hadn’t planned to investigate further, but just as he turned, his peripheral vision caught the surveillance image, and all his movements stopped instantly.

In the surveillance, Ains raised her hand—

And removed her mask.