Chapter 15: Wang’s Private Joy

Li Yao had to leave for school early. When she got up, she discovered Ren Ying had already prepared breakfast for her.

“You don’t…” Li Yao wanted to say, “you don’t have to do this,” but her voice grew fainter toward the end.

“I don’t know if it suits your taste.” As Ren Ying spoke, he was soaking the clothes Ren Xinxin had changed out of the day before in a basin.

Tao Fangyi was soaking in there too, and while Ren Ying was haltingly communicating with Li Yao, Wang crouched right beside Tao Fangyi.

Wang propped up his face. He wasn’t smiling, just occasionally tilting his head.

Since his face had no other features, Tao Fangyi couldn’t tell what Wang was mulling over.

“Are you feeling bored?” Tao Fangyi asked him.

“A little.” Wang had no way to go out and find his own fun now. His true form could only catch far too few evildoers, nowhere near enough to satisfy his own desires.

After all, his true form still had a job, watched by so many eyes.

Wang’s pent-up frustration had no outlet, and it was stifling him.

“Play with this.” Tao Fangyi raised a hand, holding a small blue ball between his fingers.

“What’s this? A magical artifact? Or a gift from some kid?” Wang took the small ball, and Tao Fangyi handed him a small blue stick as well.

“How do you play with this?” Wang first sensed it, then realized both items were indeed magical artifacts—and extremely powerful ones at that.

Wang had never come into contact with such high-grade magical artifacts before.

“You can just casually take something like this out?” Wang fumbled with how to use the artifact. Then, as if practicing catching a ping-pong ball, he tossed the small ball up and tried to catch it with the small wooden stick.

“You’re just bored.” Tao Fangyi was merely finding Wang a toy.

“So extravagant… Can you just give these two things to me?” Wang was rather tempted by the two high-grade magical artifacts in his hands.

Tao Fangyi fell silent for a moment.

Wang: “I can’t?”

“I can give them to you temporarily, but they will only belong to you completely after your reformation succeeds.” Tao Fangyi wasn’t being stingy; he was just worried Wang might use these two items for wrongdoing.

He really could give them away.

Wang was somewhat astonished.

But what were these two artifacts actually for? Attack? Defense? Why did the power contained within feel so immense, yet lack any specific function, resembling storage vessels more than anything?

Wang was still tossing and catching the small ball. As he played, he suddenly realized something was off.

Wang stopped. Before the small ball could strike the wooden stick, he snatched it out of the air.

Wang examined the small ball carefully and then discovered that the blue parts on the ball’s surface had been scraped off in the collisions.

Painted-on color?

Wang: “…Is this your eye?” He remembered now—Tao Fangyi had retrieved two parts belonging to his own body.

“Looks just like a little marble, right?” Tao Fangyi had meticulously colored the small wooden ball. The original wood color had been too plain.

Wang didn’t answer. He clutched one of Tao Fangyi’s body parts in each hand and sank into a daze.

“I’m blue now, so I painted them blue too, but the pigment I used doesn’t seem to be very good.” Tao Fangyi was a bit conflicted. His true form was too powerful; the pigment simply couldn’t penetrate at all.

Wang silently placed the two components together. “I don’t want them anymore.”

“Why?!” Tao Fangyi was actually somewhat shocked. “Do you hate me that much?”

Did this have anything to do with hate?!

Who gives away their own past body parts as little toys?!

“No, what I mean is… Ah!” Before Wang could finish his sentence, Ren Ying walked over.

Ren Ying passed right through Wang’s body and then dumped the clothes, doll and all, into the washing machine.

Wang: …

Wang stuck his head inside the washing machine, where Tao Fangyi was spinning along with the clothes.

“I’ll return your body parts to you,” Wang said.

“But you clearly wanted them before you knew they were my body.” Tao Fangyi felt Wang still had something against him.

“It’s not the same! This is your body.” Wang felt Tao Fangyi’s way of thinking was truly bizarre. “Body—do you know what ‘body’ means?”

Wang lowered his head, but the doll’s smiling face, rotating clockwise with the water’s current, offered no response. After spinning clockwise for a moment, it suddenly paused and began rotating counterclockwise along with the water flow.

Tao Fangyi finally finished his contemplation. “What’s so special about a body?”

So he completely didn’t understand.

Wang was utterly despairing.

At that moment, his true form even pulled out a cell phone, wanting to ask his parents just what the deal was with Tao Fangyi.

But Wang restrained himself.

“Using someone else’s body as a toy is an extremely offensive act!” As Wang said this, he recalled his own past deeds and felt the situation was even more surreal.

Now it was actually him lecturing others on this kind of principle.

“Why is it offensive?” Tao Fangyi still didn’t get it. “Doesn’t this sort of thing happen all the time?”

“Where does it happen all the time?!” If such behavior were truly common, he wouldn’t have been suppressed by his parents as a Reserve for all these years.

Tao Fangyi began giving Wang examples. “Aren’t the bamboo chopsticks people use the corpses of bamboo plants? Disposable chopsticks are made of wood; it’s pretty much the same as my body.”

“Everyone consumes the bodies of others, uses the corpses of others. And wood is used all the time. I used to serve as a ritual vessel before.” Tao Fangyi felt this was all quite normal.

“You have consciousness,” Wang explained. “Although you and I—uh—may not be from the same race, we speak the same language and can understand each other’s meaning. So generally, we avoid playing around with each other’s bodies.”

“But I don’t need this body anymore.” Tao Fangyi felt that since he was no longer inside this body, the body could be put to other uses.

Wang: …

Wang continued explaining to Tao Fangyi, and Tao Fangyi kept raising questions.

Finally, Tao Fangyi understood. Wang let out a sigh of relief. He held the small bead and small wooden stick out to Tao Fangyi.

Tao Fangyi reached out, but at that moment, the water current suddenly pushed him to one side. The small bead and small wooden stick fell into the water.

Tao Fangyi: “It’s fine, I’ll pick them… Ah!”

The water current kept pushing. The small bead and small wooden stick hid themselves among the clothes.

Tao Fangyi wrestled with the clothes in the water current. In the end, he retrieved the small bead and small wooden stick.

But by now, the bead and stick had returned to their original color.

“Did you clean my body?” Tao Fangyi asked Wang.

Wang: “…They were still blue when I handed them over just now.”

Tao Fangyi: …

Wang: “Why is your face looking a bit blue?”

Tao Fangyi: ?!!

The washing machine suddenly stopped. Then it began spinning madly, as if possessed.

After the spin cycle ended, Ren Ying walked over and opened the washing machine to take a look.

“How did the color bleed this badly?!” Ren Ying randomly pulled out a piece of clothing and glanced at it. “They’ve all turned blue?!”

“This… this…” Ren Ying rummaged through the laundry and eventually found the culprit—the doll with blue as its primary color scheme.

“This toy’s quality is terrible,” Ren Ying muttered.

After hanging the clothes, Ren Ying first sent Li Yao off to school. Then he came back to make breakfast for Ren Xinxin before sending her off to school as well.

Tao Fangyi was hung on the windowsill, water droplets trailing down his face.

Wang stood guard beside him. “You aren’t crying, are you?”

“No.” Tao Fangyi’s complexion already had a faint blue tinge.

Wang felt Tao Fangyi was indeed sad. “But you look very melancholy.”

“Probably because I’m blue-faced.” Blue was the color of melancholy.

“So your mood isn’t bad?” Wang was puzzled. “But I keep feeling your aura is strange.”

“That’s because I’m angry,” Tao Fangyi stated bluntly.

“Who wouldn’t be angry at being told their quality is poor?” Tao Fangyi clearly didn’t bleed color; that man had wronged him. “Those words are truly vicious.”

So “poor quality” was considered a vicious insult?

Wang truly could not comprehend Tao Fangyi’s train of thought.

Wang suddenly burst out laughing. He didn’t want to play with any small wooden ball or small wooden stick. He wanted something much more exciting. “Do you want to vent your anger?”

“How?” Tao Fangyi asked.

“I’ve been bored to the point of exploding lately. Let’s fight!” Wang wanted to see Tao Fangyi’s true strength.

Wang pointed at the red circle on his own neck. “Don’t use that disgusting spell. Let’s fight bare-knuckled, flesh to flesh, like wild beasts.”

Tao Fangyi: …

“Well?” Wang lowered his voice.

“Don’t want to.” Tao Fangyi rotated his body slightly. The clothes hanger turned with him, changing the direction in which he hung.

Wang: “Why?! Do you think it’s against morality or something?”

“You can’t handle a beating.” Tao Fangyi didn’t think he could get any satisfaction or release from this opponent.

Wang: …

Wang exploded. “Ah?! So you think I’m very weak?!”

Tao Fangyi: “Not at all.”

“Do you think I’ll die from one punch from you?!” Wang had never been subjected to such humiliation. “You don’t even regard me as a threat?!”

The bandages around his body began to flutter. “I’ll slaughter you!”

Tao Fangyi: “Already hanging myself here.”

“When it comes down to it, you were the one who dyed this pile of clothes. It was your choice of paint that was too poor. And the thing you painted was your own past body in the first place. That man wasn’t wrong; the quality was just…” Before Wang could finish his words, he suddenly felt a concussive force.

He was shoved by a wave of power and sent tumbling backward.

“Thud!” He slammed into the wall.

His body hadn’t phased through the wall?

Wang thought Tao Fangyi had opened a barrier, but when he looked up, he found the surrounding buildings had no color change. It still seemed to be the real world.

Yet Wang could not move.

In the next instant, goosebumps erupted all over Wang’s body. The terror of death washed over him.

Wang wanted to get up, but the black mist before him swelled explosively.

The black mist rapidly condensed into human form, and that person planted a single foot on Wang’s neck, pinning Wang firmly against the wall.

Wang looked up at the person, unable to make out a face.

It was a man with long hair.

“So this is how it ends,” the man said. “I can’t fight you.”

Tao Fangyi?!

Wang finally reacted.

“You… opened a barrier?” Only after Wang spoke did he realize the foot resting across his neck hadn’t exerted any force at all. That oppressive feeling he’d sensed came purely from instinctual fear.

The man withdrew his foot. The heel of his tall boot landed on the ground with a soft “click.”

It was as if it landed right on the threshold of Wang’s heart.

No one in this world had ever been able to frighten him like this.

“Opened a barrier.”

“But this place looks no different from the real world!” Wang said.

“Indeed.” Tao Fangyi noticed Wang was trembling, and the trembling was growing worse.

He knew the longer one stayed inside his barrier, the deeper the fear became.

Tao Fangyi dispersed the barrier.

The long-haired man whose face couldn’t be seen vanished. In his place was the doll with its head stuck in the clothes hanger on the windowsill.

“Are you okay? You weren’t too heavily affected, were you?” Tao Fangyi was a little worried.

Wang slowly lost his strength and finally collapsed to the ground.

“Wang?!” Tao Fangyi was startled.

“I’m fine.” Wang slowly curled his body up. “It’s the first time anyone has ever been able to scare me like this.” He had never experienced such a novel sensation.

Completely outmatched. Or rather, the instant he was locked onto by his opponent, Wang felt as if he had foreseen the moment of his own death.

“Wang?” Tao Fangyi called out again.

“I love it.” Wang looked up again, his face now flushed red.

Tao Fangyi: “…Huh?”

“I’m liking you more and more.” Wang wanted to lean in and nuzzle against Tao Fangyi, but he couldn’t do that.

His true form had just been about to start work, and colleagues were already asking about his physical condition. If he nuzzled against Tao Fangyi now, Wang was afraid he’d reveal even more things that were off.

Tao Fangyi didn’t understand what this situation was.

Terrified, yet saying he liked it?

Was this kid a little dim-witted?

Forget it. Being liked is a good thing. Can’t discriminate against the dim-witted. “Thank you.”