Chapter 33: Property
On the day of departure for the outdoor practical activity, Xia Feng had a chat with Xu Xunyue.
He mainly expressed his gratification for his diligence since he had taken up the post, and by the way, he also showed concern for his health, asking if he was really able to be an accompanying teacher for this activity.
According to the regulations, all practical course teachers of the graduating class had to accompany the team. Xia Feng was simply worried about his health.
Although the teachers only had to stay on the aircraft and monitor, and would only go to support when a student sent a distress signal, the aircraft was certainly not as comfortable as one’s familiar environment. In any case, this was a five-day trip.
“If your energy is not so abundant, it’s actually fine not to go this time,” Xia Feng took off his reading glasses and looked at Xu Xunyue with a smile. “I can ask little Xu to help you look after your little Sentinel.”
Xu Xunyue: “…”
Why is the dean, Teacher, also gossiping?
“Thank you, but he’s very capable. He doesn’t really need special attention,” Xu Xunyue smiled frankly. “It’s no problem for me to go this time. I will personally observe his performance.”
“Haha, just kidding. I remember you said last time that he was very capable. I even went to look up the news later and found that I had actually seen him before.”
“Before? Dean, Teacher, you’re probably not talking about three years ago when he hadn’t entered the military yet, are you?”
Zhu Hui, like him, had awakened at fourteen and then entered the White Tower to study, but Zhu Hui had spent his seventeenth to twentieth years in the military.
It would be normal for Xia Feng to have seen him before he joined the army, since they were both in the White Tower and would have met over the years.
But if it were that kind of “seen,” Xia Feng probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to him in this tone, and wouldn’t have even told him specifically.
“No.”
As expected.
Xia Feng said, “It was in the first half of this year.”
“The first half of this year?”
Although there were no four seasons now, according to the date, it was now the end of the year.
“It was near my house.”
Seeing his interest, Xia Feng began to elaborate.
“It’s a coincidence. Little Xu lives next door to me. The Xu family doesn’t have as many rules as other noble families. After little Xu graduated, he bought a house and moved out of the ancestral home.”
“Although I live alone and often stay up late at the White Tower doing research, I occasionally go back to lie down. That day when I got home, I saw him standing at little Xu’s door talking to him.”
Hearing this, a possibility had already emerged in Xu Xunyue’s mind.
“Doesn’t little Xu have a younger brother? He ran off to gain experience right after graduation and had an accident at the beginning of this year. He didn’t come back. He was there that day to offer condolences to the family.”
Xu Xunyue nodded.
Offering condolences to the family. This was also something he used to do often. As long as he could find a home address on the deceased’s information form, no matter how busy he was with his official duties, he would always go once.
Xia Feng sighed and continued:
“A few years ago, when his younger brother hadn’t graduated yet, he would stay at little Xu’s place every time the academy had a holiday. After graduating and joining the army, the home address on his information form was also little Xu’s, not the ancestral home.”
“You know, too many people die these days. Captains who go to offer condolences to the family are a minority. I also have an impression of him because of this. He is indeed a more talented Sentinel than Qiu Ye. In his team, his age was actually the youngest.”
Xu Xunyue: “I know.”
He recalled his interactions with Zhu Hui during this period and his observation of Xu Mengwei, and confirmed that there was nothing unusual.
Zhu Hui probably hadn’t told Xu Mengwei about those strange things.
Without direct visual proof, those phenomena were indeed hard to believe.
As long as their interests were not harmed, nobles would naturally stand on the Emperor’s side, and the Xu family as a whole and Xu Mengwei himself had a low-key style.
In the case of only discovering suspicious points but not having enough information, even if the feeling was very clear, one had to be cautious about revealing their thoughts.
If they had extra contact, Xu Xunyue would have definitely found out when he was checking Zhu Hui’s information.
However, he could still ask Zhu Hui what the specific content of their conversation was when he had time.
Xu Xunyue smiled and started another topic.
“Dean, Teacher, let’s not talk about me. What research have you been doing recently?”
“You’ve really hit the nail on the head. I’m currently researching a new topic, about new symptoms of Sentinels losing control,” Xia Feng said. “This is actually a request from the Yi family. Didn’t that kid from the Yi family lose control? He’s already seen more than ten mental soothers, and the problem still hasn’t been solved.”
This was also within Xu Xunyue’s expectations.
The indirect effects on Zhu Hui were already difficult to clear up, and this was based on the premise that the patient was Zhu Hui and the mental soother was him.
As a more direct victim of the contamination, Yi Chengli was not as stable as Zhu Hui, so his situation would definitely be worse.
He just didn’t expect it to be this bad.
But…
Xu Xunyue’s heart moved, and he suddenly asked, “Did Yi Chengli also have a situation where he lost control in the mental soothing chamber later on?”
Xia Feng: “How did you even guess this? It’s true.”
“Then when he lost control later, did the people he attacked and fought with show symptoms similar to Zhu Hui’s?”
Xia Feng let out a soft hiss and said slowly:
“No.”
No?
A problem had arisen.
Zhu Hui’s stability coefficient was the highest level, S. His intimate contact with him had not been broken before. For a Sentinel, this was a very good state.
Even Zhu Hui was affected, but the other people who were attacked were not?
Was there something special about Zhu Hui that made him more susceptible?
Xu Xunyue thought of the two times he had seen small black dots in Zhu Hui’s spiritual landscape.
Those small black dots floating in the air like contaminants.
They had spontaneously approached him.
Could it be because Zhu Hui had his scent on him?
It was perfectly normal for a Sentinel to have the scent of their bonded Guide on them.
And why would his own scent attract those unknown contaminants?
Zhu Hui said that his symptom at that time was a headache, with many voices speaking in his head, but he couldn’t distinguish what they were saying specifically.
And Xu Xunyue, since fourteen years ago, had often heard voices in his head.
It was also a very complex feeling, as if thousands of people were speaking, like the voices of others, and also like the magnified desires of his heart.
But he could clearly hear what each voice was saying, and he didn’t feel it was noisy or be interfered with or coerced. His life was not affected.
Except for three years ago, when he was on an off-site mission for the Emperor.
At that time, he had already become accustomed to going deep into the cataclysm zones and had never failed before. But the environment that time seemed to be targeting him.
The voices in his mind seemed to be superimposed with some kind of power. His subconscious told him that he was approaching some kind of source, but he also clearly knew that if he didn’t leave, he would be completely left behind.
That time, he chose to leave and completely became suspicious of the Emperor, deciding to avoid accepting off-site missions until he had figured out the situation.
So he chose to pretend to have a crippled leg.
In this era of a broken technology chain, aircraft were a limited resource, used once and gone. They were only activated for large-scale collective missions. Officers usually used cars.
If he pretended to have a too-serious injury, it would be inconvenient for him to go out when he returned to the Imperial Capital. And if he pretended to have a too-light injury, it wouldn’t be very fatal for an Offensive Guide, not to the extent of having to retire.
A crippled leg limited his movement and was not suitable for wilderness survival, which was just right.
And now, the situation was different from then.
The intelligence about the Undeveloped Zones this year, Zhu Hui’s memories, the signs of contamination on Yi Chengli… all indicated that a change had already begun.
It was time to get closer to the truth again.
Xia Feng was still talking animatedly, but Xu Xunyue was already thinking about something else.
He found that those voices that would appear in his mind always had a strong presence when he was with Zhu Hui.
The content they spoke of was mostly [He belongs to you], [He is your property], [Go possess him, eat him]… and so on, some erotic yet primitively cruel thoughts.
It clearly indicated Zhu Hui’s uniqueness and also attracted Xu Xunyue’s attention, as if his instinct was loudly reminding him:
Hurry up and pay attention to this Sentinel. The property you lost has reappeared before you.
This was very strange.
Xu Xunyue knew that he had a strong desire for control, but he didn’t think he was a possessive person, nor did he crave the company of another person.
In his early years, when he couldn’t perform mental soothing due to a blank compatibility list and needed more time to cooperate with his Sentinel teammates, he had felt helpless, but he had never wished for a bonded Sentinel to appear.
More accurately, his premonition was that no one would appear at all.
As an Offensive Guide, his intuition was always very accurate, but Zhu Hui had appeared.
That initial 60.01% was like a gift from fate, an exquisite design that could not be achieved by human means.
So, could it really be a coincidence of fate?
As a Guide with a normal worldview, why would he have that kind of premonition? And why would he have this kind of awareness of Zhu Hui?
Was he… really normal?
He had a constitution that was practically a cataclysmic factor insulator, and a physique that was stronger than an ordinary Guide’s, with surprisingly good training results.
Xu Xunyue had something about himself that he had been exploring all along.
The teachers at the Guide Academy liked to tell the freshmen stories from his student days, including the time he went to the Imperial Capital to study at fourteen.
The Empire stipulated that regions had to use aircraft at the beginning of each month to transport the newly awakened youth from the previous month to the White Tower in the Imperial Capital for training. The aircraft were equipped with local officials and teachers from the two academies who were specially responsible for this.
The Cataclysm had happened when Xu Xunyue was on his way to the Imperial Capital.
The aircraft he was on had crashed straight into a large black cloud. Then, the aircraft’s parts began to fail, its functions began to malfunction, the flight system sounded an alarm, and the scene became chaotic.
Thinking back now, that black thing was probably not a thundercloud, but a gathering of cataclysmic factors.
In the midst of the chaotic and piercing screams, in the feeling of weightlessness as they plummeted, Xu Xunyue lost consciousness. When he woke up again, everything around him had changed.
He had gone to the Imperial Capital in early May. The sun was bright, and the warm wind was intoxicating. But when he closed his eyes and opened them again, all he could hear was the whistling of the cold wind.
Just like the crash sites of human airplanes in the early records, the aircraft was broken in two, the back half nowhere to be found. Xu Xunyue’s seat was in the front half, surrounded by the bodies of his fellow travelers.
Some were already stiff, some were still warm, but without exception, they were all dead.
Xu Xunyue had never been able to figure out why he was alive.
What was special about him that allowed him to survive this disaster?
Or rather, what had this disaster changed in him during his coma that had allowed him to survive.
After temporarily surviving, the next thing to consider was how to get out. At that time, all the electronic devices had failed. He couldn’t communicate with the outside world. He could only rely on his common sense and his memory before the coma to distinguish the direction and judge which region he was probably in.
Then he had to believe in his own judgment and keep walking in the chosen direction.
He walked and walked, until his vision suddenly went dark, and the world was renewed.
One second, the surroundings were still glaring white snow that could light up the sky. The next second, he had entered a dark night full of ruins.
Half a year after the Cataclysm, this step finally had a name. It was called “walking out of a cataclysm zone.”
Perhaps it was that experience that had changed him, causing his physique to strengthen and his resistance to cataclysmic factors to be particularly high.
—Xu Xunyue had speculated this long ago, but that was as far as it went.
Now, he had a bolder association.
He suspected that the Emperor who had returned from a cataclysm zone four years ago had been contaminated.
But he himself might have been contaminated fourteen years ago.
It was just that he had resisted it, coexisted with it, so his mind was clear, he had never lost control, and he had never even considered this possibility before.
The White Tower’s monograph, “The Wilderness Survival Guide for Cataclysm Zones,” once mentioned that the bodily fluids of cataclysmic creatures could not be touched. If a human’s skin touched it, the probability of transforming into a cataclysmic being would greatly increase. If one didn’t wear a protective mask and the bodily fluids of a cataclysmic creature splashed directly into a human’s mouth and nose, there was an almost 100% probability of transforming into a cataclysmic being.
Just as the Emperor could contaminate Yi Chengli, if his speculation was correct, then he had also “contaminated” Zhu Hui.
From this perspective, he was the “source of contamination” of his own branch, and Zhu Hui was the only first-generation he had created. His unreasonable, primitive desire for Zhu Hui could also be explained.
Zhu Hui’s body had his brand, and in Zhu Hui’s blood, there were still remnants of the elements he had injected into him back then, elements that could not be digested by the human body.
Because of this, Zhu Hui had obtained a part of his characteristics—resistance to cataclysmic factors.
This could also explain the scene Xu Xunyue had seen when he first entered Zhu Hui’s spiritual landscape: large swathes of cataclysmic factors were imprisoned on the snowfield, with more white than black, and no tendency to move further, spread, or deepen the contamination.
Perhaps originally, their compatibility would not have been 60.01%, but everything was destined from the moment he saved Zhu Hui and fed him his own blood.
Zhu Hui had drunk his blood as a child.
And now they often exchanged bodily fluids.
…No wonder their compatibility was getting higher and higher.
