Chapter 29 Part 2

With such tender words, Ode’s fingertip traced lightly over Big Qianning’s throat.

A silver knife-flash gleamed and vanished in the light. The last ghoul toppled stiffly to the floor with a thud, its handsome head rolling down the corpse mountain.

【What a pity. Without the Old Ghoul standing guard, and given how much these ghouls prized the study, who knows what other intel you might’ve dug up. But—what you’ve sent back is enough. Go find Little Qianning—】

Bang!!

A sharp gunshot cracked from across the sea of flames in the backyard, cutting off Faust’s instructions.

“……!” Ode sprang up. Without waiting for Faust, he raised an arm to shield his face and charged through the firewall, shielded by his suit, into the backyard.

There, on the grass ringed by fire, Little Qianning—who should have evacuated long ago—straddled his father. He pressed a gun to Old Qianning’s temple, trembling all over with agitation.

“You finally have no one to rely on anymore… Do you know how many years I’ve waited for this day? Huh!?” Little Qianning growled under his breath, his tears dripping into the scorching air warped by the flames. “You won’t be my nightmare any longer… You won’t.”

He slowly bent down, pressing his forehead against his father’s in a dreamlike murmur. “Come to hell with me.”

“Wait!” Old Qianning, who had stopped struggling, suddenly thrashed again. “What are you doing?! Who said I wanted to die with you? Get lost—fuck! Who the hell fed you all that damn muscle?!”

“…” Ode’s gaze darted back and forth between the father and son several times. In that instant, it landed on Little Qianning’s face—condescending from above, drinking in his father’s struggles with mocking scorn—and the hazy image flickering in Ode’s mind snapped into crystal clarity. “—Wait! Stop!”

He yanked the ashtray from his pocket, gripped it tight, and charged forward. He smashed it viciously into the gun barrel, then swung backhanded to crack it across Little Qianning’s skull. “Got some spine now, have you?! Back then, you only bullied people when I was around to watch the show. Now you’re offing someone without even waiting for me to intervene?”

“What are you… Give me the gun! Give it back!!” Little Qianning lunged at Ode with a guttural roar. “What do you know!? It was this man—this scum—who let those monsters loose one by one. They slaughtered everyone in the old house. He killed my mother!!”

“…” On the ground, Old Qianning—emaciated from his illness, barely able to fight back—saw his pale pupils shrink in a flash. Moments later, he squeezed his eyes shut, a faint, wretched smile tugging at his lips. “So she really is dead… Truly gone…”

“What the hell are you playing at!?” Little Qianning’s wrist was locked in Ode’s iron grip, leaving him unable to strike. He could only thrash his legs wildly, kicking at the hated man on the floor. “Wasn’t it you feeding her that poison every single day?! Every time you left her room, she’d sob her heart out, coughing up blood worse than ever before!”

“I just don’t get it… What’s with this deep-affection act? If you really gave a damn, why didn’t you let my mom go?! Away from this godforsaken old pile, she could’ve lived a hundred times happier than rotting with you!!”

Old Qianning flinched as if lashed by a whip. But before Little Qianning could unleash another torrent of cutting curses, Ode raised his voice to cut in. “Hold on, hold on—let me get this straight. So, per Little Qianning here, your wife was some frail invalid wasting away on her deathbed? You serious?”

Little Qianning looked ready to blow a fuse. “What do you know about my mo—”

Ode glanced down at his phone, tapped a few times, and pulled up a photo. He shoved it under Little Qianning’s nose. “This your mother?”

Little Qianning trailed off. “Mo…”

He froze rigid for several seconds, then whipped around to gape at Ode in a storm of shock and suspicion. “How did you—”

His words died unspoken. Old Qianning—who’d been lying limp on the ground—suddenly surged with a burst of strength like a final rally before death. He shoved his youngest son aside with brutal force and clamped onto Ode’s wrist. Dignity be damned, he half-crawled, half-dragged his body over to Ode. “She…”

Old Qianning’s breaths came in such ragged gasps that Ode half-expected him to black out. But this battle-hardened business shark wrestled his emotions back under control. He fixed his eyes on the phone screen—Pharaoh in her military uniform—his face flushing and draining by turns. “She… she looks like she’s doing well. …Why didn’t she come find us?”

【Uh… what’s going on here?】 Faust’s voice crackled doubtfully through the earpiece. 【Don’t tell me Pharaoh’s married to this invalid?—Does she look one bit like she ‘sobbed her heart out,’ some caged bird, or a wilting invalid wife?!?】

“You don’t think Little Qianning’s smirking top-down angle looks familiar? Haven’t you been on the receiving end of Pharaoh’s boot?” Ode fired off a quick text to Pharaoh, polling her take, then eyed the father-son duo—their maudlin drama derailed by the sharp plot twist. “Anyway—it’s obvious there’s some massive misunderstanding between you two about the past.”

“You wanna keep baking in this sauna? Or should we grab somewhere cooler to sit down and hash this out for real?”

His phone buzzed. Ode flicked a glance at Pharaoh’s reply and looked up. “—With my instructor bearing witness.”

Little Qianning blinked. “…Your what??”

·

Ten minutes later, inside the GORCC London Outpost.

The ad-hoc conference room reeked of stale smoke. Faust puffed his cigar like hard candy, sucking it down until he lasted a whopping half-minute before snapping. “How long you planning to death-stare each other? Spit out those earth-shattering grudges already—no one’s a mind reader inside your guts. Hey—Ode! Your crowd, your lead.”

“Uh…” Ode snuck several glances at Pharaoh. She lounged against the conference room door, arms folded in standoffish poise, but her eyes had peeled the so-called legal husband—layer by layer—several times over. Ode half-worried she’d slam the guy onto the conference table and go at it right there.

“I’m saying Old Qianning’s position looks fishy… And it got nothing to do with Little Qianning resembling Pharaoh.”

“Clear as day: Old house gets raided by enemies, Old Qianning bolts decisively—but doesn’t hightail it outta there. He hangs on till the fight’s done, right up to Little Qianning pinning him in the grass.”

“Plain fact—he saw the whole place going up in flames post-attack, so he took the unguarded exit—no ghouls in his way, smashed window and out. But then loops back through ghoul-infested ground floor, just to yank Little Qianning clear.”

Pharaoh let out a low whistle. Her gaze lingered on Old Qianning—who’d pointedly turned away, refusing to meet her eyes—with heightened relish.

Anyone with half an eye could tell: Old Qianning slotted right into Pharaoh’s wheelhouse—that cool, refined beauty aesthetic. Toss in single dad, icy exterior masking a drive to save his kid, and her sweet spot was getting nuked:

“Alright—I’ll run with Ode’s pitch.”

Pharaoh snagged a chair at random and plopped down, wedging in tight beside Old Qianning. “Roughly nine years back, I came to in some podunk town on Egypt’s fringe. Nothing ID-wise on me, just a mess of knife scars and blood-crusted fingers—”

Little Qianning shot bolt-upright, itching to interrupt. Pharaoh pinned him silent with a glare.

She kept her eyes locked on her lawful husband. “Once in GORCC, I tracked those bastards who carved me up—hoping to reclaim my identity. Found their corpses instead.”

“Human traffickers, bouncing around the globe. Specialists in wife-and-kid ‘stock.’ Got themselves shanked by a shipment of their own ‘merchandise.’”

“—No way!!” Little Qianning exploded to his feet. “I hired a legit caravan! Signed contract—they’d ship you far from Europe. I even packed cash, stacks of it!”

Pharaoh eyed Little Qianning with pity for the fool. “Afraid your ‘stacks of cash’ signed their death warrants. You ping ’em since? Spot ’em again? Traffickers with steady supply don’t torch a whole caravan for one piece of cargo—then lose the prize. Only makes sense if the crew got greedy, went black-on-black. Or somebody snatched me solo; they saw one guy, easy pickings, and pounced.”

Little Qianning gaped, speechless. “I… back then, I couldn’t stay in touch! What if Father tracked you down that way?!”

Old Qianning clapped a hand over his face nearby—likely agonizing over his wayward son. Or maybe hand-reared kids just melt parental steel. Either way, he dropped it soon enough, voice even. “Keeping that secret all these years, playing dumb to perfection—you haven’t disgraced your mother’s blood or mine.”

Old Qianning shoved Pharaoh back—stiff-armed, as she lunged to kiss him at “your mother”—before pressing on. “…Things weren’t how you imagine.”

“Your brother—I mean, your real brother—was shy of ten months old. One night, your mother and I… Quit kissing! You…”

Old Qianning’s neck went beet-red; the devil alone knew what Pharaoh’s hand was up to under the table. He hacked out a furious cough-fit until Pharaoh mock-surrendered with raised palms. Then he shot her a venomous glare and ground out the rest through gritted teeth. “One night, we realized—the baby’d been swapped.”

Heaven knows the despair that hit the ordinary Qianning couple then. Sky falling didn’t cover it.

“Your mother wanted to bash the changeling’s brains out on sight. But a monster crashed the window, stopped her cold. Then… it slaughtered the old butler right in front of us. Took his place. To get our real kid back, we played along.”

Those days ground them down. Endless worry for their stolen child, dead certain these human-skinned monsters eyed their fortune. The minute the bank ops were seamless? Their replacements.

“Only play we had: scale up the empire. Blow it out till their pea-brains couldn’t run it solo.”

“I burned rubber everywhere daily. Your mother… she earned their grudge. Nearly pulped the fake.”

“So the ‘butler’ dosed her regular—medicine by force. Threats: play ball or the kid dies.”

“…” Pharaoh’s smirk had melted into raw pity. “But understand this: human babes swapped by ghouls? They don’t make it.”