“Haha… Haa… It hurts,” After writhing on the ground for more than 10 minutes, the man finally took a breath of relief as the sky emptied of firecrackers and the sounds subsided.
With the remaining feeling of brokenness slowly lifting, he gazed upwards in hope.
“It will not hurt after some time,” boomed a voice, causing the man’s eyes to tremble before he turned his head in the direction of the approaching footsteps. His mind was not fully aware, but the feeling rushing through him was horrifying.
“Wh-who?” Instinctively, his words let out as the terror slowly arose in his mind. The footsteps kept getting louder, approaching his lying body, which was completely covered in sweat and trembling due to the aftereffects of the seizure.
[Your dad >.<] "Now, tell me from the start, what happened to make you end up here?" Ryuk, ignoring the system's voice, approached the trembling man. The man's eyes only caught sight of Ryuk's shoes before his lying body slowly began to levitate from the ground. "Huh? No, who are you?!" The moment the man's eyes caught sight of the whole world turning upside down, specifically as his body started to levitate in the air due to some external force, his eyes widened at the sight of a black-robed figure, yet he couldn't focus on the details of the attire since he had just met the horror of his life—those two amber eyes. ".....it's a dream, yes it must be, hehe," he said, then suddenly losing his grip on reality. A smile crossed his face as he gazed into those eyes, blinking for a moment as time passed slowly, until tears began to well up in his eyes and his lips trembled uncontrollably. "It must be a dream!!" "It has to be!" He cried out, his face deforming due to an inexplicable surge of emotions and pain, with visible tears and snot coming out of his nose. His eyes let out tears as he looked towards those amber eyes, "you can't be real?!" It appeared as if he was losing touch with reality, not wanting to believe what his eyes were seeing right now. The only thing remaining in him was simply rejection, his mind deluding him after getting influenced by those firecrackers. "Indeed, I am an illusion, which will vanish once you utter the name of the one behind sending you here," Ryuk, seeing how the man had lost his mind to a large extent, tried to follow the root and make him utter the name of the person who was behind him. Naturally, Ryuk was aware that the one behind all this could only be that woman who had barged into his room that day. Given that she was somewhat related to Jenny, he guessed it was her. But first, he needed to confirm his assumptions and second, he wanted to know the name of that woman. "Hahaha, Yes, you are! Matriarch was wrong about you being alive!" The man forced a laugh, his eyes wide, as he tried to endure even more under his self-created illusion of not accepting reality, finding some semblance of peace in the harsh truth. "Matriarch, do people in the upper town believe in the myth of my existence?" Ryuk, unaware that the term 'matriarch' may refer to the main leader of the Celestial Phoenix Order, attempted to inquire about the family to which this matriarch belonged. "Huh? What upper town? No one cares about a puny prince like you. Hahaha, it was just the head of the Celestial Pheon—ughh?!" Suddenly, the man stopped speaking while revealing the mastermind behind everything. He felt his body freeze, his mouth wide open as if his tongue were being split, and his heart slowly starting to feel intense pressure. "Arrghhh!...y-you...are...illusion.." The man seemed unable to complete his words, his face contorted even more due to sudden pain, which appeared not in terms but as if wrecking his nervous system and slowly settling it down. 'What is happening with him?' Ryuk inquired the moment he noticed veins popping up in the man's neck while his eyes became white with blood vessels appearing all over the skin. [Scanning.....] [A parasite is detected inside the man's heart, which is eating it from within. Applying safety measures.] [Initiating forced suppression] Ting! "Aargghhhh?!" The man's suppressed cry instantly turned into screams the moment his mouth with white veins revealed a centipede-like creature sprinting out at a speed too fast for a human to catch, trying to run away. "Krrrreeekkkk!" The parasite, which appeared more as a centipede, cried out the moment it appeared stuck in mid-air by a force far stronger than the demonic Qi imbued inside it, causing it to cry in pain. 'How did this big worm even fit inside his body?' Ryuk glanced at the centipede, which appeared to be more than 20 cm long, feeling surprised at how it lived inside the man's body yet didn't die due to body temperature nor killed the man by causing internal injuries. [Host, there is a residual of demonic energy around the centipede, it appears to protect it from the outer effects of bodily Qi.] "Khhrrriekekekk—?!" With an intense cry, Centipede lashed out with his legs, causing green blood to splatter everywhere as it turned into mist. 'Heal him,' Ryuk commanded, after seeing the man's worsening condition. Although the healing could not address his brain, it could restore his physical body, including his heart that had been partially consumed by the centipede. "Haha, you...are dead," the man uttered, even though he appeared to be healed on the outside with remnants of veins and other symptoms, his words revealed his unhealable or irreparable mental state as he continued to ramble with eyes that had already lost their focus. "Tell me the name of that matriarch," Ryuk once again ignored the mumbling words from the man, his gaze turning cold as he reached for the man who finally burst into laughter, revealing the name of the woman. "Hahahaha, it was Yu Shao-Yan!—kughhh!" After the woman's name came out of the man's mouth, a hand instantly pierced his chest, pulling out his heart at a speed fast enough to prevent it from stopping beating. [ Successfully Preserved.] With the same speed the moment the system's voice came, the heart vanished from Ryuk's hand into a box which now materialized in the thin air. Thud The man's body plummeted to the ground with a resounding sound, his eyes wide open in terror yet a smile of madness etched on his face. His mouth agape in a chilling grin, he embraced his death with a twisted sense of revelry. [Host, how are you going to know which family that woman belonged to?] '... only if you were not useless,' Ryuk remembered how after he fell into a coma, the system reset all its data, causing it to forget the energy signatures and several connections that could have now made things easier. [ It appears to be true that the person who speaks the most often tends to be the least respected. ] '....' Ignoring the words of System Ryuk, he leaned down to pick up the pendant lying on the ground. It appeared to have some energy Qi within it, which seemed to be connecting with a particular wavelength. He lifted it and imbued it with his own energy. It didn't work. [Pfft] 'What was that?', Ryuk wondered why the pendant didn't work even after getting Ether. [ It will only accept Qi ] '...I will just learn it', Upon hearing System's clear tone conveying that he should command it to convert his Ether into Qi, Ryuk realized it would be better to start from scratch rather than having it perform the task. DING! [ Converting Ether into Qi --» output is 60 for an input of 100. ] I have my final year exams in two weeks, you can expect messed up updates for all my novels, but there will be one chapter daily atleast for this one for some time.
