"Yara, are you crazy? You want me to help you commit murder?"

"That’s murder. That means going to the base’s tribunal."

Yara gave a sneer of disdain. "If you were so afraid of the tribunal, why did you lay a hand on Selene Rivers back then?"

"Let me tell you, the Enforcement Team has already traced it to Wang Mei and her daughter."

"You don't have to go."

"But if Wang Mei turns me in, you won't be able to run either."

The man roared with the fury of being played.

"Yara, you bitch, are you threatening me?"

...

Silas pushed open the door and sat silently on the sofa. The empty room was dead silent; it didn't feel like a home.

He took out his communicator and opened it, flipping through the photos one by one.

The owner of the communicator loved recording her life. The very first photo she took after getting the device was of a small patch of sky surviving outside the base.

Silas remembered making fun of her back then.

"You’re only so young, yet you’re like a middle-aged person, obsessed with photographing flowers and grass."

Back then, they were youthful and blunt, never worrying about anything, and without so many reservations.

Silas, even more of a hotheaded youth, always wanted to drag the quiet Selene into doing things that broke convention.

He dragged Selene to the top of the base’s defensive wall in the middle of the night, giving her water when she was panting, and serving as her backrest when she couldn't climb any further. Their hands had been tightly locked together, never letting go even when their palms were sticky with sweat.

They even ran into a mutated owl. Its call from the empty wall-top at night made Selene, who was prone to fear, turn pale, but she ended up climbing even faster, which made him sneakily laugh for a long time.

It wasn't until 5:00 AM that they caught the sunrise.

Amidst the biting wind, Silas held Selene in his arms, watching the red horizon together.

In the blink of an eye, the sun revealed half its face, a beauty beyond description in hues of red and orange, the morning glow illuminating the clouds and dyeing them in every color.

Silas looked at the photos on the old communicator. The constantly recurring past tore through his cold-toned scenes, gradually piecing together their former love.

His fingers trembled slightly as he swiped to the next photo, leaving him stunned in place.

It was a candid GIF. In the frame, the handsome youth retracted his gaze from her and revealed a faint smile toward the rising sun. The love in that moment could infect anyone in front of the screen, across the span of time.

Silas’s face was half-pain, half-mockery. The screen went black, reflecting his own image.

He looked at the terrifyingly strange man in the mirror—he was completely different from the lover captured by Selene. He was like a devil, a murderer who had harmed the one who loved him most, and even worse, destroyed their future.

He reached out to touch the reflection on the communicator’s screen, trying to find his former face, only to see a lost self and hollow eyes.

A streak of malevolence came from the bottom of his heart. He stared at the distorted man on the screen, then suddenly slammed the communicator to the ground, watching it crack and shatter, rolling into a corner, motionless.

Silas panted heavily, his eyes suddenly coming to their senses as he stared at the communicator. His face became flustered and angry, and he cautiously picked it up, trying to turn it on, completely disregarding the sharp, broken screen cutting his fingers and causing blood to flow.

He seemed to suffer from schizophrenia—sometimes angry, sometimes weeping, neurotically repeating his whispers.

"Who smashed your communicator?!"

"I’m sorry... I’m sorry..."

Chapter 17

"Beep, beep, beep."

The afternoon sunlight shone into the room through the curtains, and the communicator lying on the floor continued to buzz incessantly, receiving no response from its owner.

The wedding photo on the headboard was cut in half by a sharp ray of light, leaving the faces of the couple blurred and indistinct.

Silas Thorne’s face was pale, his brow furrowed tightly. He tossed and turned on the bed from time to time, his eyeballs darting frantically beneath his eyelids, as if trapped in some terrifying nightmare.

"Silas, how could you break your promise to our son?"

A woman’s disappointed questioning echoed in his ears.

"Uncle, are you really Andy’s daddy?"

"Then why didn't you save Andy? Why did you save someone else’s child instead?"

The cute little boy’s eyes were filled with pleading and sorrow. His fair little face was slowly covered in smoke; the surrounding temperature rose steadily, causing blisters to form and melt on his skin, until finally, he was burned raw, his tears vaporized by the intense heat.

Silas was pinned in place, watching him suffer. Endless guilt and pain surrounded and tormented him; even the words "I’m sorry" felt incredibly cheap, rendering him unworthy of their forgiveness.

In a daze, he returned to the fire.

He had rushed inside, desperate to find the child, with only one obsessive thought in his mind: to save him.

Silas shouted his name at the top of his lungs.

"Andy! Andy! Andy—"

There was no answer. In his desperation, he broke down and shouted the words buried deep in his heart.

"I am Daddy, son! Please, just answer me, will you..."

"Daddy?"

Perhaps his constant calling had moved the heavens, for a childish voice came from the corner of the training room.

Silas rushed in, ignoring everything, and found him. By then, the boy was covered in blistering burns. The man was ecstatic, reaching out to embrace him and escape.

But he never expected that the moment his hand touched him, the vibrant child in front of him would turn into a charred corpse in the next second. The sunken eyeballs in his sockets burst, yet the mouth continued to emit a childish sound.

"You must not be my daddy, because I call you Uncle."

Silas recoiled in terror, the shifting nightmares wrapping around him, tormenting his reason until he was on the verge of madness!

Suddenly, a hand rested on his shoulder. Seeing the wedding ring on the hand, Silas instantly forgot the fire before him; the temperature of the surrounding environment dropped to the freezing point.

"Silas?"

Silas turned back, wanting to give her a hug, wanting to tell her that she had worked hard all these years, wanting to apologize to her.

But when he turned around, the next second, he fell into a bottomless, dark abyss.

It was the deepest part of the zombie king’s lair.

The pervasive, icy, dead air poured into every orifice of his face. His ears were filled with the hoarse howls and sharp, piercing screeches of zombies, and his nose and mouth were filled with the putrid, fishy stench of decay.

Cold, violent, inescapable despair.

Even his tears vanished into the darkness. He could only twitch, eyes wide open, staring at the faint glimmer of light on the ground in the distance. No matter how hard he tried to climb up, he couldn't; countless rotting hands reached out from all directions, dragging him into the endless abyss.

Just as Silas’s eyes were about to turn hollow, a sigh reached his ears. It seemed as if a pair of hands was gently pushing his body upward, dispelling the zombie hands that were clawing at him, allowing him to return to the light and grasp a glimmer of hope.

The man opened his eyes abruptly, coughing and crying, gasping for air, his nasal cavity and lungs feeling as if they had been torn apart.

He crawled out of the bathtub only to realize he had fallen asleep while bathing, nearly drowning himself.

Sticky, crimson liquid dripped from his nasal cavity, quickly pooling into a small puddle.

Silas didn't care about his nosebleed at all. He simply knelt on the ground in a state of emotional collapse, tears streaming down his face, crying out in agony.

"Are you back? Did you come to save me because your heart softened? Why did you save me?"

A sound of things falling came from the room, a rustling noise.

Silas rose abruptly and staggered out of the bathroom. Seeing the bottle of mental stability medication that had fallen to the floor, he wore a look that was both weeping and laughing.

"Wife, you want me to take my medicine, don't you?"

He poured out two pills and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing and swallowing them raw, as if he had lost his sense of taste.

"I’ll do whatever you want."

"This is my sin."

One week later.

Law enforcement officers appeared at the villa entrance and handed him a file.

"Mr. Thorne, there has been a new development in the case involving your wife from all those years ago."