The Eleventh Year of Making Hate with My Lover - Chapter 13

The previous night, the Servant Puppet had been relatively well-behaved, staying locked in the storage room without causing any trouble.

It provided Shen Wang with a rare night of peaceful sleep except the damn thing still materialized right in front of his bed first thing in the morning…

Anyone who has ever opened their eyes to find an identical face staring down at them blankly knows exactly what kind of “salvation” that feels like.

During the day, the Servant Puppet became even more clingy than before. When Wu Que read a book, it crouched right beside him; when Wu Que organized his belongings, it stared intently from a hair’s breadth away.

Right now, as Wu Que watered the flowers in the courtyard, it knelt by the wicker lounge chair, actively pulling weeds.

By comparison, Shen Wang was entirely an idle bystander.

Wu Que seemed to adore that patch of Eternal Beacons to an almost pathological degree. Otherwise, what sane person would mix their own blood into the water for a plant?

Ever since their first encounter when Shen Wang had lost consciousness, Wu Que had fed him a trace of his blood, making Shen Wang realize it possessed a distinctive sedative and mentally soothing property.

It was no wonder the man’s complexion constantly appeared so bloodless; the toll he endured was vastly higher than Lang Xi, who merely needed a few drops to ignite an ability.

Shen Wang stared at the flowers. Under the steady nourishment, the blue and pink blossoms bloomed with uncanny, breathtaking beauty. The edges of the petals carried a microscopic hint of grayish-purple, shifting into a misty blue outer layer, while the floral cores gradually transitioned into a delicate, pale pink. Every single petal was thin as a cicada’s wing, its vascular network perfectly defined, swaying with fluid grace at the slightest brush of the wind.

Yet, woven into this elegance was an unutterable sense of the macabre. Stepping closer, a bizarre fragrance drifted into the senses—initially striking the nose with the pure sweetness of floral nectar, but a deeper inhalation revealed a sharp undertone of decaying wood, reminiscent of rotting autumn leaves trapped in a damp, suffocating forest.

Is there something buried beneath those roots?

What if I dug it up…

As if detecting Shen Wang’s probing gaze, the two figures by the wicker chair simultaneously snapped their heads around to look at him.

“If you’re so idle, why don’t you go make breakfast?” The Servant Puppet crossed its arms, its gaze cutting through him with icy disdain, clearly finding his presence an absolute eyesore.

“Only if you don’t mind the kitchen being blown to pieces,” Shen Wang shot back, equally irritated by the sight of it, before turning on his heel to head back to the living room. Sinking into the sofa, he flipped his laptop open and dialed into the base’s internal network address.

He hadn’t reviewed the base’s recent dispatches since he had been gone for so long.

Pinned to the absolute top of the homepage was the Animancer Code of Conduct, a framework established by the Coalition three centuries ago. Scrolling down, the recent updates consisted entirely of minor, superficial announcements except for one specific entry that caught his eye.

It was a fugitive bounty dispatch. The summary detailed that an Animancer from another Coalition sector had defected. While executing a tactical mission, instead of neutralizing the anomalous specter, he had chosen to abet the entity, systematically slaughtering the local populace. The defector had currently fled into the Zemi Barrens to the southwest, and the Coalition was actively deploying tactical squads to hunt him down.

The Zemi Barrens…

That was a highly anomalous territory, serving as the habitat for a third-party faction that belonged to neither humans nor specters. Born with innate, distinct capabilities, they resided within the chaotic depths of the Zemi, existing in virtual isolation and maintaining a strict non-interference policy with human civilization.

Three centuries ago, the world comprised roughly 70% human territory and 30% supernatural domains. The vast majority of primordial specters had been driven into the Zemi by the original Animancers. Today, it was a volatile melting pot of various lifeforms, making the local dynamics incredibly complex.

This manhunt was bound to face immense friction.

Shen Wang didn’t find the dispatch surprising in the slightest. Truth be told, he harbored zero alignment with the Animancer Code; he thoroughly scoffed at the concept of sacrificing everything for ordinary citizens.

The moment he uncovered the true cause of his death and executed his enemies with his own hands, his very first order of business would be to sever all ties with the base.

Ping—

Someone noticed his online status and flashed a direct message through the terminal.

【IsItA_TimeMagician_OrWhat】: Boss! Boss!

【Jellyfish_Keeper】: Who are you?

Because he rarely utilized the platform to communicate with anyone online, he had never paid any attention to his internal base ID. He truly hadn’t expected the original host’s name to be…

Even your ID is a testament to loving him still…

The counter-response flashed across the screen instantly.

【IsItA_TimeMagician_OrWhat】: It’s me, Lang Xi! Boss, when are you returning to base? It looks like a fresh batch of recruits is scheduled to arrive soon.

Shen Wang fell into deep contemplation. He likewise wanted to figure out how to get Wu Que to return to the base with him, especially since the command sector wasn’t assigning a single mission to Wu Que lately.

If all else failed…

Recalling the bounty dispatch he had just scanned, a sudden tactical play formed in his mind.

Though it wasn’t exactly ethically sound.

【Jellyfish_Keeper】: Sometime this week.

The moment his fingers tapped out those words, Shen Wang seamlessly navigated to the base’s Internal Reporting Center, opening an encrypted document to begin drafting a file.

“What are you looking at?” Wu Que bypassed the sofa. Noticing the grim expression on Shen Wang’s face as his fingers flew across the keyboard, he cast a curious glance over his shoulder.

Shen Wang frantically closed the tab, reverting the display back to the previous notification.

“Another one off to meet their maker,” Wu Que swept his eyes over the contents of the notification, his head tilting as a slight smile surfaced.

Yet, that smile carried a distinct chill. Wu Que locked his gaze onto his face, the downward angle of his posture causing his long hair to drape softly over Shen Wang’s frame: “When people are young, they lack maturity, acting entirely on pure impulse. Only after taking a barrage of brutal hits do they turn around, only to discover that the path back has long ceased to exist.”

“Every path is chosen by the individual,” Shen Wang countered dismissively.

“Yes, every path is chosen by the individual,” Wu Que echoed softly, his tone light as his gaze drifted away.

“When are we returning to base?” Shen Wang probed. He had less than five days remaining on his window.

“You don’t exactly project the aura of someone eager to get back to work,” Wu Que reached out, his fingers gently brushing aside a stray lock of hair hanging in front of Shen Wang’s eyes, his tone smooth and fluid: “Depends on my mood. And right now, my mood isn’t particularly grand.”

Who on earth spoiled him to the point of developing this volatile, unpredictable temperament?

Shen Wang captured his hand, his thumb slowly tracing the contours of Wu Que’s wrist as he offered a half-jesting retort: “Then perhaps one day you’ll wake up to find your ex-husband has dropped dead.”

From an outsider’s perspective, the atmospheric tension vibrating between them looked profoundly intimate. Yet, both of them could clearly isolate a defiant “I will never yield to you” stamped inside each other’s eyes.

The moment Wu Que walked away, Shen Wang reopened the reporting portal to resume editing the unfinished letter. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the Servant Puppet leaning against the doorframe, its gaze freezing cold.

To prevent the Servant Puppet from slipping into structural insanity after nightfall, it was systematically locked away tonight according to protocol.

The Servant Puppet sat by the table, putting on an immense display of self-pity: “Can I please refrain from reverting to the artifact form? I promise to exercise absolute self-control and avoid triggering any incidents.”

“No,” Wu Que shattered any room for negotiation, resting his palm atop its head. “The mere fact that I haven’t dismantled you yet is already an act of supreme indulgence.”

The towering silhouette standing at over 180 cm tall obediently compressed down, transforming into a small mechanical doll that dropped onto the floor, its facial expression sour. Wu Que secured it inside the cabinet, giving its miniature head a parting pat. As he walked away, he completely missed the fact that a fractured shard had dislodged from the puppet’s chest cavity.

……

The exact moment the clock struck midnight, a pool of ink-black water began to seep through the gap beneath the third-floor storage door. It trickled silently down the staircase structure, gliding across the second-floor floorboards before snaking its way right through the crevice of a bedroom door.

At that exact moment, Shen Wang was thrashing on his mattress, gripped by a debilitating headache. The sheer force of the agony was exponentially more volatile than any episode he had endured previously.

Amidst the darkness, he instantly sensed a fluid substance rushing across the floor. Immediately after, several long lines erupted from the ground, driving downward like tempered steel spikes. If he hadn’t executed a frantic, blindingly fast roll across the bed, he would have been pinned flat to the mattress.

A deep, hollow voice vibrated through the pitch black: “Have you seen my sweetheart?”

? I’ve seen your damn mother.

How the hell did this thing break out in the dead of night?

He flipped off the mattress, slapping the light switch on. The ink-black shadows retreated instantly, leaving the room entirely pristine to the point where he almost suspected it had been a hallucination.

Yet, the mechanical voice of the system abruptly fired off at an entirely inconvenient moment.

[Contaminated mental nucleus fragment identified.]

[Hidden quest triggered. Hidden quest triggered.]

“?”

What the hell does ‘contaminated mental nucleus fragment’ mean?

Suddenly, a violent commotion erupted from the adjacent room. It sounded precisely as though a massive weight had been forcefully hurled against the structural wall, causing his own bedroom to shudder violently from the kinetic impact.

Wu Que?

Shen Wang massaged his throbbing temples as he stepped off the bed.

A series of muffled, suppressed gasps drifted down the corridor from the master bedroom.

Shen Wang shoved the door open, witnessing the Servant Puppet sliding down the wall. It was aggressively rubbing its bruised forearm, attempting to crawl from the foot of the bed back to Wu Que’s side. Wu Que sat amidst the mattress, his snow-white hair cascading wildly around his frame, his features caught in an even split between raw, icy malice and profound regret.

“Sweetheart…”

“Xiao Wu…”

The puppet’s consciousness appeared infinitely more muddled than the previous day, its entire frame swathed in a volatile cloud of black mist, having completely detached itself from the physical constraints of the spiritual tool. Rather than a mere Servant Puppet artifact, it looked far more like a supernatural anomaly birthed from a corrupted binding restriction. Compared to when Wu Que had inspected it the prior morning, it had already synthesized a physical, corporeal form.

It could no longer be permitted to exist.

“Uh, did I happen to walk in at an inappropriate time?”

Is this damn entity’s cognitive parameters completely overridden by a desire to get indecent right now?

The moment the Servant Puppet isolated Shen Wang standing at the threshold, the surrounding black mist swelled with immense density. It snapped its arm forward, causing a wave of ink-like black water to surge from behind its frame, morphing into countless puppet threads that lunged straight for Shen Wang.

“A literal line-by-line copy, huh,” Shen Wang hissed, noting that even the supernatural ability was a perfect match.

He thrust his hands forward to intercept the incoming threads, applying a violent wrenching force to drag the Servant Puppet directly toward his position. The latter instantly dissolved its threads back into fluid form, splashing onto the floorboards before melting entirely into the environment, re-emerging from the shadow cast in the corner of the room.

Correlating the system’s quest notification with the fact that its abilities were mirrored at a perfect 1:1 ratio, Shen Wang finally comprehended why his mental sea had been fluctuating so frequently ever since he arrived at this property.

Because when the original host had struck that binding restriction years ago… he had literally extracted a piece of his own mental nucleus as the price of admission.

A mental nucleus possessed the capacity to replicate core memories and supply supernatural energy.

The contaminated mental nucleus fragment shared an innate attraction and a visceral rejection toward his main body, driving the frequent destabilization within his brain. Reciprocally, his physical arrival had accelerated the manifestation of this anomaly.

“You think you’re escaping?” Shen Wang triggered his 【Myriad Forms】 ability, causing a network of fine, localized tentacles to condense from the puppet’s shadow, instantly wrapping around its ankles.

The Servant Puppet’s pupils contracted in shock. The threads shooting from its fingertips suddenly sprouted vicious barbs, its tactical strikes turning lethal and merciless.

The overhead chandelier was shattered during the kinetic exchange, raining glass shards across the floorboards, reflecting the chaotic dance of the two overlapping shadows. Both entities utilized an identical suite of abilities, locking them in a brutal stalemate where neither could easily gain the upper hand.

The puppet’s barbed threads tracked Shen Wang’s movements with lethal precision, waiting for a single microscopic opening to bind and shred him to pieces. On his end, Shen Wang manipulated his shadow tentacles to erupt continuously from the dark, systematically intercepting the puppet’s offenses. Occasionally, a tentacle would manage to wrap around the puppet’s vital points, only for the entity to instantly liquify into water and retreat into the darkness.

This was Shen Wang’s core structural limitation he could not alter his physical anatomy into a fluid state like the anomaly could.

“Don’t lose focus.” A translucent, razor-sharp sword condensed within Wu Que’s grasp. A blast of biting, freezing sword intent slashed downward, effectively pinning the anomaly against the structural wall.

“Sweetheart…” The Servant Puppet’s expression fractured with a deep sense of betrayal. It pressed its thin lips together, its pale features actually projecting a trace of delicate vulnerability. Yet, in the next heartbeat, it transitioned back into a fluid stream, breaking free from the constraint and vaulting right through the window frame into the courtyard below.

To a certain degree, it shared an 80% aesthetic match with the original host.

And a mere 50% match was already enough to make Wu Que lose his focus for a fatal second.

It was precisely this brief window of hesitation that allowed the Servant Puppet to sprint entirely out of the operational perimeter of his supernatural control.

Shen Wang’s tentacles lunged in immediate pursuit, yet they managed to capture nothing but a slick, viscous fluid as they watched the entity round the corner, sprinting directly into the alleyway opposite the property.

Shen Wang ran a hand through his hair in sheer frustration. A completely unhinged supernatural anomaly equipped with a solid, physical form possessed a catastrophic damage potential. It was no longer an ignorant, floating spirit, nor was it a mere fragment bound safely inside an artifact casing.

Tonight was bound to be another sleepless night.

If for nothing else, he absolutely had to retrieve that piece of the mental nucleus holding his lost memories.