The Eleventh Year of Making Hate with My Lover - Chapter 14

Shen Wang leaped straight down from the window frame, racing out in pursuit.

Adjacent to Wu Que’s property sat a narrow alleyway, serving as a shortcut to the neighboring street. By now, the time hovered close to 1:00 AM, plunging the interior of the alley into pitch darkness. Yet, a series of frantic, terrified gasps suddenly shattered the expected midnight silence.

“A ghost… there’s a ghost…”

A figure was slumped helplessly against the structural wall, trembling violently as he muttered the words over and over.

Shen Wang approached with a deep frown, thoroughly surprised to find anyone out here at such a late hour. Clicking on the flashlight utility of his terminal, he cast a cursory glance over the individual’s condition.

The youth looked to be only in his mid-teens, wearing glasses and a single-strap backpack, his cap having tossed to the side manifesting the textbook aesthetic of a student.

He had clearly suffered an immense psychological shock, the recently fleeing Servant Puppet evidently shattering his nerves. The absolute millisecond his eyes locked onto Shen Wang, he lunged forward desperately, clamping his arms tightly around Shen Wang’s leg.

“Let go.” Shen Wang’s brow knit even tighter.

The boy merely continued to shudder: “A ghost… a mass of shadows just flashed right past me…”

“Which direction?” Shen Wang attempted to pry him off, but the kid was clinging on with absolute structural finality, making it difficult to simply kick him away.

Not daring to loosen his grip, the youth tilted his chin slightly toward the left: “I didn’t manage to see it clearly, it should have headed that way. I’m too terrified to move, my house is literally right past that sector.”

“What on earth are you doing out here entirely alone in the dead of night?” Shen Wang tracked the indicated trajectory. The alley extended quite a distance, its mouth barely catching a sliver of light illuminating from a distant streetlight.

“I made a bet with my classmates…” the boy mumbled under his breath. “They claimed this specific alley was haunted…”

“Big brother, could you please escort me home?” the youth pleaded, lifting his face expectantly.

Shen Wang carefully scrutinized his features. His expression was earnest and his consciousness appeared entirely lucid devoid of any structural anomalies or indicators of an individual suffering from psychological manipulation or corruption.

Shen Wang spoke slowly: “Fine. Let me help you up.”

He extended his arm, gripping the youth’s forearm. Loosening his hold on Shen Wang’s leg, the boy attempted to utilize the leverage to rise, only to be struck by a sudden, agonizing wave of pain as if something vital was being violently extracted from his physical body.

Those were several near-invisible puppet threads. The segments suspended in the air were completely translucent, while the portions tearing free from his flesh were slick with thin streaks of blood.

Maintaining a freezing cold expression, Shen Wang systematically extracted thousands of tangled puppet threads from the youth’s body. Simultaneously, a dark blade condensed within his palm, severing the connection with a singular, decisive swipe.

The instant the threads were cut, the student’s body collapsed onto the floorboards like overcooked noodles, countless microscopic puncture wounds across his skin erupting with fresh blood. Gripping the severed cluster of puppet threads, Shen Wang delivered a violent upward wrench, pulling a mass of human-shaped black mist directly out of the youth’s shadow, his fingers clamping tightly around its throat.

Despite being caught in a defensive chokehold, the Servant Puppet made zero attempt to liquify into water to escape, choosing instead to probe: “How did you isolate my presence?”

“We wear an identical face. Use your brain why on earth would he not project terror upon seeing me?” Shen Wang tightened his grip. “I underestimated you. To think you’ve mastered the execution of puppet thread manipulation as well.”

Shen Wang’s 【Myriad Forms】 ability could condense fluid energy to manifest anything, with the puppet threads serving as his signature discipline. It wasn’t merely a matter of them being sharp as tempered steel; rather, the ability possessed an advanced parameter any biological entity or inanimate object embedded with his puppet threads could be systematically controlled, functioning precisely like a shadow puppet play.

Shen Wang was fully aware of this utility, yet he rarely deployed it. Firstly, his current mental nucleus was severely fractured, heavily limiting his operational window; when dealing with supernatural entities, a direct execution was exponentially more efficient. Secondly, this discipline imposed a severe mental drain, inflicting heavy psychological side effects on both the operator and the target.

The Servant Puppet delivered a disdainful, downward smirk, projecting zero fear toward the blade tip pressing flat against its chest cavity: “For someone possessing an S-rank ability, you fail to maximize even a fraction of its true potential.”

“Why don’t you guess why I’m making no attempt to escape right now?” A triumphant, predatory smile surfaced across the puppet’s features.

In a flash of intuition, Shen Wang realized its tactical play, instantly releasing his chokehold on its throat. Dropping to one knee, the Servant Puppet clamped its hand tightly around the blade, letting the razor-sharp edge pierce straight through its palm as it let out a low chuckle: “A bit too late.”

The puppet threads erupted like wildfire from its palm, racing up the length of the blade structure, rapidly weaving into a massive, suffocating cocoon that encased both of them layer by layer. The long lines plunged deep into their muscle tissue, generating a continuous, sickening sound of squelch, squelch…

The exact moment Wu Que sprinted to the mouth of the alleyway, the visual scene playing out before his eyes caused his pupils to tremble violently.

Shen Wang stood motionless in the center of the dark alley with his head bowed low, countless puppet threads crisscrossing through his bleeding flesh. Holding his dark blade aloft, he was systematically and repeatedly driving the weapon into his own limbs, blood spraying across the environment.

“Shen Wang!” Wu Que bellowed, racing forward at maximum velocity as he reached out to rip him from the Servant Puppet’s control.

“Don’t execute any sudden movements, sweetheart.” The Servant Puppet had completely stripped away its usual docile veneer, its eyes burning an incandescent crimson, the gaze it directed toward Wu Que shifting between raw possessiveness and deep-seated malice. It twitched its fingers, causing the puppet threads to hoist Shen Wang’s arm into the air.

“I am well aware of how formidable you are.” The puppet dropped its palm downward, forcing Shen Wang’s descending dark blade to plunge right back into his own flesh, causing the man to let out a muffled, involuntary groan.

“But I will seamlessly deploy him as a meat shield, you see.”

Wu Que locked his eyes onto the entity, his tone freezing cold: “What exactly do you want?”

“What could I possibly want? I am merely a miserable wretch programmed from my very inception to love you.” The Servant Puppet tilted its head: “Yet you have never granted me a single direct glance regardless of whether this man was breathing or dead.”

“I am going to slaughter him. I am going to consume him.”

“I will devour his mental nucleus and swallow his memories whole. That way, there will be absolutely no distinction between him and me, isn’t that right?”

“Cough… I must say…” Shen Wang spat out a mouthful of fresh blood. Despite his entire body being riddled with punctures and soaked in crimson, a mocking smile still managed to surface across his lips: “Consuming me is an exercise in futility. There isn’t a single shred of memory stored inside my mental nucleus.”

Noticing that Wu Que was hesitating to strike, Shen Wang mistakenly assumed the man couldn’t bear to destroy the entity. He curled his lips into a cynical smirk, attempting to reach up to wipe the blood from his mouth, only to find his limbs completely restricted.

“Ex-husband, stop coddling it. A literal living person is standing right in front of your face, yet you’re still desperate to preserve this cheap proxy?”

Incensed by his words, the Servant Puppet applied a violent contraction to the puppet threads, letting out a furious roar: “Shut your mouth!”

Wu Que inhaled deeply, the ice sword in his grasp dissolving instantly as crackling arcs of high-voltage electricity began to aggregate from his forearm down to his fingertips.

“Do you honestly believe I will allow you the window to reverse the timeline?” Having resided by his side for years, the Servant Puppet was intimately familiar with the mechanics of his abilities. Transforming into a spectral silhouette, it rapidly dragged Shen Wang’s body along as it fled toward the alley exit, the blue-and-white field of energy pursuing them relentlessly before swallowing them whole in an instant.

Yet, the moment the light field dispersed, the alley stood entirely vacant save for a dense mass of grayish-black, translucent energy actively compressing itself against the intersection.

“A pollution domain…”

A flash of surprise crossed Wu Que’s features as he stared intently at the fluctuating energy field. High-tier supernatural anomalies possessed the capacity to manifest their own independent dimensions, officially designated as “pollution domains” serving as an exceptionally potent mechanism for both offense and defense. The localized properties varied wildly, morphing into either psychological illusions or literal slaughterhouses depending entirely on the nature of the anomaly itself.

It turned out the entity had long broken free from its artifact constraints, systematically feigning a harmless disposition this entire time.

…

“How does my domain look? Within this independent space, sweetheart has absolutely no parameter to manipulate the timeline.” The Servant Puppet sat perched atop a towering mound of stacked mechanical gears, looking down from its elevated vantage point at Shen Wang, who hung suspended in midair by the network of puppet threads.

Shen Wang lifted his heavy eyelids, slowly surveying his surroundings.

The entire dimension was composed of an infinite, borderless expanse of grayish-purple mist. There was no sense of orientation within the fog, only countless objects slowly drifting and stacking atop one another.

The floating items possessed zero structural logic, yet every single piece radiated a deeply unsettling, distorted synthesis of “half-mechanical, half-biological.” There were rusted clockwork springs with pale pink nerve fibers tangled tightly within their crevices, the nerve endings still twitching imperceptibly, casting off tiny, shattered gears with every convulsion.

Certain objects that plummeted into the fog never seemed to strike a solid floor, choosing instead to rotate and drift alongside the currents of mist. There were plastic doll eyeballs, scattered clock hands, and fractured mechanical limbs the metallic arms welded directly onto severed halves of human scapulas, black engine oil weeping from the bone crevices to drip steadily onto the shredded fragments of plush dolls piled below.

The collective environment was enough to make anyone’s scalp tighten, triggering a creeping wave of psychological dissociation the longer one stared.

An absolute visual pollution…

“Not bad. Exceptionally repulsive.” Shen Wang closed his eyes tightly, profoundly wishing he could unsee the display.

This was undoubtedly the “pollution domain” detailed within the base’s manual, marking his very first live encounter with the phenomenon. The illusion generated by the anomaly back at the town hadn’t progressed to the structural maturity of a true domain.

A domain could exponentially amplify an anomaly’s combat parameters while drawing its form closer to its primordial state. As for the methodology required to shatter a domain, the most direct and primitive solution was simply to obliterate the domain master…

The Servant Puppet applied a sharp tug to the threads, forcing Shen Wang’s suspended body to drift closer to its position. His frame was riddled with far too many puncture wounds, his pristine white shirt having long been stained a deep, dried black by the cascading blood. His head hung low, projecting virtual absence of vitality.

“How boring. You are far too weak in your current state.” The facial lineaments belonging to Shen Wang began to peel away from the Servant Puppet’s frame, exposing unpainted features and bare ball-jointed sockets bearing a striking resemblance to a raw, uncustomized mannequin blank.

It stared at Shen Wang’s face with a hint of melancholy, its internal cognitive processes drifting to an era long past: “You don’t remember either… Seven years ago, you personally purchased me from the black market…”

The ambient soundscape around them suddenly turned chaotic and deafening, mimicking the roar of an auction house or an exhibition hall.

While the Servant Puppet remained anchored in its reminiscence, the entire dimension suddenly gasped violently, receiving one thunderous external impact after another. Someone on the outside was aggressively attempting to shatter this domain by brute force, causing a visible fracture line to rip across the chaotic space.

An anomaly’s pollution domain was structurally weakest from the interior; its external shell being exceptionally fortified to the point of near-impenetrability. It was entirely within the realm of imagination how frantic the individual outside must be right now and under such a relentless, overpowering onslaught, this domain wouldn’t be capable of holding out for much longer.

Reverting to its primordial form, the Servant Puppet glanced at the fracturing crevice, its tone turning airy and mocking: “He is incredibly worried about you.”

“However, it ends here.” It curled its five fingers into a claw formation, driving its hand straight toward Shen Wang’s heart: “I will become you to live on.”

Yet, its hand came to a grinding halt exactly one centimeter away from the man’s chest.

“You’re calling the game a bit too early.” The youth standing before it snapped his eyes open, his pupils burning pitch black.