Astonishment, shock, panic… All these words were not enough to describe how he felt at the time.

He was frozen for a long time, then climbed from the driver’s seat to the back seat, searching up and down; but the car was only that big, even if it was an extended version, and there was only that much room, so how would it be possible to hide a living person? And so quickly and easily, where could he have gone?

He wasn’t in the car and he couldn’t have gotten out of the car.

Just like that, vanished into thin air?

Lu Chong looked blankly at the kitten, and the kitten looked blankly at him.

They were both covered in blood, staring at each other in utter bewilderment.

“Meow!” The cat suddenly slapped his face with its paw.

Lu Chong woke up, his stagnant mind spinning, and then he subconsciously searched for something to wipe the blood from the seat.

No one must know, no one must know…

He wiped it twice and then tried to wipe the blood on himself, muttering, “What else is there to do, what else is there to do?”

Right!

He suddenly picked up the gun from the driver’s seat, opened the door, and strode in the direction the car had driven from.

“Meow!” The cat jumped out of the car and ran after him.

He came to the spot where he had kicked out the driver. There was a puddle of blood on the ground, with traces of blood stretching all the way forward. He followed the blood trail to the river bank below, where the driver was stumbling forward.

His face expressionless, he raised the gun, pulled the trigger, and with a bang the figure in the distance fell to the ground with a thud.

The silencer on the gun had fallen off in the scramble earlier, and the shot was extremely loud. People were opening windows in residential buildings not far away. One of the women screamed, and others reached for the phone to call the police.

He glanced coldly that way, and several windows there slammed shut in a hurry.

“Meow.” His trouser leg was tugged at; he lowered his head and picked up the kitten that had run up to his feet. He stroked its fur that was wet with blood and stuck together. The phone in his pocket vibrated and he realised he still had a mobile phone. In his panic earlier he hadn’t even thought to use it to call for an ambulance or help.

The caller ID on the phone was one of his father’s right-hand men, and when he picked it up, the other person’s frightened, sad voice came through, “Come back quickly, Jiu Shao, something happened to your dad!”

He froze; his eyes felt sore but his face showed no expression and his voice was cold and hard: “Okay, I’ll be right back.”

He looked around blankly, looked down at the cat in his hands and said, “Ribs, let’s go.”

He went back to the car, which was still empty, as if everything had just been a dream.

Later, for a long time, he really thought he had had a dream. The young man came entirely from his own imagination, because he began to realise that he could not remember the young man’s face and many details and conversations became blurred. When he asked people around him who had seen the teenager, the same thing happened to them. They only knew that there was that one person, but they couldn’t remember exactly what he looked like.

The young man seemed to be very deliberate not to leave any traces of himself. He hadn’t taken a picture, and everything he wrote would be destroyed on the spot. Lu Chong quietly took the blood and hair left by the young man for testing, but he couldn’t extract any DNA.

And nothing the teenager had touched had any fingerprints.

Some things became more strange the more he investigated them, and some things became more difficult to understand the deeper he thought about them.

It was as if the teenager had appeared out of thin air and then disappeared the same way, and the only evidence left to prove he had been here seemed to be the cat he had picked up and the piece of paper with Lu Chong’s name written on it that he had secretly hidden away.

He could not and dared not make a big show of looking for the young man; he could only wait.

As he waited, the paper turned yellow and was lost in an accident.

As he waited, the cat died too.

His heart went from cold to hot, and from hot to cold, and it seemed that he would wait until the end of his life.

And now, he suddenly realised that the person he was waiting for might have come to him long ago.

“Lu Chong, Lu Chong, wake up, don’t sleep!” Listen, he was calling him.

Lu Chong struggled to open his eyes and vaguely saw a blood-stained face in front of him. He moved his lips to say something, yet his consciousness sank deeper and deeper uncontrollably, as if something in the abyss was pulling him down.

“Lu Chong! Lu Chong! Lu Chong!!!”

Luo Wencheng watched the man close his eyes, his head dropping onto his shoulder, and suddenly burst into tears: “Don’t do this, Lu Chong, don’t do this, wake up!”

As he said this, he raised his hand to support the smashed roof of the car that had been deformed by the impact of the steel, leaving barely any room in the driver and passenger seats.

Luo Wencheng could vaguely see a glimpse of the sky through the mass of steel pressing down on him, but no matter how hard he pushed or how much he shouted, it was impossible to change anything in the slightest.

Desperation, helplessness, fear, his heart was filled with these emotions and he finally froze, gasping.

He was half pinned underneath Lu Chong, his legs were clamped between the seat and the car, his only right hand still able to move couldn’t find a mobile phone on himself or on Lu Chong. He had no choice but to stop and wait for help that might or might not come, and even if it came, it might have come too late.

“Lu Chong…” He carefully touched Lu Chong’s face, not daring to touch his head that was covered in blood and still bleeding. He even felt that the whole head was deformed.

Only the breath that sprayed on his neck brought him a glimmer of comfort, letting him know that the man was still alive.

“Why are you so stupid?” He had lunged so desperately.

He didn’t know if Lu Chong would have been so badly injured if he hadn’t lunged over. No one could be sure of what would have happened in a crash as violent as that. All he knew was that if Lu Chong hadn’t shielded him with his body, he wouldn’t be so lightly injured now.

This man actually tried to protect him with his life at the most dangerous moment.

Luo Wencheng suddenly felt that all his previous obsessions, all his resentments, were meaningless.

Like or not like, accept or not accept, what was there to care about?

He would only ever remember the fact that Lu Chong almost died, while he had been protected by him and only slightly injured.

He looked up at the warped roof of the car and suddenly said, “Are you there?”

The car was quiet, and no sound came in response.

Luo Wencheng said, “I don’t know what the hell you are, but I know you must be there, come out! Don’t you want my hope and love? Come out!”

He didn’t know exactly what that voice was, or if it could help him, but he could only hope for that now.

It was the only hope he had at the moment.

It was going to be bad for Lu Chong, and he had no choice.

“Come out, I beg you, give me some response, will you? I beg you to help me, I beg you to save this man beside me, he is dying. If he dies, I won’t live anymore, and you won’t have any more hope or love!”

Pleading or threatening, Luo Wencheng kept talking and talking. His voice was hoarse, but still there was no response, only silence all around.

Did he have to be about to die for that voice to appear? Or would it appear after he had died?

A flicker of madness flashed in Luo Wencheng’s eyes as he struggled to twist his head to look at the hard, sharp curve of the deformed car door. He reached out and slashed, the delicate, soft flesh of his wrist breaking open, blood pouring from the wound.

He had also lost some blood from his injuries, and although most of the blood all over his body was Lu Chong’s, there was also some of his own. In addition, he had been worried about Ribs before and hadn’t rested much, and after shouting and screaming just now, his body was actually very tired. As soon as he cut his wrist, he felt dizzy, short of breath and light-headed.

He lowered his head weakly; it looked like he and Lu Chong were leaning against each other.

In a daze, his consciousness also began to blur, weakness, powerlessness, suffocation, cold… near-death sensation filled his whole body, and at that moment, the cold voice he was waiting so hard for finally came: “Target’s life is detected to be under serious threat, renew it? “

Luo Wencheng was stunned. His consciousness seemed to be detached from his body. His body still had difficulty moving, but his consciousness seemed to float while the surrounding objects became blurred. It was as if he had entered another realm. He hurriedly said into the void, “Don’t renew my life, I want to save this person beside me instead!”

“Beyond the scope of ability, request invalid.”

Luo Wencheng gritted his teeth, “You can even reverse time and space, how can you not be able to save a person? Don’t you want my love and hope? I’ll give you both, but I don’t want to continue to live, I want to save him instead.”

He gasped; even though his consciousness was separated, he felt a heavy sense of powerlessness and exhaustion in his body that seemed to be very cold, “He is not dead yet, he is only badly wounded, if you can save someone who is dead you can surely save someone who is not yet dead. I beg you!”

The voice took a moment before saying, “This time the quality of your love and hope is better than last time. I can keep you alive for more than a year, do you want to exchange?”

Luo Wencheng was relieved, “So you can do it, can’t you? If he’s dead, what’s the point of me living any longer?”

“Maybe he won’t die.”

“Can you be sure that he will live? Can you be sure that even if he is saved, he won’t be left with sequelae of such a serious head injury?” Luo Wencheng smiled, “I don’t want to live anyway, so now I’m trading hope and love that I don’t intend to put to use for him to be well. Isn’t that a bargain?”

He lifted his head and looked into the void, “Please save him for me.”

A sigh seemed to ring out; in a space that Luo Wencheng could not see, there was a glowing blue screen with data flowing on it continuously, and then a page popped up with a line of words on it.

An extremely clear line of grey words:

Changing the target’s fate, first time, failed.

Then, another line of words appeared under the grey words, and the cold, stereotypical electronic voice read it.

[Changing the target’s fate, second version, rebirth…]

The voice paused and then added: [failed.]

On the screen, the end of the second line of words flickered a few times, and the word “failed” popped out, displayed there brightly, extremely dazzling.

The voice continued: [The target is automatically abandoned. The target’s life has entered a 72-hour countdown. In accordance with the target’s wish, the target’s energy is absorbed and transformed into the restorative agent. The system mission failed, the system is about to be shut down and enter permanent hibernation mode.]

Luo Wencheng grunted and found himself back in his own body. The heavy coldness of his body almost made him pass out. He didn’t die?

What the hell was going on here? Had the voice promised him or not?

He tried to call out to the voice again but couldn’t even utter a word. Blood loss made him unable to stay awake anymore. Fortunately, there was a shout outside the car at this time.

“Sir! Young Master Luo!”

The voice was so indistinct that it seemed to come from an extremely distant place. Luo Wencheng could not hear whose voice it was, but with such a way of calling them, it must have been one of their own, right?

He smiled, glanced at Lu Chong and closed his eyes weakly.

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