Chapter 109: Interrogation 3

It was an utterly ordinary night; as usual, he attended a drinking party with the powerful. Although seated at the same table, he could only play the role of the fawning flatterer making toasts, unable to talk back when he was berated and lectured.

Coming from the underworld, he was not truly trusted by the powerful. Many people were polite on the surface but secretly treated him as a “dog that can never be tamed.” As long as he was willing to remain an obedient tool, he could keep his seat at this dining table; but once he lost their trust, he would be kicked away from the table, or even be served on it.

Precisely because he came from the bottom, he harbored an intense mix of inferiority and pride when facing those privileged figures. After enduring humiliation from the powerful, that inferiority and pride became grotesquely twisted, filling his heart with anger and resentment like a poisonous Flame that burned him inside.

He felt that his career and life had brushed against an invisible yet unmistakable ceiling. Relying on his own efforts, it was already impossible for his generation to truly achieve a leap in social class. Day and night he analyzed the reasons: sometimes blaming the environment, sometimes his origins, and sometimes even his wife.

Yes, he even blamed his wife, and that thought did not come out of nowhere.

In Xianshui City there was a politician named Ying Lingyun, who was said to be, like him, from a grassroots background, of a similar age, and who had once been involved in shady underworld activities.

In stark contrast to him, that politician had, in his youth, attached himself to the daughter of the local hidden tycoon Zhu Family, and by living off her had forcibly achieved a class leap, then smoothly entered politics and went from strength to strength. The dark materials left behind from his involvement in the underworld did nothing to affect his career. Even many local elites who lorded it over him now had to fawn over that politician, who in the past had treated him as a nobody to be trampled at will.

With the same grassroots background, why was the other allowed to rise effortlessly while he could only swallow his anger? The fury and resentment in his heart grew ever more twisted and swollen, and finally he vented it upon the wife who had accompanied him from the countryside to the city.

This was the truth behind the drastic change in Goldfish’s parents’ relationship after her elementary school graduation.

And that night, after the drinking party ended, reeking of alcohol and seething with humiliation, he staggered along the road home in the dark.

At that moment, a figure wearing a silver mask appeared before him like a specter.

That was the night that changed his fate.

“Do you desire power?”

“…You mean, power?”

“Power unrelated to authority and wealth, fame and birth, capable of easily surpassing such vulgar things, a power beyond mortal understanding…” The other’s voice echoed in his ears like a Monster’s murmur. “True power.”

“True power…”

To a normal person, those words would have sounded utterly insane, but unbelievably, he understood, and he believed.

Once he agreed, he would become something no longer human, and would henceforth have to feed on human Souls; he understood and believed even that. The voice seemed to possess an unfathomable seductive magic, helping him skip over doubt and questioning. He began seriously considering whether to accept the power offered.

What a joke—how could he hesitate over such a windfall delivered to his door? He nodded without the slightest delay.

From that night on, he was no longer human, but a Monster.

After becoming a Monster, he began to treat the powerful who once humiliated him, and also uncared-for marginal figures of society, as his Prey.

To avoid investigation by official forces, an ordinary person, even if killing a powerful figure, would focus on handling the body afterward, ideally making it look like an accident or a disappearance. His thinking was completely the opposite: out of a desire for revenge and confidence in his own supernatural abilities, he deliberately left scenes where the victims’ bodies were destroyed beyond recognition, keeping the powerful in constant terror.

At the same time, he still could not let go of his past ambitions and desires, and wanted to drive his human identity to realize his dream of changing class. So he approached a nightclub owner who held great influence and connections among the local upper class, and forced her to submit to him.

He deliberately chose a nightclub owner as his “collaborator,” which at first glance seemed inexplicable, but in fact there were two reasons.

First, the nightclub owner possessed such strong influence and connections because she held incriminating material on many local elites. This was an “open secret” among the local upper class. Having had enough of being controlled by others’ leverage, the Shadow-Shifting Monster now urgently wanted to stand on the side that held leverage over others.

Second, the Shadow-Shifting Monster himself was a regular at this nightclub. He had taken a liking to one of the workers there and wanted to “buy out” her “usage rights” immediately. For this, he did not hesitate to reveal his Monster form in front of the nightclub owner.

The one he had set his sights on was the youngest little girl working in that nightclub.

The Shadow-Shifting Monster had a perverse preference for young girls. In the past, when other elites brought him to this nightclub to have fun, she was the first one he chose.

At first he chose her merely for the thrill, but after forcing her to take off her mask and seeing her true face, he instantly fell in love with her. After that, every time he came to the nightclub he would choose this girl, even bringing clothes tailored to her size for her to wear, or somehow producing hairpins and other accessories to dress her up carefully.

In the past, Goldfish relied on the nightclub rule that staff could refuse customers’ demands to remove their masks, and used that as the basis for devising the plan to frame her father. It turned out that many visiting elites did not care about the rule at all and would not be held accountable for breaking it.

As for most of what happened between the Shadow-Shifting Monster and the girl at night, Lu Youxun, who was interrogating him and reading his surface thoughts, of course did not go into detail for us; he only told us that the Shadow-Shifting Monster did not seem to have completely lost his humanity.

Regarding his past beatings of his wife and daughter, and his killings as a Monster that destroyed so many families, the Shadow-Shifting Monster did feel at least some basic human guilt. Beyond that, for all the hardships he had suffered over the years, he harbored much sorrow and regret unfit to share with outsiders.

He confessed all these things to that thin, timid little girl as if confessing to a nun, and demanded that during this process she hold him like a mother holds her child.

And he himself acted like a child, coquettishly leaning on her, even burying his face in her chest like a baby.

Forced by Lu Youxun’s Magic to reveal these secrets, the Shadow-Shifting Monster was like an internet user whose browser history was being projected publicly; his eyes almost burst with rage as he howled in utter humiliation, “You bastard… you bastard!”

Zhu Shi’s expression went blank as if her brain had crashed; after a moment, she squeezed out a word: “…What?”

“It is not entirely incomprehensible. Since ancient times, men have had two grand fantasies. One is to shed blood and sacrifice their lives for justice and ideals; the other is to be unconditionally loved and forgiven in the arms of a pure young woman.” Lu Youxun sighed. “After heartbreak, many men fantasize about seeking motherly love from girls younger than themselves. For example, I once…”

Seeing such a well-dressed grown man speak with such sympathy, Zhu Shi looked at him with increasing disgust, and Ma Zao quietly edged away from him without a word.

As for me, I tactfully cut him off: “Lu Youxun, have you been reading too much of the Shadow-Shifting Monster’s surface thoughts and let them influence your thinking?”

“Ahem, ahem!” Lu Youxun snapped back to himself, coughed twice, and said, “Sorry, I got off track. It seems this interrogation glove tool really does have side effects; prolonged reading of others’ thoughts can have this kind of influence. How dangerous—I almost let myself be affected by this pervert who likes young girls.”

Zhu Shi shot him a sidelong glance. “Yes, overusing mind-reading can easily let your target rub off on you, but you…”

“What do you all know?” The Shadow-Shifting Monster seemed to want to salvage some dignity and began spouting sickening sophistry. “Every mature woman once grew from a tender young girl. If you cannot love a young girl, it means you cannot love a complete person…”

“Shut your mouth!”

Lu Youxun seemed to use some Magic through the hand gripping the top of the Shadow-Shifting Monster’s head, and the latter’s face immediately twisted in pain, unable to continue speaking.

Not only that, the Shadow-Shifting Monster’s entire body underwent a drastic change, rapidly shrinking from a Monster form like a Monster to a human form just a bit over one meter seventy.

He had stayed in his Monster form so long that seeing him suddenly revert to human form felt visually jarring. And since the silk bathrobe he had worn before had been completely burned to ash by me, he was not wearing even half a piece of clothing, left naked, bound against the tree trunk by the Flame hand, which was quite an eyesore.

“My power!” he shouted in disbelief.

“Mm… you have been rejected by the Heart Seed.” After observing with penetrating eyes, Zhu Shi pronounced judgment. “Although Ma Zao previously dragged back the Heart Seed in your body when it tried to leave, that did not mean the Heart Seed would accept you again. The fact that your Monster form did not immediately dissipate was only because the Heart Seed had not yet escaped.

“But with just a bit of strong external stimulation like earlier, your Monster form pops like a bubble and can never return to its original state.”

The Shadow-Shifting Monster’s expression collapsed as if his world had ended.