From the end of the world

Chapter 121 Sleeping Together 1
After saying goodbye to Zhu Shi, I headed home. Ma Zao naturally went back with me. Influenced by the "shocking bad news" just now, we didn't have much mood to talk on the way. Ma Zao seemed to be worried too.

Even when she was interrogating the Monster Maker earlier, she was very silent. I thought she would not be able to help but ask a few more questions, after all, her purpose was to explore information related to "Doomsday" through the Monster Maker.

"Your ring..." Ma spoke first. She looked at my pocket where the black rope lock heart ring was placed. "You also used it during the day. Is it a prop that can force the other party to tell the truth?"

"Yes."

I explained the origin of the black rope lock heart ring and then asked her why she was silent before.

"That was the enemy you defeated, and you should be the one leading the conversation. I just did some supporting work at the end, and I have no right to make decisions. Besides, you also helped to ask the questions that I care about." She said, "Besides, the subsequent investigation work is my main 'battlefield'. If there is anything you want to know, I can use my ability to trace it back."

"Speaking of abilities, how is your soul?" I asked with concern, "You seemed to have almost collapsed again."

"It's not as bad as it looks." It's unclear whether she was telling the truth or just trying to show off. "It's more difficult for my blessing power to trace back to the outside than to trace back to myself. If I'm not careful, I'll overexert myself and it will in turn affect my injuries. But I can recover by tracing back to myself. As long as I'm not injured to the point where I can't use my power at all, there's no problem."

I think we have to find a way to heal her soul. Even if it's only a temporary solution, it's better than not finding it at all.

We returned home. It was almost nine o'clock in the evening and we were almost hungry.

Before we started the ambush of the monster maker, we just bought some food on the way to fill our stomachs, which didn't count as dinner. As a flame aggregate, I don't have a hard need to take in food and water. The physiological reaction of hunger is mimicry; and Ma Zao can rely on the power of blessing to reset himself to a perfect state, and perhaps he doesn't need to take in nutrition more than me. But I still decided to make dinner first.

Eating helps to restore the spirit. After all, I have fought with people, even killed people, and even worse, I killed my friend's biological father. Even I can't avoid the mental burden. And Ma Zao seems to have a tense consciousness. After a meal, our conditions have improved a little.

She watched TV in the living room, while I went back to the bedroom to check my super powers.

After the first murder, my superpowers seemed to have changed. This time I killed the monster maker, did my superpowers change again?
The answer is yes.

Previously, I focused all my attention on the monster maker and didn't carefully sense whether my superpowers had changed. In fact, this kind of change is not so easy to sense. Last time, I was more concerned about my psychological feelings when I killed someone, so I could detect it. In another situation, I might not even know that my superpowers had changed. Now I activated my superpowers again and found that not only did it change again, but it was much bigger than when I killed the shadow-changing monster.

Now I can roughly describe this change.

I believe that some people who are addicted to sports may understand my feelings now. I feel like I put down the sports I am addicted to for three or four days and concentrate on learning. When I pick up the skills again, there is a slight discrepancy between the feel and practice. It's like the feel has been overslept, becoming slightly unfamiliar, and temporarily unable to mesh with the memory. Sand has been sprinkled inside the gear-operating machine.

In other words, the Shadow Changer is at most a handful of sand, which can be held by the thumb and index finger. The Monster Maker is a handful of sand, which can only be held by closing the palm of your hand.

It's just a handful of sand, and it will soon be completely worn away by the operation of the gear machine. But my job now is not to wear it away, but to pick it out of the gear machine and see what it is.

I raised my right hand, summoned a fireball in my palm, and stared at it intently. Now I want to imagine that this is not a fireball, but a gear machine. I want to turn this machine upside down and let the sand inside fall out by itself.

Not long after, I saw a little black shadow emerging inside the fireball.

The shadow became more and more conspicuous until it stopped changing. I then removed the fireball. The shadow fell and landed in my palm. Its true appearance was revealed before my eyes.

This is a hard, black object.

A black, thumb-sized, irregularly shaped hard substance. It feels like coal. I have no idea what it is and why it appears in my flame. I tried to use my superpowers again and found that all the friction disappeared. It seems that the black hard object of unknown origin is what affects my feeling.

I couldn't figure out what it was, but I had some vague guesses. Since it was affecting the operation of superpowers, it was undoubtedly "impurities" in superpowers. The impurities that appeared after burning the enemy to death with flames felt like the remains of the enemy's life left in my flames.

Although my flames have enough destructive power to evaporate the target, "evaporation" is not "annihilation", it just changes the target from solid or liquid to gas. After vaporization and sublimation, there will always be some substances left. Just like salt and other impurities left after distilling seawater... No, this statement may not be quite appropriate. Just like the "slag" that appears in the process of pyrometallurgy...

Yes, it is "slag". Although it still seems a little off, I think this metaphor is closer to the core.

I took this small piece of "slag" to consult Ma Zao. I think if we have to classify this piece of "slag", it should be considered a strange thing. When it comes to strange things, she has much more knowledge than I do. "You said that this piece of coal affected your superpowers?" She looked serious and took the "slag" in her hand and examined it repeatedly.

"Yeah, but it's okay now," I said.

"Will it reduce the power of your flames, or make you less precise in manipulating them?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"But you said your controls were getting rusty, and that it was like a machine with sand sprinkled on it," she pointed out.

"That's just a crude metaphor." I reflected on my feelings carefully. "In fact, its impact is limited to making me feel a foreign body, just like adding a small gadget to the phone I'm used to. It may be a little strange at first, but you can't say that the small gadget affects the performance of the phone."

My metaphor didn't seem to resonate with her, but she seemed to have digested it, and then handed over the "slag" and said, "Then, can you take it back into your own flame?"

I summoned the fireball again, took the "slag" and stuffed it into the fireball. The result was very smooth. The "slag" disappeared without a trace in the fireball in an instant, and the foreign body feeling appeared vaguely again.

Then, I made the "slag" appear from the fireball just like last time.

Ma Zao took the "slag" and said curiously: "Has the shape of this thing changed?"

I stretched my head to observe and found that it was indeed the case. Previously, this piece of "slag" was a bit flat, but now it has become relatively three-dimensional.

Ma Zao handed me the "slag" again, and I tried several more times to put it into the flame and take it out, and finally confirmed one thing. I can decide the shape of the "slag" when it appears in the flame. The reason why the shapes were different the previous two times may be because I unconsciously changed the shape when it appeared.

"This 'slag' seems to have some breath of soul." Ma Zao used the name I gave to this substance, but it seems that this is all she can see.

“Soul…” I thought.

Assuming that the "slag" is the remaining material after my flames burn the enemy's soul, then doesn't it mean that I have "killed and refined the soul" of the "monster maker" - Zhu Shi's father? This kind of thing is really "hell" just thinking about it.

Compared to Ma Zao, Zhu Shi seems to have a more systematic understanding of strange things, so I have also thought about whether I should give the "slag" to her for a look. But now it seems that giving the substance produced by refining the soul of the other party's biological father to the other party for inspection is too twisted. I don't want to be hated by Zhu Shi yet, so I'd better stop.

But now I can more or less understand why "Slag" only appears after I kill someone.

Agent Kong and the Undead Monster didn't die because of my flames, so their souls weren't devoured by my flames. But the Shadow Changer and Monster Maker were completely different. The former was burned to death by my flames, while the latter had his consciousness network burned to ashes by my flames. Especially for the latter, it's really unreasonable to say that his soul wasn't devoured by my flames.

When the monster maker was explaining the relationship between the body and the soul to me, he hinted that the human soul, spirit, and consciousness are actually the same existence, which makes perfect sense.

Ma Zao and I studied it for a while, but we couldn't figure out what this "slag" was used for. We had a few guesses, but we didn't have a way to verify them. In the end, I had to put the "slag" back into the flame.

"Is it really okay to put it in the flame?" Ma Zao asked with concern.

If it is for the sake of safety, it is better to keep such an unknown thing away from the body. However, just like what I felt before the ambush of the monster maker, I still think that the appearance of this "slag" will not change my superpowers in a bad direction at least. When it comes to superpowers, I trust my intuition.

I left the "slag" issue here for the time being and began to think about another important issue.

Monster Maker...

In other words, is his original body, Ying Lingyun, really dead?

(End of this chapter)