Desperate people, accept the seed of my soul!

Zhou Ting opened her eyes.

Shen Hanzhou squatted down and looked into his eyes. The flashlight beam leaked through the crack in the broken floorboards, illuminating Zhou Ting's pale face and the cut on his lip that he had bitten himself.

"Back in White Rock Town, you threw me compressed biscuits and car keys. Did you even know there was a GPS tracker in the car back then?"

Zhou Ting remained silent.

His mouth opened and then closed.

His Adam's apple bobbed once, as if he were swallowing something he couldn't say.

Wang Zhaoping's crying also stopped.

Once the crying stopped, what remained was an even uglier sound—a desperate attempt to suppress but unable to stop sobbing.

He buried his face in the broken cement blocks on the ground, his shoulders shaking violently, his hands gripping the pebbles so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and the pebbles dug into the flesh of his palms.

Shen Hanzhou understood.

He nodded.

"That means you know."

He stood up and looked down at Zhou Ting.

"Zhou Ting, you said that Chi Ji has now repaid the favor he owed me."

Zhou Ting's body stiffened for a moment.

"A favor isn't repaid with someone else's life." Shen Hanzhou's voice was calm, as calm as if he had returned to that afternoon three years ago when he was waiting for them at the warehouse door, still holding the unfinished lab report in his hand. He glanced at them and said, "Don't leave any loose ends next time." "You think you're repaying a favor. You're just packaging Jiang Yi's master's orders as a favor."

Zhou Ting's lips were trembling.

He closed his eyes.

A streak of water seeped from the corner of her eye through her tightly closed eyelids, trickling down her temples and into her ear.

He did not defend himself.

Shen Hanzhou stood up.

Place both hands on the two stone platforms at the same time.

Ability activated.

The two stone platforms began to be dismantled.

This time it's not collapsing outwards, it's collapsing inwards.

The stone platform began to crumble from its edges, and the cement turned into a fine gray dust storm that enveloped Zhou Ting and Wang Zhaoping's bodies from all sides, squeezing them inward.

Like two fists clenched tightly.

Wang Zhaoping let out a scream that Shen Hanzhou would never forget in his life.

It was the sound only a wild beast buried alive could make, ripped from the depths of its throat, sharp and hoarse.

He kicked desperately in the powder, his hands clawing wildly in the air, his fingernails scratching ten bloody marks on the edge of the crumbling stone platform.

Blood seeped from under his fingernails, mixing with the gray cement powder to form a dark brown slurry.

Powder poured into his sleeves and collar from all directions.

The squeezing force gave him no room to breathe, and his ribs cracked one after another under the continuously tightening pressure.

Snap, snap, snap—each sound was muffled yet crisp, like snapping dry twigs.

Zhou Ting didn't make a sound from beginning to end.

As the powder engulfed his chest, he opened his eyes and took one last look at Shen Hanzhou.

His lips moved slightly.

He said "I'm sorry".

There was no sound, only lip movements.

Then the powder engulfed his face.

The last glimmer of light in those eyes was completely swallowed up by the gray dust storm, and the stone platform collapsed into a dense, spherical block, sealing the two people inside.

Shen Hanzhou watched as the ten bloodstains on the edge of the stone platform were slowly covered by the newly rising powder.

His jaw was clenched tightly.

He lowered his head, speaking softly to the two collapsing stone platforms, each word uttered through gritted teeth.

"This time, it's for my senior sister."

The stone platform completely collapsed into two dense, spherical hard blocks, each about one meter in diameter.

The cement powder was compressed to the extreme, making it harder than the original concrete, and its surface was as smooth as polished granite.

Then Shen Hanzhou initiated the second reconstruction.

The violent redox reaction ignited the residual organic solvent vapor inside the stone sphere.

That was something he intentionally left in the powder when he activated his ability—when he dismantled the ground, he didn't completely break down the oil and chemical residues that had seeped into the cement, but instead sealed them inside the stone sphere.

The two stone spheres exploded from the inside.

Flames erupted from the cracks, orange-red tongues licking the factory ceiling and igniting the electrical wires hanging from the broken beams.

Black smoke billowed upwards, filling the atrium of the abandoned factory building.

Shen Hanzhou stood in front of the flames.

The heat wave hit my face and was very hot.

The scorching air curled his eyebrows and the hair on his forehead, and the tiny wounds on his face ached from the intense heat.

But he did not back down.

The image of his senior sister turning to look at him in front of the fume hood flashed through his mind.

She was still holding a pipette in her hand, her goggles pushed up to her forehead, and tilted her head as she said to him, "Hanzhou, we're both getting on in years, why don't we just get together and live together?"

She dodged the light from the fume hood as she turned it off, leaned against the lab bench, and said in a low voice, "Serving the Five Mountains Society isn't a long-term solution; we need to find a way to get out of this."

The image flashed before my eyes of the empty dissection table the next morning. The table had been cleaned, and the smell of disinfectant was so strong it was pungent. On the edge of the table was the unfinished character for "escape" that she had scratched out with her fingernail.

He said to the flames, "Senior sister, you said 'get rid of it.' I did it for you."

The sound was very soft, mostly drowned out by the roar of the flames.

But he knew his senior sister could hear him.

The pile of waste on the first floor behind them also started to burn.

Flames shot up from the direction of the cellar and spread throughout the factory building along the spilled engine oil.

Packing boxes of old experimental equipment, expired journals piled in the corner, peeling paint on the walls—everything that could burn was on fire.

The firelight illuminated the entire abandoned factory building, and the orange-red light poured out from the broken windows, particularly dazzling in the hazy dawn.

Shen Hanzhou stopped looking at the sea of ​​fire behind him.

He turned and strode out of the factory's main gate.

It's almost dawn.

As dawn broke through the horizon, the greyish-white light mingled with the orange-red of the flames, illuminating his face, which was covered in ash and blood.

The lenses of the metal-framed glasses were covered with a layer of cement dust, and the left lens had a crack from the edge of the lens all the way to the center, which had appeared during the fierce battle.

He took off his glasses, wiped the dust off the lenses with the corner of his shirt, and put them back on.

Behind me came the deafening roar of the factory's internal structure collapsing.

A beam with its base burned off fell from the second floor and crashed into the rubble pile on the first floor, sending sparks flying everywhere.

Shen Hanzhou did not turn around.

He took the USB drive out from under his tongue, wiped it clean, and held it in his hand.

The plastic shell still retained its warmth, and inside were the complete experimental records and correct synthesis parameters left by my senior.

The Five Mountains Society's system is useless; Xiongbei Company didn't even get its hands on the useless one.

Only he knows the correct parameters.

This is his biggest trump card.

Shen Hanzhou stood on the open ground of the abandoned industrial area, watching the dawn grow brighter on the horizon, and began to make a new list in his mind.

Yan Tingyao—the head of the Lieyang Province branch of the Five Mountains Alliance—personally signed the purge order, using Chen Guohua's autopsy report and data on the drug developed by his senior sister as leverage to drag Xiong Bei and Chi Ji onto the war chariot. This man is the direct driving force behind the Five Mountains Alliance's strategic shift and must be killed.

Zheng Daoyuan—the head of the Lieyang branch of Xiongbei Company—provided the address of Baishi Town and also installed a GPS tracker on his motorcycle, preparing for both possibilities to see if he lived or died. This man was gambling with his life; he had to be killed.

Jiang Yi—the leader of the Crimson Thorns—was traded for three logistics lines and the right to share intelligence across the entire province. He then sent Zhou Ting and Wang Zhaoping, whom he had known for three years, to kill him, shamelessly claiming that the debt of gratitude had been repaid. This man packaged betrayal as a transaction; he must be killed.

There are three people, and none of them can escape.