Chapter 225: The First

Melancholy.

Sorrow.

And helplessness.

His vision went black.

When he opened his eyes again, Zheng Fan found himself standing on a bustling street.

He lowered his head and saw a little boy holding a stick of candied hawthorn, grinning up at him that unfilial son!

This time, the Demon Child had learned his lesson. Or perhaps their previous meeting had merely piggybacked on the nightmare Zheng Fan experienced after witnessing Tian Wujing annihilate his own clan, whereas this time the Demon Child had created the “dream” himself.

In any case, the street had an old-fashioned atmosphere. It wasn’t a modern scene.

At least it didn’t immediately break Zheng Fan’s immersion.

The little boy reached out, grabbed Zheng Fan’s hand, and tugged him forward. He wanted Zheng Fan to play with him, to walk around the street with him.

His hand was sticky from holding the candied hawthorn.

Zheng Fan sighed.

He knew perfectly well what should originally have been waiting for him.

Who could have expected it to suddenly turn into this?

It was rather like excitedly downloading a thirty-gigabyte torrent in his previous life, only to open it when the download finally finished and hear:

“Calabash Brothers, Calabash Brothers, seven flowers on a single vine…”

“Son, couldn’t you have waited a little longer?”

Zheng Fan crouched and looked at the little boy.

The boy stared back at him in confusion.

He was very calm.

And very adorable.

But Zheng Fan clearly saw that, perhaps because of Zheng Fan’s attitude, a bloodthirsty gleam had begun spreading through the Demon Child’s bright pupils.

The Demon Child was about to go berserk!

“Hiss!”

Zheng Fan immediately reached out and scooped the little boy into his arms.

“Come, come, come! Let’s ride the horsey! Ride the horsey! Come on!”

The crisis was instantly defused.

The boy’s smile returned. Once he was sitting on Zheng Fan’s shoulders, he became even happier, waving his little hands nonstop.

As the saying went, whenever you gained something, you had to give something in return.

Most people Zheng Fan’s age had elderly parents above and children below. As the pillar of the household, they had to hold everything up.

They raised the young and supported the old, living every day with care and trepidation.

Zheng Fan was different.

He leeched off the old and screwed over the young.

Whenever trouble came, his son went first. If his son couldn’t handle it, then his godfather went.

Sha Tuo Queshi lay there quietly enough, but Zheng Fan still didn’t dare neglect the customary offerings on festivals. Every so often he had to make time to go drink and chat with him.

As for his son well, normally the boy was fairly well behaved. But the moment Zheng Fan advanced, he wanted to go sleep with a woman and tossed the child to the back of his mind.

No—not merely to the back of his mind. He had literally treated him like a rock and thrown him out the window.

That wouldn’t do.

His son refused to accept it.

What was the point of calling someone your own son if you deliberately avoided favoring him in the name of lofty righteousness? That would just be saying one thing while doing another. Far too hypocritical.

If his own son didn’t get first pick of the benefits, what kind of son was he?

Besides, the boy had possessed him and risked his life to save Zheng Fan from danger more than a few times already.

After thinking all that through, Zheng Fan fell silent.

He accepted his fate.

There would be no warm bed and beautiful woman for him to enjoy tonight. He could only spend some time enjoying father-son bonding in this dream first.

They walked and walked, looked and looked.

Masks buy one.

Street performers watch for a while.

Pan-fried buns have a taste.

Zheng Fan had never married in his previous life, so naturally he had never raised a child either. In this life, he had skipped straight aboard the train and been blessed with a precious son.

And, well, what do you know? At first he had been somewhat absentminded about it, but little by little he actually began to immerse himself in the experience.

Their relationship was tangled together by countless threads: guilt, gratitude, reluctance to part. They had no bond of blood, but the connection between their souls was even closer.

The street seemed endless. There were always new curiosities to see and tempting foods to taste.

Zheng Fan didn’t feel tired.

Neither did the little fellow on his shoulders.

A Resentful Infant of Ten Lifetimes he cherished this moment, cherished the… light within the dream.

No one knew how long they walked or how long they played.

Dreams were like that.

Sometimes they passed in the blink of an eye.

Sometimes they stretched so long that the passing years ceased to mean anything.

Without warning, the clamor around them gradually quieted.

When Zheng Fan looked ahead again, he discovered that he had reached a small river. Fallen blossoms covered the bank, painting the scene with the air of a spring afternoon.

He sat down, then instinctively lay back.

The northern lands were bitterly cold. He truly did miss spring a little.

The little boy ran off happily by himself. He started catching grasshoppers, chasing butterflies, racing around to his heart’s content, singing some tune Zheng Fan couldn’t recognize.

Zheng Fan lay on his side like a reclining Maitreya Buddha, his gaze following the little boy the entire time.

Suddenly, Zheng Fan imagined what it would be like if the Demon Child were truly a child in the real world.

He could attend kindergarten.

He could carry a schoolbag to school.

He could grow up day by day…

What came with those images wasn’t warmth.

It was suffocation.

There were certain things Zheng Fan had always avoided, deliberately refusing to think in that direction.

Even though he constantly called him “son,” even though people often said an author’s creations were born of his lifeblood, his own children when all was said and done, when Zheng Fan had created the character of the Demon Child, he had taken every oppressive, dark, twisted element he could find and combined them with a hysterical art style. What he wanted to present was an atmosphere of loneliness and despair within darkness.

He had done it to satisfy his own artistic intoxication.

And to make comic readers pay for it.

He had never truly regarded the Demon Child as a son.

As those thoughts wandered through his mind, Zheng Fan suddenly froze.

Turning his head, he discovered that the little boy was standing right beside him. Since Zheng Fan was lying on his side, the boy was looking down at him from above.

Father and son met each other’s eyes.

Then both of them smiled.

“Tired from playing?” Zheng Fan asked.

The little boy shook his head.

“Then want to play a little longer?”

The boy shook his head again.

Suddenly, everything around them began to darken.

Zheng Fan discovered that he had returned to the original room.

Candlelight flickered, giving the place the distinct feel of a bedchamber in a ghost movie.

Zheng Fan’s first reaction was that the Demon Child had played enough and let him return. But after looking around and failing to find Siniang, he understood.

He was still inside the dream.

Zheng Fan began searching the room. He entered the inner chamber and saw the little boy sitting on the bed.

The boy wore a red bellyband, with a red dot between his brows. When he saw Zheng Fan enter, he voluntarily spread his arms.

Zheng Fan walked over, picked him up, placed him beneath the covers, and tucked him in.

After hesitating for a moment this was a dream anyway.

Walking out the door would still leave him in a dream.

So Zheng Fan simply climbed beneath the covers too.

Father and son lay together on the bed.

The temperature under the covers was below freezing. Zheng Fan wasn’t stupid enough to ask his son whether he was running a low fever.

Instead, he continued making a show of tucking the blanket snugly around the little boy.

The boy stared at Zheng Fan with wide eyes, then reached out and tugged his hair.

“Want to hear a story?”

The little boy nodded excitedly.

“All right. Daddy will tell you one.

“Once upon a time there was a mountain. On the mountain stood a temple. In the temple lived an old monk and a young monk. One day, the old monk said to the young monk, ‘I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time…’”

Frost began forming outside the blanket.

Zheng Fan lowered his head and looked at the little boy.

The boy appeared utterly enthralled by this idiotic story, yet at that moment it felt as though an enormous, terrifying mouth was about to bite down and swallow everything whole.

Zheng Fan shuddered.

Then said, “Once there was a man. His father was a truck driver with a bad temper who loved to drink. His mother left the family when he was very young.

“She didn’t die. She left.

“His grandparents constantly spoke badly of her, saying she had run away with another man because that man was rich.

“But deep down, he knew perfectly well that his father really wasn’t an easy man to live with.

“Later, before the boy even reached adulthood, his father left too.

“This time, he died.

“To tell the truth, growing up, the man didn’t really suffer because of any of this. Nor did he feel particularly sad because other people had mothers and he didn’t. He just lived normally. Went to school, came home from school. His family wasn’t particularly well-off, but he never lacked food or clothing.

“He had loved drawing comics since childhood. After entering university, he organized his own comics club, then gradually began developing it commercially…”

At that point, Zheng Fan lowered his head and glanced at the little boy again.

The little boy was looking calmly back at him.

“Bored?” Zheng Fan asked.

The boy rolled his eyes at him.

Then he turned over, presenting Zheng Fan with his back.

Zheng Fan placed a hand on the little boy’s head.

“Next time you want to play, give me some warning beforehand. I’ll keep you company in my dreams. If you want something warm and wholesome, we’ll do warm and wholesome. If you want something bloody, we’ll do bloody. All right?”

“ROAR!”

A furious bellow surged in from every direction.

Zheng Fan remained lying calmly on the bed.

The little boy suddenly stood.

Slowly he turned around.

His face began rapidly cycling through different expressions.

Shyness.

Innocence.

Smiling.

Gloom.

Ferocity.

Cruelty.

Like a slideshow flipping at tremendous speed, the expressions changed again and again.

“You want me… to call stop?”

Like one of those prize drawings at an annual company party?

The little boy nodded.

His expressions continued changing.

“But a lot of grand prizes at company parties are rigged.”

The boy gave no response. His expressions kept cycling.

“All right. One, two, three—stop!”

His expression froze.

It stopped on a face of pure “cruelty.”

Zheng Fan sighed.

“I knew it. Rigged.”

The little boy’s teeth began clicking together, his tongue licking his lips as though he were preparing to eat.

Zheng Fan chuckled.

“Want to eat my flesh that badly?”

The boy nodded.

“Then go ahead. It’s only a dream anyway.”

Zheng Fan was rather open-minded about it.

He would just treat it as a nightmare.

The little boy turned around, walked several steps toward the foot of the bed, stopped, then turned sideways to face Zheng Fan again.

Zheng Fan’s eyes immediately widened.

He tried to struggle, only to discover that his body had suddenly been bound in place, as though he were suffering sleep paralysis.

“Don’t! Don’t! You can’t bite there! Something will go seriously wrong!”

The little boy suddenly crouched.

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”

Zheng Fan screamed.

But after he finished screaming, he craned his neck upward and desperately looked down.

The little boy was merely crouching there.

He turned his face toward Zheng Fan. A mischievous smile appeared on his face; the previous cruelty had vanished completely.

“Hehehehe…”

The boy’s clear laughter rang out.

“Heh… heh… hahahaha…”

Zheng Fan started laughing too.

Damn it.

There were tears in his laughter.

…

In the main hall, none of the Demon Kings had left yet. There were still a few concrete matters they hadn’t finished discussing.

Xue San suddenly abandoned the current topic and said to the Blind Man, “Blind Man, scan over there. See whether they’ve started yet.”

“Oh? You want me to probe that?”

“Master won’t know anyway, and Siniang might not necessarily sense it.”

The Blind Man said solemnly, “But the Demon Child can sense my mental power.

“And then I’ll be dead.”

When everyone else was competing to be the best bootlicker, if you went probing into the Master’s bedchamber then you truly had no desire whatsoever to make progress.

If the Master developed a grudge over it, everyone else might recover their strength by leaps and bounds while you remained rooted in place forever.

That would practically be torture.

Liang Cheng said calmly, “What’s the hurry? Have faith in Siniang. We’ll have the answer tomorrow.”

Xue San nodded, then said, “I remember the first one to advance last time was the Demon Child.”

Hearing that, Liang Cheng said, “Have faith in Siniang. She clearly came prepared this time. There’s no way she’ll fall behind the Demon Child.”

“Buzz!”

The instant he finished speaking, a powerful aura belonging to the Demon Child suddenly erupted!

Then, in the blink of an eye, it vanished without a trace.

Xue San immediately sprang to his feet and hammered Liang Cheng hard on the knee.

Then shouted, “Quick! Say I’ll never grow any taller!”

[End of Chapter 225]