Chapter 60: The Corpse and the Flowers

"He calls you older brother." Yan Zhuo pushed the wheelchair, biting his lip as he spat out those words.

Qu Yan rested his hands over his abdomen, his smile faint. "You can call me that too."

"No." Yan Zhuo's tone was sullen.

Cheng Ran's obnoxious smiling face lingered relentlessly in his mind. He felt an increasing itch in his teeth and wanted to find something to grind them on.

Qu Yan turned to look at him, noticing the drooping corners of his eyes and his fiercely menacing expression, as if he were just about baring his fangs.

The smile at the corner of Qu Yan's lips deepened. "We aren't heading back yet. Accompany me to see someone."

Yan Zhuo asked, "Is it important? Didn't you say you were tired?"

Qu Yan quietly looked at him without speaking. It was only then that Yan Zhuo realized those words earlier had been merely an excuse, primarily meant to rebuff Cheng Ran. A wave of happiness washed over him instantly, and he nodded in agreement. "Alright."

Past noon, tiny specks of dust danced chaotically in mid-air amidst the surrounding silence. After making a turn at the intersection, their destination was not far off, finally stopping in front of an apartment painted an exceptionally pristine white.

The entire building was stark white, devoid of any other color, and spotless. A giant parasol was pitched on the open ground in front of the entrance, underneath which stood two rocking chairs. A man was hiding under the shade—not sitting in a chair, but instead squatting, holding a slender women's cigarette between his fingers.

The scent of the cigarette, not particularly choking, drifted into the air. The man stood up from the ground, flicking the ash from his fingertips. "Well, what a rare guest."

He was a man in his forties with fair skin, a prominent nose bridge, and eyes slightly narrowed into creases as he spoke. He took a long drag to finish the cigarette, bent down, and stubbed it out on the ground. "How come it feels like you haven't been here in ages."

"I've been too busy lately," Qu Yan replied, his tone neither warm nor cold.

Only then did the man shift his gaze toward Yan Zhuo, asking with a hint of amusement, "And who is this handsome guy?"

"Yan Zhuo," Qu Yan briefly introduced the two. "This is Lan Yin. He's responsible for managing the various supernatural teams in Yuanshan."

"Yan Zhuo..." The gaze resting on Yan Zhuo did not withdraw until Yan Zhuo raised his head to meet his expressionless stare. Lan Yin finally shrugged. "Nice name."

He tossed away the cigarette butt, pulled out a key, and unlocked the apartment door. "Yuyang won't be back until evening. I'll take you in."

The interior of the apartment was also entirely white. Every piece of furniture within sight was draped in a layer of white cloth, a sight that would likely feel rather chilling to anyone unaware of the context.

Lan Yin retrieved two pairs of white slippers from the shoe rack by the door, putting one pair on himself and tossing the other to Yan Zhuo. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do. The owner of this place has severe mysophobia."

Both his voice and tone were peculiarly strange, his emotional delivery sounding as dramatic as reading poetry aloud.

Frowning, Yan Zhuo changed into the slippers. The moment he stood back up, a white towel was shoved into his hands. Lan Yin lazily pointed at the wheelchair Qu Yan was sitting in. "You need to wipe that clean, too."

Having said that, he stepped into the apartment ahead of them. Yan Zhuo squatted down with the towel. "I didn't see this person the last time I came."

"He's always elusive; even I only get to see him occasionally," Qu Yan said. "The owner of this apartment is Yuyang, and his ability is healing. Yang Tan is here, and I come to check on her regularly."

After wiping down the wheelchair, Yan Zhuo, under Qu Yan's direction, pushed it to the very last room at the end of the first floor. The room had a glass door, allowing everything inside to be clearly seen from the outside.

The room was spacious and bare of furniture, containing only a bed and several instruments. A pale-faced girl was sunk deep into the white bedding, with transparent soft tubes inserted into her nose and mouth. One had to look closely to notice her faintly rising and falling chest.

Yan Zhuo instinctively lowered his voice. "Has she still not woken up?"

Qu Yan replied in an equally hushed tone, "Mm."

"I always thought she was your girlfriend." Lan Yin appeared out of nowhere, making not the slightest sound. He held a transparent goblet, the deep red liquid swaying with his movements. He took a sip, and his brow relaxed immediately. "The taste is just right. Care for a glass?"

Perhaps out of intuition, or for some other reason, Yan Zhuo felt an involuntary surge of caution.

This man named Lan Yin was not nearly as gentle as he appeared on the surface.

Noticing Yan Zhuo's emotional state, Qu Yan soothingly grasped his wrist.

"You come to see her every week and have turned down countless suitors back at the base. I honestly thought it was some romantic saga of unswerving devotion to a comatose girlfriend." Lan Yin held his wine glass with elegant posture and smiled ambiguously. "Now it seems I guessed wrong. This one is your little boyfriend."

"Are you that bored?" Qu Yan raised his eyes with a hint of sarcasm.

"I am indeed very bored," Lan Yin replied, appearing utterly sincere.

"By the way, there's something Yuyang definitely hasn't told you yet." He stepped back and tapped on the glass door. "She woke up briefly the night before last. Although it didn't last long, it should count as good news for you."

Qu Yan's hand tightening around Yan Zhuo's grew firmer, though his expression remained unchanged. "What did Yuyang say?"

Lan Yin said, "He said he needs to continue observing. After all, she's the first person to fall into a coma due to an ability backlash, so he doesn't dare jump to conclusions."

Qu Yan looked once more at the girl on the bed, the sunlight falling upon her scattered locks, glowing softly.

"There's something else you'll definitely be interested in. It's right next door. Want to take a look?" Lan Yin invited them with brimming enthusiasm.

Qu Yan didn't react much. "Does Yuyang agree?"

"Screw him, I have the key anyway." With extreme swiftness, Lan Yin unlocked the door to the adjoining room. Pushing it open, they found an iron security door behind it. He glanced back at Qu Yan. "If you don't say anything, and I don't say anything, how would Yuyang ever find out?"

He glanced at Yan Zhuo and added, "And it's best this handsome young fellow doesn't say anything either."

The handle of the iron door turned with a series of clacks, and the moment it swung open, a rush of cold air billowed out.

This turned out to be a cold storage room.

Lan Yin's voice echoed from inside, "I've already seen it. Come on in."

"A-Yan..." Yan Zhuo tugged slightly on Qu Yan's forearm, causing Qu Yan's hand to sway as well. "Should we go in?"

Qu Yan nodded. "Let's go in."

The chill hit them face-first, making every breath visible inside the cold room. The temperature here was far lower than outside, yet Lan Yin seemed completely unaffected by the cold, his collar flung wide open as he said excitedly, "You two can't possibly imagine what this is."

A person lay upon the iron-framed bed in the center of the cold room—or to be precise, a dead person. Their clothes were tattered and torn, their skull fractured open, their right leg broken and twisted outward, and their skin a bruised cyan-purple.

Merely a dead person would not have been enough to shock them. Qu Yan's expression grew heavy as he stared at the indigo flowers blooming from the corpse and asked, "What is going on?"

Palm-sized flowers were rooted directly into the corpse, sprouting forth from the shattered skull and eye sockets. They grew with such exuberant excess that they formed a dense cluster, their stems and leaves extending all the way down to the corpse's abdomen. These indigo flowers were exceptionally eerie yet striking, lending a strange kind of beauty to the ugly, decaying corpse.

"Look." Lan Yin opened his palm to reveal a name tag.

Zhang He. The name tag was still stained with blood. Qu Yan remembered this as one of the supernatural beings who had gone missing in Yuanshan.

"Where did you find him?"

"Right here in Yuanshan, and he came back on his own." Lan Yin closed his palm. "He suddenly appeared covered in injuries and died before he could say a single word. In less than five seconds, these flowers grew out from inside his body."

Everything that had happened recently was connected to plants—be it the giant flowers discovered in the Twin Cities or these blossoms erupting from corpses. As Yan Zhuo had said, Yefeng had not been experimenting on supernatural beings; the most likely culprit behind all of this was Yan Xingzhang. But where was he now? How could he single-handedly subdue multiple ability users, or did he have accomplices?

Qu Yan pondered deeply, feeling as though he had overlooked a crucial detail.

"Don't you think this is beautiful, though?" Lan Yin suddenly asked, leaning down to gaze with a hint of obsession at the clustered indigo flowers. "Survival of the fittest. They didn't die even in such a cold environment. Doesn't that deserve to be called beautiful?"

"What did you say?" Yan Zhuo's expression turned freezing cold.

Lan Yin returned to his normal demeanor, saying dismissively, "Just a joke. Did the handsome young fellow take it seriously?"

Yan Zhuo looked away, suddenly realizing that he might simply be incompatible with Yuanshan's magnetic field, which was why he kept running into annoying people. Cheng Ran was one, and this Lan Yin was another.