IWOL Chapter 265: The Location of the Fragment

Anyway, it was too late for Dong Zheng to go to the supermarket. They found Lillian cleaning the terrace on the second floor. Lillian was happy to see that the two of them were back and said that everyone else had entered a box, leaving herself and Fu Zhe in the castle.

The time lapse in the library was fairly consistent with the Pure White Realm. They were gone for a week, and according to the original plan, they should have entered another box by now. Cui Zuojing wasn’t worried. Although he and Dong Zheng, as the two most powerful thighs, were not with them, they still had Victor so nothing bad should happen.

Cui Zuojing went to the kitchen to find something to eat. When he returned to the room, Dong Zheng had already washed and was lying in bed. He was rather exhausted. As the host of the blood contract, the negative feedback from having the contract removed was far greater than Cui Zuojing.

He was also gradually opening up the internal feedback, which was starting to make him feel the real impact of the loss of the blood contract.

Cui Zuojing knelt on the side of the bed and looked at him from top to bottom. Seeing Dong Zheng open his eyes to look at him, he stretched out his finger to brush the bridge of his nose, and said, “Didn’t you say you would accompany me to exercise?”

“Let me rest for a while.” Dong Zheng hooked his arm around Cui Zuojing’s shoulders and pulled him down with him. Embracing Cui Zuojing, he closed his eyes. Arabidopsis in his kernel had lost connection with Cui Zuojing, and the plant was withering. Dong Zheng didn’t know what to do, and no matter what he tried, he couldn’t revive the little plant.

This incident actually distressed him greatly. Dong Zheng didn’t know if the reason it was withering was because the grass that had accompanied him for so long no longer had nourishment from the blood contract.

The blood contract with Cui Zuojing was gone, becoming nothing but a cherished memory. Now, Arabidopsis was the only remnant left. Even if it became just an ordinary grass, Dong Zheng hoped it would remain in his kernel.

Every time he saw Arabidopsis, Dong Zheng couldn’t help remembering all the times he’d used it to assist Cui Zuojing. The first time he touched the leaves, he had the shameful sensation that the young man’s beautiful soul was completely opened to him.

In the end, what should he do?

Cui Zuojing lay obediently in his arms. Seeing Dong Zheng frowning again, he stretched out his hand to smooth out his eyebrows. Although there was no more blood bond to help him sense the other party’s mood, he could still detect that Dong Zheng’s state wasn’t right.

He seemed so normal when they first came out of the library, why did he change in the blink of an eye?

Cui Zuojing blinked and suddenly thought of an excellent idea. He sat up and quickly took off his shirt.

Like the Creator’s most perfect statue, muscles covered all the right places under smooth skin, glowing with a warm luster. There was an arc-shaped demarcation line at Cui Zuojing’s clavicle, with a thin tan line left from him often wearing a round-neck T-shirt. The skin above the line was slightly darkened by the sun, while the area underneath was an ordinary pale white.

Every time Dong Zheng worshipped Cui Zuojing’s body, the traces he left behind ended at that boundary, hidden underneath his clothes.

A week had passed since the soul exchange in the kernel, and now that Cui Zuojing had the thought, the awareness of it seemed to magnify many times in his young body, filling his blood with an unbearable pheromone.

Cui Zuojing had never been good at being too patient, let alone when it came to facing Dong Zheng. Dong Zheng noticed the trembling of the bed and opened his eyes to see that the boy was already lowering his head and undoing his belt.

He was stunned for two seconds, and said, “I might—“

“You’re done lying down.” Cui Zuojing looked up at him even as he became quite busy. He threw the belt on the floor, and the metal buckle made a clanging sound as it landed. He reached over to rifle through the drawer in the bedside table until he found what he wanted. Then he lightly tapped Dong Zheng’s face with a smirk and said, “Since you’re tired, then I will work hard to serve you today.”

In short, Cui Zuojing was indeed exceedingly successful in comforting Dong Zheng. When he woke up and came out of the bedroom, his overworked leg muscles protested with soreness.

“Who would be crazy enough to take the time to stretch after it felt so good?” Cui Zuojing muttered while rubbing his faintly painful muscle. “How annoying. I thought I’ve worked hard before.”

He passed the study and saw the light of the formation coming out from underneath the door. Cui Zuojing pushed the door open and found Fu Zhe sitting on the ground, checking the formation. For whatever reason, he was wearing a white robe, looking like a pious church missionary exuding the holy light of abstinence.

“How is it?” Cui Zuojing closed the door with his backhand. Dong Zheng was still sleeping in his room. He’d used a lot of brain cells from the library, and after returning, Cui Zuojing had squeezed him again. There probably wasn’t a drop of energy left.

“I have already determined the position.” Fu Zhe handed a piece of paper to Cui Zuojing with the coordinates written on it. “It’s in the box, and this is the location of the box. If you have time, you can go and bring it back.”

Cui Zuojing folded the paper and put it into his pocket. “Which fragment is it?”

Fu Zhe shook his head. Then he hesitated and said, “The energy of this fragment is very strong, even better than my body, and the other fragment is still missing. I suspect…the two of them have merged, or one has swallowed the other.”

“I don’t know what consequences this will cause, but there’s a possibility that it will take more effort this time.”

Cui Zuojing wasn’t too concerned. “If the two fragments are fused together, with one trip, we’ll unlock two seals. It’ll save us a lot of trouble.

Fu Zhe smiled and shook his head. “I hope so.”

The others still needed to come back, and Dong Zheng was still asleep. Since Cui Zuojing had nothing to do, he went to investigate the coordinates that Fu Zhe wrote down and discovered that it was an abandoned factory.

The entire Top of the Giant Tree was lush with natural life. Since the factory was abandoned, it was swallowed by lush vegetation. Dodder vines covered the condensation towers, while rattan vines wrapped out and around the chimney. The branches of the giant tree had protruded into the factory, sticking their branches in through the rusty windows.

Cui Zuojing found a black and red box in a hole in a banyan tree.

He would take it back to Fu Zhe, so that Fu Zhe could analyze the most likely scenes and scripts, and allow everyone to make preparations in advance.

The recovery of fragments was very important. They needed Fu Zhe’s power to fight the Queen, and they cannot afford any failure in this regard.

The topography of the factory was complicated, and Cui Zuojing looked for it for a while before he found his target. By the time he returned, it was already very late. Dong Zheng was in the living room doing a report and recording his trip to the library. Seeing that Cui Zuojing had finally returned, he was relieved and finally calmed down.

God knew how panicked he was when he discovered that Cui Zuojing was not by his side when he first woke up, and he couldn’t sense where he was through the blood bond either. It wasn’t until Dong Zheng hurriedly jumped up from bed did he recall that the blood contract had already been dissolved. He and Cui Zuojing were no longer bounded together.

Seeing Dong Zheng looking up silently, Cui Zuojing could still understand the expression in his eyes even though no words were spoken. He took off his coat and hung it on the coat rack, while saying, “I went out to help Fu Zhe find a box. His fragments should be in it.”

As his voice fell, he suddenly had the long-lost feeling of returning home.

This home didn’t refer to the old castle nor the apartments they were using, but the kind of home that was made up of him, his parents, and his sister.

Every time he went home late, he would take the initiative to say where he went just as he was entering the door, hoping to make his family feel more at ease. Now, when he faced Dong Zheng, he was met with this same kind of warmth.

“I’ll take it to Fu Zhe first and wait for him to confirm what type of box this is. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

While holding onto the box, Cui Zuojing walked by Dong Zheng, when the man suddenly stretched out his hand to stop him.

“What’s wrong?” Cui Zuojing stopped.

“It’s nothing.” Dong Zheng said so, but didn’t let go. He stared into the young man’s eyes. Cui Zuojing leaned over with happiness and pressed a smiling kiss onto Dong Zheng’s lips.

“I’ll go find Fu Zhe. You carry on.”

When Dong Zheng was finally released, he went upstairs to push open the door to the study. Fu Zhe was sitting among a pile of books, staring in a daze.

His appearance was too weird. It wasn’t at all like the captain who used to plan everything and who knew everything. Since he began to detect the soul fragments, Fu Zhe often seemed to be in a daze like this, as if he was trying to figure out his life’s big problem.

“This is it. I’ll put it on the table for you first.” Cui Zuojing didn’t intend to ignore Fu Zhe’s strangeness this time. He sat on the edge of the table and said, “You have been strange recently.”

Fu Zhe’s evaded his gaze. But he stopped, he raised his head to look at Cui Zuojing, and after a moment of silence, he asked, “Did you feel guilty when taking back my goodwill?”

“Guilty? Why?”

“My goodwill left me already for eight years. During that time, he always thought of himself as an independent person with his own life. But suddenly, someone jumped out at him and said, ‘This is all fake. You are just a part of someone else.’ Wouldn’t it be cruel to take him away and deprive him of the right to exist as an independent existence?”

Cui Zuojing smiled but soon, he couldn’t laugh anymore.

“You mean, is it possible for morality or conscience to have complete independence and their own life, right?”

“Yes, I can feel the fragment radiating an intense love. He may have already found his lover in the world of the box. So if we took him away—“ Fu Zhe seemed to have a hard time forcing the words out, but he still said, “I feel like this is murder, as if I’m murdering my own personality.”

Cui Zuojing was speechless for a while, undeniably shocked by Fu Zhe’s words.

“You shouldn’t think so much,” Cui Zuojing said slowly. He wasn’t smarter than Fu Zhe, so he couldn’t use logic to comfort him. If anyone could use reason to convince Fu Zhe, it could only be Dong Zheng, who was a brain developer. Obviously, Fu Zhe wouldn’t open up to Dong Zheng like he did when facing Cui Zuojing.

“You shouldn’t spend so much time or trouble worrying about it. It was me who entered the box to recover the fragment. No matter what kind of experience the fragment had, whether it was brought to you or not, it was something that belongs to you completely. At that point, it was no longer an independent person. You don’t have to worry and beat yourself down over this.”

“Maybe.” Fu Zhe smiled. “I also wish that things will really work out like that.”