What she saw, however, was Li Tianyao with his eyes closed, apparently asleep.
An Yan shook her head. I’m probably just too on edge, she thought. She pulled her mind back and refocused on the computer screen.
If Gu Shifang has a thod for distinguishing real and fake thumb rings, then might this thod not require him to touch the thumb ring at all? To determine an item’s authenticity without contact, one would have to rely on its intrinsic field, wouldn’t they? Every object possesses its own field! And such fields are easier to sense the closer one is. It’s like her Divination Technique: when she divined an event that had already occurred, the answer was singular. But for an event yet to happen, the divination only yielded possibilities. The more information one had, the higher the accuracy. Fields were similar—the closer one was, the fewer the interferences, and the more distinct the perceived field beca!
As she watched, her fingers paused, and she zood in on a street near the detention center. She saw Qin Song!
An Yan got up, opened the door, and went outside. "Lu Feng!" she called, keeping her voice low, afraid to wake Li Tianyao.
"Here. What can I do for you, Madam?" Lu Feng replied, practically leaping to stand before her.
"What was Qin Song’s business trip for?" An Yan asked.
Lu Feng took out his phone and began to inquire. He quickly got an answer: "There’s an auction nearby. Qin Song is the Appraiser sent by the company to authenticate the items up for auction! The auction is being held at the Seaview Hotel, which is near the coast! This is his itinerary map."
An Yan took his phone and looked at the map. The distance from the Seaview Grand Hotel to the detention center was almost ten kiloters. Qin Song definitely shouldn’t have appeared near the detention center!
An Yan saved the map to her phone, returned to her room, sat down at her desk, and began to use her Divination Technique. Because she was looking into sothing that had already happened, she easily saw Qin Song’s movents.
He had appeared near the detention center because his taxi had taken a detour. He argued with the driver, trying to get a lower fare, but the driver ended up taking him near the detention center and forcing him out of the cab! The driver had chosen that spot because he knew it was difficult to hail a taxi there. After confirming he couldn’t get a cab, Qin Song walked several kiloters before finally managing to hail another.
Everything seed quite normal, nothing peculiar at all! Was she just being paranoid?
An Yan refocused on the computer screen. Li Tianyao’s n had already investigated everyone who had entered or exited the detention center; none had co near the thumb ring. Had she made a mistake? Or was there so oversight?
As she pondered, she suddenly heard the sound of rapid breathing. An Yan turned to look. Li Tianyao, still asleep, had beads of sweat covering his forehead. He had undoubtedly fallen into a nightmare again!
An Yan went over to take his hand, about to call him, when her consciousness involuntarily sank. Then, she found herself once again in Li Tianyao’s dream.
This ti, Li Tianyao was older; he looked to be about fourteen or fifteen. He was wearing a set of white inner clothes, stained with blood. His limbs were bound by iron chains as thick as an infant’s arm. No, not rely bound—each chain was connected to an iron ring that pierced through his very flesh. The chains pulled him taut into a T-shape, suspending him inside a gigantic iron cage. Underneath the cage, a strange pattern was carved. His head hung low, his disheveled long hair obscuring most of his face. His sharp brow bones were more pronounced due to his emaciation. Deep within his sunken eye sockets, his long lashes rested on tightly closed eyes. His deathly pale lips were lightly pursed, making him look as if he had fallen asleep standing up. A shiver went through An Yan’s heart at the sight.
Perhaps it was because she was accustod to his omnipotent presence in reality that this broken version of him in the dream was so hard for her to accept!
"Li Tianyao!" An Yan went over, trying to wake him. But just like the last ti she entered his dream, her actions had no effect on the him in the dream.
Soon, a shadowy figure in ancient-style clothing approached, carrying a bowl of foul-slling liquid. The figure grasped Li Tianyao’s chin and forced the contents into his mouth. An Yan knew instinctively that the substance had to be harmful. She rushed forward, raising her hand to strike the bowl away. Unfortunately, she couldn’t touch it! In Li Tianyao’s dream, aside from watching, there was nothing she could do.
As the liquid slid down his throat, the unconscious Li Tianyao jolted awake, his body trembling uncontrollably. His long eyelashes lifted, and his pitch-black eyes instantly turned blood red! His muscles tensed, cold sweat breaking out. The pain made him struggle instinctively. But with every movent, the iron chains piercing his wrists grated against his flesh. In the blink of an eye, fresh blood gushed out. DRIP. DRIP. DRIP. It splattered onto the ground. The blood trickled along the lines of the carved pattern on the floor, flowing towards a porcelain basin outside the cage...
An Yan watched all this, her heart filled with disbelief. She had previously thought Li Tianyao being thrown into the Ice Lake, the Fire House, or a room full of wooden stakes was pitiable enough. She never imagined that the older version of him would be subjected to... this.
After that, ti seed to fast-forward. She watched, horrified, as Li Tianyao’s features were stripped of their youthful innocence day by day, through relentless torture and forced ingestion of drugs. His monts of lucidity were brief, but each ti he awoke, he would count. Over and over. At first, An Yan didn’t know what he was counting. Later, she realized he was counting the floor tiles and the bricks on the wall! There were exactly 73 tiles on the floor. The wall opposite him had 1,034 green bricks, the wall to his left... Confined by those few walls, he counted day after day, like a desperate machine, clinging to his sanity solely through this monotonous act.
Later, she saw a flicker of longing in his eyes; he was actually beginning to anticipate the arrival of the person who force-fed him poison! It turned out that pain wasn’t the most unbearable tornt—loneliness was! To escape the solitude, he was even willing to endure being poisoned.
"You want to dump after using , little girl? What do you take for?"
"Little girl, in this lifeti, it’s you and only you!"
"Aside from not interacting with other n, I’ll indulge you in everything else!"
"I won’t harm you."
"I can’t risk it!"
"Little girl, you should understand. It’s not that I can’t touch you; I just can’t bear to hurt you!"
"You don’t want anymore, do you?"
"..."
These words of his, words she had never consciously tried to morize, suddenly surged into her thoughts, echoing relentlessly. At that instant, a sudden fear gripped her—the fear that he might not survive this endless torture and vanish forever!
Li Tianyao, you’re incredibly strong. You’ll make it through this, won’t you?
Perhaps her silent prayer had an effect, for ti suddenly seed to slow. This ti, after the poison was administered, there was a noticeable change: the bleeding from his ravaged limbs quickly ceased, and his flesh began to nd. An Yan realized that the poison the shadowy figure had given him this ti was similar to the toxin that had once coursed through her own body as a child.
Then, she heard a crazed, unnatural voice—neither male nor female—exclaim, "Success!"
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