The time was clearly about to run out. The overall situation was clearly in his grasp. This was clearly an unsolvable situation...
Yet from both of Gu Qingyun's upper and lower perspectives, he could see this man from every angle, wearing an utterly bizarre and inexplicable smile at him.
During the Manager Mission, he had groveled before this man and suffered an immensely humiliating defeat. The shadow of that crushing loss stirred an inexplicable trace of hesitation and fear within him.
Ji Li was famously cold-faced; almost no one had ever seen what he looked like when he smiled.
Yet at this very moment, Gu Qingyun saw an eerie smile, stiff and distorted, carved onto a face as pale as paper, as if something had forcibly drawn that smile onto it.
What was most hair-raising was that when normal people smiled, aside from the upward curve of their lips, their brows, eyes, nose bridge, and even the finer details of their faces would undergo subtle changes as well.
But Ji Li's smile consisted only of the corners of his mouth curving upward. A ghostly white slit showed between his two dark-red lips, while the rest of his face remained slack and motionless, with only that bizarre curve upon it.
It felt as if something had tugged at Gu Qingyun's heart. His lone head, impaled on the wooden stake, trembled unnaturally as he spoke:
"What... are you smiling about?"
The person before him said nothing. He merely kept raising the corners of his mouth, higher and higher.
"Ji Li, you can't even kill me! What do you have to smile about?!"
In the sky, Gu Qingyun's deathly pale face looked down upon Shanming amid the torrential rain, its gaze fixed on Tianbao Repair Shop as its enormous mouth let out a