"Hello, Doctor."
After quietly watching Fu Qian for two seconds, Natalie greeted him with the poise of someone meeting him for the first time.
Her fair face was bare of makeup, and her gaze was even a little unfocused. She looked very much like someone who'd been woken while resting.
There wasn't a trace left of Soul of Vengeance's hideous appearance.
She clearly didn't want anyone to know about their late-night conversation over snacks.
And on the way here, the intellectual had probably thought long and hard about why she'd been invited.
Without figuring it out.
Fu Qian hadn't brought her here because he was unbearably bored on this long night and wanted to watch a family drama unfold.
To be honest, his further "examination" of Jian just now had yielded more than he'd expected.
When he realized that some of the changes to her had been unnervingly humanlike, he'd tried using Clear Dream to help him think. To his surprise, a certain "person" had appeared directly.
Fu Qian hadn't rashly dismissed it as a hallucination. Something invisible and intangible was all too easy to connect with the castaway Natalie had just mentioned.
Combined with Jian's experience of coming into contact with the dense fog beyond the city, one possibility couldn't be ignored: the anomaly affecting her originated from the castaway of the stars, a being even the cult feared.
And those words hadn't been a hallucination, either. This special entity had really "said" them in her ear.
It had come back with her when she returned.
Such a seamless progression had successfully piqued Fu Qian's interest.
If this assumption was true, it would mean two things. First, the castaway's ability to conceal itself was even more outrageous than Natalie had described.
Outside the dense fog, at close range,