The most tragic child

"Wan Qiu?"

At the sound of that name, Gao Ming immediately had Zhu Miaomiao let go of him and headed to the corner of the school corridor.

Four male students stood outside the girls' bathroom. Some had cigarettes dangling from their lips, others had their school uniforms tied around their waists, and one, dressed in trendy clothes, was deftly toying with a metal lighter.

Gao Ming approached slowly without making a sound.

The student with the cigarette held his phone up high, filming. Inside the girls' bathroom was another boy, soaked from head to toe.

The boy looked vacant. He tried to run outside, but the other students laughed and pushed him back again and again.

"The new idiot in our class is pretty fun." The trendy boy with the lighter spat on the floor, then turned to the only one of the four dressed normally. "A-Zun, should we take him to Back Nineteenth Street tonight and show him the world?"

The boy called A-Zun laughed. "Do you want to take him along for some fun, or watch him get tormented to death?"

As though sensing something, Wan Qiu charged toward the bathroom door again. He threw all his strength into it, knocking aside the student filming at the entrance, but when he tried to escape down the corridor, the others grabbed him.

"***! I just got this new phone, and you made me drop it!" Picking up his phone, the boy shoved Wan Qiu hard onto the floor. "You fucking idiot! ****!"

He covered Wan Qiu's mouth. The other three gathered around and raised their feet, ready to kick him!

Thud!

The phone fell to the floor. Only when the trendily dressed boy slammed into the wall did he realize someone had sent him flying with a kick.

Pain tore through his lower back. He clutched it, unable to get up for a long while.

"School is a place for learning. How can you get into fights here?" Gao Ming lowered his right leg and stood before the students.

The other three bullies were dumbfounded too. They had watched Gao Ming kick their friend clear off his feet without holding back at all.

"Come on, we're in a school!" Zhu Miaomiao was badly startled too. It was one thing for Gao Ming to be ruthless toward ghosts during an anomaly event, but she hadn't expected him to be just as brutal toward people in the real world. Was everyone who came out of Henshan Prison this vicious?

"The four of them were bullying this kid." Gao Ming reached out and snatched the boy's phone. When the boy instinctively tried to grab it back, Gao Ming kicked him square in the chest. "I've now finished collecting evidence."

"Okay, okay. Let's all calm down." Zhu Miaomiao worried things would get out of hand.

"You dare hit people openly in a school?" A-Zun stood up and looked at Gao Ming. He seemed mature for his age and remained very composed. His family probably had some clout too.

"Did I hit anyone? They clearly fell over on their own. After all, there are no cameras in this spot you picked." Gao Ming walked toward A-Zun. After being trapped at home eating cake for three days, something about his demeanor had changed.

"Are you Wan Qiu's family? But I remember the teachers saying he's an orphan. No mother or father. He was sent here temporarily." A-Zun took a step back. "My mother is an officer at the Hanhai Charity Federation, and my father works at..."

Before A-Zun could finish, Gao Ming landed a vicious kick in his stomach, leaving him crumpled on the floor.

"A catastrophe is almost here, and you're still going on about that?" Gao Ming moved on to the last boy. He tried to run, but Gao Ming chased him down and gave him a savage beating.

"Gao Ming, calm down! Gao Ming!" It took Zhu Miaomiao a great deal of effort to pull him away. She couldn't understand why Gao Ming, who usually seemed so rational, had suddenly become so violent. "We'll be disciplined when we get back if you do this!"

"Disciplined?" Gao Ming released the last boy, tossing him aside, then turned and stared into Zhu Miaomiao's eyes. "Investigators defend this city with their lives. Do we risk everything just to protect trash like this? Just to be punished after standing up for someone?"

Zhu Miaomiao opened her mouth, but she didn't know what to say.

"Last night, we went through a level-two anomaly event, stopped the disaster from spreading, and indirectly saved a lot of people. Right?"

"Right."

"But eight people from our team went missing. We paid an incredibly painful price. Don't we deserve some compensation for that trauma and emotional suffering?"

"We do."

"So if I accidentally used too much force while stopping a bully, there's nothing wrong with that, is there?"

"No." Zhu Miaomiao suddenly felt that Gao Ming made a lot of sense. He was human too, and the pressure and pain he bore might be immense. If the Investigation Bureau couldn't even protect its own investigators over something like this, it really would leave them bitterly disappointed.

Patting Zhu Miaomiao on the shoulder, Gao Ming walked past her and approached the boy.

Gao Ming offered no words of comfort and showed no concern for the boy's injuries. He simply held out his hand. "My name is Gao Ming. I'm a psychological counselor at Henshan Maximum-Security Prison, currently working for the Lishan Investigation Office. If you're unhappy with your life, I can offer you a job that comes with dignity and freedom."

From brutally beating the bullies to every word he had just spoken, Gao Ming had thought it all through. In the entire city, only he and Wei Dayou, who had seen the game design, knew how terrifying this child was.

The boy looked vacant, but his eyes were beautiful, and those eyes were exactly what Gao Ming needed.

"I can help you grow claws and fangs. No one will ever be able to bully you again. If you want to bully others, I can turn a blind eye to that too. I don't have much of a moral code. I'm very partial to my own people."

His fingertips stirred slightly. In Wan Qiu's eyes, the arm Gao Ming extended toward him seemed like a rope dangling from heaven, yet also like a staircase leading into the abyss.

He stared blankly, then slowly raised his arm and took Gao Ming's hand.

Pulling Wan Qiu up from the floor, Gao Ming didn't even bother speaking to the school. He headed straight downstairs.

"Gao Ming, shouldn't we tell his teacher?"

"Then go give them a brief explanation. Tell them the Lishan Investigation Office needs to take Wan Qiu back to ask him some questions." Gao Ming touched his Black Ring. Sometimes, having an official identity really came in handy.

After leaving the school, Gao Ming bought Wan Qiu a huge pile of food.

Watching Wan Qiu wolf it down, he gave a rare smile. "Eat slowly. From now on, as long as I have a sip of broth, you'll have a bite of meat."

Gao Ming hadn't misspoken. He valued Wan Qiu enormously, and he also wanted to make amends for the tragedy he had personally designed.

When he first began working with Nightlight Games, Gao Ming had conceived a crime game called "Born Psychopath."

The protagonist was an abandoned infant with a brain disorder. Under the player's step-by-step guidance, however, he would eventually become an expert at solving cases, hailed as the Shield of the City.

But just then, the protagonist discovered that corpses and bloodstains had begun appearing all around him and in his home. They seemed like hallucinations, yet were utterly real.

He tried everything to cure himself, but the more treatment he received, the more horrors appeared. In the end, his mental power spiraled completely out of control, and he finally "opened his eyes" to see the truth.

Wan Qiu was the most dangerous supercriminal in Hanhai's history. He had suffered almost every conceivable tragedy in childhood. Later, a psychopathic serial killer adopted him. Constant stimulation of his brain gave him mental powers beyond those of ordinary people. Under that killer's tutelage, Wan Qiu became the most dangerous person in Hanhai at the time.

As technology continued to advance, Wan Qiu was eventually arrested. Research into him had never stopped since that moment.

The entire experience the players controlled was actually a virtual experiment conducted on Wan Qiu's brain. People wanted to see whether, if Wan Qiu had never met the serial killer, he could emerge from the shadow of his childhood through his own efforts and rewrite his life.

The results proved that Wan Qiu could successfully rewrite his life. Even so, he would never be able to leave the laboratory again, because all that remained of him was a brain immersed in a special container.

"From today onward, no one will ever bully you again."

(End of chapter)