EXTREME CONTENT WARNING. This chapter contains a prolonged, graphic, and psychologically intense scene of torture involving burns and the threat of self-cannibalism. It explores extreme pain tolerance, clinical detachment, and psychological manipulation. Reader discretion is strongly advised. Please heed the tags.
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The man tried to break Wu You'ai with layered psychological suggestion and real, escalating physical agony, combining mind games with searing pain to maximize the effect. Yet the girl tied to the chair in front of him did not seem to show the primal fear he expected at all. He needed to turn the screw, to find her breaking point.
"You know Bi Ri's boss, Brother Da Ri, right? The one who led the raid on your community that day. He ended up in the hands of my colleague, Yang Yang from the Armed Police Unit. After being injected with one jin (about 500 g) of saline solution, a peculiar method, he couldn't wait to confess everything. He still died under Yang Yang's meticulous torture in the end. Do you know how he died?" The man lit the red candle with a casual flick of a lighter. In the sweltering, still air of the room, the flame seemed hotter still, throwing flickering light across his fine, sculpted features and strikingly handsome, cold face.
Wu You'ai's eyes, despite the sweat beading on her brow, brightened, a sparkle of clinical interest flickering inside. "Frightened… to death?" she ventured, her voice surprisingly steady.
"Smart." A faint, approving smile touched his lips. "Yang Yang blindfolded him and described each punishment in vivid detail as he performed it. The narration, the anticipation, amplified the pain exponentially, and fear killed him before his body gave out. I heard the perceived pain is many times worse than the real thing. Ever heard of an old, almost artistic punishment called 'roasted flesh in oil'?" The man's tone was almost nostalgic, academic.
Wu You'ai stared, playing along with detached curiosity. "No."
"It goes like this." He leaned closer, the candle between them. "First you pick a piece of your own flesh, somewhere with enough padding. Then you slowly roast that piece until it cooks through. Relax. The advantage is there is no bleeding, very tidy. You can even… eat your own roasted scab afterward, if you're so inclined.
Burns carbonize the wound and form a crust so it doesn't inflame easily, but among all injuries, fire hurts the most. It stings, burns, every second. The best record we had was eight pieces before death from sheer pain shock. I wonder how many you will reach." His eyes held hers, testing.
He set the red candle directly beneath Wu You'ai's exposed thigh. A drilling, intense heat surged up immediately. Sweat beaded instantly and ran in rivulets down her skin, hissing faintly where it met the hot air.
"Still not talking? Just tell me what happened that day at the villa. How many are inside? How did you kill so many people? What's the secret?" He watched dispassionately as the skin reddened, then began to blister and smoke, the smell of cooking meat faint in the air.
"I… can I ask you a question?" Wu You'ai stammered between sharp intakes of breath, her focus surreal.
"If you ask, will you answer mine?" He kept adjusting the candle's angle minutely, as if savoring the process, the control.
"What is your name?"
He looked up, a faint, amused smile playing on his lips. "I'm Shangguan Jun. Now you can answer me."
Wu You'ai panted, her chest rising and falling rapidly. "Given my mental resilience and physiological tolerance, based on available data, I estimate I can endure at least more than twenty pieces. If you want me to last longer for your experiment, you should replenish my water and food intake in time. At the current rate of fluid loss through sweating, I can only make it to five, maybe six pieces before circulatory shock sets in.
In medicine, pain is scaled to ten levels. Severe burns and childbirth are ranked at the top. My mentor says the stronger the mind, the greater the pain one can theoretically withstand. Generally speaking, studies show women often tolerate sustained pain better than men." She delivered this as a matter of fact, a bizarre lecture in hell.
Shangguan Jun's mouth twitched, the first crack in his cool facade. "What did the villa people feed you, a bowl of loyalty soup? You'd rather die than give me anything? No matter. Once they finish failing at the petroleum base, and they will fail, they will bomb the villa next. The whole place will vanish into rubble. Everything you're protecting, your silence, is worthless."
"I'm not protecting tactical intelligence about the villa. I'm protecting the bottom line of being human," Wu You'ai said, switching deliberately to a pattern of three short breaths, two long, a pain management technique. "My mentor has been looking for firsthand material on level ten pain tolerance. If I survive, this will be excellent observational data. Empirical proof shows that when pain peaks, conventional breathing techniques and conscious relaxation have minimal effect. The body's override is too strong."
"What else helps then?" Shangguan Jun found himself asking, against his better judgment, intrigued by this strange specimen.
Sweat poured off Wu You'ai in fat drops, plastering her hair to her scalp, but what looked like genuine scientific curiosity seemed to glint in her eyes. She gritted her teeth as a fresh wave of agony hit. "Distraction. High level cognitive distraction can reduce perceived pain by one level. Self hypnosis, vivid visualization, can reduce another. For example, right now I'm telling myself you're very handsome. Focusing on analyzing your bone structure and symmetry lowers the pain by a measurable degree." She managed a ghastly, pained smile.
"Is this woman flirting with the man torturing her?" Shangguan Jun frowned, genuinely annoyed and off balance. "You're truly not afraid of death? You have no unfulfilled wish? You're willing to die like this, burned piece by piece?"
The skin on her thigh was now visibly cooked, the scent unmistakable. Staring at her own flesh being roasted, the woman still didn't scream, didn't break.
"Death is an end, and a beginning. Wishes can be completed in the next beginning. When pain reaches the summit, it is a kind of… ecstasy. The limit of pain is pleasure. You're almost there." Her words were slurred but clear, philosophically unhinged.
"Pervert."
"If you can," she gasped, "when you slice off my flesh to feed me later, as you mentioned, add more salt. I like strong flavors. Too bland affects my appetite." Her eyes held a challenge, a madness.
Shangguan Jun: "…"
He stared at her, the candle wavering in his hand. He had met fanatics, he had met the stubborn, but he had never met anyone who treated torture as a peer reviewed experiment in which she was the principal investigator.
…
In the car, racing back toward their community, Jing Shu received an urgent, coded message from Wang Dazhao.
"The oil field attack failed. Zhetian lost dozens of men. Now a vanguard of more than a hundred is moving directly toward our community. Their second target is your villa. They plan to drop a few homemade bombs, level it, then occupy the rest of the community as their new base. They're angry and want a show of force."
Wang Dazhao hadn't managed to infiltrate the upper ranks yet, so he only learned of plans at the moment of execution, a dangerous lag.
Worse, unlike Bi Ri's last reckless, noisy raid, Zhetian had taken a more methodical approach. They had grabbed several people leaving the community before acting, including a woman who had gone out foraging. They questioned them roughly about the villa layout and defenses and had even found an old paper household registry left in the abandoned management office.
Among those captured was someone named Wu You'ai. Her ID address showed a clear link to the villa. She was under severe interrogation now by one of their lieutenants.
Wang Dazhao sent their suspected location, an abandoned factory on the outskirts.
Face like forged iron, Jing Shu made a snap decision. She had already dropped Uncle's family on the roadside earlier. Now, after explaining the dire situation tersely to her parents in the car, she said, "We're not going home to defend. Turn back and take the route past Ai Jia Supermarket. We will intercept their main group in advance, hit them before they consolidate. If they bomb the villa, the structural damage and fires could be unimaginable, could draw impossible attention. We take out this group first, then go rescue Wu You'ai. She's tough. She should be able to hold out for a while. If the villa's defensive capabilities get exposed, so be it. Those traps were never going to stay secret forever."
Jing Shu's true, ultimate secret was the Cube Space, and the doomsday level weapon hidden inside it. That couldn't be risked.
Even with all her precautions, her stockpiling, her traps, she hadn't expected those damned lunatics from Zhetian to set their sights specifically on her villa. Then again, maybe it was just a target of opportunity on their path of chaos. If she hadn't planted Wang Dazhao as a piece on the board this time, Jing Shu might not have known the villa was about to be bombed until she returned to ruins. That organization really was full of unpredictable maniacs.
They sped down the cracked road, the electric motor humming at its limit. Jing Shu ran through quick plans to eliminate the approaching attackers using ambush and the terrain. And in the same breath, she pulled out a secure satellite phone, a prize from a past trade, and called the direct line for Yang Yang of the Armed Police Special Unit. There were too many enemies for them to handle alone cleanly.
No one should gamble with their life against those odds. She called him in as insurance, offering high value targets in exchange for intervention. She believed Yang Yang, the torture artist, would take a keen, professional interest in the Zhetian Gang's leadership. It was time to bring in the state's sharper teeth.
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We've made it to Chapter 100!!! (ﾉ≧∀≦)ﾉ🎉✨
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