Dragon Clan: Thought So Far.

The dark skyscrapers stand side by side like giants. When the train passes by, the elevated railway casts bright sparks because of the friction between the rails and the wheels. Night falls in Chicago, whose golden age has long passed. Looking from afar, every community is divided into squares of different sizes by the flowing river of light, and pedestrians hurry by under the flashing neon lights.

When he woke up again, Lu Mingfei found himself curled up on a wooden bench, covered with a thick blanket, and heard the sound of bells in the distance. He suddenly thought of the people chasing and running with torches in the dark shadow of the church. The firelight could not illuminate their faces, and everyone's face was hidden in the shadow. In the distance, there was a huge full moon, half of which was hidden under the continuous mountains. The crowd ran to the top of the mountain and jumped towards the moon.

The structure and decoration here are clearly no different from the Chicago train station, but there are no familiar murals and superfluous decorations on the walls. There is only a huge electronic clock. The time on the clock shows 2010:9 pm on September 22, 11. Lu Mingfei stared at the clock for a long time. After at least five minutes, the number at the end did not change.

After a moment he smiled, put his hands behind his back and walked around.

From the touch on his wrist, Lu Mingfei immediately realized that the muscles he had worked so hard to hone over the years had disappeared, and his body had returned to the state where he could even pin down a street thug and rub him to the ground.

This is exactly what Lu Mingfei looked like on September 2010, 9 in another world line, when he was just one step away from entering Kassel College.

Sure enough, in a corner not far from the bench where he slept, Lu Mingfei saw two huge suitcases. The combined weight of the things in them might be almost as heavy as himself. There was a backpack stuffed in the gap between the suitcases. He opened the backpack and found a pressure cooker stuffed inside, which was filled with pickled mustard greens.

There was also a woven bag next to it. You didn't have to guess what was in the bag. It was nothing more than some clothes for changing, a twelve-hole quilt and two pillows stuffed bulgingly.

He didn't know why he felt a little hungry. Just as he was thinking about this, the lights in the nearby sandwich shop suddenly came on. The waitress, who was looking down and whose face could not be seen, came bouncing towards him. Her ponytail and skirt were rising and falling, revealing her bright collarbone and calves. She put the beef sandwich in Lu Mingfei's hand and took the only three dollars left in his pocket, then she ran away bouncing.

Lu Mingfei thought to himself how miserable it was that just by eating a sandwich he became a person with zero assets. As he thought about this, he took a bite of the sandwich.

It would be nice to have a Coke.

He just thought about it for a moment, and the lights behind him spread again. Lu Mingfei turned around woodenly, and the metal railings of the subway were pulled open to both sides. In the dim window rendering, a Pepsi vending machine was outlined with a bright edge by the LED lights.

He was stunned for a moment, remembering that on a sunny morning long ago here, a girl who was determined to set up a tent in Central Park because of the strike of the workers of the Chicago Railway Bureau stood on one leg with graceful ballet movements and reached out to steal two cups of excellent Coke for him and Chu Zihang from this Coke machine.

Lu Mingfei could no longer remember the details of that day, he only remembered that iced Coke was the best thing in the world.

As he thought of this, he was already squatting on the ground eating a sandwich with an ice cola, wolfing it down. The boy's face was reflected on the bright marble floor tiles, and he was crying silently. The only sound in the huge, silent space was the chewing.

The sound of light footsteps came from afar, and finally a pair of shiny leather shoes stopped in front of Lu Mingfei.

What followed was soft moonlight, like the tide approaching the shore. The shadow of the window pane was projected on the back of the bench. The little devil stood in front of Lu Mingfei and reached out to touch the man's messy hair.

He was wearing a formal black suit, a white tie, and a white rose in his chest pocket.

When Lu Mingfei looked up, the tear marks on his face had no time to fade away, but the little devil still bent down and touched the man's cheek with his own.

"Brother, I miss you so much." said the little devil.

His hair was curly and his face was childish. The golden flames in his eyes faded for the first time in front of Lu Mingfei. His black pupils actually looked very innocent, like a poor puppy.

Lu Mingfei stared blankly at the boy's warmth. He remembered that before undergoing the cutting ceremony held by the Safe Haven Committee, he had returned to the Final Sanctuary accompanied by Lu Lincheng. There he saw Lu Mingze tied between bronze pillars again. When he stared at the little devil immersed in the mercury pool, it was like staring at a limestone sculpture.

The little devil sighed softly, and he pulled out a handkerchief from somewhere to wipe the food residue from the corner of Lu Mingfei's mouth.

Lu Mingfei reached out his hand tremblingly to touch the rosy and shiny cheek, but when his fingers touched the little devil's skin, a spreading ripple appeared on the boy's body surface, and a faint grayish-white color was visible beneath the ripple.

He had the same color when he saw the little devil in the final sanctuary. At that time, Lu Mingfei trembled and wanted to ask him if he was willing to tell him the truth, to ask him whether he really cared about his body as Lu Lincheng said or the feelings they shared, to ask him if he felt heartbroken when he hugged Eri's dry body on that rainy night?
But now the little devil was standing in front of him, and Lu Mingfei could not say anything.

Both of them stood up. Lu Mingfei took the little devil's hand and sat down on the bench. The boy leaned on his shoulder, as light as a bird that could fly away at any time.

The ticking sound keeps going on, it's really noisy.

Red liquid was flowing out from under his feet. The spider-web-like scars under Lu Mingze's black suit were bleeding.

"Are you okay?" Lu Mingfei asked.

"Not so good, I'm dying." The little devil whispered, as if he was so weak that he couldn't even mobilize his vocal cords to speak loudly.

Lu Mingfei trembled a little. “Don’t talk nonsense. Brother and the others should have arrived at the final sanctuary. They will rescue you soon.” He said.

The little devil held his knees with both hands, sat up straight, and shook his head: "It's useless, I'm already burned out."

"Bullshit, do devils also have burning ashes? Who the hell do you think you are? Deidara? You also know the technique of self-destruction?" Lu Mingfei's sudden outburst did not scare the little devil. The boy touched his cheek, looked up and smiled, but did not say anything.

"Why the hell just say something? Why are you holding it in? Are you mute?" Lu Mingfei cursed manically. He was so timid that he turned his head away and didn't want to look at Lu Mingze's face at this time.

Sadness sprouted from the man's heart like an unknown root, and he almost shed tears.

"Don't be sad, brother. At least like you said, if I die one day, someone will remember me, and my name will be engraved on your tombstone in the future." The little devil said with a smile. Lu Mingfei gritted his teeth.

In fact, it was expected, wasn't it? For so many years, this little brother has been teaching him to be strong and to learn to resist. If someone takes something from you, you jump up and hit him hard on the nose, even if you are covered in bruises, you will never bow your head.

He did not take the body away from the soul of a loser, but told the loser how to be an adult.

When dealing with many things, Lu Mingze repeatedly tells Lu Mingfei the truth about this world.

Put away your nonsense, put a golden collar lining in your collar, and you will face this huge world alone.

Hide all your cowardice deep in your soul. There will no longer be cool guys or long-legged pretty girls to support you. You can only be strong.

This world is so cruel and so real. If you bump into it, you will be covered with scars. If you bite it, you will lose half of your teeth. But you still have to resist. If you don't resist, you are just a pathetic, cowardly, runny-nosed kid. No one will be afraid of you and no one will respect you. They are only afraid of your brother with a long knife and your angelic sister.

"Brother, you have grown up. You can live well even without me. No one in this world can bully you anymore, and no one can take away the people you want to protect from you. You don't have to make deals with me anymore." Lu Mingze said, his expression was indifferent and full of sadness.

"For so many years we have been snuggling together for warmth. Others have coveted that cold throne of thorns, but you are the only one who wants to escape... You shouldn't be sad, you should smile, you are finally free, how wonderful it is, and you are free with me."

In the past, Lu Mingfei would always tell the little devil to go to hell and get out of his sight. The boy would smile and say, "I'll get out of here right away," and then disappear from Lu Mingfei's sight for several days or even weeks.

But now he felt inexplicably sad, and was really afraid that what he said back then would become a warning.

"Brother, there are some things I haven't told you. I think now is the time." The little devil said with a calm expression, staring at the huge full moon outside the window with Lu Mingfei in a daze.

Under the full moon is the brightly lit Chicago. In this dream, the residents of Chicago repeat their lives in the same way. But isn't this a kind of happiness? How many people want it but cannot get it, and how many people pursue it all their lives.

"Where should I start... Let's start from the time when you were born, brother." Lu Mingze's voice was so low that it sounded like he was talking in a dream, but he spoke very quickly, as if he would not be able to finish saying the words that were piled up in his heart if he didn't speak faster.

"You really are a piece of flesh that fell out of your mother's belly. You are not some stone monkey born and raised naturally, nor are you a monster that escaped from a genetic laboratory. You are Lu Mingfei, and you have the blood of the old Lu family flowing in your body."

Hearing the little devil say this, Lu Mingfei's heart was actually calm.

"But unfortunately, from the perspective of the dragon race, you are not Qiao Weini's son." Lu Mingze smiled, "I guess you and your senior brother have heard a story from Alexander Bunin about Qiao Weini and Lu Lincheng dying in southern Siberia in early 1992... I have to tell you that this is not fabricated information, but a real event in the past."

This time, Lu Mingfei could no longer maintain his composure. He trembled violently and tears suddenly welled up in his eyes.

"In fact, you already knew it, right? You already knew it even before Bunin told Chu Zihang about this. The safe haven is actually a tomb filled with the living dead." The white rose pinned on the little devil's chest was extremely dazzling. Lu Mingfei knew that he usually wore this to attend someone's funeral, and this time it was obviously his own funeral.

"Before entering the safe haven, you were attacked by a Time Zero user. During the brief encounter, you should have seen the face hidden in the shadows."

"Xita." Lu Mingfei said softly.

The elder of the Gattuso family in the Palace of the Blues, his code name is θ. He works together with β and comes to Siberia to find the dragon-slaying hero on the run.

However, in City 023, Lu Mingfei witnessed with his own eyes the old man's heart being cut open, and Eva, who had been with him, also confirmed that the school board would receive the bodies of Sita and Beta in Valhalla.

If Khorkina and Anton could attribute it to the port's sophisticated cloning technology, and even all the strange things happening in the safe haven could be explained from an alchemy or scientific perspective, only the appearance of Sita made Lu Mingfei feel terrified.

Back in Tokyo, they already knew that cloning a hybrid would not allow the clone to possess the words and bloodline of the gene provider, because the expression of dragon genes is recessive in the human body. Cloning an S-class might require hundreds or thousands of times to obtain a perfect copy.

It was only half a month after they left City 023 that they arrived at the safe haven.

This meant that the Sita who attacked them must be himself.

He is a dead ghost resurrected from hell.

"My dear little Renata and I escaped from Black Swan Port on Christmas Day in 1991. We traveled thousands of miles to Moscow just to find his parents, but I found out that those two guys were scum, so I killed them. Then I took the girl along the K3 railway all the way south, trying to reach China." Lu Mingze raised his head and leaned his head on Lu Mingfei. He half-closed his eyelids, and a kind of fatigue and weakness surged out of his body like a tide.

"I slept for too long and had no idea that satellites in the sky had been monitoring my every move since I left Moscow, until the secret party started hunting us down."

"You killed them all, right? Including dad and mom." Lu Mingfei asked calmly.

"Hey, don't think of me as something bloody and brutal. With that kind of intensity of pursuit, they can't even catch up with me! While these people were still fishing in Siberia, Ling and I got on the train and prepared to cross the border, okay?" Lu Mingze raised his voice slightly.
"Of course it was Pompey who killed them. He was also Bondarev. It was also because of him that Herzog was able to ascend the throne of the White King. He was also the prince who seduced Finkel to the Greenland Sea. How shameless! This old man is still a prince... In short, the elites of that generation of the Secret Party were almost wiped out, but the school board announced to the outside world that they had become the doomsday party and betrayers of the academy. Then a new generation rose up, and the forces close to the Gattuso family sneaked into the core circle of the Secret Party like flies that can penetrate any hole... I was also caught by him."

When the little devil said the last sentence, he seemed to lose his temper, cursing and regretting his decision. (End of this chapter)