Xingtie: My silly online friend is actually a raccoon!

Inside the confinement room, Lu Ze lay on his back on the floor, motionless.

His white coat lay scattered on the ground, and cold sweat still clung to his face.

His breathing was rapid and irregular, his brows were furrowed, his lips were pressed into a line, and his expression was sometimes stiff and sometimes painful.

It looks exactly like someone having a nightmare.

Two girls, around eleven or twelve years old, were standing beside him, looking down at him.

The one sitting is Celine.

She sat on the only relatively intact metal folding chair in the room, her long, deep purple hair cascading down her shoulders, the ends almost touching the ground.

The white, hospital gown-like garment hung loosely on her body, and the meandering, corroded lines on her wrists and neck gleamed with a dim purple light under the lamp.

Standing there is Benares, or rather, she should now be called Bella.

She stood very straight, with her hands hanging at her sides, standing upright like a loyal maid.

She looked very much like Bella from Sirin's memory; her eyebrows, face shape, and hair color were about 70% similar. However, her light blue eyes were as clean as a mirror that had just been wiped, with no extra emotion in her pupils.

"Your Majesty, shall we not kill him?"

Bella spoke in a very soft, flat voice, with each word spaced precisely at the same interval, as if she were not yet used to speaking with a human body.

Celine did not answer immediately.

She tilted her head, looking at Lu Ze lying on the ground, his furrowed brows reflected in her golden eyes.

That illusion was woven by her own hands. From the moment he stepped into the confinement room and raised his phone to take a picture of her, he had already fallen into Celine's control.

Sirin showed Lu Ze a tunnel filled with Honkai Beasts, and made him run desperately while holding her.

She gave him a choice.

At the fork in the passageway, choosing the right side would allow him to escape; when the Honkai Beasts approached, putting down the girl in his arms would allow him to run faster; after the control room door closed, he could have used that girl as bait to save his own life.

But he didn't do any of that.

At the fork in the road, he chose the narrower and more dangerous path on the left without hesitation, because there were more roars of Honkai Beasts deep on the right, and he didn't want the girl in his arms to take any risks.

When he squeezed into the control room, he held her with one arm and patted the control panel with the other, because he didn't want her to leave his protective range for even a second.

When Benares cornered him, he shielded her behind him and used his own body to face the dragon's claws.

Luze selected all the dumbest options.

And the dumbest ones are often the right ones.

She had only ever met one person like that.

She is the real Bella—the one who would break her bread in half and share it with her, the one who would press her cold little hands against her forehead when she had a fever, the one who, despite being skin and bones, would always say "I'm not hungry" and then push the food towards her.

But that person is no longer here. She only had time to tear off a corner of her clothes, and that piece of cloth is still clutched in her hand.

The man on the ground did the exact same thing as Bella.

"No need," Celine finally spoke, her tone indifferent. "Keeping him around for fun isn't bad either, after all, he passed the test."

She jumped off the folding chair, walked over to Lu Ze, squatted down, and reached into his pocket to take the cell phone out.

The screen was still lit, showing two unread messages.

[Galaxy Baseball Man: Watch out, Sirin has become a Herrscher! Escape quickly!]

[Galaxy Baseball Man: Those guys deserve to die!]

Xilin's gaze lingered on those two lines of text for a moment.

"Be careful, Sirin has become a Herrscher."

This person named Lu Ze knew before she came that she would become a Herrscher.

But he still came, and upon seeing her, he reached out his hand to her.

From the chat history, Celine knew that this person was not a member of any of the tower.

He accidentally wandered in from outside.

A complete stranger would actually want to save a group of children who have nothing to do with him.

Xilin gave a cold, indifferent smile.

She had seen too many people in this tower; people in white coats injected drugs into her, and people in uniforms recorded her reaction data on a record board.

Those people treated her as an experiment, as a data source.

And the guy called "Galaxy Baseball Man" was cursing these people as being deserving to die.

"Hahaha...that's interesting."

Celine let out a maniacal laugh; those words struck a chord with her.

He then flipped his phone over to look at the back before casually stuffing it into the pocket of his white shirt.