Chapter Sixteen: Breaking Free

The day Zhong Si was brought into the "Raven" Mu Ye's domain, the sky was leaden gray and a cold drizzle was falling, as if even the weather was setting the stage for the impending ordeal.

It wasn't Mu Ye himself who came to pick him up, but two taciturn intelligence subordinates with eyes as clear as inorganic glass. They didn't say anything more, only gesturing for Zhong Si to follow.

Sia stood in the shadows of the corridor, her fists clenched so tightly that her knuckles turned white, her red eyes swirling with the pain and anxiety of helplessness.

He could only watch as Zhong Si turned back again and again, his violet eyes filled with fear and a final plea for help, before finally disappearing around the corner leading to a deeper, quieter area of ​​headquarters.

Muye's "domain" is located in the most secluded wing of the headquarters complex, where the atmosphere is completely different from the living or operational areas. The air is filled with the smell of disinfectant, old paper, and a faint ozone odor emanating from precision instruments.

The light was a constant, uniform, cool white, eliminating any shadows that might cause disturbance. The walls seemed to have been specially treated, with excellent sound absorption, making footsteps and breathing sounds unusually clear, which only added to the oppressive atmosphere.

Zhong Si was led into a room with bare walls, containing only a metal table and two chairs.

Mu was already waiting there.

She was wearing an immaculate dark gray suit, and although she hadn't tied her hair up today, it was still neatly combed, making her look like a cold sculpture.

Several folders and sheets of paper covered in complex symbols were spread out in front of her. When she saw Zhong Si, she merely raised her eyelids, her silver-gray eyes sweeping over him without any hint of welcome or small talk, as if she were examining a piece of experimental equipment that had just been delivered.

"Sit." She gestured to the chair opposite her, her voice steady and flat.

Zhong Si sat down tremblingly, gripping his knees tightly with both hands, trying to suppress the trembling in his body.

Mu wasted no time and began the assessment immediately. Her questions were as precise and ruthless as a scalpel, devoid of emotion or concern for the past, focusing solely on perception, memory, logic, and deductive reasoning.

She would have Zhong Si memorize a long, random sequence of numbers or symbols in a very short time, and then immediately ask him to recite it backwards or repeat it after a period of time.

She would play a complexly encrypted, rhythmically chaotic Morse code recording and ask him to identify patterns or anomalies. She would show him several seemingly unrelated photographs of people or scenes and ask him to find details that had been deliberately altered or hidden.

She would even simulate some simple interrogation scenarios, using cold words and techniques to apply psychological pressure to observe his reactions and resilience.

Throughout the entire process, Mu Ye's face remained completely expressionless. She showed no approval for Zhong Si's correct answer, nor did she show the slightest pity for his incorrect answer or his apparent pain.

She simply recorded, endlessly recording, writing dense symbols and annotations on paper with that extremely fine fountain pen.

Her gaze was always analytical, like observing cell division under a microscope.

In the first few days, Zhong Si was on the verge of collapse. This high-intensity, high-pressure mental exertion without any emotional feedback was more unbearable than the physical pain.

His brain felt like it was being repeatedly rubbed on a grinding wheel, his temples throbbed, and he often fell asleep due to mental exhaustion during breaks between tests, sometimes even experiencing brief periods of confusion and hallucinations.

Whenever he was about to give up, Mu would calmly hand him a glass of water or let him rest for ten minutes before continuing.

Despair, like an icy tide, overwhelmed him time and time again. He felt like a butterfly pinned to a specimen board, all his vulnerability and nerve endings exposed to Mu Ye's cold gaze, left to be dissected.

He longed for warmth, for a word of comfort, even just a warm look in his eyes. But all he found here were cold walls, cold lights, and Mu Ye's eyes, colder than ice.

However, amidst extreme pain and helplessness, an image emerged more and more clearly in the depths of his mind—West Asia.

That fiery red hair, those red eyes that occasionally revealed worry and clumsy care beneath their fierceness, that large, calloused hand that silently rested on his shoulder when he woke from a nightmare, yet which gave him a strange sense of security.

His longing for West Asia became his only source of spiritual support.

When the strings of numbers from the memory test began to coil around his nerves like venomous snakes, he would force himself to imagine Sia standing in front of him, looking at him with those eyes as if saying, "Keep going." When the noise of the encrypted code gave him a splitting headache, he would recall the stiff yet careful movements of Sia feeding him water. That tiny bit of warmth was magnified infinitely at that moment, becoming a spark to fight off the cold.

When the simulated interrogation pressure made him almost want to give up everything, he would tightly clutch the ordinary button that Xiya had secretly given him in his pocket, saying it could "bring good luck," as if he could draw a bit of strength from it.

He knew that West Asia was somewhere in this building, and although they could not meet, the knowledge itself was a comfort.

He couldn't let Xiya down, and he couldn't let him see him completely broken down.

He wanted to prove that he wasn't a burden, not a fragile person who needed constant protection. This almost obsessive thought sustained him as he struggled back from the brink of mental collapse time and time again.

As time went on, a subtle change began to occur. Under Mu Ye's continuous and almost brutal "training," Zhong Si discovered that certain areas of his brain seemed to be forcibly activated.

Under pressure, his attention becomes more focused, and he becomes exceptionally perceptive of details. The previously chaotic information seems to spontaneously seek connections and patterns in his mind.

He still makes mistakes and still feels pain, but his recovery speed is getting faster, and his way of dealing with challenges is gradually shifting from purely passive endurance to a slight initiative of trying to understand and crack them.

Mu also keenly noticed this change. Her recording became more frequent, and the evaluation projects were designed to be more complex and challenging.

She began to introduce some real intelligence fragments—a few blurry surveillance screenshots, a few intercepted call logs, and a few processed enemy action reports—so that Zhong Si could try to extract useful information from them and even make preliminary trend judgments.

She still didn't give any positive feedback, but Zhong Si could occasionally catch a very faint, almost imperceptible glimmer of focus in the deepest part of her eternally frozen silver-gray eyes. It was a purely research-oriented interest in the unexpected reaction of the "experimental subject".

This inhuman training, while destroying Zhong Si's original fragile shell, was also, in an almost violent way, nurturing the budding of some hidden talent.

Pain is his soil, dependence on West Asia is his only light, and Mu Ye's cold indifference is the merciless pair of scissors.

One day, Mu gave him an extremely complex task: to analyze records of seemingly unrelated sporadic harassment incidents that had occurred at several peripheral outposts over the past week, and to determine whether there were any potential connections or common patterns.

This document is voluminous, chaotic, and full of useless information and potential misleading information.

Zhong Si locked himself in the small, simple room that had been temporarily assigned to him. Facing the documents covering the table, he once again felt the familiar dizziness and powerlessness.

He stayed up all night, his eyes bloodshot, his fingers red from turning pages for so long. Just when he was about to give up, feeling he couldn't possibly finish, his vision suddenly blurred for a moment.

He didn't seem to be looking at those dry words and numbers, but rather at a boundless, chaotic ocean composed of countless subtle clues and fragments of information.

Within this sea of ​​information, several seemingly insignificant points appeared to be connected by invisible threads—the time intervals between the harassment attacks exhibited a subtle pattern; the targeted outposts all seemed to be near a new smuggling route about to be activated; and although the methods of harassment differed, their retreat methods all displayed characteristics of a non-local gang…

This kind of "seeing" is not clear reasoning, but more like an intuitive, holistic grasp.

He suddenly grabbed the pen and, relying on this vague feeling, drew a few marks and connecting lines on the paper.

The next day, he handed this uncertain "analysis" to Muye.

He didn't even dare to look at Mu Ye's expression, bracing himself for yet another cold rejection.

Mu also took the paper and quickly scanned it. Her gaze lingered on the points Zhong Si had marked for an unusually long time. The room was so quiet that only the faint sound of the paper turning could be heard.

After a long while, she raised her head, her silver-gray eyes falling on Zhong Si once again.

This time, her gaze seemed different from usual, lacking a pure scrutiny and carrying a deep, almost solemn consideration.

She didn't comment on whether his analysis was correct; she simply carefully put the paper into one of the folders marked with a special symbol.

"That's enough for today." Mu Ye's voice remained calm, but she unusually added, "Go back and rest."

Zhong Si walked out of the room somewhat blankly, exhausted in body and mind. But deep in his heart, a very faint ripple, which even he could not understand, was stirred by Mu Ye's last almost "human" instruction and his strange "seeing" just now.

He returned to the cold room, collapsed wearily onto the bed, and almost instantly fell into a deep sleep. In his dream, he seemed to have truly become a butterfly, struggling and fluttering in a vast ocean of information woven from countless luminous threads, while in the distance, a pair of familiar red eyes seemed to be quietly gazing at him from the other side of the mist.