This dark emotion had been present inside him for so long that he couldn’t even remember when it started.
Maybe it was the first time his sister skipped his parent-teacher meeting to be with Sister Bai Lai instead.
This jealousy was a thick, black, bitter, and astringent liquid, accumulating drop by drop in a container he had never shown anyone. But that container for jealousy seemed never to fill up and never to break.
Its walls were soft and tough; no matter how the venom inside churned, it was always firmly held within, never leaking a single pinprick-sized hole.
Not because he didn’t hate enough. Not because his will was strong. It was because he couldn’t bring himself to hurt Sister Bai Lai.
Assassination plans, accidental deaths, hiring someone to cause a car crash, luring her to an abandoned park where no one passed by and finishing her off with one stab—he had rehearsed these thoughts in his mind countless times.
During those long, talkless nights, and those evenings when his sister once again unreservedly neglected him, these thoughts would sprout like poisonous mushrooms one after another from the damp darkness, wrapping him in a greenish, blood-tinged hallucination.
But every time dawn broke, those thoughts automatically faded away.
He couldn’t bring himself to do it because he knew too much.
He knew how important Sister Bai Lai was to his sister. “Best friend” and “most important person” had already become too soft and insufficient. Like his sister, he had a nearly stubborn, one-track obsession with important people. They had both lost important people before.
When their mother died, he stood in the corridor outside the morgue all afternoon, watching his sister held in their father’s arms.
Neither of them wore a crying expression, but that night, when he passed by his sister’s room, he heard her muffled sobs through the sliding door as she buried her face in a towel, holding back with all her might.
If Sister Bai Lai died, what would happen to his sister? She would cry. She would lock herself away.
He didn’t want his sister to go through that again. The person who could make his sister smile happily could not disappear because of him.
No matter how much Sister Bai Lai occupied the position he so desperately wanted, no matter how his sister’s gaze never fell on him because of her, he could not lay a hand on this person.
That was the only reason the container inside him that could never be filled eventually cracked and shrank—his last vestige of protection for his sister.
Lunch slowly ended under Hisaki’s constant hand-feeding.
Hei Luan Yu Si wiped his hands with a wet towel at the head of the table, then wiped the corners of his mouth with the same towel, his movements identical to his father’s.
Then he stood up, gave a slight bow to his sister, who was still wiping the corner of Rinna’s mouth across from him, turned, and left through the passage on the left.
After Hisaki led Rinna back to the room by the hand, Rinna had no time to digest the shame of being hand-fed through the entire meal before Hisaki let go of her hand.
Hisaki crouched by the low table, poured Rinna a cup of warm water that was just right, then took out the afternoon heart-protecting pill and stomach-nourishing tablet from her canvas bag and placed them on a small dish. She arranged the pills in order of intake with her fingertip—heart first, then stomach.
Then she settled Rinna against the pillow at the head of the bed, took off her slippers, and pulled the blanket up to her waist—Doctor Qi Lai had said not to wrap it too tightly.
She ran her fingers through Rinna’s white hair scattered on the pillow a couple of times, gathered it to one side, and confirmed the hot water bottle on the bedside table was just the right temperature.
Then she said:
“Rinna, wait for me a moment. I’ll be right back.”
Rinna didn’t even have time to ask ‘Where are you going?’ before Hisaki had already stood up and quickly walked out of the room.
The sliding door closed softly behind Hisaki. She was running.
Hisaki was going to discuss something with her father.
Yesterday, in the blind spot without surveillance at the northeast corner of the second floor of Sunshine Town Shopping District, she and Rinna had been surrounded by over a hundred men wearing identical sun hats and disguised as a tour group.
That leading man had escaped under Hisaki’s steel pipe, and the rest were taken away by the Kurose Family Cleanup Squad.
But these people were just the peripheral tentacles swept along by a vast underground network—ordinary middle-aged men kidnapped by perverse desires and false collective security.
The true core remained.
That massive organization, which operated a secret group for sharing train upskirt videos and exchanging target information, was still squirming like a snake hidden in the depths of a sewer.
Hisaki would not allow a single person in this world who harbored malice toward Rinna and posed a substantive threat to continue breathing comfortably.
Even a casual lewd comment left in an obscure online group, even half a drunken boast in the corner of some strip club—within the safety threshold she had set, these were signals that must be completely eliminated.
She would not wait for the other side to act again.
Before the information about yesterday’s arrests and the mysterious disappearance of the leading man could fully explode within the organization, she intended to dig out their roots first—every last one.