A certain man was locked up in his room, intensely focusing on the pen that was moving upon and down a sheet of paper.
His mental focus was on a whole other level, writing and writing, not showing a hint of impatience on his handsome yet hardworking face.
Drips of cold sweat accumulated on his forehead as it dripped on his paper, but he did not pay it any heed.
He continued writing diligently, the ink running out of his pen.
Did he give up?
Of course not!
He brought the whole case of pens and grabbed once from the box swiftly, like a Chinese 'black bellied' protagonist.
Hours passed, the sun rose to the sky, settled at dusk, and the moon rose, high and mighty in the sky.
He finally settled down his pen besides the piece of paper, with an exhausted expression overtaking his face.
Haaahh.....
He still had cooking to do.
The dishes to wash.
His clothing to put in the washer.
And.....
Readers to annoy.
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Note: Keep in mind the story starts of psychological right off the bat and is a bit slow paced at the start, so bear with me this first arc, and I promise all the good stuff- fantasy, comedy, better reactions, action, and spicy r18 will be there waiting for you on a queen-sized luxury bed. The first arc won't be long hopefully, just character development which will be soon for a specific little guy.
Also, please join my discord server for further questions (even if you don't have any, just join it lmao). Link is in synopsis of novel.
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Xin walked toward the far end of the corridor in a slow and composed manner, where a well-kept staircase led upwards. The woman followed, as if she was trying to regain some semblance of control over her hopeless situation, almost like a maiden in love.
A hum slipped past his lips, a silent sync with his inaudible footsteps, as if he were a mere specter hovering over the marble, unblemished flooring.
"Why didn't we take the elevator to the seventh floor?" he questioned out of profound curiosity, leaning his head back and playfully in an attempt to look at her without turning his head.
His question oozed curiosity, similar to a particular cat that had lost its nine lives, not even sparing a single one.
Maria adjusted her glasses with her middle finger as her right lens flashes for a moment as if measuring her answer approrpiatly, with the edges of her lips curving upwards for a moment, before she regained her cold, poker expression.
"...Due to precautions"
She answered simply and smoothly to avoid any over complications. She could not afford to reveal confidential information to outsiders, as the risks were too high to do so.
Meanwhile, Xin scratched the back of his head as he easily saw through Maria's cold attempts to redirect the topic on something else other than the question. He smiled mirthlessly before adjusting his question once more.
"Why doesn't the elevator go beyond the 6th floor?"
Maria's expression shook as she froze on her spot.
She looked back to Xin with a startled look as if asking the question 'How?'
To outsiders, the elevator seemed to function like any other elevator, meaning that it seemed completely normal, reaching to every floor like any other elevator. However for this particular case, the elevator actually could lead to the sixth floor as the maximum.
The infrastructure with how the building was built in the first place violated the idea that the elevator could reach any higher than that. The space where the elevator was supposed to reach was molded into a small room used as a storage for confidential information files and such.
As such, it seemed odd that the young man was able to identify it from the first glance without so much of a thought.
'How?'
The young man wryly smiled before he raised two fingers, brushing off her question indifferently.
Maria furrowed her brows in confusion as she wondered what the young man was up to exactly. However, her thought process was interrupted as she reeled back in utter shock.
"There are two possibilities to why it does not go beyond the 6th floor"
He turned his hand into a fist before raising his index finger while slightly shaking it in the air, Maria's eyes not flinching for a moment away from it.
"One, the elevator was created that way due to a malfunction or insufficient funds"
He then proceeded with raising his second finger.
"Two, the elevator was created that way since it would be dangerous if someone by accident reached the 7th floor instead of the 6th."
Maria, who had held her breath listened intensely to the young man's words.
He paused for a moment, letting the weigh of his words sink in.
"Option number one is highly unlikely, due to the prestige of the building that wouldn't want a bad reputation to hit it due to a malfunctioning elevator. It doesn't make sense of multibillionaires to not be able to afford the simple price of an elevator, heh. It is highly unlikely that such a case would occur. Only around 0.35%"
He then proceeded with slowly raising his middle finger. With his two fingers that were up; his index and middle, he slowly closed one finger.
"Option number two seems plausible at first, but upon inspection it is highly unlikely. The reason is because it is simply inefficient."
"If they really wanted to stop someone from going to the 7th floor by accident or even on purpose without authorization, they would have put a policy of a severe punishment that would befall whoever went there without authorization, whether by accident or on purpose. They could also purposely put on an automatic system that prevented the elevator from reaching the floor unless that person held a specific card or DNA print. That has a percentage of happening of around 23.7%. "
"This would have been a simple solution instead of completely removing the elevator. It would be ridiculous if they removed it because of that, except if there was something of great significance on the floor that they couldn't risk exposing"
He sighed slowly.
"So its none of them?" Maria asked attentively, her cold mask slowly melting.
The young man's eyes slowly opened before he gazed at her expressionlessly. However to Maria, who had seen all types of gazes on her since her birth whether lust, love, obsession, hatred, fury, pity, she shivered as she saw the look in the young man's eyes.
There was simply.... nothing.
Not emotion, not pity, not lust,.... not even emptiness.
There was simply nothing.
He simply answered her without removing his eyes from her.
"There is a third option"
He raised one finger after he had closed his two other previous fingers with a slight tilt of his head.
"It was created to stall time as a precaution for an ambush"
Maria trembled for a moment at the young man's reactions but rapidly regained her composure.
"This is unacceptable," Maria said, her voice clipped, an echo of practiced authority.
"You're not cleared for this level of information. Turn around and leave, you are not welcome here."
But the words felt empty as they left her lips. Xin tilted his head slightly, as if amused by her little circus-like performance.
"Haha, did I hit the nail on the head?" he said softly, like a teacher disappointed in a failing student.
She hated how those words cut deeper than they should have
The perceptive eyes of the young man didn't miss her reaction before he smiled and continue.
"With that, we can formulate two things; either you have created this as a precaution for any traitors between you that you cannot identify, and thus are taking this as a precaution so that you can filter all individuals. The second one.... is a secret"
"But in both cases, it seems you have prepared specific emergency exits"
He held his chin with his fingers as he looked at the ceiling, still maintaining his smile.
"The emergency exits are unlikely to be using elevators. As such, they are either hidden in a wall, or even hidden somewhere, such as under a couch, where a hidden mechanism in the room would be activated to open the escape route. It would seem unrealistic if you had hidden the mechanism near the emergency exit, as the pursuers would have a high change of around 85%of detecting it early on."
"Thus that leaves us with many possibilities where they can be hidden, but we cannot judge before taking a look, can we now?"
The young man who was almost talking to himself shook off these thoughts before taking a look at the woman in front of her.
The woman had her mouth agape as the clipboard slowly slipped from her grasp, landing on the ground with a low sounded 'Tink!'.
The woman however paid it no heed as she held her mouth with her right hand and pointed at the young man like he was a horrifying monster.
"H-how?!" She tried to speak in her cold voice but only managed to mutter this out. In response, the young man merely smiled before he walked up to her
The woman slowly took a few steps backwards as the young man continue walking towards her.
Her hands trembled and she clenched her fists, as her breathing became erratic. Her back was against the wall, and her heartbeat hitched, as the young man continue his advanced with no signs of stopping.
'What kind of monster is he?' The woman wondered, as she couldn't believe the intelligence of the young man. It was like he had pre-read all the information before.
She entertained the idea for a moment, but it was simply impossible. The information couldn't be released, no, it simply was not known by anyone except a select individuals.
She narrowed her eyes as she considered that the young man was affiliated with the spy, but she doubted the spy knew about the emergency escapes, since the authorities had yet to ambush the building. This suggested that they still had their guards up for potential escape routes, and had not found any.
'Then... how?'
She wondered before she shook her thoughts out of head and looked at her current situation.
The young man was approaching, and she got the feeling that this was the last day of life. Untold pressure. Unknowingly, a tear slid down from her left eye, as she surprisingly touched her face at the undeniable warm liquid that formed as a waterdrop at her chin, before descending to the marble floor.
'W-why... am I crying?'
Still touching her face, she realized that another tear slid down.
She reflected on the days she lived, she remembered her traumatic childhood, her broken heart, and her ruthlessness in her rise of power, the despair she felt, the darkness that she experienced.
Her life flashed through her eyes, and what came after despair?
Acceptance.
Acceptance of the very despair you ran from.
Acceptance from the hatred you felt.
Acceptance from the self-disgust you felt.
Acceptance from the lust-filled gaze of men.
Acceptance from the unforgiving world.
Acceptance of your existence.
Acceptance of everything!
The woman's eyes gained a glimmer of acceptance, as she wiped the tear with her sleeve before looking at the young man with a resolute defiance.
She closed her eyes comfortably. If she died then so be it, if she lived, she would work again to walk the path she had chosen.
She had chosen it, and she would continue it to the end, even if it meant the end of her life.
The young man finally reached her.
Death flashed in her mind, as she felt the cold touch of it on her spine, slowly crawling. Suddenly opening her eyes, she gasped as she fell to the marble floor.
Trembling with widened eyes she touched where her neck was.
'W-what was that?' She wondered.
For a moment she felt an illusion of her head being severed from her body. The woman trembled as she looked with moist and wide eyes at the young man who smiled softly at her. To her however, he looked like a mysterious, unfathomable being.
She touched her neck with shaking fingers, half-expecting blood. There was none. Only cold sweat.
Xin hadn't touched her, but it felt like he had carved into her with words alone.
"You're thinking about escape" he said, his voice being distant. "Your pupils dilated. Pulse spiked. You know where the exit tunnels are, don't you?"
Maria said nothing. Not because she refused, but because she couldn't. Her throat had closed up.
She had thought her life had left her, when she realized that she did not want to die. She was afraid of everything, afraid of her problems, afraid of the world, afraid of people, afraid of death.
She was afraid. Extremely so.
She was terrified even more when the young man squatted in front of her with his head tilting. Roughly, he grabbed her hair and she reacted with a 'kyaa!', as he peeked into her eyes, feeling her warm breath on his nose.
Pain enveloped Maria's lower lip as she realized he had bit it, drawing blood from it.
Her eyes widened in shock and fear, before the young man licked the now bleeding lips. He then looked at her right eye, licking her dried tears before he licked her cornea, making shivers of revulsion crawl up her spine.
"You don't want to die?" He asked dismissively as he gave the impression that he already knew the answer to his question.
The woman gulped a mouthful of saliva before she nodded her head slowly in agreement, her breathing becoming extremely shallow and her body uncounsiously trembling.
"But who said I gave you a choice?"
The woman froze, as tears slid down her eyes silently. The young man, as if laminating her expression, smiled as he stuck his index and thumb into the woman's mouth.
He grabbed her slippery tongue with them, and pulled it slowly out of her mouth, twirling it between his fingers and not heeding the slippery liquid on his fingers before casually commenting.
"You know, I really love your expression. I want to see you in more pain and crying more. I really want to pluck out those beautiful eyes for yours."
Saliva dropped from her tongue onto the young man's finger, but he paid it no heed. He continued gazing at the woman for a while before he let go of her tongue.
He moved forward with the calmness of a man taking a walk. Maria flinched — just slightly — and he paused, savoring the moment.
Then, he leaned in, whispering, "You already understand, don't you?"
His breath tickled her ear. Not warm — cold. Like a morgue.
"....N-no"
She wanted to deny the reality. It wasn't her reality. It can't possibly be, right?
"You're not crying because you're afraid of death," he murmured like a devil in an angel's cloak, his words flowing like rivers of honey. "You're crying because part of you... wants me to make the choice for you."
Licking her saliva of his fingers, he stood up as he motioned to her to do the same.
Maria however, had an emotional breakdown as she started sniffing at first, before she started sobbing.
A extremely sadistic smile formed at the edges of the young man, but he regained his composure as quick as he had almost lost it.
When she had finished sobbing, she picked up her glasses the young man had laid on the ground before she tried to fix her cold face. It was clear, however, from her puffy red eyes that she had been crying.
She slowly stood up, only to slip when she tried to walk on her feet, and only after she leaned on the wall was she able to stand up. She brought a handkerchief from her pocket a wiped off the fresh blood on her lips.
She then looked at Xin's indifferent eyes, before she took a deep breath to calm down her mind before speaking with a slight bow.
"... P-please, follow me sir.."
Xin nodded his head in understanding.
She walked with her hips swaying, still attempting to calm down her turbulent heart. Despite all he had done to her, she felt her heartbeat increasing dramatically when she was around him.
She didn't know what Xin wanted. But she knew one thing.
Whatever it was, she had already lost.