110. What to Do When Your True Form Is Revealed

"Are you a cow?"

Hearing this, she turned her exquisite, porcelain-white face toward him. Her eyes, clear as a mountain spring, seemed to hold a flicker of something deeper as she looked at Chen Sheng with earnest intensity.

Chen Sheng froze. He could feel his slow heartbeat suddenly accelerate, thumping violently against his ribs.

*Was I just being flirted with?*

The thought crossed his mind, and he immediately wanted to turn toward her and ask, but as he moved, the words died on his lips. He simply pressed them together and remained silent.

He was hesitant, held back by his own anxieties. He was fixated on the changes occurring within his own body. What if, after establishing a relationship and becoming intimate, he accidentally revealed his true form? Surely, he couldn't just resort to murder to silence her!

*Pah, pah! What "true form"?*

Chen Sheng shook his head vigorously, trying to brainwash himself. He was undergoing an evolution into a higher-dimensional being—not some monster-like transformation!

Seeing Chen Sheng acting like a wooden statue, Yu Youxin pouted slightly and turned back to tapping away at her keyboard.

Chen Sheng felt a wave of relief. Driven by curiosity, he caught a glimpse of the registration page. In the name field, she had typed two characters: "Old Chen."

Chen Sheng: "..."

He soon accepted it. After all, it was just "Old Chen," not his actual name. Countless people in this world went by that moniker, and they held every profession imaginable—leaders, drivers, colleagues, laborers, and so on. Using it as a pen name was perfectly fine.

Yet... did those two words imply something more?

He felt he was being delusional, but he couldn't help himself. He opened his mouth, but found he couldn't speak. It wasn't that he didn't know what to say; he was simply afraid to say it.

Chen Sheng remained silent, and Yu Youxin, having been poked by his awkwardness twice already, said nothing either. She was busy fulfilling her promise of "I can do it myself." The room fell into a heavy silence.

***

Because Yu Youxin remained quiet, Chen Sheng was even less inclined to speak. The sound of typing filled the room, yet it was so quiet one couldn't even hear their own breathing.

Chen Sheng soon found it difficult to sit still. Watching the girl’s profile, he found her increasingly beautiful—and it wasn't just physical attraction.

A moment later, he decided to break the ambiguous atmosphere. He stood up and walked toward the door. "I'm heading out for a bit. Do you need me to bring you anything?"

"Whatever you like, Old Chen, though I'm not really hungry."

Chen Sheng was already at the door. Hearing her voice behind him, he didn't dare linger. He stepped out into the hallway, where a gust of freezing wind hit him, causing him to take a deep, sharp breath.

Feeling the chill settle in his lungs, he finally felt a bit more at ease.

"I can feel the cold, I can still feel embarrassment, I have full sensory perception and complex emotions—this is enough to prove I haven't turned into a monster yet," he muttered to himself.

The words seemed to give him immense courage. He vaulted over the balcony railing, and in a blink, he appeared on the roof of the shop across the street.

The sky was dim, the streetlights had flickered to life, and light spilled from the shop windows. Chen Sheng didn't hesitate for a second. He began to run, unleashing his full speed. "Lightning fast" couldn't even begin to describe him; in one second he was here, and in the next, he had cleared several buildings and was a hundred meters away.

He seemed to have merged with the wind. No human electronic device could track his movement.

His body temperature was terrifyingly low—almost non-existent.

Suddenly, Chen Sheng stopped. He was in the middle of an open field, with no idea how far he had traveled.

"My speed has at least doubled."

Then, as if melting, Chen Sheng dissolved into a pool of blood-red liquid and slithered away at high speed. This liquid form was significantly slower than his running speed, roughly matching a car traveling at sixty kilometers per hour.

He didn't know where he was going or what he was trying to do; he simply moved forward aimlessly. When he encountered utility poles, he didn't go around them; he split his form in two, passed through, and merged back together on the other side.

A guard dog in the distance was startled, barking wildly at him before scurrying backward. It wasn't posturing; it was pure, unadulterated fear. As Chen Sheng approached, the dog collapsed to the ground, whining, too terrified to move, as if it had encountered a primordial beast.

***

Chen Sheng veered away; he had no grudge against the creature, and it wouldn't be right to scare it half to death.

A river blocked his path, but he dove into the water. Like a fish in its element, his speed increased several times over, and he crossed the river in an instant.

An hour or two later, Chen Sheng stood on the peak of a mountain, looking down at the city.

Gazing at the myriad of lights below, he suddenly said, "Perhaps one day, there will be a light for me among those thousands."

Then, he descended the mountain. Now was not the time for sentimentality; a small "accident" had occurred.

By the time he circled back to the city, dawn was breaking. The area where he rented his apartment was pitch black, with only the streetlights providing a faint glow.

Suddenly, a door seemed to open, a gust of cold air slipped inside, and then the door appeared as if it had never been touched.

However, in the dark living room, there was now one more person.

"Why do my clothes vanish every time I transform?" Chen Sheng sighed dejectedly. He had only realized this after changing back to human form on the mountain.

It had forced him to run the entire way back completely naked. Thank goodness he was fast enough that no surveillance equipment could capture his figure, or else it would have made headlines—he didn't even want to imagine how the tabloids would spin that!

Glancing toward the bedroom, he assumed the girl was still asleep. Relieved, he quickly put on a set of clothes and collapsed onto the sofa.

Even though he had exerted a massive amount of energy, he didn't feel particularly hungry. Still, he needed to rest.

After all, that run had been... damnably exhilarating.

He could still feel a lingering chill in his lower regions. The only silver lining was that his resistance to the cold had increased; even without any protection, he hadn't frozen solid.