Professor

Yu Fu lay slumped by the bedside in silence.

After an unknown amount of time passed, he rose without a word and laid his wife back properly upon the bed.

He tidied her clothes which had just been mussed, smoothed her long hair, and let his fingertips brush against her face.

It was a long time before the old man slowly turned around.

He looked toward the Professor, who had sat back in her chair at some point and was reading her book.

Then…

With a heavy thud, Yu Fu suddenly fell to his knees!

The man who once commanded wind and rain now adopted the most humble posture without hesitation.

He lowered his head, his raspy voice filled with desperate pleading: “Save her, Professor!”

“Here we go again.”

The Professor sighed.

She closed her book, and when she looked up, her eyes were filled with nothing but cold, indifferent light.

“I have already saved you many times.”

“Over thirty years ago, the Shen family found me and begged for help, asking me to break the demonic curse on them. I agreed and recommended you to them. You sacrificed twenty years of your lifespan, but in return, you received everything you wanted—a peak career, infinite wealth, and love!”

“More than a decade ago, your wife found me again to cure your terminal illness. I agreed to her request as well. She paid with half of her remaining life to trade back your health.”

“Not long ago, your wife was on the verge of death due to extreme aging, so you ran to me once more, begging me to save her. I agreed yet again and told you the method to save her.”

“You are the one who messed things up.”

“The two of you are at the end of your ropes; you have no more lifespan left to use, so you could only sacrifice others. If you cannot even handle such a simple task, who else can you blame?”

“I have done all that I can do. I have helped all that I should help. What more do you want from me?”

She said a great deal in one breath.

It sounded like a lament, yet also like a memory.

However, those light words fell into Yu Fu’s ears filled only with rejection.

He opened his mouth but did not know what to say, only able to continue pleading: “Please, Professor, save her…”

This display made the Professor feel somewhat helpless.

The woman in the chair crossed her legs, her expression returning to a state of cold detachment.

“Let us change the subject. Even if I could save her, what could you possibly pay?”

“Wealth? To me, it is like dust. Power? I have no interest in it. Knowledge? You cannot find what I desire. Lifespan? You are already a lamp without oil.”

“I…”

Yu Fu fell silent.

Then he raised his head, no longer pleading, but speaking with an equally cold tone: “Then what do you want? A busy person like the Professor would not come here at a time like this just to talk nonsense with me, right?”

“Correct.”

The woman finally showed a smile.

She uncrossed her legs and stood up from the chair again, looking down at the old man from a superior height.

“I simply like your calmness in desperate situations; that is why I chose you back then.”

“Enough nonsense…”

Yu Fu also slowly climbed up from the ground, his white-haired body straightening once more.

He looked expressionlessly at the woman wearing the witch hat—a woman who was a thousand times more terrifying than a true witch in every respect.

His voice was hoarse but firm: “State your requirements. As long as it can save Xiaoya, I will agree to anything!”

“Mr. Yu, I think you have misunderstood something.”

Faced with Yu Fu’s persistence, the Professor in the evening gown merely shook her head slowly.

She said softly: “I did not come here this time to provide an ending for this project.”

“An ending?”

“Yes. I am sorry to tell you that the experiment regarding you has already ended.”

The woman’s voice was filled with pity: “This was not the result I wanted. But it cannot be helped; Yujing has been targeted by a group of madmen. I cannot remain unaffected here, so I had to terminate this project early to trade for something of value from their hands.”

Yu Fu remained silent.

He did not fully understand, but he sensed danger.

The old man remained steady. After a brief moment of thought, he raised his head and asked expressionlessly: “Then what does this have to do with me?”

“I want some important data, and in exchange, those madmen asked me to provide a special heart.”

The Professor was very honest.

But Yu Fu froze on the spot.

“A heart?”

“That is right.”

The woman pushed the gold-rimmed glasses on her nose.

Her gaze gradually settled on Yu Fu’s chest, her voice very slow: “A heart of sin and madness, filled with pain and distortion, yet saturated with love and obsession—the Heart of the Wife-Eater.”

Yu Fu realized the horror and instinctively backed away, only to find that a pitch-black shadow had appeared behind him at some unknown time.

The shadow was incredibly tall, like a wall.

The moment he bumped into it, a bone-chilling coldness penetrated his body.

Then he discovered that he had lost control over his entire body.

“Go on, time is short.”

The Professor spoke lightly.

Under her gaze, Yu Fu’s rigid body slowly turned toward his wife on the bed.

‘No, no…’

He tried to resist, but it was meaningless.

He tried to plead, but he soon discovered in despair that his throat could not make any sound at all.

He quickly found that even his throat had lost control.

For the first time in his life, he resisted approaching his wife, yet he could only watch helplessly as he drew closer and closer.

Finally, like a starving beast, he lunged at her.

The luxurious room, the dim lights, the beautiful woman by the window flipping through a book—it looked like a scene from an oil painting.

Matched with it was the blood-stained man with a distorted face on the large bed nearby.

“Xiaoya… ow… no no, let me go, why… ow!”

Formless words squeezed out of his throat, chaotic and contradictory.

One moment his hands were frantically pounding his own chest, the next they were violently tearing at his own throat.

One moment he was in agony, the next he was laughing loudly, appearing completely insane.

Yu Fu had indeed gone insane.

His powerful spirit was not even worth mentioning in the face of this ultimate pain and despair.

He looked at the mess on the bed, looking at the tattered pajamas soaked in blood.

His body and soul were completely distorted along with it.

He ate his own wife.

He suffered, he pleaded, but nothing could stop his own actions.

He could not even close his eyes, forced to watch as he sent his beloved into his stomach bit by bit.

In a daze, he suddenly recalled a scene from decades ago.

At that time, he was just a fishmonger.

His mother was seriously ill, and treating her had exhausted their meager savings.

Finally, even his previous wife could not take it anymore and left him.

As the treatment costs grew higher, he had to resort to some illicit loans, but even that was just a drop in the bucket.

In the end, so as not to be a burden to him, his mother found an opportunity and leaped from the fourth floor.

His mother was dead.

Yu Fu seemed to die along with her at that moment, but while his spirit died, his flesh lived on.

He buried her hastily, and soon after, the debt collectors inevitably came knocking.

He naturally had no money to repay them.

In the end, they broke one of his legs and threw him directly off the building.

Fortunately, it was only the second floor and no vital organs were hit, so he did not die, merely falling into a coma.

When he woke up again, his soul lost, he met the woman calling herself the Professor for the first time.

“A filthy, broken body, a numb yet resilient soul. An interesting fellow. Do you want to join my project?”

“Project?”

“Yes.”

Yu Fu still remembered the Professor’s smile at the time.

She said: “Become my research subject, and then you will obtain everything you desire. Wealth, status, power, and a family… or perhaps one could say, love?”

At that time, the semi-conscious man only thought he was hallucinating before death.

Until shortly after, the woman calling herself the Professor took him into a luxury car he dared not even imagine, brought him into a residence like an ancient imperial palace, introduced him to big figures he could not even see on the internet, and finally, showed him the woman he would remember for the rest of his life.

The man named “Yu Fu” walked onto a completely different path of life from then on, starting a life he dared not even dream of.

In the years that followed, he often wondered—what was the price for all of this?

This doubt remained unresolved even years later when he met the Professor again, seeing the woman who seemed completely unaffected by time.

At that time, she only told him meaningfully that he would know one day.

Yu Fu had been waiting for that day, because he knew that all of fate’s gifts were marked with a price from the very beginning.

Nothing in the world could be obtained out of thin air; something always had to be spent.

He waited day after day, year after year.

“Professor, is this the price?”

The man on the bed stood straight.

His tall frame nearly hit the ceiling, but Yu Fu seemed completely unaware of these abnormalities.

He lowered his head, his crimson eyes staring fixedly at the woman by the window.

The smell of blood began to spread in the bedroom, and even the lights turned crimson.

A chaotic and dangerous aura was brewing.

But the witch sitting by the window did not even raise her head, still speaking in that incredibly cold tone: “I said, this was not the result I wanted. You should have had a more reasonable ending. Unfortunately, plans change…”

She closed the book she had finally finished and placed it gently on the table beside her.

“Those madmen are in a hurry, and the time left for me is very short. There is no other way; this project must end here.”

“Hahaha… because of a reason like that?”

Yu Fu covered his face with hands sporting sharp nails.

Large amounts of blood and tears flowed through the gaps of his fingers, dripping onto the collapsed bed below and instantly emitting a puff of blue smoke.

His voice was hoarse, sounding more like a wail: “Because of a bullsht reason like that? You fcking made me… made me eat her? Hahahaha, crazy! You are just like me, all of you are f*cking crazy, hahahaha! You all deserve to die! All of you deserve to die!!”

Before his voice finished echoing, Yu Fu—who had unconsciously returned to an adult state but with muscles bulging like a giant—stepped down, shattering the floorboards as he lunged frantically toward the Professor.

“Then I will eat all of you too!”