Goddes: The Assassin Reborn

The Hypnotherapy Chair

Click.

The door opened, revealing an all-white room steeped in an almost unnatural calm. The walls were bare of any paintings, the floor gleamed like the surface of a frozen lake, and the air carried the faint scent of sandalwood burning in a distant corner. A black hypnotherapy chair lay at the far end of the room, in stark contrast to the sacred stillness radiating from everything around it. Beside it stood a black wooden desk, its corners bound in sturdy steel, facing a work chair of the same color.

"Fengyu, my head hurts again. Examine me."

A voice broke the silence. The young man finishing a report at the desk lifted his head. His face looked smooth, its jawline not yet stripped of the last traces of youth. Yet the eyes behind the silver-rimmed glasses perched on his high nose seemed to betray that innocence, sharp and far too mature. In his black irises, the reflection of a woman appeared so clearly, as though all of his attention had been drawn in the moment she arrived.

The woman leaned against the doorframe, her fingers massaging her temple. Her eyes were clear, shaded by thick lashes that gave off the gentleness of a young girl. Her pink lips were pressed together. Her face held the beauty of a noblewoman kept locked in a castle all day long, flawless. Her arms were bare below carelessly rolled-up shirtsleeves, revealing porcelain-smooth skin with faint blue veins beneath.

No one would believe that hands so lovely had ended hundreds of lives in the past year alone.

Ziye blinked several times, looking puzzled. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

"What exactly is going on in your head? It's all you've complained about all year." The man's low voice was calm. Fengyu blinked lightly before turning his attention back to the papers on his desk, as if her arrival were merely part of a routine he had long since memorized.

And that was exactly how it was. For the past three years, not a single week had passed without Ziye knocking on this door with the same complaint.

She walked without hurry toward the hypnotherapy chair beside Fengyu. Her boots made almost no sound on the white floor, a habit she had never been able to shake even when there was no one left to avoid. The moment she touched the cold leather cushion, she closed her eyes.

"How would I know? You're the expert."

Fengyu didn't answer right away. The pen in his hand stopped moving. He glanced at the woman who now lay half-curled in the chair, her face expressionless, her brows slightly furrowed. He let out a very quiet sigh, almost inaudible.

"Your wound?"

"Healed."

"What time did you get back last night?"

"Who knows. Three? Four?" Ziye didn't open her eyes. It had actually been an hour ago, which meant she had rushed here right after finishing her official work. "He talked a bit too much. I had to wait for him to finish giving a speech to his men before I could move."

"Do you have a heart now?"

"Maybe? I just couldn't bring myself to kill someone who was so enthusiastic."

Fengyu snorted, the closest thing to a laugh he could manage at an hour this early. He set down his pen, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose before putting them back on. It was a gesture he always made when he was weighing something.

Ziye was the best assassin in their organization. Even across this entire underworld, if she said she was the second best, no one would dare claim to be the first. Truthfully, it wasn't empty praise, nor a title she had given herself. It was a fact recorded in files, spoken of with great caution, and proven by her own actions. She never failed, never left behind a trace she didn't want left. People would only know it was her from the code she always left behind: "Zi."

Though she appeared to need nothing and no one, the truth was that Ziye still depended deeply on one person: Fengyu.

...

If anyone knew Ziye's background, they would surely ask the same question: why?

Lan Ziye was born the only daughter of the Lan family, one of the largest conglomerates in country Z. Her family's name was displayed on skyscrapers, on the logos of cargo ships, on plantations stretching all the way to the national border. She grew up with private tutors, personal chefs, and a bedroom larger than most people's houses. If she wished, she could have spent her whole life sitting in ballrooms and marrying the son of an equally prominent family.

Yet she chose a path entirely different. At eighteen, she vanished from her own graduation party and reappeared three months later in an organization whose name had never been recorded in any official document.

No one, Ziye herself included, could give a reasonable explanation.

Their meeting was neither unique, romantic, nor dramatic. At the time, Ziye had just finished her second mission and returned to headquarters with a bullet in her shoulder. She didn't come in through her usual route but through the very back door of the base. Without the slightest expression, she knocked on the door of a consultation room labeled "Psychiatrist," because it was the nearest room with its light still on. The young man with glasses inside looked at the blood dripping onto the white floor, then at the pale face of the one it belonged to, and finally said, very calmly, "I'm a psychiatrist, not a surgeon."

"I know," Ziye answered.

The man's lips twitched. "But I have a first aid kit."

"I know."

Those were the first two exchanges between them. And somehow, from that night on, Fengyu became the only person who stood at Ziye's side without feeling the need to step back.

Over the following three years, that man became everything she had never asked for. He helped plan every mission, analyzed the psychological profiles of targets down to their smallest habits, and became the voice in Ziye's ear whenever things veered off plan. Sometimes, when he had business elsewhere, he would leave warm soup on the small table in the corner of the room for the nights Ziye came home with an empty stomach.

Ziye never said thank you. Fengyu never asked her to.

They didn't need that.

...

"We'll start with basic relaxation," said Fengyu, rising from his work chair. He pulled a low stool beside the hypnotherapy chair. From this distance, the scent of sandalwood was stronger, mingled with something clean and cold that always clung to his clothes. "Breathe in. Hold. Release."

"I know how to breathe."

"You know how to kill without making a breath-sound. That's not the same as knowing how to breathe." Fengyu dimmed the lights with a flick of his finger on the wall panel. The white room instantly turned into a soft, silvery glow. "Just do it."

Ziye snorted, but her body obeyed. Her breath flowed deep, then slowly lengthened. Her shoulders, always tense, lowered bit by bit, like a burden finally given permission to be set down. Behind her eyelids, the darkness felt warm.

"How long has it hurt?"

"Since this morning."

"Where?"

"Here." She raised a finger to her left temple, then slid it behind her ear.

"Then it spreads to here. Like something pulling from the inside."

"Pulling?"

"Like..." Her brows furrowed. "Like something is calling me. But I can't catch the voice."

A moment of silence.

Fengyu didn't take notes right away. He simply sat there, looking at Ziye's face with an expression that was hard to read. His slender fingers tapped his knee twice, three times, then stopped.

"Since when have you felt it?"

"I told you, since this morning."

"I mean, since when did you first feel that you were being called?"

Ziye opened her eyes. "Why do you ask that?"

"A standard question."

"No, what kind of question is that? Maybe it's just a hallucination." She looked at him, noticing how his hands seemed slightly too stiff on his knees. "You look strange today."

"I'm not strange."

"You're looking at me like you're calculating something."

"I'm calculating your pulse."

"You haven't even touched my wrist."

Fengyu fell silent. That rarely happened. Usually this man had the right answer for every line Ziye threw at him, whether a subtle jab or a clinical fact delivered with a blank face. This time he only lowered his head slightly, the shadow of his lashes falling over the lenses of his glasses.

Ziye closed her eyes again. Maybe she was just too tired. Maybe Fengyu was too. They had both spent too long moving in the shadows, and now and then a person's mind simply needed room to breathe.

But the pain in her head did not ease. Instead, the pulling grew stronger. Faintly, behind the darkness of her eyelids, she heard something like the trickle of distant water. Like a wind carrying a scent she had never smelled before: wet wood, leaves, and something sweet and warm, almost like cake just taken out of the oven.

Strange.

Ziye had never paid attention to the smell of cake.

Suddenly, in a low voice, like a murmur that was never meant to be heard, Fengyu said, "Of course it hurts. I'm lost."

Ziye's eyes snapped open again.

"What do you mean?" Her brows lifted. At this point, a curiosity she rarely felt began to creep up, replacing the drowsiness that had wrapped around her.

Fengyu looked genuinely shocked by his own words. For a fraction of a second, an expression Ziye had never seen before crossed his face. A restrained panic, like a child who had just broken his mother's favorite glass. His eyes widened slightly, and his lips moved as if to pull back a sentence already spoken.

"It's nothing," he said quickly.

"You said you're lost."

"I said what?" In an instant, his face returned to calm. Too calm. The expression of someone trained for years to hide his thoughts, now using it on the one person he should never have needed to lie to. He pushed his glasses up and tried to explain in a flat tone far too smooth to be believed. "You misheard. But honestly, maybe..." He paused, then looked straight into Ziye's eyes. "Maybe there's another world you were meant to live in."

"Another world?"

"Just a figure of speech. Rest."

"Fengyu."

"Close your eyes."

"Fengyu, what—"

"Ziye."

Just one word, her own name. Yet the way he said it, so gentle, so reluctant, carrying something Ziye couldn't name, caught all her protests in her throat.

As if that were a signal he had been waiting for all along, the pull in her head turned into a current.

No longer calling, but dragging.

The white room began to c***k. Not literally, not with the sound of shattering glass like in those action movies, but like a painting blown by wind from the wrong direction. Its edges trembled and its colors blurred. The hypnotherapy chair beneath her back lost its texture. The white ceiling faded into something darker, deeper, like water.

"Fengyu!"

This was the first time she had felt anything so unreal. She tried to reach for something, but her fingers only closed around air. The figure of Fengyu seated on the low stool beside her slowly drew away, not because the man moved, but because Ziye herself was falling, hurtling backward across an immeasurable distance.

The last time she saw him, he was standing. His glasses had come off and were clutched in his hand. Without the silver frames, his gaze looked far more fragile, and it was fixed squarely on her.

Fengyu's lips moved, forming something.

Ziye heard nothing.

Then darkness.