Deep Crimson
Translator: Cinder Translations
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Inside the lighthouse.
The flame in the center burned fiercely, and Su An, who had just woken up, was hiding alone in the corner, his tall frame curled into a ball. His body was covered in bandages, and marks from the bindings were everywhere.
Fortunately, he wasn't very sensitive to pain.
Even the huge claw marks on his abdomen, just below his ribs, only caused him to furrow his brow slightly.
He kept his head low, occasionally glancing toward the half-open stone door.
He was waiting for Su Xiaoxiao.
Before leaving, his sister had whispered in his ear that she would be back soon.
In Su An's world, there were only two kinds of people: his sister, and everyone else.
She was his only family.
She was also the only person who understood him.
They even had a set of communication methods that outsiders couldn't comprehend. Contrary to the impression others had of him as foolish, only his sister knew how extraordinary her brother truly was.
He possessed a unique ability that others couldn't imagine.
Empathy.
But not the simple, human-to-human empathy.
He could empathize with any living thing, diving deep into their feelings to understand them, their situation, and their state of mind at that moment.
Whether the other was a fierce tiger or an inconspicuous wild grass on the roadside.
Su Xiaoxiao had discovered her brother's ability by accident.
When he was very young, Su Xiaoxiao had taken him to an ocean park to watch a dolphin show. The whole performance was lively and exciting, but after the show, Su Xiaoxiao suddenly realized that her seemingly dumb brother was actually crying.
At that time, he could still express some disjointed sentences. He cried and told her, "Sister… those big fish are so pitiful, they're still hungry."
In another instance, Su An carefully picked up a flower that he had accidentally stepped on, very seriously telling himself, "It got scared and hurt."
The most thrilling incident happened at the zoo.
Su Xiaoxiao wasn't paying attention for a moment, and her brother, Su An, fell into the tiger enclosure. Immediately, several tigers surrounded him.
But they didn't attack until a large tiger, full of power, approached from afar. Its muscles in the forelegs looked like they were about to explode.
This tiger was clearly the leader of the pack.
If not for the visitors and staff desperately trying to stop her, Su Xiaoxiao, with reddened eyes, almost jumped in.
But surprisingly, this fierce beast froze when it neared Su An. Then, everyone present witnessed an unbelievable scene.
The seven or eight-year-old Su An wobbled toward the tiger and treated it like a domestic cat. First, he scratched its ears, then patted its head.
In the next second, the tiger nudged its head forward and actually pressed its massive head into Su An's arms, rubbing against him while making a sound similar to human sobbing.
Afterward, while sitting in the back of the car on the way back to the villa with his sister, Su An finally spoke. "Sister, that big cat said this wasn't its home." He lowered his head, pinching his fingers, and in a very soft voice added, "It said it wants to go home."
It was at this moment that Su Xiaoxiao finally realized that her brother wasn't the useless person others thought he was, but rather someone entirely beyond their comprehension.
In the time that followed, Su Xiaoxiao tried to understand the world her brother saw in her own way, gradually realizing that, in his eyes, everything didn't look the same as it did in hers.
What he saw seemed more like the "essence".
This term was something Su Xiaoxiao had applied based on her understanding. Su An would assign complex and bizarre numbers to things he was interested in, like his drinking cup or the potted plants on the windowsill.
Su Xiaoxiao once even sought out a cryptographer to decipher the numbers her brother used to describe the world, but in the end, they failed.
Before leaving, the cryptographer subtly hinted that the numbers her brother arranged were chaotic logical behaviors without conscious intention and held no actual meaning, so there was nothing to decode.
But Su Xiaoxiao didn't take it to heart. After giving the cryptographer some money, she had the butler escort him out.
By this point, she had already noticed that her brother's perception of people was also strange.
In his subconscious, he would categorize everyone in a way similar to colors.
The depth of the color varied.
For example, Su Xiaoxiao tested this with different people. A newborn baby, in Su An's judgment, was pure white. As a person grew older and gained more experience, the color would deepen.
The family's servant was white, while the butler was white with a slight grey tint.
Su Xiaoxiao even brought a murderer, someone with multiple lives on his conscience, to see how her brother would judge him. In Su An's eyes, the murderer appeared a faint red.
Su Xiaoxiao boldly guessed that the purer and simpler a person was, the lighter their color appeared. The more complicated and dangerous a person was, the deeper the color in her brother's perception.
From white to red, the deeper the color, the more she had to be cautious.
And this ability was incredibly useful in nightmares. It could be said to function as a human radar, capable of seeing through any disguise.
No matter how well you disguised yourself, how natural, innocent, or pure you seemed, it would all be useless in Su An's eyes.
The only downside was that, due to some issues in expression, Su Xiaoxiao couldn't fully understand her brother's descriptions. Moreover, her brother's abilities often presented problems in tasks that even she couldn't grasp.
Like with this old woman.
When they first met, Su Xiaoxiao hinted to her brother to investigate her. At that time, the old woman appeared as white with a slight grey tint in Su An's eyes, much like the butler.
But a moment later, her brother gave a completely different answer: the old woman had turned from white with grey to pure white.
No, according to Su An, it was even more than pure white… it was… colorless?
Her brother's judgment on a baby was pure white. Could this old woman be worse than a baby?
She couldn't understand.
The motorcycle girl was white with a grey tint, the rock-climber Liang Long was white with a hint of red, and then there was Chen Ran, who was an extremely rare deep crimson!
This result shocked Su Xiaoxiao.
She had never seen anything like it. But based on her sources, she learned some information about nightmares and the players involved in them.
There was the name of an organization.
It was called Deep Crimson.
The people within it referred to themselves as disciples.
Due to survivor bias, very few people knew about the existence of this organization, but those who had encountered them and survived all gave eerily consistent evaluations.
Madmen!
(End of the Chapter)
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Translated 4 Series, 1.65K+ Chapters and 2.01M+ Words.