He deliberately smiled as he spoke: “Look, your mom really cares about you, and besides, your family’s situation is pretty good. The houses around here are expensive.”

“Is this really the time for you to discuss housing prices with me?”

Henry Bennett felt a bit helpless. After a while, he finally said in a low voice, “I spent the whole day outside today, trying to see if this world is actually real…”

“After all, I hadn’t gone out for a long time before this…”

“……”

When Grace Cooper heard this, she laughed, her beautiful eyes looking at Henry Bennett: “Still doubting whether there’s something wrong with yourself?”

Henry Bennett fell silent.

Yeah, compared to the world going crazy, it’s more reasonable to think that he himself had lost it…

“Believe in yourself, young man.”

Looking at his frowning, deep-in-thought expression, Grace Cooper couldn’t help but laugh, patting him on the shoulder as she said, “Doubting yourself instinctively is actually a reasonable and common reaction.”

“But after I take you to meet ‘him’, you won’t think that way anymore.”

“Him?”

Henry Bennett suddenly looked up: “Who is it?”

But Grace Cooper just gently put her index finger to her lips and shushed him, signaling that he didn’t need to ask more, then turned to look in a certain direction.

Only then did Henry Bennett realize that he had been walking with Grace Cooper for quite a while, but hadn’t seen her stop at a car by the intersection. Instead, they were heading toward a subway station.

Inside the subway station, no more trains would stop, but there were still many homeless people huddled in the corners.

The air was filled with the pungent smell of urine and a rotting stench from who knows where.

Henry Bennett had come here during the day and had marveled that even in the afterlife, so many people still had to squeeze onto the subway for work—it was truly a terrifying thing.

But now, following Grace Cooper back here, he noticed the lighting was harsh and pale, flickering from time to time due to unstable voltage. Every time a subway train sped past, the shadows reflected in the windows made it feel as if his body was being twisted or stretched.

The people around were dazed and sluggish, each with a zombie-like dullness and stupor.

Henry Bennett instinctively stuck close to Grace Cooper, watching as her gaze swept over the various people inside, as if she were admiring some kind of scenery.

They walked all the way to a homeless man who was sleeping with his head covered, and stopped.

Looking at the man who reeked so strongly, she smiled and said, “Hello.”

After a while, the homeless man slowly pulled down the blanket of indeterminate color covering his head, revealing only his eyes, staring blankly at Grace Cooper’s stunning face.

“Who are you?”

He asked in a low, sharp voice, almost like a child.

“Someone who gets paid to do things.”

Grace Cooper replied with a smile, “Someone paid me before to come do a rat-catching job.”

The man under the blanket was silent for a long time. Suddenly, he sat up abruptly, the filthy blanket sliding off him. He stared blankly at Grace Cooper: “Who’s the rat?”

Henry Bennett instinctively took a step back, full of caution.

But only now did he see clearly that the person under the blanket wasn’t some kind of monster, just an ordinary homeless man—thin, with only a slightly bulging belly, skinny limbs, skin a grayish-brown from years of malnutrition, surrounded by a mess of empty bottles. It seemed that Grace Cooper’s sudden arrival had made him nervous, and he shrank toward the wall, trembling.

The smile on Grace Cooper’s face grew even wider, as if she was carefully sizing up the homeless man before her, then she nodded lightly.

She opened her shoulder bag, took out a gun with a chilling aura, and casually shoved it into Henry Bennett’s hand, saying, “Kill him.”

“Kill him?”

Feeling the cold metal of the gun in his palm, Henry Bennett was truly shocked.

Grace Cooper nodded lightly, as if it were a trivial matter.

Henry Bennett turned to look at the homeless man, who seemed to have overheard their conversation and was now shrinking fearfully into the corner.

Still wearing a look of disbelief, he suddenly raised the gun, aimed at the homeless man’s chest, and pulled the trigger again and again.

“Bang” “Bang” “Bang” “Bang” “Bang”

Grace Cooper: “?”

Chapter 6: Aberrant Creatures

The sudden, violent gunshots even took Grace Cooper by surprise.

Handing a gun to someone who had just woken up and telling him to shoot an innocent homeless man—who could actually do that?

What she had intended to teach Henry Bennett was that, living in a foreign land, many things couldn’t be viewed with normal logic. One had to learn to see through others’ disguises, and even more, to be ruthless.

When facing these aberrant creatures, any hesitation or fear could get you killed.

So, after handing over the gun, if Henry Bennett had hesitated, asked a bunch of questions, she might have been a little annoyed, but it would have been a good opportunity to teach him.

After all, her own teacher had taught her the same way back then.

But Henry Bennett…

…he didn’t hesitate at all.

He took the gun, didn’t even ask for a reason to shoot, and pulled the trigger without a second thought, not stopping for a moment, as if he intended to empty the entire magazine.

……

……

“Is he dead?”

While Grace Cooper was still in shock and doubt, Henry Bennett was calmly staring at the homeless man, whose body was erupting in clouds of blood, his nerves taut.

When he first took the gun, faced with Grace Cooper’s order, he had actually hesitated.