The boy looked embarrassed and stammered, “I... I... I need to use the bathroom.”

One was scared to the point of wetting himself. Logan Sullivan was stunned for a moment, then burst out laughing like a complete rascal.

“There are still three hours until dawn,” Carter Shaw said. “My talismans can hold for at least five hours, so everyone can relax—if you need to use the bathroom, just hold it a bit longer and go out after sunrise. If anything tries to bite you, just pee on its head. Boy’s urine wards off evil. Even if it can’t kill them, at least it might give them a concussion.”

Zach Warren said softly, “I can keep watch...”

She hadn’t finished before Logan Sullivan interrupted her: “If something really happens, you won’t be able to handle it. I’ll take the second half of the night.”

He pulled a windproof lighter from his pocket. “Any ladies here mind secondhand smoke? If not, Officer Uncle needs a little pick-me-up.”

After being frightened out of their wits, everyone actually calmed down and relaxed. The students laughed and crawled back into their sleeping bags—maybe it was because Logan Sullivan made them feel so safe, or maybe they just weren’t fully awake.

Soon, the cabin quieted down again. Only the sound of skeletons rolling in the snow outside remained. Even Darrin Grant curled up in Logan Sullivan’s arms and closed his eyes, while Zach Warren sat in a far corner, leaning against the wall, lost in thought.

The messy beams of flashlight in the room all went out, leaving only the faint, gentle white glow from the talisman papers scattered on the door and walls.

Logan Sullivan stood by the window, feeling the draft from the crack Carter Shaw had pried open earlier. He simply leaned against it, blocking the thin gap with his back, and lit a cigarette.

When he’d been startled awake by the commotion outside the window, he’d actually noticed William Sherman’s gaze. But at the time, looking at William Sherman was too awkward, so he’d deliberately glossed over it.

Logan Sullivan was almost certain that William Sherman’s state at that moment wasn’t just being woken up or simple insomnia. That calm and contented expression, and the unusually complex, gentle look in his eyes, made anyone watching feel a pang in their heart. It was as if... the other person had been gazing at him, unblinking, for half the night.

If William Sherman was interested in him because he liked men, Logan Sullivan thought that was perfectly normal—he considered himself decent-looking, financially stable, at a suitable age—not too old, not too immature. Although he had a slight tendency toward machismo, he generally cared about others’ feelings, and he usually didn’t show his beastly temper to people he wasn’t close to. So, unless you spent a lot of time with him, people tended to think he had a great personality and was good at handling things.

But whether it was physical attraction, liking him as a person, or even love at first sight, Logan Sullivan didn’t believe anyone would stay up all night just to foolishly watch over someone else.

Logan Sullivan recalled the first time he met William Sherman.

He must have had a deep, tangled connection with William Sherman at some point, even if he himself didn’t know it.

But when could that have been?

Logan Sullivan was lost in thought for a long time. Only when his cigarette burned down to the end did he absentmindedly stub it out and, with no regard for public decency, flick it out the window crack. It landed right on the forehead of a jumping skull outside. The white bone instantly turned black, twitched twice on the ground, and stopped moving.

Before the age of ten, he was too young to understand anything, barely able to tell boys from girls. The biggest thing he’d done was throw rocks at someone’s window—basically negligible. But after he grew up a bit and became more aware, Logan Sullivan’s memories were clear and continuous. He remembered the cause and effect of every stage and every event, with almost no memory gaps or logical inconsistencies.

There were indeed some external forces that could alter a person’s memory, like hypnosis or a few secret techniques Logan Sullivan could name. But these usually just made the altered person automatically avoid recalling or scrutinizing those tampered memories—human experiences are extremely complex, and only the person themselves can truly sort out all the causal details.

For example, suppose someone had a minor car accident. When they recall it, they know it happened because they were late. Why were they late? Because they were constipated that morning and spent five extra minutes in the bathroom. Why constipated? Because they’d eaten too much fried food the day before and got “heated up.” Why eat so much fried food? Because a free coupon from a fast-food place was about to expire...

Trace it back further, and you’d get into how they got the coupon—was it given by someone else, or handed out on the street, and so on.

If any trivial detail in a memory is real, it should be able to withstand this kind of scrutiny and connection. No matter how clever someone is, they can’t possibly know everything about another person’s bowel movements, menstrual cycles, friendships, or random whims.

So any memory that’s been tampered with will have blurred details and, upon close examination, will feel unnatural.

Unfortunately, when it comes to these things, Logan Sullivan himself is an expert.

That’s why, from a young age, Logan Sullivan understood the fragility and importance of memory. After Darrin Grant gave him the Soulbound Order, the first lesson was to regularly use meditation to review and organize his memories. Logan Sullivan was sure he really didn’t know anyone like William Sherman.

So... either this good-looking, refined Professor Sherman was actually a stalker who’d been secretly in love with him all along—of course, as far as Logan Sullivan was concerned, that was basically impossible. If anything, it would be the other way around.

Or, this “William Sherman” was just a disguise, and he wasn’t an ordinary person at all.

If he couldn’t find anything, it meant the person was either truly ordinary, or truly extraordinary.

Three or four hours passed easily. As the sky in the east just began to lighten, before even the faintest hint of dawn had fully formed, the ghosts in the courtyard quieted down. One by one, they dropped to the ground as if the power had been cut, unable to move again. The strange, nameless fire in the distance had also, at some point, completely disappeared.

Logan Sullivan gently pushed open the door and went out into the yard to check. Once he was sure the sun was rising, dawn had broken, and the ghosts had gone home, he returned to the cabin, tiredly rubbed his face, crossed his arms, and leaned against the wall for a nap.

“Once it’s fully light,” he thought, “I have to find a chance to talk to William Sherman.”

Logan Sullivan fell asleep with this thought in mind.

Maybe it was because he’d been driving all day in the freezing cold, and hadn’t dared to relax before, but he was truly exhausted. Logan Sullivan accidentally fell into a deep sleep.

About an hour later, he was woken up by Holly Harlow.

Logan Sullivan found that someone had covered him with a blanket. Instinctively, his eyes searched for William Sherman, but before he could spot him, Holly Harlow’s words startled him.

Holly Harlow asked, “Chief Zhao, do you know where Zach Warren went?”

Chapter 33 Terra-Spike …

What?

Logan Sullivan’s nerves snapped. With this kind of shock, even if he were dead drunk, he should have sobered up, let alone just lightly asleep. But right now, his mind felt like it was wrapped in glue, and his eyelids were unbearably heavy.

“Zach Warren?” Logan Sullivan pinched the bridge of his nose hard, blinked his nearly glued-shut eyes, forced himself to sit up, and said in a daze, “I’ve only slept for less than an hour... wasn’t she just here?”

Holly Harlow studied him seriously for a moment.

She’d known Logan Sullivan for many years. Even when he was tired, he usually just rested his eyes or dozed lightly. Sleeping so soundly in the wilderness, surrounded by skeletons, had never happened to Logan Sullivan before—being careless and being clueless were two different things. Holly Harlow bent down and leaned in to sniff him.

Logan Sullivan: “Wha—”

“Don’t move.” Holly Harlow pulled off the blanket covering him, lifted a corner, carefully parted the fibers at the edge, and used her sharp, manicured nails to pick out a bit of brown powder from inside. She sniffed it, immediately understood, and said to Logan Sullivan, “You’ve been drugged.”

Dizzy and with ringing ears, Logan Sullivan felt like everyone’s voices were muffled. When he finally made out what Holly Harlow said, and realized that after all his years of hunting, he’d been pecked in the eye by a little bird he’d raised himself, all his thoughts condensed into two words: “Damn it!”

...The surge of anger came so fast that Logan Sullivan couldn’t even tell which was more infuriating: “Zach Warren actually drugged him,” or “the blanket wasn’t put on him by William Sherman.”

“Get me a bottle of mineral water,” Logan Sullivan said quietly to Holly Harlow, “cold.”

“There’s no hot water anyway.” Holly Harlow grabbed a bottle of mineral water, its outer layer already coated with a thin layer of ice, and shook it hard to break up the frozen chunks inside.