[BL] Daily Disposable Persona

104: High School Student 12

"Happy birthday, Zong Yan."

The Lord of Time and Space stood over an expanse of empty sky. Behind him was an array of shadows, extending outward like a physical substance.

One of the shadows held the black-haired young man's waist and kept him securely in the air.

They hovered above the night-darkened city, and beneath their feet were countless flickering lights. The city had millions of inhabitants, lighting up the darkness with a dazzling array of blurry, gorgeous colors.

At this height the wind was powerful. It snatched at the hem of the gray-haired evil god's khaki trench coat and tossed the teen's longer black hair into his eyes.

Zong Yan wasn't a person who attached a lot of importance to his birthday.

A long time ago, before Grandma passed away, she always remembered to cook him a boiled egg on that day, waking up Zong Yan at dawn to eat it.

Sometimes a boiled egg was too boring, so Grandma poached it in a little bit of sweet wine. As she sat at the small, dingy table in the tube apartment, watching Zong Yan eat the egg bite by bite, she would tell him, "Eat it slowly, slowly..."

Zong Yan forgot about his birthday every year. It was his grandmother who remembered.

Even when Grandma was in the hospital, she struggled out of bed and borrowed the hospital kitchen to make a boiled egg for him to eat.

The nurses and aides in the hospital were kind. Grandma's hospital stay was like a bottomless pit for burning money, but the hospital waived a lot of the expenses, and everyone in the tube building helped by chipping in. Unfortunately, Grandma didn't survive the winter.

When Grandma was gone, no one celebrated Zong Yan's birthday again. Besides, he learned from the small metal box left by his grandmother that he was just an orphan she'd adopted. His birthday felt meaningless.

But as it turned out, even though there was no one left to observe his birthday, Zong Yan ended up remembering it every year.

On that day, every year, he went to visit the cemetery.

For Zong Yan, the word "birthday" didn't represent joy. It was a form of commemoration.

But today there was a man—no, an evil god—who told him "Happy birthday".

Of course, the great Yog-Sothoth was an all-knowing, all-seeing god. There was nothing an omniscient god didn't know. It was just a birthday, and it wasn't like Zong Yan had tried to hide the birth date on his ID card.

But... why would the Lord of the Gate remember the birthday of a tiny human? Why did he manipulate time to stop at the precise moment of midnight and say those words?

He even knew Zong Yan liked to look down at the darkened city from above.

Before Zong Yan upgraded the Child of the Wind card to Yun Zhong Jun, during the period just after Grandma's death, he used to go to the roof of the tube building every night after finishing his homework. Then he'd use the card and fling himself into the night sky, like a bird soaring freely in the air.

If Zong Yan were still the Lord of R'lyeh, it would make more sense. Maybe it stemmed from the fact that the three original pillar gods had stubbornly insisted Zong Yan was one of Azathoth's streams of consciousness.

He stared blankly at the Lord of the Gate, and once again he peered into an endless sweep of billions of brilliant spheres behind those chaos-colored eyes.

The evil god still had a smile on his face, but it wasn't the smile he usually wore, nor was it a contemptuous sneer with a hint of mockery. It wasn't even the smile of a far superior being who felt pleased, looking down from high above.