It was an unremarkable night, and as always, he attended the banquet of the aristocrats.

  Although seated at the same table, he could only py the role of a smiling attendant, toasting and fttering.

  When reprimanded and lectured, he had no way to talk back.

  Coming from the underground society, he was never truly trusted by the aristocrats.

  Many treated him with polite courtesy on the surface while secretly regarding him as an “ungrateful dog.”

  As long as he remained an obedient tool, he could continue sitting at this table.

  But the moment he lost their trust, he would be cast aside—or even served on the table himself.

  Precisely because he came from the lower css, he harbored a deep sense of both inferiority and pride when facing those born into privilege.

  This mix of inferiority and pride became twisted to the extreme under the weight of the aristocrats' humiliation, filling his heart with a searing rage and resentment, like a fire of poison consuming him from within.

  He felt that his career and life had reached an invisible yet undeniable ceiling.

  With personal effort alone, achieving true social mobility within his lifetime was an impossible task.

  He analyzed the reasons day and night—sometimes bming the environment, sometimes bming his background, and sometimes even bming his wife.

  Yes, he even resented his wife, and this thought was not entirely without basis.

  In Xianshui City, there was a politician named Ying Lingyun, who was said to have come from a simirly humble background.

  He was around the same age and had even dabbled in unsavory underground activities in the past.

  However, in stark contrast to him, that politician had managed to attach himself to the daughter of the Zhu family, a local cn of hidden wealth, during his youth.

  By living off her, he forcibly climbed the social dder and successfully entered the political arena, where everything went smoothly for him.

  Even the bck marks left by his past involvement in underground society had no impact on his political career.

  Many of the same local elites who looked down on him would go out of their way to curry favor with that politician—someone who, in the past, had trampled on him like an insignificant nobody.

  They came from the same grassroots background, so why was the other able to rise effortlessly while he could only endure humiliation in silence?

  The rage and resentment in his heart twisted and swelled until it finally erupted, shing out at the wife who had accompanied him from the countryside to the city.

  This was the true reason behind the dramatic shift in his parents’ retionship after Jin Yu graduated from elementary school.

  That night, after the banquet ended, he staggered along the road home, reeking of alcohol and humiliation.

  Just then, a figure wearing a silver mask appeared before him like a ghost.

  That was the night his fate changed.

  "Do you desire power?"

  "...Power, you say?"

  "A power beyond authority, wealth, fame, and lineage—one that effortlessly transcends such trivialities, one beyond mortal comprehension..." The stranger's voice whispered in his ear like a devil's murmur.

  "True power..."

  To an ordinary person, those words would have sounded like utter madness.

  Yet, inexplicably, he understood—and he believed.

  Once he agreed, he would cease to be human, forever bound to sustain himself on human souls.

  And yet, even this, he understood and accepted without question.

  That voice carried an inexplicable, bewitching power, compelling him to bypass doubt and hesitation entirely.

  He began to seriously consider whether to accept the power being offered to him.

  What a joke—how could he possibly hesitate when such an opportunity was handed to him on a silver ptter?

  Without the slightest doubt, he nodded.

  From that night on, he was no longer human. He was a Oddities.

  As a Oddities, he began preying on the aristocrats who had humiliated him in the past, as well as the overlooked and forgotten outcasts of society.

  To avoid official investigations, any ordinary person seeking revenge against the elite would be meticulous about covering their tracks, making deaths appear as accidents or disappearances whenever possible.

  But his approach was the complete opposite.

  Driven by vengeance and emboldened by his newfound power, he deliberately left behind horrific crime scenes where the victims were torn apart beyond recognition—forcing the aristocrats to live in constant fear, never knowing who would be next.

  At the same time, he could not fully abandon his past ambitions and desires.

  He still longed to achieve social mobility under his human identity.

  To that end, he sought out a nightclub owner—someone with immense influence and deep connections within the local upper css—and forced her into submission.

  Choosing a nightclub owner as his "partner" might seem strange at first gnce, but in reality, he had two clear reasons for doing so.

  First, the nightclub owner held such powerful influence and connections because she possessed incriminating secrets on many of the local elites.

  This was an "open secret" among the upper css.

  Having spent his life being controlled by others due to his own weaknesses, the Shadow Swap Oddities was now desperate to switch roles—to be the one holding leverage over others instead.

  Second, he was already a regur at this nightclub and had taken a particur interest in one of its workers.

  He wanted to secure exclusive "ownership" of her as soon as possible.

  To achieve this, he had no qualms about revealing his monstrous form to the nightclub owner.

  The one he had set his sights on was the youngest girl in the nightclub.

  The Shadow Swap Oddities had a perverse inclination toward young girls.

  In the past, when other aristocrats brought him to this nightclub for entertainment, the first one he chose was this little girl.

  At first, it was merely for the thrill.

  But after forcing the girl to remove her mask and seeing her true face, he immediately fell in love with her.

  From that moment on, every time he visited the nightclub, he would always choose her.

  He even brought outfits tailored to her size for her to wear or produced hairpins and other accessories from who knows where to carefully dress her up.

  Jin Yu, knowing that nightclub employees had the right to refuse a guest’s request to remove their mask, used this rule as the foundation for a pn to frame her father.

  However, it turned out that most of the aristocratic guests simply didn’t care about such rules—breaking them bore no consequences.

  As for what transpired between the Shadow Swap Oddities and the girl during those nights, Patrol Lu—who was interrogating him and reading his surface thoughts—did not eborate to us.

  However, he did mention that the Shadow Swap Oddities did not seem to have completely lost his humanity.

  He still felt a shred of guilt as a human—for beating his wife and daughter in the past, for the countless murders he had committed as a monster, and for the families he had destroyed.

  Beyond that, he harbored a great deal of sorrow and regret for the hardships he had endured throughout his life—sorrows that no one else could ever truly understand.

  He confessed all of these things to the frail and timid little girl as if making a confession to a nun, and he demanded that she hold him like a mother cradling her child throughout the process.

  Like a child, he whimpered and clung to her, even burying his face against her chest as if he were an infant seeking comfort.

  Forced to reveal these secrets under Patrol Lu’s spell, the Shadow Swap Oddities looked as if his deepest, most humiliating internet search history had just been projected onto a giant screen for a public audience.

  His eyes were bloodshot with rage, and he cursed furiously, "You bastard… you absolute bastard!"

  Zhu Shi’s face went bnk, her brain clearly short-circuiting.

  After a long pause, she finally managed to squeeze out a single word:

  “…Huh?”

  “Well, it’s not entirely incomprehensible,” Patrol Lu mused with a sigh.

  “Since ancient times, men have had two great fantasies. One is to y down their lives for justice and ideals, spilling their blood for a grand cause. The other… is to be unconditionally loved and forgiven in the arms of a pure young girl.”

  He continued with a reflective tone, “A lot of men, when faced with heartbreak, fantasize about seeking maternal comfort from girls younger than themselves. For example, back in the day, I used to…”

  Seeing such a well-dressed, dignified-looking man make such an empathetic statement, Zhu Shi’s gaze toward Patrol Lu grew increasingly disdainful, while Ma Zao quietly and subtly distanced herself from him.

  I tactfully interrupted him, “Patrol Lu, have you been reading too much of the Shadow Swap Oddities’ surface thoughts? It seems like your mindset is getting a little… influenced.”

  “...Ahem!”

  Patrol Lu snapped out of his trance, hastily coughing twice before saying, “My apologies, I got off track. It seems this interrogation glove does have some side effects—prolonged reading of someone’s thoughts really can mess with your own. That was dangerous; I nearly got influenced by this perverted lolicon.”

  Zhu Shi gave him a sideways gnce.

  “Sure, excessive use of mind-reading can lead to being affected by the target… but in your case…”

  “You all don’t understand anything!” The Shadow Swap Oddities, seemingly desperate to salvage some dignity, began spewing an unbearable, twisted argument.

  “Every mature woman was once a young girl. If you can’t love young girls, that means you can’t love a complete person—”

  “Oh, shut the hell up!”

  Before he could continue, Patrol Lu seemed to activate some kind of spell through the hand gripping the Shadow Swap Oddities head.

  The tter immediately contorted in pain, unable to speak another word.

  Not only that, but the Shadow Swap Oddities' entire body underwent a drastic transformation.

  His monstrous, devil-like form rapidly shrank, reverting to his human shape, which was only about 1.7 meters tall.

  After seeing him in his grotesque form for so long, suddenly watching him turn back into a human felt strangely jarring.

  Moreover, the silk robe he had been wearing was completely incinerated by my fmes, leaving him without a single piece of clothing.

  Now, he was stark naked, bound to the tree trunk by fiery restraints—a truly unsightly scene.

  “My power…!” he cried out in disbelief.

  “Hmm… it looks like you’ve been rejected by your Heart Seed,” Zhu Shi observed with a piercing gaze before delivering her verdict.

  “Although earlier, Ma Zao forcibly pulled back the Heart Seed that was trying to leave you, that doesn’t mean it has accepted you again. The only reason your monster form didn’t immediately colpse is simply that the Heart Seed hasn’t completely escaped yet.”

  “But just like what happened just now—if any external force applies the right amount of pressure, your monster form will pop like a bubble and never return again.”

  The Shadow Swap Oddities’ expression was one of utter devastation, as if his entire world had just crumbled before his eyes.

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