Chapter 145: The Ghost in the Shadows

Inside the wooden cabin of the Survival Space, Ethan severed the spatial frequency with a flick of his wrist.

The azure interface dissolved into mist. He turned his head toward the side wall, where the translucent surveillance screen projected a live spatial feed from the anchor point embedded in Century Skyline.

The slender silhouette that had been lurking on the periphery of the estate was no longer near the garden hedges.

While Ethan had been speaking with the women in the air-raid shelter, the figure had quietly emerged from the darkness of the subterranean crawlspace and was now moving deliberately down the central corridor of the villa’s ground floor.

Ethan’s dark eyes narrowed into cold, calculating slits.

’Time to see who you really are.’

He had waited five full days for his body to heal and his spiritual pool to replenish. Now that his chest wounds were sealed, his energy stood at over twelve thousand points, and his upgraded Time Stop was ready to deploy, he possessed zero reason to remain passive while a stranger rummaged through his designated safehouse.

Focusing his intent on the spatial coordinates of the villa’s living room, Ethan stepped into the void.

Shhhk.

The air in the grand salon displaced with a faint, velvet whisper.

Ethan materialized in the shadowed recess between two towering marble pillars, his boots making zero impact on the polished stone floor.

Silver moonlight poured through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long, pale beams across the dusty expanse of the luxury living room. Broken crystal from an overturned chandelier glittered like diamonds in the pale wash, while the heavy leather couches stood draped in thick shadows. The mansion was tomb-silent, the quiet so profound that the gentle rustle of the night wind through cracked glass sounded like running water.

At that exact second, soft, feather-light footsteps padded into the salon from the service hallway.

The girl took two steps into the moonlight and froze dead in her tracks.

Ethan stood five paces away, tall, broad-shouldered, and completely motionless, his dark gaze pinned directly onto her face.

For the space of a single heartbeat, neither of them breathed.

The girl looked barely twenty years old. She wore a faded floral dress that hung loosely over her remarkably slender frame, its hem stained with dark urban soot. Her long, ink-black hair cascaded down past her shoulder blades in slightly tangled, unruly waves, with fine specks of plaster and dust clinging to the strands. Her clothing and scuffed canvas shoes gave every indication of someone who had spent weeks crawling through ruined drainage pipes and hollowed-out basements.

Clutched in her right hand was a stale, moldy heel of wheat bread, half of it already torn away.

She had clearly been attempting to scavenge food in complete silence when the sudden displacement of air revealed a towering man standing right in her path.

Raw, suffocating terror flared in her wide eyes.

"Who’s there?!"

Her voice came out in a sharp, trembling gasp that barely rose above a whisper.

She took a panicked, stumbling step backward, her heel catching the edge of a Persian rug.

The scrap of dry bread slipped from her numb fingers, bouncing off the polished parquet floor with a tiny, hollow thud.

Her hands flew instantly to the collar of her floral dress, clutching the coarse fabric tightly against her throat as her knuckles turned stark white. Her breath came in rapid, shallow gasps, her pupils dilated until they swallowed the dark irises.

"Stay back!" she stammered, her voice shaking violently as she pressed herself against the cold wood of the hallway doorframe. "Don’t... don’t come any closer!"

Ethan did not move an inch.

He kept his hands resting loosely at his sides, adopting a relaxed, non-threatening posture. He could read the extreme tension coiling through her muscles; she was wound like a clock spring, trembling violently and ready to bolt into the dark at the slightest aggressive twitch.

Instead of advancing, he quietly studied her face in the moonlight.

Her facial structure was exceptionally delicate~a high, aristocratic bridge to her nose, a sharply defined lip line, and large, expressive eyes that held an innate elegance despite the grime smudging her cheekbones. Her skin was unnaturally pale, bearing the translucent, sickly cast of someone who had spent months deprived of sunlight, balanced nutrition, and fresh air.

Yet beneath the sheer panic currently gripping her features, Ethan caught an unmistakable trace of quiet, stubborn resilience in the set of her jaw.

It was an expression he recognized instantly.

It was the exact same aristocratic pride and unyielding grit he had seen in Victoria when she had stood on the balcony, prepared to leap to her death rather than submit to the scavengers.

Before he could speak, a sharp, crystalline chime sounded in his mind.

A translucent golden panel flashed across his vision:

[ Ding! Gift Target Detected: Evelyn Sterling, 20 years old. Beauty Score: 95. ]

Ethan’s brow rose slightly in genuine surprise.

’Evelyn Sterling?’

The surname was an exact match.

His gaze swept over her once more, cataloging her features with newfound context. The high cheekbones, the slight upward slant of her dark eyes, and the graceful contour of her throat were not mere coincidences. Even buried beneath dirt, exhaustion, and an ill-fitting floral dress, the genetic inheritance was unmistakable. She possessed the same striking, high-class beauty that defined Victoria, merely framed by the softer, fresher lines of youth.

If she were given a week of hot meals, clean water, and proper rest, her presence would rival any high-ranking beauty he had encountered since the apocalypse began.

Finding an unawakened 95-point gift target hiding in the shadows of Century Skyline was entirely outside his calculations.

Ethan’s eyes dropped to the stale crust of bread lying on the floorboards between them, then rose back to the terrified girl shivering against the doorframe.

She was starving, physically exhausted, and completely terrified by his sudden appearance out of thin air.

Ethan kept his expression calm and his voice completely level, devoid of hostility.

"I’m not going to hurt you."

The girl flinched at the sound of his voice, her fingers digging deeper into her collar, but she didn’t run.

Ethan stood his ground, letting the silence settle between them while a dozen questions clicked into place within his mind.

The matching surname explained why Victoria had guarded the crawlspace with such desperate panic. But it opened an even deeper puzzle.

What exactly was Evelyn to Victoria~a daughter, a younger sister, or a niece? And why in the world had Victoria abandoned her in a pitch-black cellar while following him into the shelter without uttering a single word?