Everyone Is Non-Human Except Me [Rebirth] Chapter 2

“Eh? Isn’t that someone from thatThousand Cuts Research Institute? What’re they doing out here so late?” The guy riding in front chatted casually as he picked up speed, oddly at odds with the life-or-death urgency of the situation. “Do you know who they’re chasing?”

Wei Huan gave an awkward but polite smile. “Me.”

“Oh.” The guy turned around. Two seconds passed.

“WHAT THE F—?!”

“Less talking, more driving, brother. This is heaven’s way of testing you.” Wei Huan babbled nonsense while turning to check behind them. The convoy of vehicles was closing in fast. A massive billboard up ahead was switching ads, currently displaying some low-energy synthetic food.

As the demon clans grew stronger, they increasingly pushed humans out of the food chain and resource pool, forcing humanity to turn to technology just to survive.

The ad’s background music was a hard-hitting electronic remix of Horse Racing. The tempo was so intense it gave Wei Huan a headache. Images flashed in his mind—black rooms, magic arrays, magnetic fields, and blood spilled across the floor, nearly dried.

“D*mn it. First day on a mission and I run into this crap.”

Wei Huan, who had an oddly good attitude in all situations, asked out of habit, “What mission?”

“Oh cr*p.” The boy suddenly clapped a hand over his mouth. “Did I just say ‘mission’? I wasn’t supposed to say that.”

Wei Huan’s mouth twitched. “…Whatever makes you happy.”

A group of barefoot, dirty kids dashed by, nearly colliding with them, clutching mechanical parts scavenged from who-knows-where. The billboard changed again—this time showing the slogan:
“Endangered Species Protection Day.”

Dodging the children, the rider muttered again, “Protect what, exactly? Humans can’t even protect themselves, and now we’ve got a d*mn protection day.”

Wei Huan didn’t reply. He and this human boy stood on completely different sides. In the eyes of most demons, humans were just another link in the food chain. Back in the early days when the demon race took power, most leaders were peace-oriented and chose to recognize humans as equals. But as internal demon conflicts worsened, and humans grew dissatisfied with being subjugated, friction turned into conflict, and conflict into war.

Back when Wei Huan was still alive, the conservative human party held power. They had signed a temporary peace treaty with the demon nations. But under that peaceful facade, tensions seethed.

Wei Huan might’ve been a carefree type, but he was never clueless. Humans and demons had feuded for centuries. His parents died in the war, and he himself died trying to keep the peace. Yet he never once hated ordinary humans.

Most of them were just sacrifices to a greater conflict.

He sighed quietly. As his gaze swept over the distant clock tower, he caught sight of the digital date on the corner of a display.

His heart skipped a beat.

He grabbed the motorbike kid’s shoulder. “The last counterattack—wait, I mean, when was the human assault war?”

Startled, the kid wobbled the bike into an S-curve. “The assault war? That was… seven years ago, right? I was still in elementary school. Been a long time since we had a war.”

Wei Huan’s heart beat faster and faster. His mind spun in chaos.

Seven years…

Had he really only just revived after a full seven years?

Wei Huan clutched the boy’s shoulder again. The wind was too loud, so he raised his voice. “You said it’s been a long time since the last war. What’s the situation now? Did humans win?”

“No way!” the boy shouted back. “Win? Now the ruling party in Fanzhou is just a puppet regime controlled by demons. Humans are suffering like h*ll right now!”

So much had changed while he was gone? Wei Huan asked again, “Humans—I mean, is Song Chengkang still the Prime Minister?”

“Song Chengkang?” The boy paused, then seemed to remember. “Him? He stepped down ages ago! Don’t even know how many successors we’ve had since. The current puppet party… eh, forget it.”

So the “puppet party” meant a human government stripped of real power, manipulated by demons. What about the conservatives? The radicals who used to shout about fighting demons—where had they gone?

His thoughts were interrupted by a sharp whiz past his ear—something grazed him and smacked right into the kid’s helmet with a loud clang. It was too fast to dodge.

“F—!!” the boy swore.

“They’ve got weapons,” Wei Huan said, glancing back. As expected, the pursuers now raised guns, aiming right at him.

“You got anything that can stop bullets?”

“Nope.” The kid’s voice was shaking. “No way—they’re really gonna shoot?!”

“If I handed you a gun, would you shoot?”

“I wouldn’t dare! I wouldn’t dare!”

“…Wow. You’re a real champ.” Wei Huan took a deep breath and spotted a narrow alleyway ahead. At its mouth was some kind of late-night barbecue stall or shop. “Hey, hey—turn into that alley!”

The motorbike swerved sharply, its frame nearly scraping the ground. Seizing the chance, Wei Huan stretched out his arm and grabbed a small folding table in front of the barbecue stall. With a quick fold of the legs, he used it to block the incoming bullets.

“You’re so clever!”

“Your riding skills aren’t bad either—solid performance from a veteran,” Wei Huan bantered while inspecting the tabletop. The bullets seemed unusual; the marks they left were small, different from standard bullets.

“Wait a sec, this alley…”

Wei Huan’s breath that had just been released was sucked right back in. “Don’t tell me it’s a dead end—if it is, I’m jumping off right now to end it all.” Maybe he’d respawn at a checkpoint.

“No, it leads to a main road. I’m just worried they’ll be blocking the other side!” Right after he said that, sirens from the pursuit team blared at the alley’s other end. Sure enough, they were being cornered.

The view wasn’t clear, but Wei Huan spotted several one-meter-tall metal trash bins near the left wall up ahead, with a half-meter-wide discarded wooden plank resting atop them.

“This way!” Wei Huan leaned left, swung his arm, and hurled the folding table at the first trash bin under the wooden plank. Thud—the bin toppled over, the long wooden board lost its balance and tilted toward them, one end landing on the ground, forming a ramp.

“Smart!” the rider twisted the throttle hard, heading straight for the makeshift ramp Wei Huan had created. “Hold on tight!”

Wei Huan and the bike soared into the air, drawing an arc mid-flight. They cleared the squad of pursuit vehicles guarding the alley’s mouth and landed more than ten meters away.

“Holy cr*p! That was awesome!” The boy on the bike crouched low and accelerated like mad, leaving the others far behind.

“Low thrill tolerance…” Wei Huan mumbled. “If you could fly, you’d probably die from joy.”

The wind roared past them, drowning out Wei Huan’s muttering. The boy rambled on, “There’s a really hidden road up ahead—if we take that, they definitely won’t catch us. Oh right, I saw your clothes… That logo looks like it’s from that d*mn research institute. What are you, anyway? Why are they chasing you?”

“Opened my eyes and got dropped into a kill-on-sight scenario—I’m panicking too, y’know. Not even a mission-assigning NPC…” Wei Huan, a gamer to the bone, suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck. Reaching back, he pulled out a syringe. “What the h*ll?!”

His vision blurred. Before he could make sense of it, he passed out, slumping forward onto the other boy’s back, still gripping the needle.

***

Wei Huan had a dream.

In the dream, he wasn’t wearing a school uniform, just a black cap, disguised in human form in a chaotic slum.

Wait a minute—wasn’t this the Dark Zone?

He walked casually among a group of humans, indistinguishable from them. In a place like this, there’d be no demon detectors anyway. The dream was split by flickering lights, like shards of a shattered mirror, reflecting strange and dazzling scenes.

A human boy grabbed his wrist. He had blue hair, similar to the mermen at Shangshan College, but not quite the same. The boy dragged him into a basement, filled with humans swaying to music, holding vividly colored liquids—humans called it “alcohol.”

Demons didn’t drink alcohol—or rather, not the kind brewed by humans.

But Wei Huan had always been a rule-breaker. The more taboo something was, the more he wanted to do it.

The alcohol scrambled his senses. The only moment of clarity in the chaos was when someone yanked him away. His hazy gaze drifted upward from the hand gripping his arm: a wide black coat, a peek of dark red school uniform beneath, pale neck, and higher…

It was a face more beautiful than any human or demon he had ever seen. Perfect in every way—except it never smiled.

[“Trespassing in a restricted area—do you want us both to get punished?”]

He jolted awake.

Wei Huan opened his eyes, feeling strangely empty, like something was missing.

He had been to the Dark Zone before. And not just him—that cold guy had come to drag him back. But no matter how hard he tried, Wei Huan couldn’t recall the moments between meeting that guy and being punished back at school. Just… blank.

Suddenly, the door opened.

“Hey, he’s awake!”

It was a familiar voice—the motorbike kid. Wei Huan looked up, about to sit up, but the boy grinned and dragged over a chair, straddling it next to the bed. “Don’t get up yet. I called Leah to check on you, make sure nothing else is wrong.”

“Leah?” Wei Huan asked, confused. But the person soon entered the room: a pretty, short-haired girl with brown hair carrying medical equipment. “That’s me. I’m the doctor.”

She didn’t look like a doctor—no lab coat, just a black crop top and shorts.

While the pretty female doctor examined him, Wei Huan, with nothing else to do, raised his chin at the motorbike kid. “Hey, you still haven’t told me your name.”

“Me?” The boy smiled brightly, flashing a row of white teeth that contrasted against his tanned skin. “Call me Ah Zu.” He rested his chin on the back of the chair. “And you?”

“Wei—” It slipped out, but Wei Huan suddenly realized it might be reckless to reveal his identity so easily to a human he’d only met twice. So he changed course mid-sentence. “Wei Heng.”

Wei Huan recovered fast. Ah Zu didn’t notice a thing. “Wei Gui Wei?”

Wei Huan nodded. “En, Heng as in eternal.”

“Then I’ll call you Ah Heng.”

Leah packed away her instruments with a flat expression. “Your condition is pretty much the same as when you were unconscious.” She turned to Wei Huan, tone cold and serious. “You’d better be honest about where you came from.”

Wei Huan’s heart skipped. Had they found out? But even he didn’t know this body’s origin—how could he explain?

“What do you mean…” At this point, he could only play dumb.

Leah crossed her arms and raised her right eyebrow. “Your body is… highly unusual.” She pulled open a black box at the side of the bed. “These are the chips I removed from your body. There are twenty-three in total.”

Looking at the blood-streaked chips in the box, Wei Huan was momentarily speechless.

But the next second, Leah somehow produced a dagger and pressed it against Wei Huan’s throat. “Talk. What’s your connection to the people from Research Institute 137?”

Wei Huan raised his hands in surrender. “Hey hey hey, calm down, calm down. You’re such a pretty girl—why do you keep pulling knives on people…”

Ah Zu quickly grabbed Leah’s hand. “There must be some misunderstanding. I saw it with my own eyes yesterday—those 137 Research Institute people were chasing him. If I hadn’t shown up like a hero from the heavens, he’d be dead by now!”

Wei Huan was smiling on the outside, swearing inside. If you hadn’t snagged my clothes yesterday, why the h*ll would I have ended up on your d*mn bike?

Leah’s expression softened slightly, but she didn’t withdraw the knife. “You were wearing the experiment suit of Institute 137. But none of their test subjects have ever walked out alive. Every day before dawn, the only things that come out are truckloads of failed experiments being hauled to the graveyard.”

Wei Huan hadn’t realized the research institute was that kind of place.

So they used living people for experiments?

“You’re definitely not an ordinary human.” Leah flicked her wrist, sheathing the knife, and gave a cold laugh. “Whatever. I don’t have to do anything. You won’t live long anyway.”

Author’s note: Wei Huan, didn’t you say you wanted to die again? Wish granted.