From Villain to Virtual Sweetheart: The Fake Heir's Grand Scheme(BL)-Chapter 641: When the Machine Felt Pain (part two)

Silas had been watching Micah from the moment the boy stepped into the auction hall.

From the upper level, hidden behind a decorative railing, Silas observed everything with the calm patience of a predator. His eyes followed Micah’s every movement, recording each expression, each careless smile, each small gesture as if storing data.

Micah looked relaxed in his disguise. He moved through the hall as if he belonged there, laughing with relatives, exchanging polite words with strangers, slipping easily into every conversation. His voice was light, his smile natural, his posture loose. No one suspected anything strange about him. No one guessed that the stunning silver-haired girl hid a male body beneath the disguise.

He fooled everyone.

Silas felt no admiration for that skill. He felt ownership. Micah was a secret meant only for him.

Silas had not approached him immediately. He preferred control. He always did. He had been waiting for the right moment, watching, calculating. He imagined stepping out of the shadows and standing directly in front of Micah, watching the boy’s expression collapse into panic.

He wanted to see it. The fear. The shock. The helplessness.

He planned to use that secret as a leash.

Once Micah realised he had been exposed, Silas would tighten the grip slowly. He would push him into private meetings, into explanations, into dependency. Not through violence, but through psychological pressure. That was cleaner. More elegant. More satisfying.

Silas also had another motive. He still wanted to test his reaction to Micah’s touch. Even after all this time, that detail disturbed him.

Silas despised physical contact. It was not a simple dislike... it was a pathological aversion. The idea of human skin made his stomach churn. Sweat, heat, breath... Every person was a walking reminder of his trauma.

He structured his life around avoiding it. Gloves. Disinfectant. Distance. Control.

Only two people had ever bypassed that barrier. His mother. And Micah.

That exception was unacceptable. He needed to understand it. He needed to test it again.

But something interfered with his carefully prepared plan. A pest.

Some foolish man at the auction had mistaken himself for something important. He thought he could touch Micah. He thought he had the right.

When Silas heard about it, a flicker of annoyance crossed his cold eyes. It was not jealousy in a normal sense. It was irritation at contamination.

Micah was already his anomaly. Someone else touching him was like smearing dirt over a controlled experiment.

Silas went to the scene immediately. It was not out of concern, but out of possession and control. He examined Micah’s ankle with his bare hand. The skin was warm, smooth, alive and yet Silas felt nothing. No nausea. No urge to withdraw. No internal alarm.

Instead, there was a quiet satisfaction. A sense of correctness. As if this contact followed a rule only his body understood.

His mood improved slightly, not into happiness, but into Stability.

Then everything collapsed.

When Silas returned to the second floor, a violent headache struck him without warning. The pain was sharp and crushing, as if something inside his skull were tearing itself apart.

His vision blurred. His balance faltered. And then the memories came.

They were not vague impressions or dreams. Full, detailed scenes flooded his mind. Different places. Different faces. Different lives. Different deaths.

They did not feel imagined. They felt remembered.

Silas had spent his entire life believing only in science. Everything had an explanation. Every phenomenon followed laws. Yet now he faced a problem that existed outside his system. An unscientific problem. One he could neither prove nor dismiss. It was like a physicist being forced to accept the existence of ghosts, being told the soul could travel through time.

Absurd. Impossible. And yet the memories were there. They were clear, consistent, logical in their terrible way. They formed a pattern he could not ignore.

Past lives. A repeated role. A story that reset itself.

The possibility that he was not an independent existence, but a character trapped in a narrative. Manipulated by a plot. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The irony was unbearable.

Silas had always believed he was the manipulator. The observer. The one who pulled strings.

Now he was forced to consider that he himself was nothing more than a pawn. The memories humiliated him. He wanted to reject them. He tried to label them as hallucinations. A neurological disorder. Stress-induced psychosis. Delusion. But something inside him resisted.

A deep instinctive certainty told him they were real. That certainty shattered the foundation of his identity. For the first time, Silas felt true fear. Not fear of danger. Fear of meaninglessness.

He needed more evidence. He needed proof. He went to the police station with one purpose.

To see Micah. To confirm whether reality itself had betrayed him. But instead, he encountered Clyde.

The moment their eyes met, Silas’s thoughts stopped. Completely stopped. It was as if all internal noise had been cut off.

Clyde’s gaze was calm, knowing and unsurprised.

Silas understood instantly. This man knew. With dread creeping through his mind, Silas asked, "Where is he?"

Clyde did not look confused. He did not hesitate. No. He had even expected it. That alone destroyed half of Silas’s remaining defences. A stranger, even an enemy, should not have understood the question so easily.

Then Clyde spoke. "How ironic. You are still the first. But does it matter? You no longer have the right to ask."

Those words shattered what remained of Silas’s rationality. They confirmed everything. Not only was the truth real. He was also too late.

The realisation hit him with brutal clarity. He had missed his chance. Not just in this life. In all of them.

He had been too focused on logic. Too obsessed with rational explanations. He had ignored every emotional contradiction.

Why Darcy’s touch had always made him uncomfortable. Why watching other men hurt Darcy had excited him. Why intimacy with Darcy had felt like punishment rather than love. Why the person he claimed to want most had always been treated like an object.

And why, when he extracted stem cells from Micah, the fake young master, was there no disgust at all?

He had ignored all these signs because they did not fit his theories. He had chosen logic over truth.

It was the stupidest decision of his existence.

Now, standing in the police station, Silas felt nothing explode outward. No shouting. No tears. No collapse. His psyche was too rigid for that.

He did not break loudly. He broke silently.

With his detached personality, he simply went empty. Like a machine whose core had been removed. He stood like a statue, staring into nothingness. The blow destroyed his ability to think clearly. His mind could no longer operate properly.

At last, he turned toward Luna Francis.

"Yes," he said flatly. "I came to bring you back."

The words should have sounded gentle. But they were hollow. More Mechanical than human.As if spoken by something wearing a human face rather than truly being one.

And Luna, listening to her son’s voice, felt a chill she could not explain.