# Chapter 2 - I AM VANTA
*Cold.*
That was my first thought as consciousness crawled back—not the piercing cold of winter air, but something deeper. The cold of space. Of absence. Of being completely, utterly alone.
I tried to open my eyes and realized I already had them open. The darkness was absolute, pressing against me like liquid obsidian. My lungs burned for air that didn't seem to exist.
*Am I dead?*
Then sensation returned in a rush. Water. I was underwater, sinking through the factory's flooded ruins. My back screamed where the kunai had torn through flesh. My lungs spasmed, demanding oxygen.
I clawed toward what I hoped was up, breaking the surface with a gasp that echoed through empty space. Emergency lighting flickered somewhere in the distance, casting dancing shadows across the devastation.
The factory was gone. Where Father's life's work had once stood, only twisted metal and smoking concrete remained. The explosion had carved a crater deep enough to fill with groundwater, creating an underground lake where our family's empire had died.
I dragged myself onto a chunk of debris and immediately knew something was wrong.
My reflection in the dark water wasn't Jun anymore.
Where my skin should have been, there was only void—a darkness so complete it seemed to absorb light itself. I held up my hand and watched my fingers disappear into shadow, as if they were holes cut from reality.
"No," I whispered, but even my voice sounded different. Deeper. Hollow.
I scrubbed at my arms, desperate to wash away whatever had coated me. But the darkness didn't come off. It wasn't paint anymore—it was me. Part of me. Fused with my skin at a molecular level, transforming every cell into something that shouldn't exist.
I looked like a living shadow, a two-dimensional silhouette walking in a three-dimensional world.
The vanta black had saved my life by making me into something else entirely.
For three days, I wandered the crater in a daze. I found Father's staff, twisted and broken. Mother's jade bracelet, cracked but still beautiful. Fragments of my old life scattered like breadcrumbs through the wreckage.
Each discovery cut deeper than the kunai wounds had.
On the fourth day, hunger finally drove me from the ruins.
The Xishuangbanna rainforest stretched endlessly in all directions—a green maze where every shadow could hide death. Under normal circumstances, a ten-year-old boy wouldn't last a week.
But I wasn't normal anymore.
The first animal to find me was a king cobra, twelve feet of coiled death that struck without warning. Its fangs should have punched through my neck, but they passed harmlessly through shadow. The venom that could kill an elephant had nothing to bite into.
I grabbed the snake behind its head, feeling its muscles writhe against my transformed fingers. For a moment, we stared at each other—predator and predator, both of us trying to understand what the other was.
Then I twisted. The cobra's neck snapped with a wet crack.
Raw snake meat tasted like survival.
That night, as I crouched by a stream trying to wash the blood from my hands, I caught my reflection again. The thing looking back at me was getting harder to recognize as human. The vanta black had begun to change more than just my appearance—it was changing how I moved, how I thought, how I saw the world.
Colors seemed muted except in moments of violence, when everything became sharp and vivid. My hearing had grown acute enough to track heartbeats through thick jungle. Most disturbing of all, I was starting to enjoy the hunt.
*What am I becoming?*
The answer came two weeks later when a pack of dholes surrounded me.
Twenty wild dogs, each one built for killing, circling like they'd found easy prey. Their pack leader stepped forward, lips pulled back in a snarl that had terrorized this forest for years.
I should have been terrified. Instead, I smiled.
The lead dhole lunged. I moved—not like a frightened child, but like something that belonged in the darkness between trees. My fist connected with its skull, and the impact sent the hundred-pound predator flying twenty feet into a tree trunk.
The pack hesitated. In that moment of uncertainty, I struck again.
I moved through them like smoke given purpose, each strike precise and devastating. Bones snapped under my transformed hands. Claws that could tear through kevlar couldn't pierce my shadow-skin.
In thirty seconds, it was over.
Twenty dholes lay scattered around me, their pack leader twitching in its death throes. And I felt... nothing. No remorse. No shock at what I'd done.
Only satisfaction.
Standing over the carnage, I finally understood what the vanta black had done to me. It hadn't just changed my body—it had awakened something primal, something that had been sleeping in human DNA since we first learned to hunt.
I wasn't Jun anymore. That frightened little boy had died in the explosion.
I was something new. Something evolved. Something designed for violence.
The weeks blurred together after that. Each day brought new challenges, new tests of my growing abilities. A leopard that stalked me for three days learned what it meant to become prey. A python that could crush cars found its coils useless against shadow. Even the tigers—apex predators that had ruled this jungle for millennia—began to avoid the areas where I hunted.
I wasn't just surviving anymore. I was thriving.
But with each kill, each victory, the human part of me grew smaller. I stopped talking to myself. Stopped trying to remember Mother's laughter or Father's lessons. The pain was too sharp, the rage too useful.
Instead, I let the forest reshape me into something pure. Something focused.
Something that could make the Claw pay for what they'd done.
One month after the explosion, I stood waist-deep in a mountain stream, studying my reflection in the moonlight. The creature looking back at me was barely recognizable as the boy who had fed koi fish with his mother.
I had grown taller, though I was still only ten. Lean muscle had replaced baby fat. My movements had acquired a predator's grace. Most importantly, my eyes had changed—they held the cold calculation I'd seen in Kěnshī's gaze, the patient hunger of something that knew it was built for killing.
I raised my transformed hand to the night sky and spoke for the first time in weeks:
"Mo Lang. Li Wei. Fēngshàn. Jiànyä. Niúrén. Kěnshī."
Their names felt like promises on my tongue.
"I remember all of you. Your faces. Your weapons. The way you laughed when Father screamed."
A night bird called somewhere in the darkness, as if the forest itself was listening.
"You think you killed me in that factory. But you didn't kill me—you made me. You turned a frightened child into something that belongs in your nightmares."
I closed my fist, watching shadow consume shadow.
"I am what happens when innocence dies. I am what crawls out of the darkness you create. I am the price you pay for taking everything from someone who had nothing left to lose."
The reflection in the water showed something that could have been a smile—if smiles could hold that much promised violence.
"My name was Jun. But Jun is dead."
I turned away from the stream and melted back into the jungle, leaving only disturbed water and the echo of a vow that would reshape the criminal underworld.
"I am Vanta now. And I am coming for you."
The hunt had begun.