The storm scrubbed at the lower city all night long and still couldn't wash the sour rot out of the air.
Lu Jin dragged his half-dead right leg into a narrow alley lined with red neon tubes. The locals called this stretch the Slaughter Zone. Every step kicked dark ripples through the ankle-deep water—pig blood, motor oil, and something that probably used to be human.
Every pull of his lungs felt like swallowing ground glass. The nose Hound had broken with an elbow was swollen into a rotten peach, clogging his airway. He had to breathe through his mouth, sucking air like a fish on a cutting board.
The encrypted terminal he'd looted off the corpse buzzed once in his hand.
The green dot that marked a "safe house" pulsed just ahead, behind a rust-stained roll-up door.
He leaned against the wall for a second, fingers shaking as he wiped rain and blood from his face. In his head, he went over Hound's notes again. The guy wasn't just a hitman—he gambled, owed money here. A lot.
Now those debts were Lu Jin's bargaining chip.
He didn't knock.
He lifted his good left leg and kicked, putting what was left of his strength into it.
CLANG.
The half-latched door smashed into the concrete with a crash that sliced straight through rain and thunder.
Inside was maybe forty square meters of basement. Thick disinfectant fumes mixed with the sickly-sweet reek of old meat. Stripped pig halves hung from hooks in the ceiling, glistening under a greasy yellow bulb, fat dripping slow and steady onto the floor.
Behind that curtain of carcasses, beside a filthy stainless-steel operating table, a middle-aged man in a yellowed lab coat jolted so hard he nearly dropped his half-empty bottle of whiskey.
"Who the—"
He spun around mid-curse. Bloodshot eyes shrank to pinpoints.
Lu Jin stood in the doorway, soaked through, skin the color of paper, eyes burning far too bright in that dead face.
He didn't beg.
He walked in. One step. Two. All stiff, mechanical. Reached the table. Pulled out the still-warm Glock 19 from under his coat and slapped it down on the steel, barrel pointed away but close enough to be a promise.
Then he pulled out a thick, wet stack of bills.
Two thousand from Hound, plus what he had left.
¥12,000 in crumpled federation notes. A fat, red brick of "please don't die."
"Fix me," Lu Jin rasped. His voice scraped like sandpaper in a rusted pipe. "All of this is yours."
The Glock's metal caught the light, cold and casual.
The underground doctor—everyone called him Old Yan—froze.
He'd patched up thugs in the lower city for twenty years. He'd had people put a gun to his head and demand he save their lives. He'd had people sob on their knees and kiss his shoes.
A guy who put the gun and the money on the table at the same time, and looked at him like he was just another line item on a balance sheet?
That was new.
Old Yan swallowed. His gaze flicked between the cash and the gun.
Twelve grand. Enough for three months of decent booze, or a night with a clean girl in the upper blocks. Tempting. But the kid's condition tempted him more—as a doctor and as someone who liked not having corpses on his floor.
The hand that had slammed the gun down was shaking hard. The fingernails had gone a bruised blue-purple from lack of oxygen. The way his chest rose and fell was all wrong. Each breath came with a wet gurgle—the sound you heard when blood filled a lung.
"You're almost done, kid."
Old Yan set the bottle aside and reached out, fingers twitching, aiming for the money. "That lung sounds like a busted bellows. And that nose… if a bone chip went up into your brain, even a god couldn't pull you back."
"Can you fix it?" Lu Jin cut in, flat.
His fingers brushed the Glock's slide, not exactly subtle.
Yan's hand froze mid-grab. He laughed it off a second later, pulled back, wiped his palm on his grimy coat.
"I can fix it. As long as the money's real, even the King of Hell can wait his turn."
He produced a pair of surgical scissors and a roll of questionable gauze from under the table like a stage magician. Pointed at the stained operating slab, where someone else's blood hadn't even fully dried.
"Lie down. Pants stay on. Shirt comes off."
Lu Jin didn't move.
He stared straight into Old Yan's cloudy eyes. "No general anesthesia."
"What?" The doctor stopped mid-draw on the syringe, looking at him like he'd just announced he could breathe vacuum. "I've got to open your nasal cavity and reset the bone. Then crack between your ribs and put in a drain. No full anesthetic and you'll die from shock or bite your own tongue off."
"I said no general."
Lu Jin's tone didn't shift. No room for argument.
He was in a wolf's den. Outside, Leishen's security hounds were still hunting. If he blacked out, this old vulture could sell him to the company for a neat bonus. Or harvest his organs and move on with his night.
In this city, staying conscious cost more than any painkiller.
"Local only," Lu Jin said. "And give me a mirror. Or your phone. Something reflective."
He climbed onto the table on his own. The steel was icy against his back, drew a brief shiver out of him. He slid the Glock under his spine, palm still wrapped around the grip.
Old Yan held his stare for five long seconds, then spat a curse under his breath.
"Fine. You're the boss. You start thrashing and I nick an artery, don't cry at me from the afterlife."
The next half hour could've been filed under "things hell used as marketing."
Old Yan was a drunk, a miser, a bastard—but his hands had once held a federal license.
The metal speculum forced open Lu Jin's swollen nose. When it cranked wider, it felt like someone was trying to peel his skull open through the middle of his face.
Crack.
The sound was small and sharp. The dislocated nose bone snapped back into place under the pressure of steel.
Pain didn't so much roll in as explode. The little ring of local anesthetic dissolved like tissue paper. A live wire shot up his trigeminal nerve straight into the front of his brain.
His whole body went rigid, pulled tight like a bowstring.
A raw, animal sound dragged out of his throat. Cold sweat soaked the already blood-streaked sheet beneath him in seconds.
But he didn't move.
His hand stayed locked around the phone he'd propped on his chest, screen tilted toward his face.
On the screen was another world.
The wasteland. A-11 Zone.
An endless white plain caked in old snow. At its heart, a small dome of soft orange light—the camping pod.
Li Xing was tucked into that tiny space. Wrapped in a mangy blanket stripped off some dead man, still clutching an empty compression-biscuit wrapper like it was treasure.
She was asleep.
Out cold. The corners of her mouth were relaxed, a silver thread of drool glinting on her lip. She looked like she'd dreamed of something good to eat.
Lu Jin watched that face.
Watched the faint rise and fall of her chest. Watched that mess of short hair, sticking up in directions that somehow made her look softer, not feral.
That peace was something he'd bought with his life.
That easy sleep was what his ¥1,500 "dog food" purchase had bought tonight.
"Urgh…"
His vision blurred for a second, then he forced it back into focus.
On that tiny screen, the girl became the only light in the filthy basement.
The constant ghost-pain of gene collapse clawing at him, layered with the very real slicing and prying going on in his chest, pulled back a fraction. Like someone had turned the volume down.
[System Notice: Host mental activity: extremely elevated.][Passive triggered: Pain Diversion (Mind-Over-Matter Edition).][Note: As long as she's napping, your brain insists the knife is cutting someone else. Some folks call this "when there's love in your heart, everywhere's a tropical vacation." You currently look more like you're on a torture rack.]
Old Yan had moved down to his ribs by then.
He cut a neat line between them and shoved a drain tube in with a motion that would've made any normal patient scream. The kind of scream that stripped your throat raw.
On the table, Lu Jin's skin was the color of chalk. Muscles jumped under his chest like something trying to get out, but no sound came except a rough, broken hiss of breath.
His eyes never left the cracked phone screen.
Still watching that girl sleep like a stray cat inside his little miracle pod.
The doctor's shoulders prickled.
He'd sliced into more gangsters and smugglers than he could count. Most of them bawled, begged, cursed his ancestors.
This kid was built from something else.
Or maybe he was something else—some kind of lab product, dragged out of a nightmare project and dropped into the lower city by mistake.
Even through latex, Old Yan could feel it: the wrongness under the scalpel. The muscle fibers were too dense, like cutting synthetic mesh instead of flesh. And the cell growth along the wound edges, slow but furious, was nothing like a man supposedly on his last legs.
Snip.
He tied off the final stitch with a flourish he still took pride in. Pulled off his bloody gloves, pitched them into a bucket of red water, grabbed the bottle and took a long pull until the chill under his skin eased.
"All right."
He grabbed Lu Jin under the shoulder and hauled him up. "Got the blood out, bone's back in place. Don't sprint marathons or get into knife fights and you might limp around a bit longer."
Lu Jin didn't answer right away.
He glanced down at the phone.
Inside the pod, Li Xing rolled over, jammed her face deeper into that ratty scarf, and sank back into heavier sleep.
Only then did something in him loosen.
He exhaled, slow. For the first time in hours, the air went in without ripping. The bellows in his chest still wheezed, but they worked.
"Thanks."
He slid off the table. His legs nearly gave; he caught the edge of the steel and stayed upright by sheer stubbornness.
The Glock went back into his waistband. He didn't bother counting how much of the cash stack was left on the tray. If Yan had a conscience, that was change. If not, consider it a tip. Lu Jin didn't have enough spare processing power to argue.
"Hold up."
Old Yan's voice stopped him at the doorway.
The doctor rummaged in a drawer, pulled out a white pill bottle with no label, and tossed it over.
"Strong painkillers. My own mix. Should keep the nerve pain from eating you alive."
He hesitated, watching Lu Jin's reaction carefully. The cloudiness left his eyes for a moment, something sharper gleaming underneath.
"Kid, I don't know which lab you crawled out of, but you're a failed batch."
Lu Jin's hand paused halfway to his pocket.
Yan lit a cigarette, dragged deep, exhaled a gray veil between them.
"Your genes are collapsing. At that speed? A normal man would've been sludge days ago. Something nasty's holding your shape together from the inside, like gluing broken porcelain back together with industrial cement."
"This'll make it easier, but that's all it does."
He tapped ash into an overfull tray. When he spoke again, his voice went colder.
"Three months. At most. After that, you start coming apart at the blueprint level. You'll watch your skin peel, your organs melt, and then you're just a bucket of protein soup without a name."
He lifted his fingers, rubbed them together meaningfully.
"Unless…"
"Unless you've got your hands on the kind of 'Sequence Reconstruction Serum' only the top floors of the big corps see. One shot of that, even a pig walks out a superman. Of course, the price tag? They could grind you up and sell every part a thousand times and still come up short."
Lu Jin closed his fist around the pill bottle.
Being read like that didn't rattle him. If anything, the corner of his mouth twitched up, a smile that twisted when it tugged at his stitches.
"Three months, huh?"
He tucked the bottle into his pocket, turned away, lifting a hand in a lazy wave.
"Plenty. As long as I'm breathing, money's not the problem."
"And, old man—"
He reached the door, stopped, glanced back. His one good eye had gone flat and cold.
"I hacked your cameras on the way in. When I leave, if I find so much as a single packet of data with my face on it floating around out there…"
He didn't bother finishing.
"Dead men don't bring repeat business."
He shoved the door open and stepped back into the sheets of icy rain.
Old Yan watched his silhouette blur and vanish.
Only after a long minute did he spit out the cigarette butt and curse under his breath.
"Crazy bastard."
He turned back to his work, clearing the table.
Halfway through scrubbing out a tray filled with bloody gauze and bits of dead tissue, his hand froze.
Something in there twitched.
He frowned, grabbed a pair of tweezers and plucked out a dark red fragment the size of a fingernail—the sort of meat scrap any other day he'd toss without a second thought.
Under the weak bulb, the scrap didn't just sit there. It pulsed, a slow, obscene little wriggle. A faint vibration buzzed against the metal tips, like a tiny insect beating its wings in syrup.
Old Yan's face drained.
He checked the room on reflex. Empty, aside from the pigs.
He spun, yanked open a cabinet, snatched up a small glass jar filled with formalin, dropped the scrap inside and sealed the lid so tight his knuckles whitened.
The jar disappeared into the very bottom of his safe.
His hands were shaking.
"That's not gene collapse…"
He grabbed the whiskey, drank until his throat burned, trying to drown the rising mix of fear and something much uglier.
"That's a goddamn… 'divinity rejection' reaction."
He let out a shaky laugh that didn't sound amused at all.
"So that rumor back then… was real."
The rain didn't let up.
Two blocks away, in a half-built concrete skeleton of a building, Lu Jin finally stopped walking.
This was his temporary nest. No doors. No power. Just wind on all sides and a moldy mattress shoved against one wall.
He slid down the wall until he hit the mat. Dry swallowed two of Old Yan's pills. Warmth spread through his chest a few minutes later, blunting the sharpest edges of the pain into something heavy and dull.
He pulled out his phone.
[Holy Resonance Energy: 27 points.][Life Countdown: 64 hours 12 minutes 03 seconds.]
The numbers kept ticking, second by second. A sword hanging overhead, molten metal for a blade.
But he was alive.
He'd spent ¥12,000 and half his remaining body integrity to claw himself a few more days in a city that chewed people like gum.
The screen refreshed.
Li Xing was awake.
She rubbed her eyes and climbed out of the pod, her stupid little ahoge bouncing defiantly in the cold wind.
Maybe she felt something watching her. She turned toward the unseen camera and waved, grin bright and uncomplicated.
"Good morning, Listener!"
Lu Jin stared at that smile—the one that had held him together on a blood-slicked operating table.
He lifted his hand and, very gently, tapped the glass where her face was.
"Morning," he answered in his head.
"Don't panic. As long as I'm still breathing, the sky's not allowed to fall."
He leaned back against the cracked concrete and let his eyes close. The painkillers dragged his mind under, soft and slow.
This time, there was no rain in his dreams. No hounds in the pipes. No scalpels.
Only that off-key little melody, drifting over a frozen wasteland, hummed under her breath as she walked north.