Chapter 1
The wind, like a shroud,
Cold, wet and hard, it tightly strangled my shaky body.
I moved to the edge of the rooftop, my soles scraping against the rough cement.
Below, the silent crowd shrank into a blurry black stain, but I could sense their expectations.
As for the angry shouts behind him, they were torn apart by the wind and were meaningless.
His fingers were frozen to the iron railing, his knuckles curled up, and as soon as he let out a barely audible sigh, it was blown away by the wind.
come down.
impact.
The moment the head hit the ground, severe pain exploded.
The vision was flooded by the splashing scarlet,
The warm blood twisted like a living thing, turning into a cold and slippery poisonous snake, gushing out from the wound crazily, tightly wrapping around the broken neck in circles, tightening.
At the last moment when his consciousness was completely crushed by the severe pain, the sudden cheers made the dead silent campus lively.
A thought came to my mind very clearly:
They are right.
It turns out... we are all a puddle of mud.
*
"Huh?" The child's unique innocence was hidden in the drawn-out sound. Under a bright yellow raincoat, a pair of large water-blue eyes were revealed.
The brown hair was wet by the rain, and a few scattered strands stuck to the plump and rosy cheeks like solidified caramel.
Could there be a kitten in this box?
The hem of the raincoat sank into the murky, cold water as the girl squatted down. With curiosity and anticipation, she carefully lifted the lid of the soaked cardboard box in the corner.
Scarlet, glaring.
"ah--!"
A sharp cry suddenly exploded, like shattering ice into countless silver needles, each one piercing through my skull.
The severe pain tore me awake, and I struggled to open my heavy eyelids to look. The dark and blurry scene, and the heavy rain wove an inseparable curtain for the strange world.
A faint light penetrated a circular hole in front of my vision. I endured the dry and burning pain in my eyeballs and struggled to look at the outside world.
A bright yellow figure stumbled backwards, then fled in panic, and was finally completely swallowed up by the damp and gloomy rain.
I'm alive?
This idea was so absurd and terrifying, but it deeply penetrated my numb nerves.
The rain fell heavily from above the exposed cardboard boxes, whipping my body and chilling me like maggots.
I didn't have any strength left in my body. At this moment, I was truly limp, like a pool of rotten mud abandoned in a corner and being diluted by rain.
No one cares, no one pays attention.
Numbness flooded back, thick and sticky, clogging my lungs. Pain tried to squeeze into the place where my left chest should be beating, but it found that it was just a mess of ruins.
It had already cracked and collapsed, like a dilapidated old house that was completely hollowed out and had broken beams.
A cold, sticky liquid, reeking of rust and stale dampness, seeped and dripped from the cracks in the ruins, like endless, dirty raindrops from a broken eaves...
I don't know why I'm still alive,
I closed my heavy eyelids, and the only sound in my ears was my own faint breathing that could stop at any time.
But, it doesn't matter.
The complete decay of this body is only a matter of time.
I will wait,
Waiting for consciousness to sink into eternal, cold darkness,
Waiting for... the final tranquility.
*
"Mimi? Come and eat something, Mimi~"
The sweet, familiar and exhausting voice once again pierced through the silence, and the floating thoughts were like frightened fish, fleeing and collapsing on the edge of the abyss of memory.
……here we go again,
I lifted my heavy eyelids and moved to the only hole with great effort. My vision gradually became clear and I saw a pair of blue crystals with a dazzling luster.
How on earth... did she manage to treat a disgusting pool of blood and flesh as a cat that needed love and care?
A small piece of torn, soft bread lay obediently in the center of the girl's palm. The faint fragrance of sunshine and wheat fields stubbornly drifted through the paper shell.
Ignoring the piece of bread, I blinked my sore eyes and carefully looked at the scene revealed by the hole.
The rough palm is covered with fine lines. The bright yellow raincoat hanging down to the wrist is bright in color, but the edges are badly worn.
The hair scattered on the chest is dry and frizzy, withered and yellowed due to malnutrition.
A poor kid with a bad heart,
I closed my eyes and ignored it.
"Mimi?"
The warm touch fell on my body, and I could clearly feel the trembling from the other person's fingertips.
The emotion of fear is contagious, a cold tremor spreading from one point, freezing my perception.
I want to shrink my body and hide in the tiny cracks on the ground.
I don't want anyone to notice me, and I don't want anyone to care.
"Very good!"
The strong feeling of being suspended in the air made me feel nauseous. Disgust crawled out of my stomach, causing my body to twitch.
The falling rain flows over me, washing away more blood.
I opened my eyes tremblingly, and a drop of blood fell on the girl's face.
She looked up at me, her clear blue eyes sparkling with joy, and she folded her arms, bringing us closer and closer, until I could even see the fine hair on her face.
“—You’re still alive!”
But I don't know why, even at such a close distance, I still can't see her specific appearance.
*
A month has passed...is it a month?
I can't remember the time clearly, I just feel that the days I have been in this world are not too long but not too short either.
That girl still comes to see me often, even though I don’t pay much attention to her, but she still enjoys doing so.
"I brought you fish soup today. It was a snack the orphanage mom paid for us. I secretly saved a small bowl. The story says cats love fish. You'd like it too, right?"
The girl who was so scared that she ran away crying when she saw me for the first time, is now brave enough to hold me in her arms.
When the hell is she going to realize I'm not a cat?
Confused emotions entangled my heart like a thread. My eyes swept across the bowl of milky fish soup with oil stains floating on it. I closed my eyes in disgust.
I hate fish, especially fish eyes which can fill the eyes.
"Still don't like it?"
The depressed words fell softly, like glass beads thrown away by a child who was disgusted with them, falling crisply to the ground.
Glass beads that appear fragile but are actually strong.
The glass beads with blue ink traces winding inside,
She held me in her arms, and as if unaffected by anything, she began to talk about her own things as usual.
"The mother at the orphanage said someone wanted to adopt me... but I didn't want to leave the orphanage at all. Even though they said adoption would make us a family... I always felt like I would be the odd one out."
"But sometimes... I can't help but think, how nice it would be if I really had a family member with the same last name as me... But, that's probably impossible, right? After all, the last name 'Kurozuka' is really strange, everyone says so..."
"Mom and Dad... I miss you so much..."
Her words are like a feather, which will disappear lightly when the wind blows.
So I probably didn’t care at the time.
*
It didn't rain today.
The sun was weary, it passed over the layers of buildings, only illuminating the world outside the alley.
I am thankful for its bias, and deep down I believe that I am not worthy of it. After all, the light falling on me does not make me feel warm, on the contrary, it is burning and dazzling.
After waking up for 38,219 seconds, Kurozuka didn't come.
Wisps of hot air were rising. Inside the cardboard box, which had been renovated to look like a proper little house, was a piece of rotten meat that would be suffocated and spoiled. I didn't know if I would stink.
Am I finally going to be rejected again?
Thoughts move upward, across the hippocampus, across the depths of memory fragments, and find traces buried somewhere.
I can only vaguely recall the faces of my family members, but I can't really see them clearly. I only vaguely remember that my mother had a cowardice similar to mine, and my father passed on his violent nature to me.
What a ridiculous combination, vicious and incompetent,
But I didn't have the energy to laugh at myself as loudly as I used to. After not eating for a long time, even if I miraculously didn't die, my overall condition was so bad that I could only be said to be barely alive.
Suddenly, sirens ripped through the sky above the city, their shrill shrieks blending into the constant hum in my ears.
In a trance, that familiar, nagging voice seemed to ring in my ears.
Gray shadows, huge suffocating shadows, pressing down heavily,
The moment he closed his eyes, the previous blood color was swallowed up by the darkness.
The uneasiness slowly rose from my heart, rolling and shifting, strangling my vocal cords and making me unable to make a sound.
So I watched helplessly as those tall buildings, which had only a corner of them showing, collapsed like rotten wood eaten away by moths.
The dust exploded like dirty snow and flew all over the sky.
At a certain moment, the sight became strangely clear. In the distance, a point of sea-blue light flickered in the smoke and ruins.
I seemed to...see my glass bead with blue veins.
Glass beads, will she break?
Memories of the past are flying,
A glass bead with a missing corner rolled slowly to my feet and stopped.
My thoughts were cut off, my consciousness and body seemed to be cut apart by a blunt knife.
And in this broken gap, I clearly heard - a strong and heartbreaking wail erupted from that unbearable and disgusting body.
They are like boiling bubbles, trapped in turbid water.
Like a wandering soul, I floated up into the air and looked down, witnessing the rotten flesh on the ground begin to wriggle and pile up.
In the bloody mess, countless pale and slender roots emerged, entwining, twisting, and outlining crazily.
A bloody figure stood up from the filth,
Then pale skin covered the new bones, black hair like crow's wings spread out, and finally - the pupil slowly slid out, replacing a large area of scary white.
It formed a pair of black eyes that were like deep pools, solidifying the boundless deathly silence.
*
Death was not unfamiliar to Kurozuka Aoi. A few years ago, she had watched her parents turn into charred remains in the flames of a car accident.
But the impending death now has a different flavor.
She hugged the worn, patched doll tightly in her arms, trying hard to control her trembling body.
Her lower lip was bitten until there was no trace of blood left. Tears welled up in her eyes. She hurriedly raised her hand to wipe them away, fearing that they would dirty the last gift she wanted to give.
The monster's huge eyeballs were like rotten moons, pressing down heavily, staring at her through the cracks in the ruins.
The long, sticky tongue spitted out greedily, easily breaking through the obstacles of the ruins, and came straight towards it with a fishy wind.
Fear was like cold mercury, instantly filling the nerves behind her eyes, screaming wildly and urging her to close her eyes.
But this time, she didn't want to.
Then, the weak ant raised its head, and tears washed over its dirty cheeks, leaving clear traces.
There was no crying or shouting, only an almost solidified, enormous courage that supported her - she wanted to see clearly, to see clearly what this death that took away everything from her again looked like.
In the gap between life and death, hair flew and blood mist exploded.
A strange figure appeared, like a moth to a flame, and stood in front of her resolutely.
An extremely familiar scent hit me, like the scent of fallen flowers wet by rain, the fishy smell deep in the soil...
They blend into a strangely damp, quiet, yet distinct clarity.
"Mimi..." Uncontrollable fantasy seized her, broken syllables squeezed out of her throat, and Kurozuka Aoi trembled as she guessed the identity of the person in front of her.
Instantly, an emotion heavier than death crushed her spine. She looked at the hideous penetrating wound on the girl's chest, blood gushing out.
An almost instinctive, cautious touch, her fingertips felt the warm and sticky liquid,
The next second, Kurozuka Aoi used all the remaining strength in her body to hug the body in front of her tightly with an irresistible, almost embedded force.
"Why...why did they all choose to save me! Why, why..."
Hot tears fell on the girl's soft but cold chest. The rough linen scraped her pale skin until it bled, and the taste of rust entered her tongue.
The whispers beside my ears made Kurozuka Aoi's sobbing stop abruptly at this moment.
"Strange... I'm so hungry..."
She stared with wide eyes in astonishment at the horrific wound that almost tore half of her chest apart. At the moment when the long tongue that had pierced her body was about to be withdrawn, the squirming flesh at the edge of the wound suddenly wrapped around it like a living thing.
With an imperceptible erosion sound, the monster's long tongue rapidly dissolved and shrank as it entangled itself, being greedily devoured and transformed by the new pale flesh and blood.
But within a few breaths, the huge wound had healed as before, leaving only a piece of dazzlingly smooth pale skin, as if the penetrating wound just now was just an illusion.
Kurozuka Aoi suddenly raised his head, and what caught his eyes were the girl's eyes.
The black eyes were as silent as a deep pool, without pain, without astonishment, without even a trace of the ripples of a living being.
It was empty and cold, reflecting no sunlight at all, nor her terrified face at the moment.
*
After running away with Kurozuka Aoi in my arms but being pierced by monsters one after another, I looked at the tattered sack on my body that was barely covering my body. A brief, almost stagnant thought flashed through my empty mind.
Then, when the next attack came with a shriek that tore through the air, my body reacted before my mind did.
Completely different from the heavy and slow body of the previous life, this new body, after actively absorbing the "food" sent by the monster, contained unimaginable lightness and strength.
My toes touched the broken wall, and I slid sideways like an afterimage. The wind whistled in my ears, and I could even "hear" the monster's roar, a mixture of confusion and anger, because it missed its target.
Easily dodging the monster's attacks, he led the giant creature through the maze of ruins for several laps, feeling its increasingly frantic but futile charge.
I closed my arms and held the girl, who was feeling dizzy from the high-speed movement, tighter. I exerted force with my legs, jumped a few times, and left the area.
Under the thick afterglow of the setting sun, like molten gold, the monster's huge body seemed to be coated with a layer of short-lived and false glory.
I squatted on the top of a towering building, quietly watching the monsters that seemed like a natural disaster to normal people being killed by a simple cannon shot from the third force that arrived. The corpses collapsed and destroyed everything around them.
"Are you Mimi?" A faint, stubborn tug came from the corner of my clothes, and Kurozuka Aoi's voice came muffled from behind me.
I turned my head to look at her, her face was still a blur of light and shadow, her features were as if immersed in swaying water, difficult to identify,
A belated realization surfaced in the silent lake of my heart: In this life, I might be face-blind...
Silence was pulled by the howling high-altitude wind, heavy as cotton wool soaked in water. Thinking required me to consume a lot of extra energy, and my thoughts slowly sank and floated in my rigid mind.
"I'm not a cat."
The words I uttered with difficulty sounded dry, like the cracked surface of a frozen river, with the rough cracks left by long silence.
"Besides..." The last breath squeezed out of his lungs, a breath of resigned exhaustion, "Cats can't support humans."
The gray shadow representing the black mallow below shook violently, and the brightness of the area symbolizing the "eyes" rose rapidly in the blurry scene, almost giving me the illusion that my retina was burned.
"Are you going to support me?!"
Her voice was like a sharp thorn, suddenly piercing the dull air, carrying with it an overly vivid vibration that made my eardrums swell.
At the edge of the blurry halo, the colors of the sunset were blurring and burning violently.
The blurred face of the other person seemed to become clear in an instant. The sunlight shone on that face, making me unable to tell whether it was the setting sun or the afterglow of my childhood memory.
My jaw pulled at the stiff muscles of my neck, and I nodded slightly. The movement carried a sense of heaviness, like the guillotine's blade finally falling.
The cervical vertebrae made a subtle but clear friction sound as they turned, like rusty door hinges, and my gaze returned to the burning sky.
The huge setting sun is sinking into the grave of steel, and the molten gold-like light splashes on countless broken mirrors, reflecting a dazzling and cold brilliance, like countless mocking eyes.
The same sun hangs in the sky, sunset and sunrise, in my eyes, are just the same meaningless cycle.
Warmth seems to always be felt by others, while I... can only feel the glare of the light and the desolation of the end.
"Black Mist Dies."
The new name was like a sigh, which just escaped from my lips when it was torn apart and swept away by the wind in the sky, leaving no trace.
I tilted my head slightly, and my long, crow-feather-like hair fluttered wildly behind me, whipping the cold air.
In the distance, the skeleton of the city decayed rapidly in the twilight. The first early-rising star, like a needle tip, pierced the indigo sky.
That faint, cold starlight briefly fell into the depths of the dead black eyes, like a deep pool, without causing a ripple, leaving behind only a deeper nothingness that was instantly swallowed up.
“—My name.”
"By the way... do all the monsters here smell that good?"
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