Chapter 4
This time, the pain of hitting the ground woke me.
I opened my eyes groggily and saw the old farmer shaking people out of his sack in a tumbling heap.
I rolled aside in a hurry, just avoiding being buried under them.
Everyone who came out had a gruesome, bloody hole in their temple. Dazed and vacant, they barely reacted to anything around them.
When he had emptied the sack, a gust of wind rose from the farmer’s palm and pushed us, one by one, into a new, larger cell.
It was dim inside. When I could finally make out what was in front of me, a thin film of sweat broke out across my back.
Hundreds of people were packed into a stone room that wasn’t particularly spacious. Their skin was so pale and tender they looked as though someone had put a soft-focus filter over them.
I had always thought my skin was fairly good. Compared with theirs, it looked unbearably rough and dull.
These earlier arrivals stared blankly and moved slowly.
They clawed themselves bloody while howling in pain.
The wounds they scratched open healed fast—faster than any human body should have been able to heal.
“You’re the newcomers they sent in today?” a woman crouching in a corner suddenly asked.
Her skin was almost translucent. I could see her veins clearly.
With such an obvious difference in our skin, there was no point denying it. I bit my lip and nodded.
“I’m Xu Yuan.”
She perked up.
“Hello. I’m Chang Gui. Huh. Not a drop of blood on your temples?”
Muttering to herself, she scanned the rest of the group and finally fixed her gaze on my former cellmate.
“There she is. The other one without a wound… I see. You made those marks on her throat, didn’t you? So you were the one with the seed, but you didn’t kill her.”
I tensed. “What if I did? What if I didn’t?”
She gave a strange laugh.
“Nothing. If you didn’t, congratulations. Unlike the rest of us, you’ll soon have a new way forward.”
“What way forward? And what are these seeds you keep talking about?”
“Seeds? Ha! They’re clean, new-energy batteries. Though you could also think of them as nasty little things that make us dream.”
Chang Gui held up a finger.
“Here. Let me ask you something.
“If someone tortured you to death, then you were reborn and found your enemy completely at your mercy, would you choose to kill them?”
“If a kind person killed the enemy they’d hated all their life, thinking they’d finally had their revenge—”
“Only to learn the next moment that the person they’d killed wasn’t an enemy at all, but an innocent passerby, a small child, a lover, or a dear friend. Someone who had even cried and begged to live before dying.”
“Would that killer hate themselves? Would they be trapped in suffering they couldn’t escape?”
My face drained of color. The woman smiled.
“It’s exactly what you’re thinking. This place is a factory. It produces resentment to be used.”
“And us? In a way, we’re just the biological fuel they use to generate it.”