Su Ming’an opened his eyes.
He stared at the dark ceiling, recalling the eting that had just taken place.
These nightly high-end etings were extrely beneficial for him.
As "Number One," the highest ranked among them, the other eight participants always considered his opinions. If he could take the opportunity to propose plans that favored his side, he could subtly manipulate the overall situation.
He closed his eyes, sinking back into sleep.
The night breeze blew across his cheeks through the window screen, and he wrapped the blanket over his head, turning his back to the window.
Perhaps because it was deep into the night, the sounds of gunfire and battles outside had ceased, replaced by a lody similar to piano music, soone was playing an instrunt.
Playing an instrunt late at night, if it were loud instrunts like suona, bells, or drums, it would indeed be annoying. But this piano-like sound was soft, like a nocturne of the night, not only was it not noisy, but it was also conducive to sleep.
Even in such a world where humanistic status had declined and cold machinery prevailed, so people were still intoxicated with music.
Amid the sleep-inducing lody of the nocturne, he dread.
...It might have been just an ordinary winter night when he played a Schubert’s nocturne.
However, he made a mistake in the last staccato, and the woman by her own hand pressed down the piano lid, crushing it onto the backs of his hands.
He pushed her away, waves of dull pain traveling through his hands. Seeing the blood, the woman began to sob uncontrollably again, grabbing him, saying she would take him to the doctor, but seed to forget that she was the one who had just caused the injury.
"Ming’an... Mom, mom is in so much pain, people outside say mom only has skill, no emotion, you have emotion, why can’t your skill keep up...?"
"You don’t know how much mom envies you, your piano music is mom’s most precious treasure. But why, why do you waste this gift?"
"—No, it’s all because of you, before you were born, mom perfectly fused emotion with piano music... it’s you who stole mom’s treasure..."
"If mom never t your dad... If your dad could have spent more ti with mom, if Dad didn’t have to be on duty, didn’t have to train, didn’t have to be on call, didn’t have to stay out all night... If dad could have been there when mom was most vulnerable, if dad hadn’t always disappeared... mom wouldn’t have turned out this way..."
Anxiety, sadness, joy, anger... he had never seen such a mix of emotions simultaneously displayed on one person’s face, her expressions half joyous half angry, as if her face was forcefully split in half, one side smiling, the other unable to control the downturned corners of anger. She reached out her hand, grabbing his blood-stained wrist, as if wanting to crush his bones.
So he ran without hesitation, rushing down the stairs.
The woman was soone he found difficult to evaluate.
...If he really had to say, she was a madman, a madman whose sanity was not normal, only music could bring her black and white life into vividness, only music with emotion could reach her almost rigid brain.
Her love for the piano and music had reached a terrifying extent. Sotis, she would almost kneel down begging him to play the piano, looking at him as if he were a lover... yet she could, in a manner angry at his underachievent, want to break his hands when he played a wrong note.
"Ming’an, Ming’an don’t go... Mom knows she was wrong, stay with mom, let mom take you to the doctor, get your hands treated, mom will teach you Debussy’s ’Moonlight’ okay... Bach, Canon, Czerny... mom will practice with you every day, don’t leave..."
He didn’t look back.
Perhaps the only thing sustaining her life was the music he could provide her.
So, in her pathological and absurd thoughts, he was no longer her child, but an emotional, satisfying, and joyful piano-playing robot.
Years earlier, after a circuit performance where a master comnted that she had "no emotion, only skills," she went insane, confined herself at ho, and never went out, as if she could see pairs of eyes mocking and casually judging her the mont she stepped outside.
Whenever she went online and logged into forums, she would see nurous negative comnts about herself.
This madness peaked after her husband’s long deploynts, nights after nights away from ho.
Washing clothes, grocery shopping, cooking, caring for the children... the complexity of life turned her once young and beautiful face increasingly dull and stained with indelible ugly spots. Her hands began to suffer from chilblains, making her arms tremble in pain whenever she played the piano in winter.
The marriage she thought was happy wore down her beautiful youth, and her body’s transformations after childbirth made her more irritable. She no longer compared shades of lipstick or looked in the mirror, but often sat disheveled in front of the piano all day without touching a single key.
Back then, he was four years old, and she had gone mad.
His grandfather had disappeared before his birth, and the grandmother who protected him had recently died. His maternal grandparents were unwilling to care for the family, so the household responsibilities fell into his hands.
His father would only co ho once every half month, and he used the savings from the woman’s touring concerts in previous years to hire a nanny, whom the woman scread at and chased away.
The once comfortable financial situation of their ho worsened, the woman’s dication was expensive, the house seed to shrink, the car was gone, and the only thing that couldn’t be replaced was the piano that the woman constantly stared at.
Later, the woman began teaching him to play the piano, with hopes so intense that he couldn’t resist.
...and then, it beca like that.
His hands were smashed, and bursting out of the building, his hands throbbed with intense pain. He dragged his frail body outside, the world was vast, but he had no idea where to go.
The scenes in his dreams were blurry, and his childhood mories were not very clear. He might have turned left, or turned right, but eventually, he saw an ordinary street... a street that was slightly bleak, yet not dim.
A child walking alone on a deserted street in the dead of night... What was he thinking at that ti?
...Perhaps he thought of his grandmother, still alive, still pulling maltose candies from her pocket for him, or perhaps of tis before the woman had gone completely mad, when their family of three went on outings to the park... The spring days were warm, the warm breeze would wrap around him, surely more enduring than the cold wind at that ti.
Enduring the pain in his hands, he walked on the asphalt road between two sides of brick platforms; the surroundings were empty and quiet, the windows were dark in the deep night, perhaps during the day they might emit the fragrance of delicious dishes or the sound of laughter, perhaps children would cuddle in their parents’ arms and play, but all this had nothing to do with him.
Interestingly, on this wide-open street, during his solitary walk, he suddenly encountered another being covered in scars.
Her black hair was loose, looking darker than the winter night’s cold; in her hand, she held a wooden sword, her body bruised as she made eye contact with him, the desolate street scene unfolding before them.
She stared at him in a daze, their encounters were so similar.
"You escaped too." she said.
"Just ’growing up’, for us, has beco very difficult," she said. "But I can’t bla them... They are family, the only family... We can’t bla them."
"If we can grow up," she said, "...I don’t want to bla anyone, I want to leave that place, forever, completely."
He wanted to speak.
He wanted to say that there would be a day, in the future, when you had completely escaped from that gloomy past, you traveled to many worlds, and you beca a good person.
But, he didn’t manage to say that.
The dream faded.
The vast streets in the dream gradually blurred, twisted, and receded from him.
The snow that had fallen in the winter days turned into a void of white and faded away without a trace.
...
Su Ming’an opened his eyes and rubbed his temples.
He glanced at the System Ti, realizing dawn was still so ti away.
"Good morning, Anjiang! The ti is now 4:32 AM! We recomnd you continue to get adequate sleep for a total of eight hours to prevent mory blurriness, intelligence decline, and sudden death!"
"Good morning, Doctor."
One voice followed another, coming from either side of him. He looked at the two virtual shadows next to his hands sowhat helplessly.
His left hand’s virtual figure, Ado, retained a faceless persona without any facial features set. His right hand’s Xike, however, flaunted blond hair and a pair of beautiful blue eyes.
In terms of appearance, Ado was outmatched.
Add to that Xike’s pleasant female voice, Ado, with his chanical simulation voice, lost out once more.
"Anjiang! This Xike AI is so annoying! Kill it, kill it!!!" Ado, irritated and embarrassed, exclaid: "I will not allow anyone to replace !"
With a "snap," Su Ming’an muted the noisy Ado and maneuvered his wheelchair outside.
The wind that t him carried a tallic rust scent and was refreshingly cool. He raised his head to see airships slowly passing beneath the high grey-blue do, like clouds blocking the sun.
Surrounded by uneven mountains of tal junk, this was a residential area, composed mostly of bungalows or small two-story structures, with the sound of snoring unevenly erging from rooms, and so people simply wrapped in sheets sleeping outdoors.
"Gurgle..." The sound of wheels crushing tal debris awoke so of the more vigilant people. They leaned against earthen walls, their weary eyes opening, and they tightly gripped the worn firearms they never let go of, their dirty faces full of wariness like rats living in sewers.
This place resembled a lifeless black-and-white painting, only bleak black, gray, and white remained, and even just walking through it felt a deep, survival and human-nature driven oppression.
Su Ming’an moved forward slowly when he suddenly spotted a shaky figure walking from the other side of the broad street.
Her black hair was ssy, as if soone had roughly tugged at it, and she wore a thin red cloak over her shoulders, with white fluffy material around the neckline that hugged her slender neck. Her legs were as slender as reeds and exposed, showing blue and purple bruises. As she walked, her whole body shivered slightly, as if from sickness or cold.
As he got closer, Su Ming’an could see her features clearly—a face as pale as frost or snow, wrapped in white fluffy material, with narrow eyes and dim pupils, her lips strikingly red as if they had been brushed with a layer of bright red blood, her cheap powder fluttering in the cold wind, cleansing her delicate face like a freshly painted white wall.
She suddenly looked up, eting Su Ming’an’s gaze. After a mont, she slightly turned her face away, not wanting to hold his gaze. She walked on heels slightly too tall over a ground littered with trash and tal pieces, her figure swaying as if she might fall at any mont like a reed.
She was a very pretty young girl, appearing no older than sixteen—a high school age suitable for sitting in a warm classroom, if she were on Zhai Xing.
"Click, click," her sharp heels crushed tal pieces. She coughed once, shivering in the cold wind.
As he passed by her, Su Ming’an noticed the direction she was walking—it was to Dong An’an’s house.
She was perhaps the older sister Dong An’an who had gone out to work that night, unaware of what her job was.
He continued to move forward, and a gust of night wind passed by, suddenly bringing with it a fragrance of powder and perfu.
He looked up and saw two won standing against the wall under the chanical light in the distance, each holding a cigarette.
The soft halo cast on their faces, which were painted with bright lipstick, mixed the white of the powder and the red into a dim yellow. In the cold night wind, their limbs were exposed, their fingers frozen red like ten delicate carrots.
They shared a lighter and laughed softly, discussing so crude topics in their dialect, a thin cloak draped over them, wrapping their slender and fragile bodies attractively.
Seeing Su Ming’an in the wheelchair, a hint of surprise appeared in their eyes. One of the more delicate won hesitated for a mont and approached him, a clearer scent of powder assailing him.
Su Ming’an had already figured out what their profession entailed.
"... Sir with the mask, on this cold winter night, do you need soone to accompany you?" The woman’s words, distorted through the system’s translation, carried a strange tone. Her eyes were bright, her scent alluring, and even had a hint of tobacco. If a man tired from his day happened to pass by, he would find it difficult to refuse such a beautiful woman.
However, Su Ming’an had already understood their ’job’ or rather, such ’work’ exists in any world.
He looked along the wide street into the distance, vaguely able to see under the dim yellow street lights, groups of slender figures, so tall, so short, figures of drunkards. Woman, heavily made-up, arm-in-arm with n passing by while lights dimd in the houses on both sides.
Many of them were won not much older, so not even past sixteen or seventeen years of age. They displayed their slender wrists and ankles, shaking under the thin cloaks.
The girl in the red cloak from earlier must also be one of them.
"... I think, I don’t need that." Su Ming’an’s voice ca out, lower than he himself expected.
He had never seen such a direct portrayal of the world.
Or rather, he was too young, he had never seen such a ’real’ world.
The woman laughed softly and slowly backed away, the smoke of her cigarette floating in front of her eyes, one of her few comforts on this winter night.
As a person of a lower class persona, she had arms and legs but couldn’t find a job. As soon as she entered the city, she would easily overload emotionally and get arrested. She could only do this kind of night job that brought in money or else she would starve to death.
She also understood that a man in a wheelchair probably didn’t need such services.
"Then suit yourself, but it’s best not to wander around at night without purpose, people like us might misunderstand," the woman said as she took another drag of her cigarette, her expression becoming sowhat impatient.
Su Ming’an turned his wheelchair around and went back the way he ca. He didn’t dare look back; the atmospheric pressure on this street was too low, the cold wind too chilling.
From behind, faint laughter from the won could be heard, perhaps discussing how even a man in a wheelchair wanted to find so fun, or maybe talking about where they would get tomorrow’s breakfast from.
The thick sll of engine oil, the rust of machinery, the air filled with powder and tobacco lded together. The cold wind lifted Su Ming’an’s black hair, his gaze dim and unclear.
After returning to his room, having shut out the cold outside, he bent down to pick up the dagger that "Dong An’an" had intended to use to assassinate him.
He stared at the reflective side of the dagger, observing his own clear, unchanical, pure gray human eyes, and murmured to himself.
...
"Yasa Acto..."
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