Editor: Elanor
Bai Jingan had a recurring dream.
He was lying on a dirty floor, and a huge mutant creature bit his ankle and dragged him into the darkness.
He often had this dream, in which he was badly injured, lost too much blood, and was extremely helpless. In reality, he was an adult who knew how to protect himself, but in this dream world, he was always extremely vulnerable.
As the dog that was huge as a bull dragged him out of the room for almost a dozen meters, he looked at the city from the perspective of a dead person. It was a sight from his deepest nightmares…
Too many dead people. Too much of a slaughter, struggles, despair, dead friends, dead children, and all those innocent people…
There were cameras hovering in the air. These sophisticated little balls were all over the city, even in places they didn’t know about… The huge chaos that their brains couldn’t understand was being watched by countless people as a spectacle for their sick entertainment.
From the perspective of a dead man in the dream, he saw a child hiding in the darkness of construction debris, like a dying rat, all dirty and with blood stains all over his face.
He fumbled and grabbed onto an iron rod, purely out of instinct. He still wanted to fight in the end, even though his grip on the iron rod was weak… One end of the rod was sharpened and it was quite bloody. He didn’t know who had used it as a weapon, but now that person was also dead.
He took a breath and hit the dog hard on its nose, but it didn’t retreat a step, and its other head turned frantically to bite at the boy’s neck.
He dodged as hard as he could, and it only got to bite his shoulder, shattering his bones, but he plunged the rod into the dog’s body with all his strength and severed its spine.
No matter who was the person that sharpened the rod in the first place, that person was indeed an expert. The monster instantly lost its strength and fell on top of him. It was terribly heavy and even at its dying moments, it was still biting into his flesh and blood.
He pushed the corpse away forcefully and turned to look at the boy. He was only six or seven years old. He wanted to call him over. The chances of two people surviving might be a little higher… But then he found out that the boy was dead.
His lower body was full of blood, and the internal organs had been hollowed out, but even at death, he was still maintaining a defiant stance.
He stared blankly for a few seconds, then staggered back. He pressed against the wall and tried to stand still, but his legs gave out and he still fell to the ground.
He could never get up again.
There was no future in this world, for any of them.
That was when he saw the thing that came over. It stood there looking at him. It was a… he didn’t know what that was. Was that a mutant weasel? Its hair had all fallen off. It was two meters tall. Its paws… were in the shape of a human hand. Perhaps it was once a human being. Now it was a grotesque apparition; a mixture of man and beast.
He couldn’t stand up, he wanted to give up.
He sat against the wall, waiting for the monster to come up to him and kill him like it had killed everyone else. When it ate him, their flesh and blood would meld together. This was such a world.
The ubiquitous camera was still hovering, presenting everything to the greedy, chaotic world above. He closed his eyes and buried his head in his knees.
His dreams always ended like this.
But this time the monster did not come. He heard footsteps approaching, it was the sound of human footsteps.
A voice said, “Lil’ Bai?”
He looked up and the man stood there, wearing dirty boots that had been made locally in the Lower City, stained with gunpowder, blood and pieces of flesh, looking down at him.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Behind the man lay the body of the monster, its head had been burst open under the impact of a quick burst of bullets.
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“Get up, we have to kill it,” he said.
He looked at the other party for a moment, then carefully reached out and took the hand. Xia Tian’s hand was warm and strong. Although it made no sense, he felt hopeful about the future again.
It was like seeing the light.
Bai Jingan woke up. The night outside was deep and silent.
He fell in a daze, not sure where he was. It was as if he was still trapped in that place and had never escaped out. Everything after that was just a dream, a facade.
Slowly his brain reacted to the fact that he was indeed in the Upper World now, at home… but it felt distant, as if the real him had never been here. He didn’t know where the real him was either. Maybe he had never existed, or had died long ago.
He turned on the light, and after thinking about it for a moment, he turned it off again. He was more at ease in the dark.
He got out of bed. He knew he couldn’t fall asleep when he woke up like this, so he might as well go for a cup of herbal tea or review the upgrade procedures of the training room. The reporters from the Upper City might be trying to install spyware in his house right now.
He went downstairs barefoot in the moonlight and found that the small light in the living room was on. Xia Tian was playing games sitting cross-legged on the sofa with half a bottle of wine in front of him. He must have taken a shower, his hair was still wet.
Only after Bai Jingan walked downstairs did he notice that his pyjamas were wrinkled from the nightmare. Three buttons were unbuttoned, and a hideous scar extending from the shoulder could be seen. One could only imagine how cruel his past was. This body must have been torn by sharp claws.
He subconsciously wanted to stretch his hand to tidy up his clothes but thought better of it.
Xia Tian had come out of the medical cabin still not fully recovered. After undergoing some more follow-up treatment, he had returned home this afternoon and had received a grand welcome from the Upper City media on his return.
When they reached the lobby of the medical department, they saw Dee Dee in the crowd.
Her hair was braided and her small face was taut with tension. Hui Tian let her go, and when she reached in front of Xia Tian, she was unable to hold it together any longer and burst into tears.
She clutched his hand tightly and cried and said they should go back to the Lower City, she didn’t like this place, she hated it here.
Bai Jingan realized that she had seen everything that had happened at the Commemorative Show.
Xia Tian looked up at Huitian, and the image planner sighed helplessly. In such a highly-interactive large-scale show, she did her best to make Dee Dee appear in front of Xia Tian in a perfectly good condition.
Xia Tian put his arms around Dee Dee’s shoulders and kept telling her that he was okay and wasn’t hurt at all, and helped her to wipe away her tears. But the more he spoke, the more she cried till she was out of breath.
They finally got rid of the media and took her home. On the way, she clung to Xia Tian and refused to let go. After she was finally put to bed, she tugged on his sleeve and still didn’t let go.
Since Xia Tian was now in the living room, he must have finally consoled her to sleep.
Xia Tian lifted his chin to say hello. Bai Jingan also nodded and walked over to make a cup of herbal tea for himself.
—It was prescribed by the medical department. It was very popular in the Upper City recently. They said that consuming it could make you feel the energy of the earth, blatantly ignoring the fact that they were floating in the sky, so there was no way whatsoever for them to have any connection to the earth.
He took the hot tea and sat down next to Xia Tian. There was only a half bottle of wine on the table and no glass. He was probably too lazy to use a glass.
Xia Tian glanced at him. He must have seen the scars, but he said nothing.
The game Xia Tian was playing was the new “Confined District 7” with the Zone N Massacre as its setting. Huitian had put it here, saying that the sponsor wanted them to play it and say their thoughts about it.
At this moment, the protagonist was staying in a small house, a bit like the houses near Xining Street. There were locomotives and gun parts scattered around. Most of the people living in that area were mechanics.
Bai Jingan remembered that two days ago, those people had shown him a video of Xia Tian in the Zone N Massacre… Xia Tian was there at that time. He was still a child, but he had survived. He had actually survived…
He ignored the herbal tea and stretched out his hand and directly picked up the half bottle of wine from the table, and took a sip.
Although he had no memory, it was definitely not the first time he had drunk alcohol. The pungent taste poured down his throat into his stomach, and the taste was strong enough.
Xia Tian glanced at him again but didn’t say anything.
Both were silent. They just sat on the sofa, staring at the big screen in front of them that was displaying a vivid model of the Lower City, dark and broken. Bai Jingan felt as if he was still enveloped in the dream from just now.
After a while, he said, “I was there.”
Xia Tian pressed the pause button, then turned to look at him.
Bai Jingan was sitting in the shadows. The gleam of the moonlight fell on his face, and something dark oozed from his every movement. This feeling could be found in people who had come back from the Asura field.
Staring at the blank wall, he said, “I was in District N7 during the Zone N Massacre and had been there before that.”
Xia Tian did not speak, waiting for him to continue.
“I participated in everything,” Bai Jingan said.
He picked up the half bottle of wine and took a sip, looking very skilled at the movement.
“I was about twelve or thirteen and I felt like I was getting closer and closer to the Killing Show. I guess I kind of lost it… so I went to the Lower City,” he continued, “My father came from District N7, and my father’s father also lived there, so I could only think of that place.”
Xia Tian nodded. When he couldn’t stand it, even he went back to his hometown.
“I stayed there for about four years, but it felt as if I had been there all my life,” Bai Jingan said, “Now that I think about it, I was probably destined to belong only there.”
“You were in the ‘Core Group’ of the N7 riots,” Xia Tian said.
Bai Jingan nodded. “Core Group” was the name given to the leaders of the Resistance Army. In the Upper City, this word carried a legendary meaning.
After a brief silence on both sides, Bai Jingan continued.
“I definitely know those people, just like how I know I must have participated in this incident, but I don’t remember any of it. The Starmount’s Virus 17-3 is a subcategory under type 17 that targets the genetic chain of all mammals. Even though the Upper City could create poison gas that could instantly kill people, or viruses that could cause everyone to mutate and kill each other, they didn’t use that. They used the type 17-3 whose mutagenic effect was random.
“The target of this type of virus infection was also random, it may be a rat, or it may be a person. The mutated creatures wouldn’t kill each other, they only wanted to eat people. In addition, depending on your genetic condition, some people would have partial limb mutations, or brain function decline, or like me, suffer severe brain damage and loss of all long-term memories.”
He stopped, and Xia Tian took a sip from the bottle and handed it back to him.
Bai Jingan continued, “They first infected a rat, then followed it with a camera as it went from the sewer all the way into a town, infecting various other creatures along the way. The filming was superb and exciting, but when you were in that town yourself, it didn’t feel very interesting or exciting.”
“I also watched that video,” Xia Tian said, “Sometimes… I am curious, when they destroy someone’s life, exactly how do they do it?”
“Yeah, arouses curiosity,” Bai Jingan said, “I… couldn’t find their faces in the video, they were all wearing the camera jammer at that time. I can only imagine what I was like at that time. I must have been young and angry, wanting to change something.
“But I can’t recall what I looked like at that time… All the young faces were all the same, very angry and full of pain…”
Xia Tian suddenly stretched his hand and rubbed Bai Jingan’s hair, making Bai Jingan laugh.
“My brain is an unrecoverable post-disaster scene,” he said, “but sometimes I remember some fragments of memory. I still remember that time when we attacked the chief executive’s house, the situation was very chaotic, and I told someone to keep quiet… I remember someone in that group had called me ‘Lil’ Bai’.”
Xia Tian gave him an odd look and finally just said, “Don’t be too upset. When I was young, some people called me Lil’ Xia, but in the end it didn’t catch on.”
Bai Jingan laughed and choked on the wine.
He paused for a moment and then said, “Actually, Lil’ Bai is not bad.”
“I’ve seen your medical report before. So your memory of everything that happened before the attack… just disappeared?” Xia Tian said.
“Basically,” Bai Jingan said, taking another sip of wine. Although he should not have drunk any alcohol since he returned to the Upper City, he looked quite adept at drinking alcohol just now.
“So I don’t remember much about this house,” he said, looking around, “Both my parents and my childhood, they are way too back for me. All the things that I remember clearly are about the Massacre. Besides that, I remember some fragmentary details of life in the Lower City.”
He sighed. “It seems that I was born in the Lower City, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get out of there.”
“What happened later?” Xia Tian asked.
“With my identity, I had the permission to go to the Upper City, so I escaped the encapsulation net,” Bai Jingan continued, “The one responsible for the Massacre was the Floating Gold TV station, and it only cared about good-looking killings and was not particularly interested in the tightness of the encapsulation area. I wandered around the Lower City for a while, and not once did I think about going back to the Upper City.
“One day… I arrived at a place. I don’t know where it was, maybe it was Zone M. I encountered a robber, but I couldn’t bring myself to resist the other party at all… However, someone came over and chased the guy away, then asked me if I needed help. The other person seemed nice. I looked at his face and suddenly remembered that I must have known some other really nice people somewhere. I finally wanted to get out of there.
“Otherwise I would stay and try to settle down again. And then… still the same thing would happen, the torture, the killing, the anger, the pain… You would always lose very important people and there was no way to save them. I would fail again, I… I had to get out of there and do whatever it took to get away from the Massacre.”
He spoke slowly, and this was the first time he spoke so much and talked about his past.
“I came back to the Upper City, back to this house…” he gestured. “Upper City is lax in its protection and management policy of a single person family. The policy previously consisted of the management robots and once-a-week visits from social workers. When I was twelve years old, I filled out an application for living alone, and I haven’t even had a visit from a social worker. But I had been falsifying records to keep people from taking the house away… My hacking skills were good enough to modify my whereabouts, add purchase records and pretend I’m just a shut-in nutcase…
“I thought about giving up my Upper City life and just forgetting about it, I couldn’t bear to come back… but eventually I came back and pretended to be the same person I was before and live the same life as before…”
Bai Jingan never thought that he would say so many words one day, and he didn’t even realize that these thoughts were always in his heart, quietly circulating in his mind. They were all dark, distant, and meaningless things that no one could say.
“It’s just… everything here has become very strange, and I try to understand and pretend to be who I was. But here, I’ll only be myself, and no one else ever again. But I still feel that I’m always in that darkness. It is… too powerful, swallowing all of my past and turning me into another person.”
“I always dream about it too,” Xia Tian said, “You just cannot remain same after experiencing that kind of thing.”
Bai Jingan didn’t speak any more. The darkness of the night softly enveloped the surroundings, and it seemed like things were getting better and there would be no more nightmares. But that was just an illusion.
Xia Tian looked at him for a while, then suddenly reached out to wrap his arms around the other party’s shoulders. Bai Jingan froze but then he relaxed. This feeling was very warm.
The screen in front of him was still frozen in a dark frame of the District N7 game. Xia Tian caressed Bai Jingan’s hair and said, “We will be fine.”
Bai Jingan didn’t think so at all.
But he nodded anyway.
Man, I thought this was a mass update until I reached the next chapter and realized I’d already read it. 😅 Thanks for the chapter!
Thank you for informing! I don’t even know how the hell I wrote c53 as c38. These numbers are not even remotely similar.
Thank you for reading 😊
Np. Glad I could help. Btw, I’ve been wondering this for a while… is your profile pic Zoro? It’s very cute!
Yeap, it’s Zoro! I am a One Piece fan 😊
Nice. I’m a huge Zoro fan myself! 😁
with the technology to bring people back from a hair strand away from death and create hellish unimaginable mutations, robots and technologies, there HAS to be some way to heal bai jingans memory. Not bring back memories but certainly improve his long team (´∩｀。)
I don’t think Bai Jingan wants his memory healed.
I guess so （┬┬＿┬┬） but its still sad that his long term is all frucked up