He woke on his family's wooden bed, mother's red-rimmed eyes hovering. "Herb gatherers found you at the cliff bottom," she said, feeding him bitter medicine, "clutching that ragged hide like it was your life." Alan touched the booklet beneath his shirt; wounds ached, but nothing compared to the dread coiling in his chest. The caged old man, bloodstained cables—it felt like a nightmare, but one that lingered in his bones.
That night, he hid under the covers and opened the manual. Following the title page's diagrams, he sat cross-legged, trying to guide what it called "qi." No sooner had he focused than pain lanced through him—sharp, stinging, like shards of ice piercing every limb, as if ants swarmed his veins, gnawing bone and nerve. He trembled, sweat soaking his shirt, teeth grinding till his jaw ached.
First night: three breaths, then he collapsed, gasping like a fish hauled from water. The faint warmth in his lower belly was nothing next to the tidal pain. But dawn revealed his knee wound half-healed, his grip on the hatchet steadier.
From then on, Alan's childhood split into two agonies: daylight, mocked for butchering the dialect; night, enduring The Remaining Sun Manual's bone-gnawing torment. His spiritual root, as the old man said, was fractured. Others absorbed heaven and earth's energy like drinking spring water; he farmed in salt-alkali soil—every step forward peeled a layer of skin.
At seven, on a winter night, he hit the third cycle of cultivation and vomited black blood. Droplets hit the pages, and the symbols flared crimson. He curled in the wood shed, listening to wind howl, nails digging into his palms till they bleed. But dawn came, and he lifted half a bundle of firewood with ease; his frostbitten fingers tingled back to life.
Ten years of this. Whenever he wavered, he saw the cave old man's eyes—ablaze with unwillingness. His body, torn and mended a hundred times, grew unnaturally tough: bumps left no scars, he outran mountain hares. But no one knew: behind every ordinary dawn, a boy screamed silent in the dark.