The tavern's door creaked shut behind him, sealing in the stale smoke and whispers. Outside, Slaughter City sprawled beneath its eternal twilight, a labyrinth of jagged alleys and crooked towers clawing toward the ash-colored sky.
Gu Kuangren walked without hurry. His boots scraped over the uneven stones, leaving faint streaks of drying blood. His towering frame drew glances from the shadows — some wary, some hungry. He ignored them all.
The city was alive in its own way. The walls bled with condensation. The streets pulsed with whispers of violence. The air itself tasted of iron.
Kuangren tilted his head back, inhaling deeply.
This was freedom.
Not the kind sung about by fools with dreams of open skies and green fields. No — here, freedom was stripped bare. Here, there was no law but strength, no morality but survival. Here, he didn't need to pretend.
The others called it a cage. A nightmare. A hell.
To him, it was home.
He turned into a narrow alley, the torchlight thinning until only faint embers glowed on the damp stones. His steps slowed, his gaze softening, crimson light dimming as memory pulled him inward.
An orphan. That word had followed him like a shadow since he could remember. He didn't know where he was born, or to whom. All he knew was hunger — the gnawing ache that hollowed out his chest until nothing else mattered.
He remembered sleeping in gutters, the cold gnawing his bones as rats scurried over him. He remembered watching other children cling to mothers, fathers — faces he never had. He remembered fists, boots, the jeers of stronger boys who took what little he had.
And he remembered the first time he fought back.
The rock. The blood. The silence that followed.
Even now, all these years later, he could still hear it. The sound of a skull cracking under his hand. The way his own heartbeat had thundered in his ears, not with fear, but with exhilaration.
That was the night he stopped being prey.
Kuangren reached a dead end, a wall slick with moisture and graffiti carved deep by knives. He leaned one massive hand against it, closing his eyes.
The faces of the dead flickered through his mind. Not with guilt. Not with regret. But with familiarity. They were milestones, markers on the road he had carved in blood.
He smiled faintly, though no one was there to see it.
"Mad," they whispered of him. "Monster. Demon."
Perhaps they were right. But what was a demon, if not the purest form of honesty?
The world killed without pause — famine, disease, war. Humans hid behind excuses, cloaked their violence in righteousness. But him? He stripped it bare. He killed because it was truth. Because it was joy. Because in killing, he lived.
His crimson eyes opened, glowing faintly in the dark.
And if that was madness, then he would embrace it until the end.
Far behind him, unseen in the shadows of another alley, golden eyes gleamed faintly.
Zhu Zhuqing had followed.
She didn't step closer. She didn't call out. She simply watched, silent as the night, as Gu Kuangren leaned against the wall, the faint smile on his lips lit by torchlight like a smear of blood.
Something tightened in her chest. Not fear. Not admiration. Something colder, sharper. Recognition.
For she, too, carried chains of her own. Chains she would one day break in blood.
And so, she did not leave.