Eight hours passed in a fog of semi-consciousness. Pain would drag Tòumíng toward wakefulness, then exhaustion would pull him back under. The alley remained empty, the dumpster casting long shadows as night gave way to early morning.
When he finally opened his eyes, the sun was already climbing, pale light filtering between the buildings. His body felt like it had been put through a grinder. Every muscle ached, every joint screamed, and his legs were stiff with dried blood. But he was alive.
Tòumíng blinked at the sky, confusion cutting through the haze. He should be dead. Those stab wounds, the beating, the broken ribs. No one walked away from that. No one woke up eight hours later in an alley and just opened their eyes like it was a normal morning.
The system. Cupid. The glowing blue screen.
He looked around, searching for any sign of the interface, any hint of that snarky voice. Nothing. Just an empty alley, garbage scattered around him, and the faint sounds of the city waking up for another day.
A hallucination. It had all been a hallucination, his brain's last desperate attempt to make sense of dying. The trauma, the blood loss, the head injuries. Of course he'd imagined some kind of supernatural salvation. Of course he'd conjured up a voice offering him power and revenge right when everything was ending.
Except he wasn't dead.
"CAN I GET A THANK YOU AT LEAST?"
Tòumíng jerked upright, immediately regretting it as pain lanced through his torso. The voice was back, loud and annoyed, echoing inside his skull.
"What..." He looked around frantically. "Where are you?"
"Oh my god. Oh my actual god. Are you serious right now?"
"I don't see you. There's no screen, there's no glowing letters, there's nothing."
"Look down, genius."
Tòumíng, taking the instruction literally, stared at the ground. Pavement. Blood stains. Some questionable puddles he didn't want to think about. "I don't see anything."
A sound that could only be described as the verbal equivalent of a facepalm echoed in his head. "Not down at the ground, you absolute moron. Down at yourself. Your body. Specifically, your chest."
"My chest?" Tòumíng looked down at his torso, at his blood-soaked shirt, at the general disaster that was his physical form.
"I'm in your heart, jackass." Cupid's voice dripped with exasperation. "You never seen Chainsaw Man before? Pochita? Or even Parasite? Any media where something takes up residence in someone's body? Come on, work with me here."
Tòumíng's hand moved to his chest, pressing against the fabric. Beneath it, he could feel his heartbeat. Steady. Strong. Impossibly normal given what he'd been through.
"Wait, you're actually..." He pressed harder, feeling the rhythm. "You're inside me?"
"Unfortunately, yes. This is my life now. Cramped, dark, constantly moving. Do you have any idea how nauseating it is to be a heart? Everything's pumping and squeezing and I can feel every single heartbeat. It's disgusting."
"But how..."
"I fused with you, dumbass. When your heart stopped, I replaced it. Well, not replaced exactly. More like merged. Became it. I'm your heart now. I'm manually keeping this whole operation running." Cupid's voice took on a bitter edge. "Eight hours I've been doing this. Eight hours of pump, pump, pump, squeeze, release, pump, pump, pump. Do you know how boring that is? This is why I go for weeb losers instead of sad cases. Weebs at least know the tropes. They get the whole 'supernatural entity fused with my body' thing immediately."
Tòumíng sat there, hand still pressed to his chest, trying to process this. There was something alive inside him. Something that was keeping him alive, literally pumping his blood through sheer force of will.
"So you're stuck in there? Until..."
"Until you die, yeah. We're bonded now. Lucky me." A pause. "On the bright side, I can probably heal you. Maybe. I'm not entirely sure about that part. The heart thing I know how to do. The healing is theoretical. But your legs seem to have stopped bleeding at least, so that's something."
Looking down at his thighs, Tòumíng could see the torn fabric, the dried blood, the holes where the knives had gone in. But Cupid was right. No fresh blood. The wounds had somehow closed, or at least stopped actively trying to kill him.
"Thank you." The words came out quiet, genuine. "I don't know why you did this, but thank you."
"Yeah, yeah, touching moment, very emotional. Now get up and go home. Get your pickaxe. You've got work to do if you want to survive past today."
"Work? I can barely stand."
"Then crawl. I don't care. But you need that pickaxe and you need to get to the mine. The system isn't going to level itself, and you're not going to get revenge lying in an alley feeling sorry for yourself."
Tòumíng gritted his teeth and pushed himself to his feet. His legs protested, the damaged muscles and tendons screaming, but they held. Barely. He took one step, then another, wobbling like a newborn deer.
"That's it. One foot in front of the other. You look like shit, by the way. Might want to clean up before someone sees you and calls the cops."
The walk back to his building took twice as long as it should have. Every step was agony, every breath a reminder of the broken rib grinding against something it shouldn't. People gave him a wide berth on the streets, eyes sliding away from the blood-soaked figure limping through the morning crowds.
Longhua district was waking up properly now. Vendors setting up their stalls, workers heading to their shifts, the smell of street food mixing with exhaust fumes. Normal life, continuing on, completely indifferent to the fact that Tòumíng had died and come back in the span of a night.
His building came into view, the crumbling concrete facade as depressing as ever. But something was wrong. Tòumíng slowed, his survival instincts prickling.
Three black SUVs were parked outside. Sleek, expensive, their windows tinted so dark they looked like voids. The vehicles stood out in the slums like diamonds in a trash heap. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people owned cars, let alone SUVs that probably cost more than everyone in the building made in a year combined.
The engines were off but Tòumíng could see figures inside, waiting.
His heart, Cupid's heart, their heart, started beating faster.
"Fuck."