Schedule Update
Hey guys,
From now on, the release schedule here will be daily.
If you'd like to read up to 20 chapters ahead, you can support me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
Thank you for all your support. it really keeps the story going.
Lu Changcheng looked at Bone Saw and took a half step back.
"Ren," he said. "What is that."
Bone Saw turned toward him and gave a small bow.
"Greetings, Dao Guild Master," he said. "My name is Bone Saw. I am Father's third son."
Lu Changcheng looked at the titanium skull over the obsidian skull, the red light in the eye sockets, the branding barely visible above the mask's forehead line. He turned back to Ren.
"Ren," he said. "Is your wife an undead? Is this your third child?"
Ren opened his mouth.
"I normally don't involve myself in a friend's personal life," Lu Changcheng continued, "but this is crossing a line. You know undead have rotten flesh. If you have been having relations with one you will catch all sorts of diseases. Brother, I say this with concern."
"STOP," Ren said.
"I'm not judging. I'm genuinely worried for your health."
"Brother Lu, it is not what you think." Ren pressed one hand over his face. "This person is more like an experimental subject. I created him using a part of my own flesh and blood. My blood runs through him. That is why he calls me Father."
Lu Changcheng took five full steps backward.
"So your research has gone in the alchemist direction," he said. "I didn't expect that from you. Did you produce a test tube and grow him from there? Did you have to do anything into the test tube yourself, or something like that?"
"First," Ren said, holding up one finger, "that is not what happened."
"Second," he continued, holding up another, "why do alchemists have such a terrible reputation? Why is it that every time I try to explain my abilities to anyone they immediately put me in the same category as those people? What is wrong with the alchemist name that it carries this much baggage?"
Lu Changcheng sat down on the clinic sofa.
"Explain it to me then," he said.
Ren explained.
He took one hour and thirty minutes. He covered the full process, the mechanism, the difference between what he did and what alchemy did, the results with each of the three Abominations, the skill sets produced, the Father connection, the sensing of objectives, the sleep situation, and the forty-two subsections of documentation he had only recently discovered existed.
Lu Changcheng listened. His expression started at interest, moved to careful, and settled into a deepening frown that got worse with each new piece of information.
"What the fuck, Ren," he said, when Ren finished.
"I know it sounds unusual," Ren said.
"Are you trying to become the next Muzan? Have you been watching too much Demon Slayer? Every single one of your abilities is somehow more disturbing than the last. The tentacles. The chainsaw puppy. Now you're producing people from your own flesh and calling them your sons." He looked at Bone Saw, who had been standing quietly through the entire explanation. "No offense."
"None taken," Bone Saw said.
"Why is everything you do so creepy?"
Ren reached out and picked up the white shirt hanging nearby. He looked at it. Something in his expression shifted, and the mask sank inward, pulling back from the surface of his face until it merged with him entirely, and for a moment the clinic held a different version of the man who usually stood in it: Ren Hector, late twenties, pale, dark hair, tired, his eyes doing something close to a welling.
"Brother Lu," he said. "You meanie."
He turned and walked out of the clinic.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Lu Changcheng stood in the waiting room.
The clinic was quiet. Bone Saw was still present, standing by the far wall, the red light in his eye sockets directed toward the door Ren had just exited through.
"Are you a high school student?" Lu Changcheng said, to the door. "I teased you for two minutes and you ran out crying. Aren't you supposed to be a cosmic horror entity of some kind? What is happening?"
The door did not respond.
Lu Changcheng rubbed the back of his neck.
A small sound came from his left. Deliberate. Someone clearing their throat.
He looked at Bone Saw.
"Guildmaster," Bone Saw said.
"Yes."
"If you are Father's sworn brother."
Lu Changcheng saw where this was going immediately.
"Don't," he said.
"Should I call you uncle?"
Lu Changcheng pressed both hands over his face.
"Kill me," he said, to no one in particular. "Just kill me."
. . .
The metro platform at noon was nearly empty. Long plastic benches, flat grey light from the overhead panels, most people elsewhere.
Ren sat on one of the benches in his white shirt and black slacks, the mask gone, his actual face in the world. His arms were folded, his chin was down, staring at the tiles across the platform and thinking about the fact that his sworn brother had just compared him to a fictional demon cult leader.
I won't talk to him for a week, he thought. Two weeks. He said I was creepy.
A train was incoming, the distant sound of it building in the tunnel.
He looked up.
There were maybe fifteen people waiting. Workers on a late lunch break, a couple of students, an older man reading something on his phone. His gaze moved through them by habit, the background scan he ran without deciding to.
It stopped on a girl near the edge of the platform.
She was young, university age, in plain clothes. She was shaking, the fine continuous tremor of someone who has been crying for long enough that the body has taken it over. She faced away from him, toward the tracks.
Breakup, he thought automatically. Or an exam. Something sharp and recent.
The girl suddenly turned her head, scanning the platform quickly, checking if anyone was watching.
Their eyes met for one second.
She looked away fast, but not before he saw it. The expression behind the wet eyes. Decided. More decided than grief or embarrassment by a considerable distance.
No, he thought. It shouldn't be. She's fine. She's just upset.
Screech.
The train filled the tunnel entrance, brakes beginning, still moving.
The girl stepped to the edge.
And then off it.
Fuck, I knew it.
Ren was already moving.
. . .
It's finally here.
The air was rushing past her and the platform edge was gone from under her feet and the only thing left was the sound of the train getting louder and she thought: this is what I always wanted. Peace. Quiet. To disappear. To stop carrying all of it.
Rhea always wanted this.
It's time to forget everything.
A quiet hand closed around her wrist and pulled with a steady, certain force, and then she was back on the platform, on her feet, the train arriving in a wall of displaced air.
She was standing.
The train rumbled through, so close the wind from it hit her face. She felt it and stood there and the fact that she was standing was the worst thing that had happened to her today.
She turned on the man still holding her arm.
"Let go of me."
He released her wrist.
"Why did you do that." She was louder than she meant to be, her voice cracking before she finished the sentence. "Who asked you? Who asked you to do anything? I didn't ask you. I didn't ask anyone."
The man said nothing.
"Answer me." She shoved his shoulder with both hands and he barely moved. "Why did you grab me? What gives you the right? That was mine. That decision was mine. You had no right to take it away from me."
Still nothing.
"And you could have died." Her voice cracked fully on the last word, splintered into something she hadn't meant to let out. "You could have slipped. The train was right there. You could have gone down with me and you just—you just reached out like it was nothing, like I was worth that, like throwing yourself in front of a train for someone you don't even know is a reasonable thing to do—"
Her legs gave out.
She hit the platform floor hard, knees first, and sat there. The crying came out all at once, the whole ugly weight of it, months of it, arriving at once because there was nothing left to hold it back.
"I'm nothing," she said. "I'm not worth it. I'm not worth the risk you took, I'm not worth the second you spent thinking about it, I'm not worth anyone stopping what they were doing to reach out for me, and you did it anyway, you just did it, like it was obvious—" She pressed her hands over her face. "I hate you. I hate you so much right now. Don't you understand what you did? Don't you understand that you risked your life for someone who was trying to leave because she has nothing left? What is wrong with you? What kind of person does that?"
The crying was getting worse. She couldn't stop it. She had wanted to be done. She had been ready to be done. And now she was sitting on a metro platform floor with her knees bleeding and a stranger crouching in front of her and all the weight she had carried to that platform edge was still there, still entirely hers, and she was still here to carry it.
She hated him for that.
She hated him completely.
"Haa."
The man exhaled slowly. Then he crouched down in front of her, getting to her level.
He looked young up close, late twenties, with dark hair and eyes that were a deep, unusual red she had never seen before. Tired, present, entirely unbothered by the fact that she had just shoved him and screamed at him and told him she hated him on a public platform.
"I'm a doctor," he said. "I made a promise a long time ago to use what I know to help people."
He lifted his hand and set it gently on top of her head.
"So I can't sit still when someone is asking for help right in front of me."
"I wasn't asking," she said. Her voice was raw. "I have never asked anyone for anything."
"No," he said. "You didn't say a word."
"Then when?"
"When our eyes met," he said. "For about one second, before you looked away." He did not move his hand. "Save me. Someone, please. You can't ask out loud because asking out loud means admitting you want to stay, and you've been telling yourself for a long time that you don't."
Rhea's mouth opened.
She had no answer for that.
The crying changed. It shifted into something different and worse and more honest, the thing that comes when you have been holding something back for too long and your body simply stops cooperating.
"You can want to stay," he said quietly. "That's allowed."
His hand on her head was warm and steady.
She cried, and for the first time in a long time, she did not try to stop.