The nights in the Undercity were not dark.
Colorful neon lights adorned the city at night, temporarily making people forget the cruelty of the surface, forgetting that they were supposed to live aboveground, rather than eke out a living underground like rats.
Zha Liqun drove alone to the private hospital. The fleeting lights outside the car window left him somewhat dazed.
It was as if he had returned to the years before the disaster.
Back then, he had been an ordinary man.
He had a family that was not perfect, but not too bad either.
He had been a taxi driver, rushing through the city every day for a few scraps of silver.
Even though he had worked hard to make money, every time he returned home, he received no words of concern. Instead, he was met with his wife's disdainful looks and mockery.
Burdened by his mortgage and car loan, with no children and no hope in sight, he had worked hard to gain a foothold in the big city, only to be swept this way and that by the flood of life.
Whenever he passed by the river, he felt the urge to leap in, but in the end, he never acted on it.
And then.
The disaster arrived.
Massive beasts fell from the sky, shattering the peace of countless people and reducing Zha Liqun's life to pieces.
His wife had died in a building brought down by a giant beast, and the entire residential complex had even been razed to the ground.
Zha Liqun had escaped the disaster because he had been out driving. When he returned to the complex and saw the devastated ruins before him, he instead laughed.
He felt liberated.
And it was at that moment.
He changed.
He became another person.
The Black