"Why does life sink into sleep?"
"Because tonight, I join the hunt..."
Evan mumbled instinctively through the haze of sleep.
He opened his eyes. They were so dry they hurt, and crust had glued his eyelashes together. It took a great deal of effort to pry them apart.
The kerosene lamp's flame had dwindled to a pea-sized point of light, wavering feebly inside its glass chimney.
Its dim yellow glow barely illuminated the four walls, which were plastered with old newspapers.
Some corners had curled away, exposing the moldy plaster beneath.
A torn piece of the Bolton Evening Post hung crookedly above the bed.
Only half the front-page headline remained: "...gas explosion..." The rest had been swallowed by stains.
The old gray curtains were drawn tight. Specks of mildew dotted the fabric like a clumsy printed pattern.
A thread of damp November cold seeped through a gap in the window frame.
The night outside was not quiet.
In the distance came the intermittent moans of a vagrant and the barking of stray dogs.
Farther away, a gang erupted in howls somewhere down an alley, mingled with the sharp crack of a breaking glass bottle. Then came a burst of coarse laughter.
"Where am I?"
Evan had barely tried to stand when a violent wave of dizziness exploded at the back of his head.
He slumped back into the chair, its backrest giving a dry creak when he hit it.
He was exhausted.
Not the kind of exhaustion a night's sleep could fix.
His bones ached, his muscles were limp, and even his breathing came in strained, hurried bursts. Every rise and fall of his chest drained what little strength he had left.
"Even going seven rounds in one night wouldn't leave me this wiped out..."
Evan muttered hoarsely and looked down.
A pair of forearms so thin he could make out the outlines of the bones lay exposed in the kerosene lamp's faint light.
His skin was almost translucent with pallor, covered in dense dark-red spots. Some had merged into patches with an ominous copper-red edge.
There were several needle marks in the crook of his elbow, surrounded by bruised skin.
Memories surged in like a tide.
"Fuck! I've just transmigrated, and I already have secondary syphilis?"
This was a parallel world resembling the years before the First World War.
The year was 1910 of the New Calendar.
The United States of the New Continent had been rooted in this land for over a century and was in the midst of a dizzying ascent.
Every few days, the newspapers carried news of another invention.
Electricity, internal combustion engines, automobiles, wireless telegraphy—new things sprang from the soil like mushrooms after rain.
The last notes of westward expansion had sounded.
Steam and electricity met above factory rooftops.
Science and ignorance tangled on opposite sides of the same street.
Steel mills, textile mills, and canning factories spread at an astonishing pace. Capital was a hungry giant beast, swallowing coal and human blood and spitting out gold.
The New Continent teemed with life, everything surging forward.
The nations of the Old Continent, meanwhile, nursed a vicious anger, baring their teeth at one another as they waited for a fuse to be lit.
Evan Ludwig Arkham was nineteen years old and a student.
Thirty years ago, his grandparents' generation had moved the whole family from the famously close-knit Arkham Town in Essex County to Bolton City.
As for why they had left, no one in the family ever spoke of it, and Evan had never gotten around to asking.
With the small death benefits left after his grandparents died in the line of duty, his parents had bought this cheap apartment in the south of the city.
Two and a half rooms, peeling walls, no electricity, and pipes prone to freezing and bursting in winter.
But at least it had a door that closed and a washroom of their own.
That meant they did not have to squeeze into the same tenement as the Irish immigrants in the Dock District, who spoke a different language and were quick to throw punches.
Dozens of people shared one toilet, and the corridors always smelled of boiled cabbage and cheap gin.
Six months ago, everything had changed.
His parents had abruptly killed themselves on their way home from working overtime.
No suicide note, no warning, no reasonable explanation.
The police called it "impulsive behavior caused by a mental breakdown." They filed the case away, and no one asked about it again.
Evan went to the Police Department twice. The second time, the officer on duty did not even look up at him. He just tapped his pencil on the desk.
"Go home, kid. Don't go looking for trouble."
His life, which had been manageable until then, collapsed overnight.
His meager savings were only enough to keep him going for six months.
He counted every cent, every day. Breakfast was a two-cent cup of black coffee and stale bread left over from the day before.
He often skipped lunch. Dinner was a five-cent bowl of mixed-bean soup, and if he was lucky, he might fish out a small piece of fatty meat.
Two months ago, Evan had earned a place at Bolton City's renowned private institution, Sage University, on the strength of his excellent grades.
He had fulfilled his parents' wish.
But tuition was a full 120 dollars a semester!
One hundred and twenty dollars.
Two months' wages for a university-educated technician who spent nothing on food or drink.
So Evan sold his blood for the first time in his life.
Two hundred milliliters for two dollars.
The blood was drawn at a small clinic near the Dock District with a sign that read "Medical Research Institute."
Lime dust flaked from the walls, the rubber tubing was yellow and stiff, and black grime was lodged beneath the nurse's fingernails.
He lay on a narrow bed covered in oilcloth, watching his blood flow through the tube into a brown glass bottle while silently calculating how many days of mixed-bean soup two dollars would buy.
It still was not enough.
Through a friend, Evan found two drug trials to take part in.
The rules were simple: take the medication on time every day for seven days, record his body's reactions, and collect ten dollars afterward.
No one told him what he was taking. The contract only said "clinical observation of nutritional supplements," followed by Latin abbreviations he could barely understand.
Ten dollars.
The figure made Evan's heart beat a little faster.
A dockworker would earn about that much from a whole week of backbreaking labor.
After that, he signed a Financial Aid Agreement through Sage University's student affairs office.
The terms were packed with fine print, but the heart of it came down to one condition: cooperate with experimental projects run by professors designated by Sage University, and his annual tuition would be reduced from 120 dollars to 40.
Forty dollars.
He gritted his teeth and scraped together the tuition for his first semester.
And so Evan finally stepped through the gates of the university he had dreamed of attending and became a freshman in the Chemistry Department.
His plan was clear: study chemistry as an undergraduate, build a solid foundation, then apply to medical school.
On the day he graduated, he would put on a clean white coat and open a clinic in a respectable neighborhood.
A brass plaque by the door would read "Dr. Evan L. Arkham."
"And the price?" Evan gave a bitter laugh. His lips were cracked, and the smile pulled painfully at the corners of his mouth.
Selling blood so often had left his body as worn out as a filter used again and again.
A dirty needle at that filthy clinic had given him syphilis.
The various drugs of unknown origin had turned his organs to mush.
Every day he was dizzy and foggy-headed, with no appetite and limbs so weak that unscrewing a bottle cap left him panting for ages.
Three days ago, Evan had fallen while running in gym class, tearing open the sleeve of his shirt.
The horrifying red patches on his forearm were exposed for everyone to see.
The sports field fell quiet for about two seconds.
Then came the whispers, then the undisguised snickers, then someone shouted something that set off a roar of laughter.
Evan did not catch the exact words, but he saw the expression on every face.
He knew that look well. It was the look people wore when they saw a rat in a sewer.
He returned to his apartment and sat down in this chair. The more he thought about it, the angrier he grew; the angrier he grew, the colder he felt. Then a string inside him that had been stretched too tight for too long simply snapped.
The body's previous occupant had died just like that.
"What a catastrophic start."
Evan leaned against the back of the chair. The old, loose wood groaned under his weight.
He flexed his fingers. Every joint felt like a rusty hinge: stiff, sluggish, and faintly aching.
"Good thing I have a cheat ability."
A translucent panel appeared in his vision, like glowing words branded onto the inside of his retinas:
[Nine Dragons Panel loading complete] [Profession: None] [Status: None] [Characteristics: None] [Physique: 0.5] (Normal adult baseline: 1. Affects stamina, strength, speed, immunity, and ability to withstand injury.) [Mind: 0.6] (Normal adult baseline: 1. Affects willpower, memory, processing ability, reaction speed, and resistance to corruption.) [Spirit Vision: 0] (Normal adult baseline: 0. Affects insight into and control over supernatural mysteries.) [Talent: Power of the Nine Dragons] [Power of the Nine Dragons: You can reverse the negative effects of up to 9 drugs simultaneously.]
"These stats are downright miserable." Evan sighed, and the breath left his throat with a rusty taste.
"But this Power of the Nine Dragons is interesting. Heh."
Once the panel finished loading, he noticed a column of status indicators at the lower right of his vision.
It looked like a prescription list posted behind a pharmacy counter, except every item on this list was bad news:
[Syphilis: 46%] [Pneumonia: 12%] [Anemia: 65%] [Liver damage: 41%] [Digestive tract ulcers: 12%] [Neurological damage: 17%]
"How the fuck did you stay alive this long?"
Evan stared at the numbers and could not help cursing aloud.
This body was a condemned building ready to collapse at any moment. Every load-bearing pillar was cracked; only the resilience of youth had kept it standing.
"No. I've only just arrived in this world. I'm not dying like this."
"I'm going to survive. Heh..."
His gaze fell on the table.
A jumble of medicine bottles lay across the brown wooden tabletop, which was covered in knife cuts and burn marks.
Most of the bottles did not even have labels. Some held blue-gray pills that looked like balls of mud; others were open tins containing a dark paste that gave off a pungent metallic smell.
There was also a small bottle of milky-white liquid sealed with wax. A blurred mark had been pressed into the wax.
Some of these were syphilis medicines he had quietly bought from a pharmacy in the south of the city after school yesterday.
The others were freebies he had received during the earlier drug trials. He had been told they were "for restoring his health."