The seed

The business at the Fight Club came to a temporary close.

Chu Mu's feat of taking an eye for an eye caused a brief stir in the Underworld, then quickly faded from public attention.

It was not that the incident had been too tame to shock anyone. A far more sensational piece of news had simply overshadowed it.

According to a source in the Upper District, Belobog's newly appointed Supreme Guardian, Lady Cocolia Landau, was planning to seal off all passages between the Upper District and the Underworld!

The moment the news broke, it shot straight to the front pages of every major newspaper.

Although the authorities issued a denial the very next day, recalled every newspaper carrying the false report, and even arrested several people for spreading rumors,

a seed of doubt had already been planted in the hearts of the Underworld's residents.

People began to grow restless, unease filling every heart.

Against this backdrop, however, Chu Mu enjoyed the most peaceful stretch of his life.

He studied at the Orphanage during the day, then explored the Underworld's streets and alleys with Natasha in the evenings.

One hundred and thirty-six steps took him from the classroom to the Orphanage's front gate. Fifty-two stairs led from the Orphanage down to Rivet Town. Another twelve thousand seven hundred and sixty-five steps brought him to the Public Security Office in Boulder Town.

Chu Mu committed all of it to memory. In his mind, the hazy outline of the Underworld grew clearer by the day.

The light gradually receded. Darkness had accepted him, and he, too, would embrace it.

It was worth mentioning that Chu Mu had asked Natasha to borrow numerous books about the Aeons from the great library in the Upper District. Those books allowed him to confirm a suspicion.

The eerie woman he had seen in his dream during that night's treatment was none other than Yaoshi, the Aeon who presided over the Path of Abundance!

Of course, gods had already become embodiments of laws and concepts, so calling one a woman was inaccurate. Gods ought to be sexless; their true forms were creations of absolute perfection, without flaw or deficiency.

The distinction between a male god and a goddess lay only in the form they revealed before mortals. Calling Yaoshi an eerie woman, as Chu Mu did, was actually rather disrespectful.

How could a mortal presume to assign a god a gender?

Chu Mu still did not understand why Yaoshi had attacked him, or why the Aeon had released him in the end and begun to weep.

Was he really just an ordinary child?

Were those memories he had once dismissed as illusions truly illusory?

At that moment, profound confusion about his origins welled up within Chu Mu.

A longing began to take root in him: to leave Jarilo-VI, leave this planet, and return to the sea of stars-to uncover the truth and unravel the mysteries surrounding him!

But Belobog's technology could not send anyone beyond the blue sky.

Perhaps Belobog could have managed it seven hundred years ago, when its technology was highly advanced. The city of today, however, had yet to recover from its civilization's regression, and was even teetering on the brink beneath the onslaught of ice and snow.

Chu Mu could only sigh.

He had suffered no further attacks during this time. The agonizing illness seemed to have vanished.

But Chu Mu did not believe for a moment that he had been cured! It was merely lying dormant. When it struck again, it would surely bring a deadly ordeal he might not survive!

That realization weighed even more heavily on his heart.

Seven days passed quickly, bringing the day of his weekly appointment with Svarog.

That weekend evening, Chu Mu arrived at the Great Dump with Natasha.

"Chu Mu, why are we coming here?" Natasha asked.

A strip of black gauze covered Chu Mu's eyes. His remaining vision was already very weak, deteriorating even faster than he had expected.

He had also developed sensitivity to light. What seemed like gentle illumination to an ordinary person felt to him like a light bulb pressed against his eyeball, burning him with unbearable pain.

Chu Mu was not particularly upset about it. If anything, he thought it made a useful disguise. After all, an artificial eye could not constrict its pupil like a real one, and covering it would keep Xiao Bu from discovering the truth.

The little girl still had not realized that Chu Mu's right eye was artificial. He had told her that the black gauze was there to protect mortals, lest his Wicked King's True Eye strike them dead with its gaze.

"But your Wicked King's True Eye looks at Xiao Bu too, and I haven't died," Xiao Bu had asked, looking puzzled.

"Because you're special," Chu Mu had replied.

Xiao Bu had stopped asking after that, but whenever she looked at Chu Mu, her gaze would linger on his eyes for a long time.

Perhaps the little girl had already noticed something.

Chu Mu had no doubts about Xiao Bu's powers of observation. But sometimes, leaving things unspoken was a kind of mutual understanding.

If her big brother said it was the Wicked King's True Eye, then that was what it had to be.

Sometimes, sustaining a lie took more courage than admitting the truth.

Chu Mu had told Xiao Bu countless lies because he thought of her as his little sister and did not want her to worry.

But in this world, amid this snow-covered dump, there was also an old, discarded robot-the only friend to whom he could tell the truth.

Machines did not lie. All sincerity needed was someone to listen.

"Svarog, I'm here to see you." Chu Mu brushed away the snow bit by bit.

Beneath the covering of steel plates, the robot's eye lit up red as he looked at Chu Mu:

"Six hundred thousand, two thousand, eighty-one, seconds. This time, very, punctual."

Then he turned toward Natasha and asked:

"Who, is this?"

At the sight of the robot suddenly speaking, Natasha could not help taking a step back.

Chu Mu caught Natasha's hand and reassured her:

"Teacher, Svarog is my friend."

Then he turned to Svarog and introduced her:

"This is Natasha, a teacher at our Orphanage."

"Evaluating... Natasha, human, adult female, tagged, added to, friendly life-form records." Svarog's mechanical voice rang out as he looked at Natasha. "Hello, Ms., Natasha."

"H-hello!" Natasha nervously clutched her skirt. "Hello, Mr. Svarog?"

"Just, Svarog, will do." Svarog turned his head toward Chu Mu. "I am, Chu Mu's, friend."

"Teacher, Svarog is easy to get along with," Chu Mu said with a smile.

Natasha, meanwhile, was inwardly astonished. She knew more about robots than Chu Mu did, and this hulking machine was clearly a combat robot, likely a creation from the Pre-War Era.

How had he ended up immobilized in the Underworld's Great Dump? Could he really still move after hundreds of years?

"Teacher, I'm going to talk with Svarog for a while. Why don't you wait for me back at the intersection?" Chu Mu said to Natasha.

There was a Heating System installed by City Hall at the intersection.

"All right." Natasha nodded, but rather than going to the intersection, she merely moved a little farther away, giving the two of them some space.

Seeing this, Chu Mu could only tell Svarog:

"Looks like we'll have to make this quick. I can't let my teacher freeze."

"What happened, to your eyes?" Svarog wasted no time in asking.

The red glow in his eye seemed capable of seeing through the black gauze covering Chu Mu's eyes.

"As you can see, I'm one-eyed now." Chu Mu smiled. "Svarog, we could debut as a duo. I'll be Little One-Eye, and you can be Big One-Eye."

"We, can." Svarog nodded. "Who did it?"

"I gouged it out myself." Chu Mu shook his head. "No one else had anything to do with it."

Then Svarog continued:

"Was it, because of, the problem, with your left eye?"

"My left eye?" Chu Mu looked puzzled.

His right eye was now artificial. Although his left eye had turned green and its vision was failing, there seemed to be nothing else wrong with it.

"Your, left eye, has a, seed."

The wind and snow howled, yet Svarog's mechanical voice struck like a thunderclap, exploding in Chu Mu's ears!

A seed, in his left eye?