"The price of surviving was becoming everyone's target."
"The children from the same neighborhood all went to the same school."
"I alone was the surviving outcast."
"Most families had lost their loved ones in that catastrophe."
"They huddled together for warmth and comforted one another."
"Only my parents were quietly shunned, turned into outsiders."
Why was I still breathing?
The questioning spread like a plague, eventually festering into naked malice.
No one would offer shelter.
No one would give my parents a job to put food on the table.
Even the disaster relief funds were held up under all sorts of pretexts, their payment endlessly delayed.
The natural disaster hadn't broken this family.
Human cruelty had snapped its backbone.
Mother washed her face in tears day and night, her eyes as red and swollen as peaches.
Father had once been hardworking and driven, but now he drank heavily and had a temper like a firecracker.
One night, Father slumped over the table, reeking of alcohol, and mumbled indistinctly.
"If only she'd died in the rubble too..."
"Wouldn't that have been nice."
It felt as though a sledgehammer had struck my heart, shattering it in an instant.
Then a gentle whisper sounded beside my ear.
"Welcome to the Theatre of Domination."
Kiana froze in place.
She had never imagined it would end like this.
Yet this absurd reality was suffocatingly cruel.
The livestream chat fell deathly silent.
The viewers.
Because this scene had actually played out in the real world before.
Cases of survivors being ostracized after disasters weren't uncommon.
It was just that very few people knew the inside story.
Only now had a corner of it been torn open.
Those who knew remained silent, waiting for what would happen next.
Everyone was curious.
Faced with such a desperate situation,