Awakening

Some were counting money, some were writing things down in notebooks, and others were making trip after trip to carry things to the corner. There were several sacks, crudely piled on top of one another. Some lay still, while muffled thumps came from inside the others, as though they contained living things.

Luo Ruzhuo gave them a single glance before looking away.

Just then, a man wearing glasses walked toward them. His face, too, was covered by a blurry mosaic, obscuring his features. All they could sense from behind his lenses was the sticky weight of his gaze as he looked them over.

He held an enormous ledger in his hands. After flipping through a few pages, his gaze slowly moved to the iron chain around Zhu Rongtian's ankle and lingered there.

"Are you from Wang Fuzhuang's family?"

Zhu Rongtian nodded vigorously. She tried to steady her voice and explained again, "Grandma's sick, and my dad's dead drunk... We really did come to get Grandma treated. Otherwise, he'd never have let us drive his car!"

Her explanation was coherent and well supported, and she was terrified of leaving a hole in it.

But the bespectacled man didn't answer. His gaze crawled slowly across the ledger. Someone beside him leaned over and whispered a few words in his ear. He looked down and flipped through the pages again, then raised his head. This time, he was looking at Luo Ruzhuo.

"What about her, then? Where did your dad get the money to buy a new one? Your family's so poor you can barely put food on the table. You've only bought a person once in all these years."

Bought a new one? What did he mean, buying a person?

Zhu Rongtian didn't understand what he meant, but she had no time to think it over. She racked her brains for a story about where Luo Ruzhuo had come from.

"She... her relatives couldn't afford to raise her either, so they sent her over..."

She stumbled through the words, but she'd barely started when the middle-aged man in glasses began to giggle, his voice shrill and grating. Several men around him joined in, laughing together as though they'd heard an utterly ridiculous joke.

"Sent her?" His shoulders shook with laughter. "Hahaha, who in our town gives little girls away? Every last one of them was bought!"

He paused, then turned his gaze on Zhu Rongtian's face. His tone was casual, as though he were talking about something amusing. "You're from Wang Fuzhuang's family. Don't tell me you thought you were given away?"

The air seemed to still for a moment.

"Your grandma spent every last penny your family had to buy you." He waved the ledger, wet his thumb with saliva, and deftly flipped to the first few pages, as though displaying some extraordinary piece of evidence.

He jabbed a finger at a line and read it aloud. "'Wang Fuzhuang's family purchased one female child, aged three. Paid in full, three thousand yuan.'"

When he finished, he smacked his lips. "That old bachelor of a dad of yours is no good and couldn't find a wife. Your grandma originally wanted to buy a boy to carry on the family line... But where was she going to find a boy that easily? She couldn't come up with the money, so, well, she could only buy a girl."

What?

The words fell.

Zhu Rongtian's world suddenly went quiet.

The voices and mocking laughter of the people in front of her, the sounds inside the sacks-every sound seemed to have been paused.

She wasn't a child her parents had abandoned... Her grandma had bought her from human traffickers?

Zhu Rongtian opened her mouth and turned to look at the unconscious old woman beside her. She had looked at that deeply lined face for so many years, and in her memory it had always been kind. Now it was as though she were looking at a stranger.

She remembered the anxiety written all over Grandma's face after she ran away. She remembered the iron chain on her ankle, which Grandma had fastened herself while saying it was "for her own good."

All those images suddenly came together to form a cruel truth.

Zhu Rongtian had always known she wasn't Wang Fuzhuang's biological child. She had asked where she came from. Grandma had told her that her parents hadn't wanted her and that their family had been kind enough to raise her. The debt she owed those who had raised her was greater than the debt she owed those who had given birth to her, and she had to repay their kindness.

So she had learned to do laundry, cook, and take care of the household at a young age.

Only occasionally, after her adoptive father beat and cursed her, would she secretly cry alone under the covers and imagine her birth parents' faces. Had they really not wanted her? Had they had some reason they couldn't help? Had they had too many children to raise?

But she was grown up now and could help take care of the family.

If she found her way back to them, would they be willing to take her in?

Again and again, she pictured those two faces she had never seen.

In this family, Grandma treated her well, but Wang Fuzhuang was nothing like the parents she imagined.

After bathing, he often walked around naked in front of her. He also said strange things and touched her inappropriately.

Zhu Rongtian was frightened, but whenever she told Grandma about it, Grandma only comforted her by saying her adoptive father acted that way because he liked her.

But was that what liking someone was?

Was liking someone the fists, the slaps, the things her adoptive father grabbed at random after he got drunk...?

She couldn't convince herself, nor was she willing to accept that kind of affection.

So Zhu Rongtian secretly ran away.

She went from house to house along the main road, asking for news of her birth parents, but everyone said they didn't know.

In the end, she was caught and brought back, and an iron chain was put around her ankle.

When Grandma learned why she had run away, she was silent for a long time. Finally, she went to speak to her adoptive father. Zhu Rongtian didn't know what she said, but after that, his behavior became much more restrained.

From then on, little by little, Zhu Rongtian stopped dreaming of her parents' love. She thought that even if her adoptive father was terrible, at least Grandma still loved her.

As long as there was even the tiniest bit of love, she could keep going.

But now, the little warmth left in her memories was like a bubble, bursting at the slightest touch.

Tears welled uncontrollably in her eyes and rolled silently down her face like beads slipping off a broken string. The dull ache in her head grew into a searing pain, as though something inside were tearing apart.

But she couldn't collapse yet.

Zhu Rongtian bit her tongue hard, and the taste of blood spread through her mouth.

These people knew all about how she had been trafficked here, which meant they were still in that business.

This place was most likely a trafficking den.

They could find out where she came from, but not where Luo Ruzhuo came from... Her little sister would be in danger!

Zhu Rongtian forced an awkward smile onto her tear-streaked face, pulled Luo Ruzhuo close, and turned her head to whisper in her ear.

Her voice was so quiet it was almost a breath.

"Listen to me. Don't treat Grandma for now. Give me that knife. I'll hold them off in a moment... You run."

Run.

All the children here had been trafficked. They couldn't find out where you came from, so they would definitely sell you.

As Zhu Rongtian thought this, the buzzing in her head grew louder and louder. She thought she was speaking loudly, but in reality her voice was as faint as a mosquito's.

Before she could finish, her eyes closed. Her lips brushed lightly against Luo Ruzhuo's ear. Then she slid down and fell onto the muddy ground in the courtyard, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Luo Ruzhuo reached out, but her hand only managed to brush the edge of Zhu Rongtian's clothes.

The mosaic-faced figures around them frowned and closed in on them, whispering among themselves.

At that very instant, an immense surge of mental power poured out of Zhu Rongtian without warning.

Fenrir Talo's voice suddenly rang out in Luo Ruzhuo's mind:

"...That godforsaken place hardly has any sentinel or guide genes. They can go hundreds of years without a single awakening... and then this one freak appeared. On the day she awakened, her mental power went out of control and killed her adoptive father. Then everyone in the entire town."

This Pollution Domain was recreating the scene from the day Zhu Rongtian awakened!

Luo Ruzhuo's pupils contracted. She sprang back, quickly putting distance between herself and Zhu Rongtian.

She had been wondering why the contaminants here were outrageously weak, showing almost no aggression apart from their regenerative ability.

So the real source of aggression was here.

Luo Ruzhuo frowned, her entire body taut as a fully drawn bowstring as she prepared for battle.

She looked at the little girl lying on the ground. The person who had been desperately telling her to run just moments ago was now curled up on the ground, deathly pale, her features scrunched together as though she had been dragged into a nightmare she couldn't wake from.

Luo Ruzhuo didn't know whether she was Zhu Rongtian's own consciousness entity, part of the Pollution Domain, or whether she herself... was the source of the contamination.

Kill her.

Maybe the Pollution Domain will shatter, and I'll be able to get out.

The thought flashed through her mind for only an instant.

Luo Ruzhuo's mental power condensed into an invisible blade in the air. At the same time, she reached inside her uniform, her fingertips touching the cold, sharp surface of the folding dagger. She gripped it tightly and slowly approached.

The mental power of the person before her grew stronger, like a tangible storm vortex, shredding everything around it. The iron bars on the wall clattered, and the ledger in the bespectacled man's hands was swept up by the wind and torn into scraps in an instant.

The contaminants closing in were swept up in the storm. Before their howls had fully escaped their mouths, the mosaics on their faces began to peel away. Then their entire bodies crumbled like sand and scattered on the wind.

Then came the courtyard, the houses, the streets, and finally the entire town.

Every contaminant with mosaic contamination on its face was reduced to ashes under the impact of that power.

Yet Luo Ruzhuo was closest, almost at the very center of the vortex.

The raging mental power, however, precisely avoided her, leaving her completely unharmed.

Luo Ruzhuo's hand hung in midair, her fingers gripping the dagger tightly.

A scorpion-shaped Mental Entity gradually appeared behind the little girl. An iron chain identical to the one around her ankle was fastened to the scorpion's stinger in the same way.

The difference was that the chain on the scorpion was covered in a thick layer of black. Following the chain to its end... what bound the scorpion was a chip emitting a deep black light.

Seemingly because of the chip, an endless stream of contamination crawled up its back, and the scorpion howled in pain.

Something was trapping them.

The attack Luo Ruzhuo had condensed in her mental sea did not strike Zhu Rongtian. Instead, it abruptly turned toward the chip—but just like her earlier attack on the chain around Zhu Rongtian's ankle, it left it completely unscathed.

She couldn't help frowning deeply.

After she had killed Wang Fuzhuang that night, he had come back to life before long.

But after Zhu Rongtian killed him herself, all the way up until they returned to town, a day and a night had passed. Luo Ruzhuo had deliberately checked with her mental power, and Wang Fuzhuang's corpse was still in the little courtyard, with no sign of coming back to life.

She had never been the one who could kill the contaminants here.

The folding dagger lay in her palm, cold and sharp.

In the end, Luo Ruzhuo gave up on the idea of killing Zhu Rongtian. She pried the cold fingers open one by one, pushed the dagger into the small palm, then firmly closed the hand around it.

"Zhu Rongtian."

"If you're not the source of the contamination, then you need to find a way to save yourself, just like I do." She spoke quickly, explaining what she was going to do next. "I'll help you, but this is your Mental Domain. Whether you can break free of their restraints depends most of all on you."

Her voice was soft, but every word carried weight.

"Please, no matter how many times it takes, save yourself from this peril."