Shackles of Humanity

For some reason, over the past month, Luo Kai’s body had started to almost enjoy the feeling of being beaten. His mind, however, was utterly repulsed by it.

The onlooking prisoners saw the tables had suddenly turned and grew even more excited. As they cheered, their gazes toward Luo Kai were now tinged with a hint of fear.

Luo Kai found his flattened food bowl. He took it to a corner and silently hammered it back into an oval shape with a rock, cursing endlessly in his heart. The bowl was now full of dents, which meant it would hold much less food from now on.

...

The next day at noon, Luo Kai curled up in a corner to finish his meal. Over a year of imprisonment had made him extremely withdrawn. Combined with the constant feeling that he didn’t belong in this world, he spent every day alone. Although he had joined a small group, he rarely interacted with them.

Today’s meal was back to being a hodgepodge of boiled fish and shrimp, which made him long for yesterday’s half-eaten rice ball even more.

After eating, he walked past rows of dilapidated shacks, making a few turns before arriving at a massive mining pit. A powerful stench assailed his nostrils. This was the prisoners’ ”toilet.” The enormous pit was nearly full of excrement, but that didn’t matter; they would just switch to another one soon.

After relieving himself, he pulled a long, smooth stone from his pocket to take care of his personal hygiene, then covered his mouth and nose and left.

Just as he reached a stone wall, a figure suddenly darted out from behind it. Luo Kai’s scalp tightened as a powerful grip seized his hair and yanked him to the ground. Several kicks immediately landed on his chest. He screamed in pain and reached up to pry away the fingers tangled in his hair.

His ambusher was Wai Gou. With a savage expression, he dragged Luo Kai by the scalp to the base of the wall, while three other men followed, punching and kicking him along the way.

This time, Wai Gou had learned his lesson from their last encounter. He aimed specifically for Luo Kai’s vulnerable areas like his waist and abdomen. His attacks were vicious, a veritable storm of blows. In no time, Luo Kai’s face was covered in blood. A normal person might have been beaten to death. Although Luo Kai was durable, the convulsive agony brought him to the verge of blacking out.

They were close to the latrine pit, and people passed by from time to time, but no one intervened. Brawls in the mining camp were as common as daily meals. The passersby didn’t recognize the prisoner being beaten, and Wai Gou was notoriously infamous, so no one wanted to get involved.

Seeing that Luo Kai had lost the strength to resist, Wai Gou and his men finally stopped. They took out a hemp rope and tied Luo Kai’s hands securely. Wai Gou sneered, ”You dare to fight with Laozi? If I don’t finish you, I’ll lose all face around here. Today, Laozi is going to throw you into the latrine pit to feed the maggots!”

Luo Kai struggled to open his blood-blurred eyes, fighting with all his might. ”Fuck you, Wai Gou! If you don’t kill Laozi today, Laozi will never let you off!”

”You son of a bitch, you still dare to curse me? Heh heh.”

Wai Gou snickered and suddenly reached out to grope Luo Kai’s chest. ”This kid’s got such smooth, tender skin. It’d be a pity for him to die just like that...”

The other three men immediately burst into laughter, hooting, ”Brother Gou, why don’t we find a spot and have some fun first? We’ve all forgotten what a woman even feels like!”

Exhilarated, Wai Gou grabbed Luo Kai by the hair and began dragging him toward a nearby shack.

Luo Kai dazedly heard their words, and an involuntary shudder ran through his body. ’Death isn’t scary. What’s scary is suffering such a great humiliation before I die.’ The anger and hatred he had suppressed for a year finally exploded.

His chest began to heave violently. His heart hammered faster and faster, as if it were about to leap out of his chest. A massive amount of blood surged into his head with no sign of flowing back out. His eyes instantly turned blood-red. The fragile capillaries on his face burst, and blood began to pour from his nose and mouth.

Just as the blood vessels in his brain were about to rupture, the now-viscous blood suddenly surged out of his head. The thick, returning blood rushed toward his arms like water from a burst dam, forcing open all the blocked pathways along the way. His bound arms swelled rapidly. With a sharp SNAP, the hemp rope broke.

It was as if some kind of shackles had been broken. His groggy consciousness sharpened, and he could even faintly sense the air flowing around him, and hear the thump of Wai Gou’s heart.

Luo Kai violently threw his body around and latched onto Wai Gou, sinking his teeth into Wai Gou’s thigh.

”AH! Get this kid off me!” Wai Gou screamed, punching Luo Kai in the head. The other three men scrambled to pull him off, but Luo Kai was like a hound that had locked onto its prey; he refused to let go. For a moment, they couldn’t pry him loose.

Luo Kai clung tightly to Wai Gou. With a powerful clench of his jaw, he tore off a large chunk of flesh. He finally understood why the men in the fighting pits fought like animals. Because now, he was one of them.

Wai Gou collapsed to the ground, nearly fainting from the pain. ”Laozi is going to kill you!” In his agony, he grabbed a rock from the ground and smashed it toward Luo Kai’s head.

Although Luo Kai acted like a mad dog, his mind was clearer than ever. He twisted his head to dodge the attack, then surged upward. His blood-red eyes locked onto Wai Gou’s throat, and he bit down.

The metallic tang of blood filled his mouth as Wai Gou’s body gradually stopped twitching. Luo Kai raised his head and shot a savage grin at the other three men, who had scrambled to a safe distance. He spat out the unidentifiable chunk of... something... from his mouth, licked the blood from the corners of his lips, and roared, ”Come on! Come and kill me!”

The three men stared at Luo Kai, who looked like a blood-soaked Demon. They shivered in unison, exchanged a glance, and then scrambled away, stumbling over themselves to escape.

Luo Kai sat dazedly on the ground as the red faded from his eyes. He stared blankly at the mangled corpse before him, then struggled to his feet. He began to drag Wai Gou’s body toward the latrine pit, laughing like a madman. ”Hmph, now it’s Laozi’s turn to throw you in the latrine pit to feed the maggots!”

Watching Wai Gou’s corpse slowly sink beneath the filth, Luo Kai limped back to the corner of the wall. A guard in a nearby watchtower had been staring intently at the scene. ’There’s no escape,’ he thought. ’Might as well just wait for them to arrest me.’

He was badly injured; his internal organs were likely damaged. A normal person would surely die without proper treatment, but Luo Kai was different. This young body possessed an extremely powerful Recovery Ability. As long as an injury wasn’t immediately fatal, he would heal from it in no time. This was the main reason he had survived until now.

He had expected guards to come for him immediately after the killing, but he waited for a long time and no one came. Exhausted, he drifted into a hazy sleep.

He didn’t know how much time had passed when he felt a strange sensation, as if someone were washing his body. Then, he felt himself being thrown into foul-smelling water. He groggily opened his eyes to find himself in a ditch filled with black sludge. The ditch connected to the sewage-filled creek outside, so one could only imagine how filthy the water was. In just that short time, he had no idea how much of the dirty water he’d swallowed. Furious, he scrambled to climb out.