Fang Yuan stepped into the afternoon light, letting it wash over him like a spotlight on a stage meant only for predators.
A smirk tugged at the corner of his lips.
"Fools," he whispered.
Did they really think he'd lashed out at Fang Zheng out of anger?
Did they truly believe his talk about moving his mother to the central continent for her recovery?
Did they genuinely think he, Fang Yuan, wasted effort on sentiment or pointless charity?
Ridiculous.
A sentence from his previous life resurfaced—a crude truth wrapped in an old idiom:
A person becomes a fool the moment he lets love, hate, rage, or any useless emotion steer him.
The world—any world—ran on one rule.
The strong fed.
The weak were fed upon.
A jungle lived inside every breath of existence.
A vulnerable, Innocent deer drank peacefully at the riverbank.
Then—snap.
A crocodile burst from the water, jaws locking onto the deer's leg, dragging it toward a muddy grave.
But before the kill could land, a water rhino lumbered from the shadows.
All it took was one heavy step.
One brutal decision.
It crushed the crocodile like rotten wood, stomping again and again until bone and blood blended with the river.
The rhino turned to leave, but hunger has many faces.
Three foxes lunged from the undergrowth, sinking teeth into its hide.
Their snarls filled the jungle.
The rhino fought, bleeding, raging.
Hours seemed to pass in moments.
One fox fell.
Two remained—panting, trembling but victorious.
They stared at the dead rhino with raw hunger.
And just as they prepared to feast—
A tiger exploded from the brush.
One chomp—fox throat was ripped away.
One claw swipe—another's neck shattered.
The tiger claimed the battlefield, devouring carnage like it was a festival.
But victory is a moment, never a guarantee.
All it took was a sharp whoosh.
A single arrow shattered the skull of the king of the battlefield.
High above, a hunter had been watching the entire spectacle unfold.
Each time he drew his bow, another predator appeared, doing the work for him.
So he waited—silent, patient, unseen—until the apex beast stood alone.
His arrow flew.
And his triumph surged.
He descended, thrilled, gathering carcasses like trophies of a perfect hunt.
But fate is a cruel mimic of comedy.
All it took was One misstep.
The hunter never even had the chance to scream.
His boot slid on the wet slope, his balance faltered, and the weight of his own body carried him backward into the shallow river.
His skull struck a hidden rock beneath the surface, and the impact ended everything in an instant.
His body floated for a moment before settling, face down, in the slowly moving water.
The forest did not acknowledge him.
No creature paused, no breeze shifted out of respect.
The river simply continued flowing, carrying away the thin ribbons of blood as though it were washing dirt from a stone.
Nature did not mourn his death because mourning has never been part of its design.
Life in the wild has no space for sentiment or reflection.
It only knows continuation—one life feeding another, one struggle ending as another begins.
Humans attach names to this ceaseless machinery of survival: destiny, fate, karmic cycles, divine punishment, cosmic justice.
They wrap the brutality of existence in comforting stories so they can sleep at night, believing there is order where there is only competition.
But strip away those illusions, and the truth reveals itself with far more clarity.
The world survives on a single principle: those who are strong enough to take will take, and those who cannot will simply become part of the ground the strong walk on.
The deer, the crocodile, the rhino, the foxes, the tiger, even the hunter—each believed their moment of dominance meant something, that survival was a reward rather than a temporary advantage.
Yet every one of them fell in turn, replaced by something stronger, more patient, or simply luckier.
As Fang Yuan stood beneath the slanting sunlight, that upcoming chain of events played out in his mind with clinical precision.
He didn't imagine it with horror or excitement; he viewed it the way an experienced strategist studies a diagram.
It was a reminder of the absolute neutrality of the world, a world that did not care about love or promises or grievances, only capability.
The memory of the upcoming deaths was not disturbing to him—it was grounding, a reaffirmation of how the universe operated.
A thin smile curved across his lips, not one born from amusement but from an understanding that felt deeper and sharper than emotion.
People clung to comforting illusions because they were terrified of facing the truth he embraced so easily.
To Fang Yuan, this was not cruelty; it was clarity.
The idea that one could influence fate or carve meaning into it was merely a luxury of those too sheltered to see how thin the line between dominance and death truly was.
He adjusted his sleeves, his expression settling into its usual collected calm.
"In the end," he murmured to himself, "survival belongs to those who are willing to act without hesitation."
"The rest exist only as stepping stones."
There was no dramatic tension in his voice, no whispered threat, only a quiet certainty, as if he were stating a fact already accepted by the world around him.
The warmth of the afternoon sun glinted across his eyes, but its warmth never penetrated deeper than his skin.
He took a single step forward, not rushed, not hesitant—simply assured, as though the ground had been waiting for his foot to fall in that exact place.
"It's time," he said, almost conversationally, "to decide who deserves to remain."