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Blood.
That was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes.
A red puddle on black asphalt, spreading slowly like a flower blooming in the dead of night. The flickering streetlight made the color shift between dark crimson and pitch black.
Where am I...?
His mind felt like fog. Heavy. Chaotic.
He tried to move his hand. He could. His legs. He could. But he shouldn't be able to. He should be dead.
Should be.
He remembered the sound of the crash. Metal screaming. His body flying through the air like a ragdoll thrown by a careless child. His head hitting something hard — maybe a lamppost, maybe the edge of the sidewalk. Then darkness.
But now he was awake.
And that blood... that blood wasn't his.
Or maybe it was?
He didn't know. His head was too dizzy to think. Too dizzy to ask.
He stood up. Or at least he tried. His left leg trembled slightly but still held his weight. He felt no pain. No broken bones. No open wounds.
Strange.
But that night, he had no time to question.
That night, he just wanted to go home.
That night, he didn't know that his blood had opened a door that should have remained sealed forever.
---
There was one thing he didn't realize while lying unconscious on that cold asphalt.
A package.
The last package he was delivering before the night turned into a nightmare. The package fell from his shoulder bag when his body was sent flying. The old bamboo scroll inside — tied with faded black hemp rope — fell right into the pool of his blood.
His blood seeped into the bamboo fibers.
The scroll glowed.
Not an ordinary light. A pale blue light — cold, silent, like moonlight on a snowy mountain peak. No one saw it. The street was empty. The old houses around him were dark. Only the flickering streetlight stood as a silent witness.
The scroll melted.
Melted into light, then rose into the air like thin smoke. It hovered for a moment, as if choosing. Then it entered.
Entered his chest.
Into his heart.
Into the same blood that had just soaked into the bamboo.
Then everything stopped.
The streetlight stopped flickering.
The wind stopped blowing.
As if the world took a single breath.
Then everything returned to normal. As if nothing had happened.
The scroll was gone. The package was empty. Only the drying pool of blood remained as evidence that something had happened that night.
Something that would change everything.
---
But he didn't know that.
He didn't know that from that night on, his body was no longer entirely his own.
He didn't know that there were eyes in the shadows beginning to watch him.
He didn't know that his younger sister — lying in a coma at the hospital, the only one he had protected alone for three years — was not a victim of an ordinary accident.
He didn't know anything.
That night, Fang Gongzha just wanted to go home.
That night, Fang Gongzha was still an ordinary, exhausted high school student.
And that was the last night he was ever "ordinary."
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