Fictional world, purely imaginary.
Daliang Kingdom, 33rd City.
Darkness.
Endless darkness.
Knull did not know where he was; he only knew cold, hunger, and an indescribable sense of weakness.
“I… am I dead?”
The moment this thought surfaced, memories of his past life flooded back like a tide.
Knull, twenty-seven years old, a low-level operator at an internet company, earning a monthly salary of six thousand, with working overtime until two in the morning as the norm.
After three consecutive months of 007, his body could not take it anymore.
He collapsed on the floor of the company pantry.
Sudden death from overwork.
Twenty-seven years old.
No house, no car, no savings, not even a girlfriend.
“Damn.”
Knull cursed in his consciousness.
Then, he began to seriously assess his current state.
No body, no limbs.
But he could perceive the surrounding environment: damp brick walls, foul-smelling stagnant water.
Occasionally, some small things crawled over him, with tiny legs and antennae.
Cockroaches?
Rats?
He was not sure.
But he was sure of one thing: he was now in a sewer.
And he himself seemed to be a pool of…
liquid?
Knull tried to move.
A strange sensation came over him.
It did not feel like moving limbs, but more like his entire body was flowing.
He slowly crawled a few centimeters along the brick crevices, then was exhausted.
Hungry.
Too hungry.
He needed something to fill the void.
“What on earth is going on… How did I turn into this ghostly mess?”
Knull tried hard to calm himself down.
He was alive—or rather, he existed in some form.
Although he had turned into a blob of unknown liquid, his consciousness was clear, and his memories were intact.
That was enough.
It was better than lying cold on the pantry floor.
He continued to try to move, very slowly, like a dehydrated slug crawling.
With every short distance he moved, the sense of weakness intensified.
Then he discovered something.
Within his range of perception, there was a vague signal.
It was a sense he had never experienced before—as if he could “smell” emotions.
Above his head, on the surface, countless humans were active.
Their emotions were like scents of different colors, mixing together and drifting down.
Anxiety, exhaustion, boredom, slight happiness, faint sorrow…
These ordinary emotional signals were blurry and weak, but far away from all the signals, there was one that was completely different.
Intense.
Burning hot.
Like a lamp in the darkness about to burst, constantly radiating two extreme emotions—
Despair and resentment.
That pure, thick despair, and the hatred seeping out from the gaps in the bones.
It was blindingly bright in Knull’s perception.
The hunger became even more intense at this moment.
His instinct told him that there was something he needed in that direction.
Knull did not hesitate any longer and began to move along the sewer toward that signal source.
The process was difficult; his body was too weak, and several times he almost fell apart.
The feeling was like a pool of water about to evaporate under the sun.
But he gritted his teeth (if he had any) and insisted on moving forward.
He had already died once in his past life, could anything be worse than that?
He did not know how long had passed, but the signal grew stronger and stronger.
Knull finally crawled to a spot beneath a sewer grate.
The dim yellow street light shone down through the gaps in the grate, and he saw the world above ground.
It was an alley.
It was narrow, with the walls of old residential buildings on both sides, and several flattened soda cans and cigarette butts on the ground.
There were people in the alley.
A teenager was cornered by four or five people.
Those people looked older than him; some wore leather jackets, some had cigarettes in their mouths—they did not look like good people at all.
The leader, who had dyed yellow hair and a shallow scar on his face, was kicking the teenager in the stomach.
The teenager let out a muffled grunt, bent over, but did not fall.
“Haruka, you motherfucker, you can take a beating, huh?”
The yellow-haired guy laughed, took the wallet out of his pocket, pulled out the cash inside, and threw the empty wallet at his face.
“Just this little bit? Are you trying to brush off a beggar?”
A short guy with an earring next to him squatted down.
Looking at the sneakers on Haruka’s feet, his eyes lit up.
“Yo, new shoes.”
Haruka’s body stiffened visibly.
“Don’t touch my shoes,” he said in a hoarse voice.
The short guy with the earring laughed, stepped on them, and ground his foot back and forth on the white sneakers a few times.
The mud on the ground immediately covered the surface of the shoes.
“What did you say? I didn’t hear you clearly.”
Haruka clenched his fists tightly, his nails digging into his palms, and blood seeped out.
He did not move.
It was not that he did not want to, but he could not win.
One against five, he would only be the one getting beaten.
He had understood this truth a long time ago.
The yellow-haired guy kicked him impatiently and signaled his companions to leave.
“Let’s go, let’s go. This brat has no oil to squeeze. Prepare five hundred yuan for me next week, you hear? If you’re a cent short, I’ll break your legs.”
The few people left, cursing and swearing, their laughter echoing in the alley.
Haruka was left kneeling on the ground alone.
It was unclear when the rain had started, fine and dense.
He lowered his head, looking at his mud-stained sneakers.
Those were bought with two months of saved living expenses.
He ate only one steamed bun every noon, just to buy a pair of white running shoes like everyone else’s.
Muddy water dripped down the surface of the shoes.
Haruka raised his right fist and smashed it hard against the ground.
Once, twice, three times.
His skin tore, and blood mixed with mud.
He did not cry out in pain; he only let out a low, suppressed whimper that only a small animal would make when its neck was being choked.
Tears and rain mixed together, making it impossible to tell which was which.
Beneath the grate, Knull watched all of this silently.
That emotion of despair and resentment was intense to the extreme, pouring into his perception almost like a physical substance.
He could even capture something deeper—unwillingness.
And killing intent.
Very faint, but it definitely existed.
Hidden deep within the teenager’s eyes, which were blurred by tears, like a flame about to go out but refusing to die.
Knull made a decision.
He tried to extend upward, and a part of his body squeezed out through the gaps in the grate.
Because the grate was old, a screw fell off during the squeezing process.
The part of Knull that got out formed a tiny black tentacle, thinner than a chopstick.
The tentacle silently approached the back of Haruka’s hand.
The moment it touched his skin,
Knull’s consciousness exploded.
An unprecedented stream of information rushed into his mind, and he understood in an instant what he was and what he could do.
Symbiote.
He was a Symbiote.
And he was the primordial form, the starting point of all Symbiotes.
He could parasitize, but he could do even more.
He could split.
Cut off a part of his own cells and let it become an independent sub-Symbiote to parasitize a host.
And he could synchronize and use all the abilities acquired by the sub-Symbiote.
The emotions generated by the sub-Symbiote host, especially those extreme and intense emotions, would feed back to him and become his nourishment.
Simply put, he did not need to parasitize anyone himself.
He could sit behind the scenes and let others charge into battle for him.
And he only needed to harvest emotions.
This realization made Knull’s consciousness shake violently.
Parasitize Haruka himself?
No.
That was thinking too small.
He could make Haruka his first chess piece.
Knull severed that tentacle from his main body.
The moment it broke, a tearing pain came over him.
His main body noticeably shrank, and the sense of weakness almost overwhelmed him.
But it was worth it.
The severed tentacle lost its physical connection to the main body.
But the mental connection remained—faint, yet real.
It landed on the back of Haruka’s hand.
Haruka shuddered violently, raised his head as if electrocuted, and looked at the back of his hand in terror.
A tiny piece of black substance was lying on his skin, like a miniature leech.
“Wh-what is this?!”
Haruka’s voice was trembling.
He wanted to shake it off, but just as he raised his other hand to swat it, the thing moved.
It burrowed into his skin at an incredible speed, like a drop of ink seeping into rice paper, and vanished without a trace in an instant.
Haruka was stunned.
He looked at the back of his hand over and over; it was clean, with nothing there.
“Hallucination… it must be a hallucination, right?”
He muttered to himself, but the cold sensation just now was too real; it was definitely not an illusion.
Beneath the grate, Knull’s main body shrank into a very small blob, so weak that he was almost losing consciousness.
But in his perception, a faint mental link had already been established.
Weak, unstable, but it definitely existed.
He could feel Haruka’s emotions—fear, confusion, and the resentment that had not yet dissipated.
“The first step… is complete.”
Knull said to himself in his consciousness.
Above, Haruka stood up in a daze, dragging his leaden legs, and disappeared into the rain.
What he did not know was that his fate had been completely rewritten from this moment on.
And what he did not know even more was that the black substance that had merged into the back of his hand had a name—
Carnage.