The rain was getting heavier and heavier.
Kamui did not know how long he had been lying on the road.
Maybe it was ten minutes, or maybe it was half an hour.
Some passersby stopped to take a few looks.
A middle-aged woman muttered, “Is he drunk?” then walked around him.
No one came up to help him.
Kamui did not expect them to either.
He supported himself on the ground with his left arm, trying three times before he could sit up.
He could not bend his right leg; the entire leg was stretched out straight.
The knee was swollen high, and his cotton pants were stretched tightly over it.
He gritted his teeth and stood up, relying entirely on his left leg for support, while his right leg dragged on the ground like a piece of dead wood.
He inched forward along the sidewalk bit by bit.
With every step, he had to first use his hand to hold onto a nearby railing or wall.
Then, he would shift his entire body weight onto his left leg and drag his right leg over.
It took him nearly forty minutes to walk three hundred meters.
He reached the corner of an alley.
He could not hold on any longer and slid down against the wall.
He sat on the cold concrete steps.
The rain soaked his cotton-padded jacket, his hair plastered against his forehead, and water droplets dripped from the tip of his nose.
Kamui lowered his head, looking at his immobile right leg.
He used to rely on this leg to dodge and weave in the boxing ring, his footwork so agile that his opponents could never catch his rhythm.
Now, even walking was a struggle.
He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.
His mind was in chaos: his daughter’s pale face, the deadline Dr. Wang mentioned.
The clothes and shoes Zhou Fang was wearing when she got out of the car.
The smiling face of Sun Debiao in the car window, and that kick to his knee.
Everything was mixed together like a pot of burnt porridge.
Then, he heard a voice.
It came from his blood vessels, from his bone marrow, from the depths of every muscle fiber.
A low, humming sound with a certain sense of vibration.
Kamui opened his eyes and looked left and right; there was no one in the alley.
The humming sound vanished.
He thought he was hallucinating from the pain, rubbed his forehead, and continued sitting against the wall with his eyes closed.
Deep in the rock strata beneath the city, Knull’s main body was doing something he had already done once before.
Splitting.
He detached a small piece of his own tissue from his main body.
This time it was easier than the first.
The detached tissue was about the size of a thumbnail, black, wriggled twice in the rock crevice, and then began to move.
It followed the flow of groundwater upward, passing through cracks in the rock strata. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
It burrowed into the pores of the soil, using the channels created by rainwater infiltration to move closer to the surface layer by layer.
The process was not fast, but it was steady.
Through a mental connection, Knull remotely controlled the direction of this split-off, like operating a tiny drone flying through a maze.
Three hours.
The split-off finally arrived at a position one meter below the surface from a crack in a sewer.
Above it was the city’s sewer network, and above that was the road surface.
Knull’s perception told him that the target was not far above.
That ball of fury was no longer just fury; it had transformed into something purer.
Despair.
The despair of being backed into a corner, with no way out, no longer caring about the consequences.
Perfect.
The split-off continued to burrow upward, squeezing out from the gaps in the sewer bricks.
It turned into an extremely thin black thread, spreading along the waterlogged road surface.
The rain was still falling.
In the alley, Kamui was still sitting against the wall, his right leg stretched out in front of him.
Rainwater pooled around him in a shallow puddle.
The black thread moved through the puddle, silent and soundless.
It approached Kamui’s left hand.
Kamui’s palm was open beside his knee, fingers half-curled, with calluses on his knuckles and scars from old injuries.
The black thread touched his fingertips.
Kamui shivered.
It felt as if some cold liquid had poured into the gaps between his fingers.
“What is that?”
He looked down at his hand.
There was nothing there; his fingers were clean.
But he could feel something moving beneath his skin.
It was moving up his arm along his blood vessels.
It was fast.
Kamui wanted to use his other hand to press down on that spot.
But when his right hand touched his left arm.
That moving sensation had already passed his elbow and reached his shoulder.
Then, a voice appeared in his mind.
“Do you want power?”
Kamui’s breathing hitched.
“Who?”
His lips moved, but his voice was very soft, almost drowned out by the sound of the rain.
“The tool inside your body.”
The voice did not sound like human language; it was more like information appearing directly in his consciousness.
There was no accent, no intonation, but every word was clear. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“You are injured, you are hungry, you are being trampled underfoot, yet you clearly possess the best fists in this world.”
Kamui’s fist clenched involuntarily.
“Who are you?”
“Not important.”
After the voice finished speaking, an image appeared in Kamui’s mind.
In the image.
He was standing in the rain.
His whole body was covered in a layer of dark gray, armor-like shell; the outline of every muscle was clearly visible beneath the shell, as if cast in a layer of steel.
His right leg was intact.
His right shoulder was also intact.
He stood in front of that black BMW SUV, gripped the hood with one hand, and twisted the entire car into a ball of scrap metal as if it were a piece of crumpled newspaper.
The image lasted less than two seconds before it vanished.
But Kamui’s palm had already started to burn.
That heat spread from his palm to his wrist, then to his forearm, and then to his entire arm.
A feeling of expansion.
He looked down at his left hand.
The veins on the back of his hand bulged, twice as thick as usual, and something was slowly wriggling beneath his skin.
“Go and take back everything that belongs to you.”
The voice dissipated from his mind.
The alley went quiet; only the sound of rain remained.
Kamui sat where he was, staring at his hand for a long time.
He tried to move his right leg.
His knee still hurt, but the degree of pain seemed to be slightly less than before.
He wasn’t sure if it was an illusion.
Deep beneath the city, Knull’s main body had shrunk by a circle after completing the split.
That sense of weakness surged up again, but it was much better than after the first split.
He could handle it.
A new line had been added to the mental connection, very faint, but gradually becoming clearer.
Knull felt the emotions coming through that link.
Anger, humiliation, desire.
And a base color completely different from Haruka’s.
Haruka’s base color was the despair and unwillingness of a youth, like a rapidly burning flame that burned fast but also easily extinguished.
Kamui’s base color was different.
It was what remained of a man after being crushed by life for five years.
Like charcoal that had been burning for a long time; it didn’t look very bright on the surface, but its temperature was high enough to melt iron.
Knull wriggled gently on the bedrock, carrying a hint of weakness, but also a certain anticipation.
His second creation.
Riot.