Chapter 179
Chapter 179
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 10
Chapter Title: Lead and Silver Coins
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Pain. It had been my constant companion ever since I started living in the wasteland.
Actually, that was true for everyone.
Everyone carried at least one wound pierced by a crude lead bullet.
Wounds sliced open while sifting through piles of sharp scrap metal, always watching my surroundings. Fingertips festering without a single antibiotic, agonizing for days over whether to cut them off or leave them be.
Jumping across all sorts of building debris left my whole body covered in abrasions and bruises. In winter, one wrong grab on metal frozen cold, and the skin would stick fast, tearing right off when I pulled away.
Above all else, dragging that battered, exhausted body back home to silence. The reality that no one could take care of me.
They say when the pain gets bad enough, the brain churns out all sorts of random chemicals. Sitting there on a ratty old sofa, mind dulled by inflammation, meds, and agony, I’d start seeing all kinds of bizarre hallucinations.
So this dizziness I felt now. The weird shit constantly popping into view. The numbness in my hands and feet. It was all just because it hurt so damn much.
....Someone might call this the feeling of dying.
“Is what.... I’m seeing now.... real....?”
[It’s an old wooden fence. Just hop over. You’re doing fine.]
Screeeeech- crunch, screeeeech-
“Hyde.... this? Looks like a giant membrane.... a mutant...? Gotta.... fight....”
[Old tent. It’s fine. We’re almost there.]
Crack!
“Then this one....”
[No, that’s not it. This is Happy Blind turf. No way you’re seeing the familiar shop crossroads from District 47 here.]
“Ahh. Ahhhh....”
Crunch. Crackle.
Boom. Boooom.
If only it had been total nonsense hallucinations, that would’ve been better. Every step I took, the perspective warped constantly. Grass sprouting before my eyes turned into a city, then ruins, then a blood-drenched primitive settlement. Houses built of dirt and stone. A market made from beast hides, cluttered with carved bone and wood trinkets. Massive eye motifs everywhere you looked. Yeah. Everything I was seeing was pure illusion. No way in hell a place like that could exist.
“Grrrk, Hy....de.... Where.... am I.... going....”
[To the place you want. It’s okay. No matter what happens, we can keep each other hidden from ourselves. I’m reading it right. I.... promised to respect your choice.]
So suffocating. Rattling phlegm in my throat. Did something grab my neck? Was my throat always this thick?
Body so heavy. Vision all fucked up. No clue if I was walking, running, or crawling.
One thing I knew for sure: I was drawing closer to the source of those strange sounds and lights.
I’d blacked out several times along the way and felt like I’d talked with Hyde for ages before snapping back, but now I couldn’t remember a thing. Just one ancient memory, driving my body forward.
“Grrrk.... wanna.... live....”
Live. No matter what it took. Steal, rob, kill—even if it meant doing something too horrific to speak of—I swore I’d live.
Before long, the vivid light reflecting off the altar right in front of me. That was death. I knew it without anyone telling me, without ever learning it. The cry of birth that had sent countless souls screaming into oblivion, the thing that turned me into this. Soon enough, it would drag me down the same path.
How strange. That thing was miles away from my goal. So why was I trudging toward it like this, with the desperation of someone chasing a lifelong dream?
[....Keep going. Just a few more steps.... and you’ll be there.]
‘Yeah. I have to. If no one else can....’
Boom.
Rumble.
A black, rigid claw slammed its nails into the stone-carved pedestal.
With an eerie melody, the primitive pedestal sprayed forth light, and a massive black monster crawled up onto it.
Among those who’d survived this battlefield, whether tormented by hallucinations or in full possession of their wits, none could accept what they saw as reality.
It was a scene far too surreal for the brutal wasteland reality, where sand and oil, gunpowder and blood, lead and silver held their conversations.
****
Ri Shuen was in a state of profound peace.
She had completed an unprecedented killing device. To activate it, a colleague who’d been with her for years had met a gruesome end. As a result, hundreds of people had burst apart in an instant.
But these were all things she’d been through before, and her death was predetermined regardless of the project’s success or failure.
That was why, against her own wishes, she could greet the uninvited guest approaching the “box” without panic—welcoming it, in fact, with a glad heart.
“I can hardly believe it. To think you actually.... made it all the way here.”
What a horrific sight, she thought. As the head researcher for GG. As a Dome researcher. As the “eye” of Happy Blind. She had seen more mutants than anyone—from primordial strains to the Artists’ Union “adaptees”—yet even she wrinkled her nose in disgust, wondering what kind of person could have been warped into such a form.
“Professor.... or Hyde? Or perhaps.... ‘professor’?”
“.....”
At her words, the thing—which had been staring vacantly at the box—slowly turned its face toward her.
Size aside, it barely clung to a human shape. A muscular frame poised on the boundary between supple and rigid.
In that moment, she realized why this mutant, one she’d call simple even among third-form variants, felt so viscerally repulsive.
That black sheen. Not merely black, but laced with other hues, devoid of any gloss.
‘Blood stench.... even amid this sea of blood, it stings the nose with its potency.’
She knew what it was. The color of crusted blood scabs, just like those she’d seen long ago in the District 38 lab. The deep, blackish crimson that only emerges when fresh blood flows over dried remnants, layer upon layer, time and again.
“.....”
Utterly featureless save for its eyes, the thing turned its head back toward the box.
As someone who’d studied mutants for years, she couldn’t help but scrutinize its form.
‘A mutant’s exterior follows its inner memories. Mouthless ones aren’t rare. The dead usually crave to spew their suffering onto others. A memory it doesn’t want to share? Blood carries too many meanings to guess easily.... but blood and shame? That much I can piece together. It killed someone it shouldn’t have. A common motive birthed this rare specimen.’
Ri Shuen had to admit she was enjoying this situation. It couldn’t speak, but she could sense the black monster was listening. For someone who’d endured her whole life alone, the presence of someone to unburden herself to—at least in her final moments—filled her with unexpected joy.
Beep! Beep!
The mental resonance device clamped over her head like a helmet blared its warning. It had no choice. The “shepherds” managing their scant power infrastructure had all led their “flock” to evacuate. And with the colossal energy drain to control the box, the electricity was overdue to cut out.
Drip.... drip....
“You’re.... crying.”
It stared blankly at the fully unfurled “box.” Unthinkable behavior for a scholar.
Unlike her—prepared with three layers of level-6 shields tuned to the box’s frequencies, a mental stabilizer, and her body pre-paralyzed with neural anesthetics—this black mutant was exposed raw to the box’s waves.
Even now, the violently twitching sinews and muscles hinted at its agony, yet amid energies that should have blanked its brain to white, it gazed at the box with desperate longing.
“How pitiful. Is that how you treat yourself?”
Trauma ultimately stems from loss, rooted in intense narcissism. Thus, third-form mutants—the spawn of trauma—are profoundly narcissistic, driven to realize the lives they themselves desired.
Which meant this man before her had chosen to march toward this unbearable pain as the path to his most cherished existence.
Suddenly, she felt a deep pang of regret at the thought of it perishing here.
“....Don’t you want to live?”
“....”
Rustle—
No words, but a clear reaction.
“Since you’re on your way out anyway, let me tell you this: the moment you smash that thing, you die. That much I can promise you. All the energy to fill this vast wasteland will erupt in a single instant. The most agonizing death imaginable.”
“....”
“And even if you give your life to destroy the ‘box,’ humanity is still doomed. Your sacrifice would be utterly meaningless.”
“....”
Her listener gave no reply, but Ri Shuen didn’t stop. These were stories she’d longed to confess to someone. Old folks always have tales to tell, she told herself, and pressed on.
“I’m the one who created the Orpheus Project—the original blueprint for this ‘box.’ It wasn’t anything grand at first. My lab colleague Cervantes was grieving over his grandmother, the woman who’d raised him, falling into dementia. So we started wondering if there was any way to ease it.”
Such joyful days. An idea striking just as I tried to sleep—“What if we did it this way?”—and suddenly the stars were gone, the sun rising, all of us holed up in the lab. Pulling all-nighters with colleagues, then grabbing four-dollar cheap burritos at the dawn burrito cart, grumbling about free Pepsi. Watching the fruits of that hard labor—our baby Orpheus Project—advance step by step, brimming with hope that our efforts would one day light up the world.
What a pipe dream that had been.
“My lifelong conviction.... that I could make the world better with what I’d learned and realized. My life became a resounding refutation of it.”
She’d believed they—the core researchers—could keep things under control even as the project ballooned and government meddling grew oppressive.
Even when soldiers shoved guns in their faces, barking orders to build a literal “human mind destruction device,” she’d sworn on her life never to touch such research.
Then the lab rained with fire. Amid news of her colleagues’ deaths, she’d vowed anew to use her knowledge for the world as a Dome researcher.
When the Orpheus Project—thought lost forever with her colleagues in the bombardment—reappeared, warped and twisted into something utterly alien, how furious she’d been.
How stunned when she discovered countless traces of her dead colleague embedded in that thing.
And as a high-ranking Dome official, after digging through ancient military archives, learning that she and her colleague had been the ones “kept alive” to complete the project. That the government backing it had turned every other resistant researcher to ash just to break their will. When the District 38 administration, having confirmed all the records, slyly shoved that unfinished monstrosity before the last surviving Orpheus researcher—how violently she’d retched at that loathsome truth.
“I.... finally understood. Modern humanity had fallen too far to be saved. No matter how noble the technology, they were a species specialized in wielding it for the utmost evil. That’s what Homo sapiens evolved into. Nuclear fission was a monumental discovery to free all humanity from the energy crisis, but the name it’s known by is ‘bomb.’ Only then did this broken world feel utterly inevitable. People always prayed to their god: ‘Please see us.’ ‘Save us.’ This was His answer. The final chance for irredeemable mankind. Discard the shattered vessel. Can you be reborn in a new one?”
Ri Shuen had fled Dome right then and founded Happy Blind. She’d spoken nothing but the truth. Forget everything. Let the new children build a new world.
It was all fated. Her enlightenment. Her child-project returning, transcending her colleague’s life and death, as a weapon of mass slaughter. Even among her followers who gathered one by one to hear her doctrine, the woman from a single-digit district—her skin melted away by radiation—speaking of an apocalyptic beast.
No matter how she puzzled it out, she couldn’t complete the “box.” But the deep-district monster she described from the woman possessed every function she needed. She led 120 believers into that single-digit district, where radiation hung thick enough to touch. Only six returned, but they’d successfully harvested its sample.
All fated. Their deaths from lethal radiation meant nothing to her. Her role would end before her own life did anyway.
“What a majestic sight it was! Its colossal body towered like a mountain range, belching ash, flames, and radiation like an active volcano. That hellscape of a form, burdened with the world’s every torment, was the perfect judgment throne prepared for the end of wretches like us. Mutants are born from lapses in memory, from the deepest traumas. Don’t we all have some horrific memory that surfaces when we close our eyes?”
Missiles plummeting like warnings of judgment.
Mushroom clouds heralding shock, heat, and the erasure of everything nearby.
People shredded amid hails of bullets.
The culprit that set us all tearing into each other in this parched inferno.
“War. They named it War. As if sharing the atrocities it wrought with every living thing nearby! ‘This is what you did! Your handiwork!’—scolding like that. Wasn’t it the perfect judgment for arrogant humanity? The location differed from where that melted woman found it, so it must be on the move. We’re all doomed anyway. So, child, rather than die here, won’t you live—for the sake of my final purpose? You’re far too precious to waste dying for these monstrosities.... In a world where all the good ones are dead, there’s no need.... right?”
“.....”
Crack, crunch!
In place of an answer, the monster began moving again. Amid the sounds of muscle and nerve bundles snapping in clumps, it advanced one slow step at a time. Legs wouldn’t budge? Then hands. Hands seized up? Knees and shoulders.
“....Will.... live....”
Crawling along, sliced by jagged machine shards perhaps—torn facial skin parting to reveal blood-smeared teeth—the monster opened its mouth. Creaking motions, forcing a violently resisting body. At last, its withered hand seized the core. But even that couldn’t shatter the glassy protective shell. Its opposite hand, laboriously raised, came down atop it.
Light leaked from the black monster’s grasp.
Crack!
- [Kiiiiiiiiiiii-!!!!] -
The shell shattered, blood seeped out, and with a shriek, the box unleashed colossal waves.
Even amid the searing pain coursing through its rigid body and the visions churning its brain, Ri Shuen wanted to ask.
“If you.... want to live.... why court death.... with your own hands....?”
Crackle, clack, clatter, crunch!
Strength mounted in the grip on the core. Amid radiance too blinding to open its eyes, the monster clenched its fist to the utmost—and as if sensing this was the end, lifted its head to meet her gaze.
Tears streamed down, tracing paths over the torn black hide.
“....This is how.... I’ll.... live....”
The monster bared its white teeth in a grin.
At least, that was how Ri Shuen remembered it in her final memory: as if he were smiling.
“Maybe.... that collector was.... right after all....”
Thud.
For the era’s most horrific engine of war, it was an utterly mundane demise. A mere handful of light. The faint pop of a bursting bulb.
Shock and energy more than ample to kill two.
The light that had lit the surroundings and the sound that pierced eardrums vanished in an instant.
The altar and all around it held no breaths, no faintest signs of life.
****
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