Kaodin woke to the smell of stale coffee, damp clothing, and something yellow and yellow with a pungent scent that seemed to cling to the wall, and he immediately regretted it, he quickly bit back the taste of bile as he was forced to cough from the odor.
Weight gathered along his legs and back, stiff and heavy, anchoring him to the reality of what he had just endured. His upper body felt exposed to the air, while his dark navy-blue shorts still clung at his waist, though weight had gathered when he had earlier been drenched from sweat. Now slightly dried up, white-rounded stains and creases had already begun to appear, scattering randomly across his favorite pants.
He immediately sat up, rolling his head in a small circle to loosen it, stretching his legs outward before drawing them back to cross. He inclined his back as far as he could, then settled into balance with deliberate care, wary of drifting too close to the source of the foul stench. With the movement, pain asserted itself. His head throbbed with a dull, spreading ache. Then, he noticed something when his fingers brushed coarse his hair to find fabric and the loose wrap of a bandage circling his skull. Reaching toward the back of his head, where the pain centered, a light tap sent a sharp jolt through him, though uncertain for how he got hurt.
He closed his eyes and drew a slow breath, then released it in an even rhythm constantly. And gradually, the ache across his head, neck, stomach, and legs settled into awareness all at once. He let each sensation take its place, neither resisting nor indulging them, until they dulled into something bearable under steady control.
He drew his attention back to the present. The ceiling pressed low above him, beams running close and darkened by old smoke. The walls bore the same wear, wood dulled and uneven, as if the room had absorbed years of use without ever being cleared. Light slipped in weakly through narrow openings, enough to admit a thin wash of daylight while still guarding the interior from whatever lay outside. He sensed no other living presence within the shack, and the question of how he had arrived there began to surface.
He found himself beneath old, dead trees near what used to be a residential complex, running as the chase pressed close behind him. The ground shifted under his feet as memory folded in. He thought of the kind man, the shop owner who had offered help, the one he later learned was an android.
That part resurfaced heavier than the rest. The man had given himself up for a stranger boy, traded his own life to buy him a chance to survive, a direction, a fragment of hope. He knew only to head north though no map nor marker.
He kept moving by instinct, measuring direction against the sky. In the morning, he ran with the sun on his right. By afternoon, it shifted to his left. He followed that simple rule, step after step, letting light replace a map he didn't possess.
He ran until the shape of a collapsed restaurant came into sight, searching for clean food, water, and perhaps a map, or the hope of shelter. However, as he closed in on the building, his memory went dull.
He thought.
His step might have faltered, and he might have tripped, or his strength might have given out midway.
He, therefore, let the memory pass without chasing it further, and then he focused his attention with the surrounding instead. Suddenly, a pale, swollen wooden door was pushed open inward from the outside.
"You… wake," a voice said.
Kaodin turned his head. An old man sat a few steps away, watching him with an expression that never quite settled. His clothes were simple. A loose tank top faded to near gray. Short sweatpants frayed at the hem. Bare dirtied-muddied feet planted flat on the floor.
His posture leaned slightly to one side, as if his body had learned a crooked balance over time. One shoulder sat lower than the other. The angle of his neck looked strained, the head resting there by habit rather than ease. When he breathed, his jaw shifted with it, the movement uneven, tugging the skin along his cheek in a way that suggested bone had grown where it pleased.
His eyes stayed on Kaodin, a left-eye blink lagged behind the other. When his mouth parted, the shape pulled strangely wider on one side, with lower front and upper front teeth were completely gone, followed by the faint, stale smell of cigarette tobacco, coffee, and some chemical.
Kaodin feels strangely familiar with the old man yet, he still couldn't figure out where did he saw him before.
"You hungry…?", The words came out rough and uneven, then the old man leaned forward and pressed two fingers lightly onto Kaodin's stomach. Then he drew his hand back, and lifted it toward his mouth in a slow, practiced motion. Kaodin stiffened.
"I… haven't eaten much," he said. His throat felt dry. "Just water. Some packaged snacks, that's all I had."
The old man nodded slowly, as if that confirmed something important.
He stood and moved toward the far side of the room. A pot clinked. A ladle scraped.
When he returned, he carried a chipped bowl. Steam rose from it, warm and comforting despite everything else. Inside was rice congee, pale and thick, with slices of eel floating near the surface.
Kaodin hesitated.
"Eat," the old man said, pushing the bowl closer. "Good. My daughter make."
"Your daughter?" Kaodin asked.
"She go grab thing," the old man replied. "Back soon."
Hunger won faster than caution. Kaodin lifted the spoon with trembling fingers and tasted it.
Warm, a bit salty, but at this very moment, nothing else matters.
He ate slowly at first, then faster, the heat settling into his stomach, easing the hollow ache he had ignored for too long.
And then, voices drifted in from outside before the footsteps scraped against the threshold.
The old man straightened at once. His shoulders tightened.
The door opened, and the wind from the outside led the sound and a scent of an unwashed dampened clothes rushed in with her.
A sharp laugh. Words piled too fast to separate. Kaodin's eyes lifted, but the room wavered, edges smearing. He nodded politely, offered a small smile, and met her eyes.
A gray shirt hung on her frame, oddly clean against the worn, breached jeans dragging at her legs. She moved with a hitch in her step, the pull uneven, as if one side of her body remembered a different length than the other. Each stride tipped her forward, then dragged her back into line.
Her brown hair lay stretched tight against her scalp, flattened as if pressed there for years. Her face sat slightly askew, features crowded and misaligned, one eye arriving a fraction late when she fixed her gaze. When she smiled, the skin around her mouth folded too deeply, the teeth showing before the expression fully formed.
She leaned in as she spoke, close enough that Kaodin caught the sour, agonizing stink of her breath, stronger than the old man's, before he could pull away. He stayed polite, face stiff and unguarded, holding his breath until she finally leaned back.
"The boy?"
"Father?"
"Is that my new…..?"
The old man quickly shushed her before she could say more, his attention never leaving Kaodin.
As soon as the boy finished the bowl, the old man seemed to catch the faint sound of the spoon tapping the bottom of the scraped dish while he was talking with his daughter in the kitchen. He turned at once and asked, "You… like?"
Kaodin smiled and nodded. "Yes. Thank you."
The old man returned the smile. It was small, held tight at the corners, as if unused.
As Kaodin swallowed the last mouthful, his eyelids grew heavy again. The room tilted, edges softening as the light smeared and drifted out of focus.
The image of the frightening family he had seen while being chased a few days earlier resurfaced in his mind.
Before he could react, his senses dulled. Sound gave way first. Voices lost their edges and folded into a drizzly, distant murmur, syllables overlapping without weight or separation. The ceiling tilted, then drifted, and light thinned into stretched, blurry bands. His sight lagged, arriving late and misaligned, until even that loose grip on the world softened and sensation scattered beyond his reach.
A smell cut through the haze, metallic and faint, like an old copper coin pressed too long into sweat. Recognition came before clarity, sharp and involuntary, and as the sensation settled, his stomach tightened hard. The reaction surged upward, sudden and uncontrollable, and he retched, the motion tearing through him before his thoughts could follow.
"I'm… sorry… why… am I…" The words broke apart before they could settle into a sentence. His head throbbed, pain blooming deep and relentless, and awareness slipped away again.
When sensation returned, it arrived erratically. His vision swam, edges blurring at their outlines. He tried to steady his sight, only to sense that his body and the room held still. Something else carried the imbalance. A faint itch prickled at his neck, sharp enough to register even through the lingering haze.
Unfazed, he stayed still. He forced himself to focus, piecing the scene together before it slipped away again, and understood that his hands and legs were restrained, cuffed in chains and hooked to the wall.
He tried to pull himself upright to observe his surroundings. The smell of damp cloth and blooded meat reached him clearly, sharper than his sight, while a thin wash of natural light filtered in from a narrow opening near the ceiling. The light fell in slanted bands that shifted subtly with the sun's movement, warming the upper air while the floor stayed dim and uneven.
Following the scent of blood, he noticed shapes suspended overhead. As his eyes adjusted, racks resolved into view, spaced unevenly, heavy with various thick cuts left exposed to the light. Some pieces appeared longer when he first looked, then shortened as his gaze settled, sagging under their own weight. Their forms felt familiar in mass and proportion, though their outlook refused alignment with any meat he could name.
Nearby, iron hooks carried smaller portions, flashes of raw red catching the light and then slipping away as his vision lagged. A faint drip sounded beneath one rack—the sound anchored the image more firmly than his eyes did. Lower along the walls, narrower racks held segmented-body meat which seemed to be prepared differently from the rest, split open and set flat in rows, the method deliberate yet difficult to place. And, their placement stayed closer to the floor, set where passing air brushed along the length of the room. The dry, sharp scent of sea salt remained constant.
He tried to make sense of the shapes hanging before him, searching for patterns in the cuts, forcing his memory to match them against familiar livestock. The effort stalled halfway. Strain pulled through him, slow and heavy, and his body sagged with it. His thoughts scattered, losing cohesion, unable to hold any image long enough to settle into clarity.
Time thinned into a soft smear.
Sound reached him first, seeping through the haze. A human voice stretched into awareness, drawn long and uneven, carrying the weight of pain pulled past breath. The rest followed slowly. A stinking black cloth pressed against his eyes, sealing them shut, and the world narrowed into darkness shaped only by smell and sound.
His breath shortened for a moment, then lengthened again, settling into a slow count he had used before without thinking, and after a short while, a persistent urge made him to try reasoning.
"Hello… anyone… please… help…."
The words slipped out thin and broken, each sound dragged through a throat scraped dry. His mouth held the no saliva to feel the taste of anything but dirty clothe and old copper coin.
The sedative pressed down on his body in layers, dulling hunger into a distant ache and smoothing every sensation before it could rise.
A full stretch of time pooled inside him, measured only by the air itself, first warm and disturbed, carrying dust and old smells, later cooling, and damp, settling heavier in his lungs as if the room had exhaled and held its breath. He let the pressure remain where it was and narrowed his attention instead, following sound first, then scent, rebuilding the shape of his surroundings piece by piece within his mind.
Soon after, a rhythmic sound surfaced, low and repetitive, each rise and fall stretched and rounded by the substance. The sounds overlapped, voices carrying different weights, folding into a sequence that resembled mourning. Gradually, the panting grew louder, accompanied by a groaning voice cutting through in an unfamiliar pace.
A thought formed within him, thinking that there was another person who might be held nearby, caught in the same place, being tortured right at this moment. As the weight of that thought sank in, he guarded himself, not being led into fright, but moving deeper into calm, guiding his breathing slower until his senses aligned with the surrounding environment. The space around him took shape through that alignment, and within it, his trained instincts traced the pattern.
The slight cadence shift of wind passing through the small ventilation window near the ceiling differed from the faint touch of air stirred by human movement, and he would have felt both.
However, not before he could align himself further, the noises gathered and shifted with different uncontrollable beat, not able to match his current tempo, he immediately knew that his time was lessened again by the sedative substance effect.
A surge of warmth moved through his body, rounding the edge of thought and easing alarm into float. Awareness slipped behind perception, reaching for sound after it had already faded, sensation thinning until sequence and meaning failed altogether and consciousness gave way, completely swallowed by emptiness.
Awareness seeped back in uneven pulses. His head shifted first. He let it drop, then lifted his shoulders, rubbing the blindfolded cloth against his bare skin in an attempt to catch an edge and pull it down. The fabric held. He tried again. He turned his face and dragged the side of it along the floor, the worn wooden mattress scraping faintly against the cloth. Little by little, the pressure eased. Along the edge of his left eye, the fabric loosened. A thin gap opened.v