Perched on the dusty slope of the mine, facing the quiet western sky, with the dim crimson sprawl of the beastly city looming behind him, Xu Le moved in the twilight. The stars over the Eastern Forest District shimmered faintly, as if endless veils had been draped over the upper edge of the atmosphere.
In this subtle, shifting light, Xu Le's figure twisted and stretched in continual motion. His limbs moved according to a strict sequence—step forward, twist the waist, sink the stance, punch, turn the wrist, extend the elbow... again and again.
Beside him, Feng Yu watched in silence. Over a year had passed, and the boy had already mastered this strange set of movements down to the tiniest detail. There wasn't a single misstep—not even in the slight tilt of a trailing fingertip.
The routine wasn't complicated, but it couldn't be called gymnastics either. Its structure was loose, the pace too slow. It resembled a dance, but not the kind performed by the refined stars of the Shanglin Song and Dance Troupe. Xu Le's movements were rigid—not clumsy, but raw. Like fresh flesh and sinew, blood-slick and ungrilled, tough and unyielding.
The hardness wasn't from stiffness, but from something dense and unrelenting—like the reinforced glass of a control panel or the endless bedrock beneath Eastern Forest's grassy skin. Every move he made struck with clean, decisive force.
This "rigid" dance consisted of roughly ten movements, each one followed by a step in the opposite direction. When Xu Le finally pulled back his extended right leg and squatted with an oddly coiled posture, the set was complete.
It looked simple. It wasn't. The boy's face steamed in the cool night air, a flush spreading across his cheeks. Sweat soaked through his vest and trickled down from the hem. That much effort, in such a short time.
Xu Le breathed slowly, unable to speak for a long while. His slender frame now seemed charged with latent power, finely shaped, almost beautiful in form. One could only wonder what this body might become in a few more years, once he fully grew into it.
He remained silent, not just from exhaustion but because every one of the over 600 muscles in his body was now consumed by pain—so much so that he didn't even want to move a pinky. Every single myofibril in him seemed to be breathing, expanding, rubbing against itself.
It felt like metal scraping porcelain—painful, sharp, and unbearable.
And then came the trembling. A subtle, involuntary shiver rose from deep within his core, following the lines of his nerves and tissues, rippling outward in waves. It drummed against every fiber of his body, raising tiny goosebumps on his bare skin, which flared and faded, as if an invisible hand were running gently across his flesh.
His pant legs began to twitch faintly in the still night air, hiding the trembling of his legs.
Xu Le didn't understand why his muscles seemed to heat up and rub against themselves. He didn't know that muscle fibers were composed of entwined protein filaments. Nor did he know what the trembling meant, or what it might bring. He only remembered what the repair shop owner once told him: "You have to memorize this pain. You have to remember the path of that tremor through your body."
After changing out of his sweat-soaked clothes and taking a shower, Xu Le returned to the top of the mine slope, clean and refreshed but with his head hanging low. He slumped down beside Feng Yu, looking pale and worn out—like he'd just recovered from a serious illness.
Feng Yu paid him no attention. He sat casually, watching the crystal screen balanced on his knees. The cold blue light reflected on his face, giving the repair shop owner an almost cruel and delicate look.
"The internal network won't confirm whether Bao Longtao recognized me," Xu Le said, exhausted. Just a glance at that familiar blue interface told him everything: the boss had once again hacked into the Federal Police's internal system. The last time, during the protest on Bell Tower Street, Feng Yu had recruited Levi and those orphans precisely because the two of them had already dug up everything there was to know about the governor's office and the police department.
Anyone who could hack into official systems was far from ordinary. But after two years, Xu Le had grown used to it. Feng Yu always had a way of delivering surprises—not that Xu Le found them particularly delightful anymore.
Sometimes, Xu Le wondered what kind of mistake this man had made in the military to end up as a fugitive. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd stumbled into the life of a retired legend hiding among commoners—like something out of a movie. It was too surreal to believe.
Not that he wanted to pry. Xu Le didn't care about Feng Yu's past. He was here to learn machinery and repair work, nothing more. If anything, he was wary of the man's mystery, as if he'd stumbled into a den of wolves by accident. Years of surviving as an orphan had taught Xu Le how to read people. He could tell: beneath Feng Yu's calm exterior was something cold and unshakable.
In other words, Xu Le knew Uncle Feng was not someone to cross.
"The Hexi State TV station's news and production departments are going at each other's throats," Feng Yu said, smiling faintly at the scrolling footage on the screen. "Looks like the District Committee and the Governor's backers are about to clash too. Bao Longtao has his hands full. He's not about to connect anything to a street orphan like you."
To an outsider, their conversation might have sounded like the prelude to some grand political conspiracy—the kind that could have triggered the Bell Tower Street protest. But Xu Le knew better. The man beside him had no real interest in politics. They were nobodies. Stirring up sparks was one thing. Getting burned by them was another.
Familiar music began to play. A purple-haired girl appeared on the screen. Both the man and the boy fell silent, beginning their nightly ritual of watching their favorite show—complete with occasional sighs and sounds of admiration.
Beneath the faint pink of the night sky, invisible waves, signals, and frequencies crossed paths overhead, weaving through the air and forming bursts of color on countless screens across the Eastern Forest District. They slipped into homes, into people's eyes, feeding their dreams.
A dark red line streaked across the sky with a low rumble—it was likely one of the military's dwindling suborbital patrols. Wild black cats darted through rocky natural tunnels beneath the electric fences, indifferent to the First Charter of Humanity. They converged toward the abandoned mine, joyfully scavenging the scraps left by the two humans.
One of the cats, a piece of beef in its mouth, looked up curiously at the two solitary figures on the slope.
Elsewhere in the city, a group of orphans—huddled together but still painfully alone—walked in silence toward violence. At the front of the line, Levi's hand was in his pocket, tightly gripping the metal rod that gave him the courage to keep going.