Chapter 1: The Lingering Silence

Pitch blackness enveloped everything, utterly silent.

Lin Qing’s frail, emaciated body trembled with each shallow breath, his hands gripping the cold iron bars of the cage. It seemed as though his last breath might escape him at any moment.

His pupils, dilated to their fullest in the oppressive darkness, held no flicker of light or life.

They were as dull and lifeless as the eyes of an old man nearing his end.

He had long lost track of time. Without any means to count the passing hours, the flow of days blurred into an indistinguishable haze.

His only markers of time had been the adjacent iron cages, each one falling silent after an initial period of desperate struggle.

While they offered a grim indication of the passage of time, their silence served as a stark reminder of his own dwindling chances.

They were all dead.

He alone had survived…

For now, at least.

‘If only he could turn back time,’ he thought. ‘I wouldn’t have impulsively run away from home, and I wouldn’t have fallen into the clutches of these wicked people.’

He longed for his parents, for the warmth of his comfortable bed, and for the familiar faces of his schoolmates.

As these thoughts consumed Lin Qing, the heavy iron door of the basement groaned open from the outside. The creaking sound announced an arrival.

The grating scrape of a heavy cleaver dragging across the floor followed, sounding like Death itself approaching swiftly, scythe in hand.

Death surged over him like a suffocating tide, relentlessly gripping his throat, refusing him even a single gasp of air.

Lin Qing’s eyes flickered, fixing on the figure that appeared before him. Still, no light shone within them.

“You’re still alive.”