Wei's head felt heavy, as if it had been stuffed with damp cotton.
Above him, the ceiling was pieced together from rough wooden planks. The boards didn't quite meet. Thin cracks ran between them, careless and uneven.
Through one of those cracks, a narrow blade of light slipped down, sharp and pale, cutting through the dimness like a knife.
It looked bright outside.
The light said so.
He tried to turn over.
The moment he moved—even slightly—pain exploded in his chest.
It wasn't a dull ache, not the kind that spreads slowly. It was sharp and precise, like someone pressing a finger straight into an open wound. Beneath it came a faint, sickening sound, as if bone were rubbing against bone, a dry clicking deep inside him.
Now even breathing hurt.
Each breath scraped his ribs from the inside, shallow and careful, as though his lungs themselves were afraid of moving too much.
Yet when he woke, his hand was already clenched.
Tightly.
Steadily.
Too steady for someone who had just regained consciousness.
He didn't know why he was holding on to something.
He didn't know what that something was.
But he knew one thing with absolute certainty—
He could not let go.
If he let go, something would happen.
It might not even be something bad.
But something would happen.
And that alone felt dangerous.
His mind was empty.
Not foggy. Not confused.
Empty.
Cleanly empty.
There was no name in it.
No past.
No memories.
There wasn't even a clear idea of "I."
No story. No history. No sense of continuity.
And yet his hand was not empty.
His fingers knew exactly how much strength to apply at each joint.
The pad between his thumb and forefinger knew how much space to leave.
His wrist knew which direction to sink into, just a fraction, to stabilize the grip.
None of this came from thought.
He wasn't deciding any of it.
His body simply knew.
It remembered.
He tried to change his grip, just to test it.
His hand refused.
Not with stiffness.
Not with pain.
But with something far stranger—a calm correction.
As if someone inside him had quietly said,
"That's wrong."
And so his fingers returned to their original position on their own.
Wei stared at his hand, and the longer he watched it, the more afraid he became.
Not of anyone else.
Of himself.
This body didn't feel like his.
It felt like it belonged to a stranger—and he was only staying in it for now.
As if the body had allowed him inside.
Temporarily.
The thought almost made him want to laugh.
But he couldn't.
Because the body—
was clearly more dangerous than he was.
-----------------
The air was thick and stale, like a livestock shed that had been sealed shut for years.
What entered his nose when he breathed wasn't really air at all, but damp mold, heavy and wet. It carried the sour edge of old sweat, rotting grass, packed earth, and something else—something faint but unmistakable.
The smell of people.
The floor of the shed was covered in trampled hay. It had been stepped on so many times that it was no longer straw but pulp—wet, soft, broken down into a layer of muddy mush.
Every movement pulled at the soles of the feet, as if the ground itself didn't want to let go.
Wei slowly swept his gaze across the space around him.
The shed was crammed full of boys.
They weren't sitting.
They weren't lying down.
They were packed together.
So close that stretching out a leg meant kicking someone else.
Their ages ranged from barely ten to maybe seventeen or eighteen.
Every now and then, one of them would lift his head—but the movement was slow, delayed, as if it had to pass through layers of resistance first.
Their eyes were empty.
Not angry.
Not hopeful.
Not pleading.
Even when screams rose and fell outside the shed, sharp and sudden, the boys only tightened their bodies slightly, curling in a little more, and stayed exactly where they were.
Every face was too thin.
Cheekbones jutted out sharply, skin stretched tight over bone. Shoulder blades protruded under the skin like broken wings, sharp angles pressing outward as if trying to escape.
They hadn't been placed here.
They had been piled here.
Not arranged.
Stacked.
Between the clumps of hay on the floor, Wei noticed a faint, invisible boundary.
There were no marks.
No lines drawn.
No one had explained it.
And yet no one crossed it.
Wei understood why very quickly.
That was as far as the whip reached.
The boys' postures were eerily uniform.
Legs pulled in tight.
Arms wrapped around their shoulders.
Heads lowered.
As if they had all been taught the same lesson, over and over—
Make yourself smaller.
If you shrink enough, you won't be noticed.
Wei had never seen anything like this before.
And he had never realized that a person could be compressed into such a silent shape.
And he—
was lying among them.
He instinctively tried to count how many there were, but stopped after the third.
Not because he couldn't continue.
But because he suddenly understood that the number didn't matter.
He didn't know how long he had been unconscious.
He didn't know whether it was day or night.
The sound of whips outside seemed distant, as if carried from far away—and yet also close, almost beside his ear.
There was no clear beginning to the noise.
No clear end.
As if everything here had always been this way.
As if it was natural.
Then a disturbance broke out near the entrance.
The boys moved all at once, like puppets pulled by the same string.
They surged toward the door, plates thrust forward in their hands.
Someone appeared in the doorway, carrying something heavy.
"Bang."
A thick wooden barrel hit the ground.
Through the gaps between bodies, Wei caught a glimpse of what was inside.
A dark, glue-like porridge was ladled into the plates.
Thick.
Sticky.
Still faintly steaming.
The boys scrambled for food, shoving and squeezing out of the crowd, desperate to get away from the barrel as quickly as possible. They crouched wherever they could and buried their faces in their plates, swallowing fast, urgently.
No one chewed for long.
No one paused to taste anything.
They stuffed the food in and swallowed it down, as if afraid that slowing even a moment would cost them their share.
The sound of swallowing was soft but frantic, dense and repetitive.
When mixed together, it sounded exactly like livestock being driven to a feeding trough, heads down, tearing into feed.
Wei felt his chest tighten.
The way these children ate was worse than hunger.
It was as if they had forgotten what eating was meant to be.
They only remembered one thing—
They had to swallow.
Wei watched them, confused.
He didn't know where he was.
He didn't know who these people were.
There was no anger on their faces.
No curiosity.
No joy.
It was as though something essential had been pulled out of them.
Like a sense had been removed.
Wei suddenly became aware of the emptiness in his own stomach.
A hollow ache.
He couldn't remember when he had last eaten.
Then, very quietly, a voice spoke near his ear.
"You're awake?"
The voice was soft—so soft it sounded afraid of being heard.
Wei's eyes shifted slightly, but he didn't answer.
The voice paused.
Then it added, even more quietly,
"You shouldn't have woken up…"