|———Reader Discretion: This Chapter consist of thought of Suicide. Do not try to imitate in Real Life. Remember, This is a work of imagination———|
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7: Who I am (5)
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Zu Feng's consciousness stirred like a leaf caught between storms, battered from every side by pain that felt eternal. His body trembled as though it had fought for weeks without pause, and even in that state, somewhere deep within him, a voice pressed faintly against his soul — familiar, but muffled, buried beneath sorrow.
"What happened again," said a voice, strained, brittle with sorrow and tension. It cracked like an old reed flute.
"That might have been because of Qi Reflex, Sect Leader. Young Master has pushed himself too hard and didn't care for his broken Dantian. Don't worry, he will be fine," came another voice, calm, dignified, soothing — but carrying weight, as if even that calmness was strained and forced into place to keep despair from spilling out.
The first voice wavered again, thick with grief. "Look at him, he's in so much pain that tears are flowing down from his eyes. Oh God, please, bless my child."
Those words carried warmth, but also a helpless sorrow that wrapped itself around Zu Feng's battered body like chains. He slowly began to stir, his breath shallow, his chest heavy with sharp aches. His body felt as though the marrow had been scorched, the tendons torn, the bones hollowed out. Every breath was a fight.
And then he tried — weakly — to open his eyes.
The light assaulted him first, a brightness that pierced into his skull like a blade of burning white. His lids twitched open against it, and in that flood of brightness he blinked, adjusting. Slowly, lines and shapes formed, details gathering. The roof above him… ah, yes. A familiar roof, yet one that pressed on him with memories he could not hold fully in place. The wooden beams stretched across, old but polished smooth with years of incense smoke and prayer. The grain of the wood ran like scars across a weary body, patterns darkened by centuries of flame and oil lamps. Golden threads of incense curled upward toward it, twisting and fading before touching the surface, as if the roof itself repelled them.
The smell came next. Sharp. Lingering. The smell of incense, the smoke of sacred herbs — thick, acrid, searing the lungs and yet laced with faint sweetness. It filled him, suffocating and calming in the same breath.
His eyes, red and glistening, shifted slowly to the right. A tear slipped down, wetting the corner of his cheek as it fell silently toward his jawline. His vision cleared enough to see them — the faces.
They were familiar, and yet… not.
An old man, bent slightly under the weight of worry. His brows knotted so tightly they seemed carved into stone, his eyes trembling with fear. His lips pressed thin, ready to whisper or to break into sobs. Ho Xing. His expression was not one of cold distance but of raw, breaking concern.
Beside him stood another, younger — not young in body, but younger in air, in bearing. His face was composed, almost unnaturally so. The calmness he held onto was deliberate, chosen, like the still water of a pond hiding depths below. Namda Ku, the physician. His every word seemed precise, his every breath measured.
And behind them, larger, broader, his frame casting a shadow that seemed to weigh on the entire chamber — Shí Xing. Stoic, stone-faced, unyielding. A man carved from mountains, yet his presence carried a flicker of restlessness, as if even stone can crack when the tremors are too great.
Zu Feng exhaled faintly, his chest heaving once, eyes distant. There was no light in them, none of the fire, none of the spark of the man who once carried the title of the strongest on his planet. His gaze was hollow, dark.
Ho Xing, unable to restrain himself, stepped forward. His feet dragged with urgency, his hands trembling as though in prayer. He leaned closer, his aged hands reaching out to cup Zu Feng's cheeks, desperate to feel his son's warmth, desperate to anchor him to this world again.
"Ohh, my son—"
But then.
The moment his hands brushed the air between them, Zu Feng struck them away with sudden force. The motion was raw, desperate, full of pain but firm in its rejection. His eyes — those dead eyes, covered in an abyss deeper than darkness — turned to Ho Xing, stabbing through him like frozen steel.
"Don't you dare touch me!"
The words fell heavy. Cold, merciless, cutting. They didn't echo in the chamber; they stabbed into the hearts of those present, silencing everything but the sharp ringing left behind in their minds.
Ho Xing froze, his body stiff as the air itself seemed to abandon him. His hands hung suspended in disbelief, the skin of his palms still carrying the warmth of yearning that had been refused. His eyes widened, his lips parted, quivering as though to ask why, but no sound came.
That was when Shí Xing's voice thundered, rough and harsh.
"IS THIS HOW!—"
He could not even finish.
Ho Xing, broken though he looked, lifted his hand weakly to silence him. His lips, trembling, curved into something that could barely be called a smile. It was the smile of a man who carried unbearable weight and forced himself to hide it.
"If you need anything, Feng… you can ask for it."
His voice was soft, full of love, full of longing. But Zu Feng's glare sliced it apart, daring, cold, merciless. Like a lion that had forgotten his kin, staring into the eyes of a father who had no authority over him.
Shí Xing bristled, furious, his body trembling to unleash his rage. But Ho Xing raised his hand again, stopping him. Without another word, Ho Xing turned, his back heavy with defeat, his shoulders weighed down by sorrow that bent him further. Step by step, he moved toward the door.
Trailing him, Shí Xing followed, his heavy frame casting shadows that dragged behind like accusations. And Namda Ku, calm as ever, paused at the threshold. His eyes lingered on Zu Feng, pleading silently, trying to convince him, trying to communicate something words could not. But Zu Feng did not meet his gaze.
And so Namda Ku, too, left.
The room was now empty. Silence pressed against the walls like a heavy curtain, smothering every trace of warmth that had been there before. Even the faint smell of medicine and incense clung to the air like ghosts refusing to leave.
Zu Feng rose slowly from his lair, his body trembling as though his bones had been replaced with cracked glass. Pain throbbed through him, not in one place but everywhere at once, a dull, dragging ache that made each movement feel like a punishment. He staggered, one bare foot dragging slightly across the cold floor, his breath shallow and uneven, until at last he reached the mirror that stood against the far wall.
He stopped several paces away, at a distance where the whole of him could be seen — his full body reflected back, small and broken under the weight of dim lamplight.
With a slow, deliberate motion, he reached up and peeled the black clothes from his shoulders. The fabric slid off like a shadow leaving his skin. The moment his upper garments fell to the floor and his bare body came into view, his hollowed eyes widened a fraction, a flicker of something breaking through the dullness there.
"This body…" he whispered, his voice rasping like paper torn too many times.
He raised a trembling hand and touched his arms, his chest, fingers grazing the ridges of his own skin as if touching someone else entirely. "…is full of scars."
Before him, in the silvered glass, was not a man but a map of suffering carved into flesh. His torso was covered in scars of every size and shape — some as small as a finger's length, others running as long as a forearm. Some were pale and old, others darker, puckered with time. They ran across his stomach, his back, his chest like faded rivers of pain. His arms, strangely, were untouched — pale, almost fragile, as though they had been spared by design or by fate.
He stared at himself, at the severe thinness of this body, at how damaged it was to its very core. His face — in the reflection — still carried a remnant of sharpness, of someone once proud, but his body told a different story, one of ruin and survival stretched too far. Many of the scars had darkened with time, inked into his flesh like accusations that would never fade.
His breathing grew heavier, slower. He reached for the silver bracelet at his wrist, the one constant he had not yet questioned. With a sharp tug he pulled it off. It fell into his palm with a muted clink.
The sight beneath made his eyes widen further, hollow pits of disbelief.
"This boy was…" the thought crawled up from his chest, ragged and bitter. He dragged his fingers across the skin of his wrist, feeling the raised, thin scars there — not one, but many, like tally marks in a language of despair. "…suicidal?"
The word echoed inside him like a scream in an empty hall. His lips parted but no sound came, only a tremor in his jaw. He turned, eyes catching the faint gleam of metal by his bed.
On the low table next to his lair lay a knife, its blade plain but sharp, beside it a simple apple, red and glossy. The ordinary sight was suddenly unbearable.
He walked toward it, each step slow, deliberate, like a man walking into a sentence already written. He reached down, fingers closing around the knife. It was cool, its weight steady, almost comforting in its simplicity. With his other hand he snatched up a piece of cloth, folded it, and pushed it between his teeth.
"If this body didn't die from this many attempts," he muttered around the cloth, his voice muffled and bitter, "it won't die from this too, will it?"
He lifted the knife, his reflection in the dark blade staring back at him — hollow eyes, hair hanging loose, a stranger's face. He placed the blade vertically against his wrist, the cold kiss of steel against old wounds.
"Well, if I die," his thought whispered, quiet and venomous, "I would leave this place, right?"
Memories flickered like dying candles. Earth. Friends. Son. Words like ghosts, soft and warm, drifting through the cold cavern of his mind. For a moment his throat tightened, his chest clenched, and it felt like swallowing stones. His breathing went ragged, backwards, as if his body itself was refusing the rhythm of life.
"I want to go back…" the thought was small, childlike, echoing under the weight of despair. "I want to go back to my world…"
The knife trembled in his hand. The reflection in the blade warped, his eyes wet, a single tear slipping down his cheek and catching on the cloth between his teeth.
In the next second, the silence shattered.
Slash.
The blade bit through skin, opening the pale tracks of old scars with a fresh wound. Blood surged out in a bright arc, flying in a line that caught the dim light and turned it into something almost beautiful. It splattered across the floor, warm against the cold stone, dripping from his arm in slow, deliberate drops.
Zu Feng's body jerked slightly at the pain, but his expression barely changed. He watched himself in the mirror — the hollow-eyed man with the knife and the spreading red — and it was like watching someone else entirely. His breath came in short, trembling bursts, the cloth dampening with saliva and coppery blood.
The room around him remained silent, unmoved, the smell of incense mixing now with the metallic scent of blood. The mirror reflected all of it back at him: the thin body, the ruined skin, the silver bracelet lying forgotten on the floor, the knife slick with red in his hand.
His eyes, still empty, fixed on the image. This was the body he had inherited. This was the pain carved into it long before he arrived. This was the truth he could not escape.
The blood continued to drip, each drop a soft sound against the floor, like a clock ticking away the seconds of something ending.
And Zu Feng stood there, his mind a storm of Earth, friends, son, the words swirling and dissolving in the pain. The knife trembled once more in his hand, but he did not release it. He simply stared, silent, as though waiting to see if the body would finally give up, if this act would succeed where so many had failed.
The mirror held his gaze, unflinching, showing him everything: the scars, the blood, the man who no longer knew who he was.
In that reflection, Zu Feng looked almost like a ghost, standing between two worlds, bleeding but not gone, his eyes empty yet screaming.
And still the blood fell.
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