In the Night Furnace District, the wind was a thief. It didn't bring oxygen to the lungs; it only brought the bitter taste of pulverized coal and the metallic tang of industrial rot. Here, the sky was an endless ceiling of smog, a tomb that swallowed the stars and spat out ash.
Gu Hanzhou was huddled in the jagged crevice of a discarded ore pile, his body coiled tight. To any casual observer, he was just another shadow, another piece of lifeless stone. He was slick with a layer of pungent "Condensing Salve"—a foul, viscous substance boiled from the bile of dead earth-boring beetles. It smelled like a rotting carcass, but it served a singular, life-saving purpose: it masked his biological heat signature.
In this district, heat was a death sentence. It was the lighthouse that guided the predators of the dark.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The rhythmic strike of heavy alloy boots against the cold stone floor echoed through the derelict tunnel. Gu Hanzhou didn't breathe. He didn't blink. He lowered his heart rate to a suicidal forty beats per minute, a trick he'd learned through years of surviving in the gutters.
A squad of Night Order Legion fringe guards marched past. They were giants encased in black, obsidian-like power armor, their visors glowing with a faint, menacing crimson. Behind those masks, their breathing sounded like the wheezing of heavy industrial bellows. These were the enforcers of the "Order," and to them, the mine-slaves of the Night Furnace District weren't humans. They were "Walking Consumables"—bio-fuel that occasionally spoke.
"Cough... ugh... hack..."
A few meters away, hidden behind a rusted ventilation grate, an old miner lost his battle with the black-lung. The cough was muffled, a desperate attempt to stay silent, but in the oppressive stillness of the mine, it sounded like a thunderclap.
Gu Hanzhou's pupils constricted into pinpricks. Fool, he thought, a cold stone settling in his gut.
A guard paused. He didn't turn his head; he simply lifted a gauntleted hand. A flicker of ghostly blue light gathered at his fingertip—Order Energy.
Without a word, without a trial, the guard fired. An Order Ray hissed through the air, cutting a neon-blue trail through the smog. It punched through the ventilation grate and into the old man's throat with surgical precision.
There was no scream. There was only the sound of rapid carbonization—a sickening sizzle as human flesh turned to cinder in less than a heartbeat.
"Faulty unit," the guard sneered, his voice distorted by the vox-grille into a metallic growl. "A waste of oxygen. Burning him is a mercy the Legion provides for free."
The armored boot crushed the smoldering pile of ash as the squad continued their patrol. They didn't even look back. A human life in the Night Furnace was worth less than the coal under their heels.
Gu Hanzhou's hand tightened around his weapon: a half-meter length of rusted iron rebar, sharpened to a lethal point. His knuckles were bone-white, the rough metal biting into his palm. He felt a surge of cold fury, but he suppressed it. Rage was a luxury. Survival was a job.
Only after the thuds of the iron boots had long faded did he allow his muscles to uncoil. As he relaxed, a terrifying, familiar sensation began to crawl beneath his skin.
It was the "Order Blood."
It had happened three days ago. While scavenging in a forbidden, deep-layer shaft where the air was thick enough to choke a rat, he had found it—a jagged mineral core pulsing with a dying, obsidian light. When his fingers touched the surface, the core didn't just break; it shattered into his very soul. A wisp of pitch-black energy had burrowed into his veins, rewriting his biology.
Now, his blood felt like liquid lead. It was a constant, agonizing heat, as if a thousand microscopic razors were flaying his internal organs from the inside out.
"Not enough... still not enough," Gu Hanzhou whispered, his voice a dry rasp.
He slipped out of the crevice, moving with the fluid, silent grace of a predator. He bypassed the main roads, darting through the labyrinth of low-slung shanties and collapsed tunnels. His destination was the "Waste Pit"—the graveyard of the Legion's energy residue. To a normal man, the radiation there would melt their skin in hours. But to someone whose blood had been tainted by the Order, those toxic dregs were the only fuel that could stabilize the mutation.
He was crossing a narrow alleyway when his neck hairs stood on end.
A sudden, violent displacement of air. A scent of wet fur and ozone.
Gu Hanzhou didn't look back. If you waited to see the enemy in the Night Furnace, you were already dead. He threw his weight to the left, diving into a pile of scrap metal.
SHRIIIK!
A massive, soot-covered claw slammed into the stone wall where his spine had been a second ago. The impact was so great that it gouged three-inch furrows into the solid rock.
A Shadow Hound.
These weren't natural animals. They were monstrosities mutated by "Dark Order" energy, bred and brainwashed by the Legion to be the ultimate trackers. They were the hounds of heaven's basement, designed to hunt down any slave who dared to dream of the surface.
Gu Hanzhou rolled through the grit and came up in a low crouch, his rebar held like a dagger.
The beast was a nightmare. Standing nearly seven feet long on four spindly, powerful limbs, it had no eyes—only a row of sensory pits along its snout. Its maw was a jagged canyon of obsidian teeth, dripping with caustic, black saliva that hissed as it hit the floor.
The hound let out a low, guttural vibration. It tensed its haunches, its muscles rippling like coiled springs.
It pounced.
In the eyes of a normal miner, the creature would have been nothing but a lethal blur. But as the hound leaped, Gu Hanzhou felt his heart hammer against his ribs—once, twice—and then the Order Blood ignited.
The world slowed.
The falling soot particles seemed to hang in the air like frozen diamonds. He could see the individual fibers of the hound's dark fur bristling. He saw the way its rear-left hock spasmed just before it left the ground.
Now.
Gu Hanzhou didn't retreat. He stepped into the beast's arc. It was a suicidal move for anyone else, but the slowed perception gave him the window he needed. As the Shadow Hound sailed over him, its soft underbelly exposed, Gu Hanzhou drove the rusted rebar upward with every ounce of his mutated strength.
PLU-SHEK!
The iron rod buried itself deep into the creature's chest. The hound's own momentum did the work, ripping a jagged red-black trench from its sternum to its hindquarters.
A spray of foul, boiling blood drenched Gu Hanzhou's face. It burned like acid, but he didn't flinch. The beast crashed into the dirt, shrieking a sound that could peel paint.
Gu Hanzhou didn't give it a second to recover. He scrambled onto the thrashing monster's back, locking his legs around its torso, and drove the rebar into the base of its skull. Again. And again. And again.
He stabbed until the iron hit the stone floor through the creature's head. He stabbed until his arms turned to lead and the hound's body finally went limp.
Gu Hanzhou slumped back, sitting in the puddle of cooling, black ichor. His chest was heaving, his lungs burning as if he'd swallowed live coals.
The heat in his veins was no longer a dull ache; it was a roaring furnace.
He ripped open his tattered, grease-stained shirt. Directly over his heart, a faint, pulsing crimson vein was glowing beneath the skin. It branched out like a web of lightning, crawling toward his throat.
The First Awakening: The Smoldering Phase.
In this godforsaken world, where the sun was a myth and hope was a crime, he had finally secured his first ticket to the game. He was no longer just fuel. He was a spark.
"You told me, Mom..." Gu Hanzhou wiped the foul sludge from his eyes, his gaze hardening into something colder than the alloy armor of the guards. "You said survival always has a price. I'm ready to pay."
He stood up, his bones groaning in protest. He didn't look back at the carcass. He knew the scent of blood would bring the rest of the pack—and soon, the Legion's 'Purification' teams.
But he didn't run. He simply walked deeper into the dark, toward the Waste Pit.
In the Night Furnace, you didn't hide from the monsters. You became the thing that made the monsters afraid to close their eyes.