The walk to the mine stretched into an eternity. Each step was a negotiation with his body, a silent argument between willpower and biology. The pickaxe grew heavier with each block, digging into his shoulder until he had to switch sides, then switch back when the other shoulder started screaming.
Two hours in, halfway there, something warm trickled down his forehead.
Tòumíng wiped at it absently, his hand coming away red. Fresh blood, bright and alarming, dripping from somewhere in his hairline where the boots had connected with his skull the night before. The minor brain bleeding Cupid had mentioned, apparently deciding to make itself known.
"Oh, that's not good," Cupid muttered. "That's really not good."
A woman gasped nearby, her hand flying to her mouth. "Oh my god, you're bleeding!"
Tòumíng kept walking.
"Sir, excuse me, sir, you need help!" An older man stepped forward, concern etched across his face. "There's a clinic two blocks that way, let me—"
"I'm fine." The words came out slurred, his broken jaw making them barely intelligible.
More people were noticing now, the blood dripping steadily down his face creating a small spectacle on the morning street. A crowd began forming, concerned citizens with their phones out, debating whether to call emergency services.
Then she appeared. A girl, maybe twenty, with perfectly styled hair and designer sunglasses perched on her head despite the early hour. She stepped directly into his path, arms crossed, blocking the sidewalk.
"Oh my god, like, you are so, like, not okay right now."
Tòumíng tried to step around her. She sidestepped, maintaining the blockade.
"Like, seriously, you're literally bleeding from your head? That's like, super not normal." Her tone suggested she was performing concern rather than feeling it, each word drawn out with vocal fry. "You should like, definitely go to a hospital or whatever."
"Move." Tòumíng's vision was starting to tunnel. He could see her, the street beyond her, and not much else.
"I'm like, trying to help you? You're being like, really rude right now. I could literally just walk away but I'm like, being a good person and stuff." (i wanna uppercut this bitch sooo bad)
"I need to get to work."
She laughed, actually laughed. "Work? Babe, you can barely stand. Like, your boss will totally understand if you're like, bleeding everywhere. That's like, a valid excuse or whatever."
Back and forth they went, her vocal fry grating against his skull like sandpaper, his responses becoming less coherent as the blood loss and exhaustion compounded. She wasn't moving. She was treating this like some kind of social media moment, probably already composing the post in her head about how she tried to help some random bleeding guy on the street.
"Seriously though, like, you look like super awful. Like, no offense but—"
Tòumíng lowered his shoulder and walked straight through her.
The impact wasn't hard, he barely had the strength for hard, but it was enough. She stumbled backward, her carefully balanced stance failing, and sat down hard on the pavement. Her sunglasses clattered to the ground.
"GET THE FUCK AWAY."
His voice came out raw, animal, stripped of anything resembling human courtesy. The crowd that had been forming took a collective step back. The girl stared up at him from the sidewalk, mouth open in shock, for once completely silent.
Tòumíng wiped the blood from his eyes and kept walking.
The crowd parted for him now. No more concerned citizens, no more offers of help. Just wide eyes and whispered conversations and phones recording at a safe distance. He'd crossed some line, become something they recognized as dangerous or desperate or both.
An old lady stood near a fruit stand, her weathered hands clutched together. As he passed, she bowed her head and her lips moved silently. Praying. For him or because of him, Tòumíng couldn't tell and didn't care.
The mine loomed ahead, a sprawling industrial complex surrounded by chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire. Guard towers stood at the corners, unmanned most of the time because who would want to break into a mine? The real security was at the exits, checking every worker leaving to make sure they weren't smuggling anything valuable out.
Tòumíng approached the main gate, his ID badge hanging from his neck on a frayed lanyard. The guard took one look at him and reached for his radio.
"Don't." Tòumíng held up a hand. "I'm here for my shift. Just let me through."
"You need medical attention, not a shift."
"I need to work. Let me through."
The guard hesitated, then shrugged and waved him past. Not his problem if some idiot wanted to kill himself in the mines. Probably happened more often than anyone wanted to admit.
The mine office was a small prefab building near the entrance, its air conditioning struggling against the morning heat. Inside, Zhāng Wěi sat behind his desk, going through paperwork with the focused intensity of a man who counted every yuan twice.
He looked up when Tòumíng entered, and his expression transformed from annoyed to horrified in the span of a heartbeat.
"What the hell happened to you?" Zhāng Wěi stood up so fast his chair rolled backward and hit the wall. "No. No way. You're taking the day off."
Tòumíng blinked. In three years of working at this mine, through sickness and injury and exhaustion, Zhāng Wěi had never, not once, offered anyone a day off. The man was legendarily greedy, squeezing every possible hour of work out of his employees, pushing them until they broke and then replacing them with fresh bodies.
"I'm working."
"You're bleeding from your head. You can barely stand. I'm not having you die in my mine and dealing with the inspectors." Zhāng Wěi came around the desk, hands raised like he was approaching a wild animal. "Seriously, kid. Go home. Come back tomorrow."
"Load up my cart."
"Tòumíng—"
"Load. Up. My. Cart." Each word came out with effort, pushed through gritted teeth. "Point me to the dock. I'm going down."
They stared at each other, boss and worker, both recognizing that something fundamental had shifted. The usual dynamic, the casual cruelty and accepted hierarchy, none of it mattered right now. Tòumíng was going into that mine whether Zhāng Wěi liked it or not.
Finally, the older man sighed and gestured toward the back door. "Dock three. Cart's already loaded from the morning shift. But I'm marking this down as against medical advice. If you die down there, it's not on me."
"Fine."
The cart dock was a platform overlooking the main shaft, steel rails disappearing down into darkness. Cart number three sat waiting, loaded with tools and empty ore bags, its wheels locked in place. The shaft descended at a steep angle, nearly forty-five degrees, plunging into the earth like a throat.
Tòumíng released the wheel lock. The cart immediately started rolling, gravity taking over. He grabbed the side rail and hauled himself in, landing hard on the metal floor as momentum built.
Down. Down into the darkness. Down past the safety lights strung along the walls at increasingly distant intervals. Down past the marked levels where other crews worked, their headlamps visible as distant stars.
Down into the deeper sections, the abandoned veins, the places where the easy ore had been stripped away years ago.
Down into his tomb.
The cart picked up speed, wheels screaming against rails, the sound echoing off stone walls that pressed in from all sides. Wind whipped past his face, cold and stale, carrying the smell of earth and metal and ancient darkness.
Deeper.
Deeper.
The last safety light disappeared above him, and Tòumíng descended into complete and total black.