Author: Huai Shang

Translator: Xuannie Chan

Editors: Demi, Ami K.

 

Chapter 1

 

The piercing shrill of sirens streamed down brightly lit streets. Cars swerved aside for an ambulance and its escort of police cars. They slewed to a shrill stop outside a waiting hospital. As cops piled out of their vehicles, the entrance of the A&E exploded with activity. A bed stood ready, and now well-trained hospital staff transferred onto it a bloodstained stretcher.

 

“Good evening, this is Channel 1 with breaking news. A gunfight broke out between foreign drug traffickers and the local law enforcement. The expressway has been sealed off. We’re at the A&E—hey!” the reporter exclaimed as she was nearly knocked over. Her mic hit the ground with a smack.

 

Before the cameraman could help her up, a cop shoved him aside too. “Shit, you guys are fast, aren’t you? Now stop filming!”

 

The cameraman staggered. “The people have the right to–”

 

“The blood loss is too severe,” a nurse shouted. “Prep a transfusion, stat!”

 

“BP still dropping. He’s in critical condition.”

 

“Prep him for an angiogram. We need a CT scan of his abdomen. Now!”

 

Pandaemonium reigned. Now, even the director rushed out in his coat toward the knot of activity, only to be accosted along the way. He jerked back in alarm. “Commissioner Feng?”

 

The director had never seen their head of police in a sorrier state: usually finely-combed hair dishevelled, uniform bloodied, glasses cracked. “Sir, you–”

 

He looked down at the trembling hands around his. The nails were caked with  blood.

 

“You must save him.” The commissioner’s chest heaved under the force of his emotions. “He was undercover for twelve years. Twelve years. You have to save him. If you don’t–”

The director’s own chest tightened at the pain in the desperate plea. Before he could offer any reassurances, a nurse screamed, “Doctor! Doctor, we need you now!”

 

The voice was too urgent to bode well. Commissioner Feng whipped around to the stretcher.

 

The man’s bloodied torso arched off the bed, painfully contorted. His hands reached out, as if grasping for his last chance at life in defiance of the claws of death pinning him by the throat. He convulsed, his handsome features twisted. His chest sank inwards as his lungs collapsed. His veins throbbed and bulged. The blood that seeped from his chest and limbs pooled on the bed and floor, soaking the nurse desperately trying to hold him down.

 

The reporter’s mind blanked at the terrible sight, her struggle with the cops forgotten. The man trapped in the clutches of death looked young—too young to be killed in action. Handsome too, almost delicate. Unlike any other hero featured on the news.

 

“Heart rate at 140 beats per minute, BP 75/45.”

 

“Blood oxygen level has fallen to 75%.”

 

The chief vascular surgeon’s voice sounded clearly above the tumult. “Prep the embolic agent now!”

 

Thump.

 

Thump.

 

Thump.

 

His heartbeat was like a struggling swimmer, frantic to stay ahead of a large deep-sea creature—the predator coming ever quicker while his muscle grew ever more tired. Its labouring thuds rose above the cops’ wailing and the doctors’ panicked shouting.

 

His heart would soon beat its last.

 

Death’s scythe hovered over his neck, ready to reap. Yet his mind was eerily clear. Had he more strength in his body, he would have spoken his deepest desire aloud.

 

Just let this end. It hurts too much.

 

He would get his wish soon. The endless journey was drawing to a close.

 

The beeping line on the monitor rose higher and higher, pulsed faster and faster, a thin steel wire tossed into the sky to soon vanish from sight.

 

The next second, a horrifying flatline sliced across the screen. The alarm flared red.

 

His heart had stopped. 

His eyes fell shut. His body collapsed onto the bed, sinking into a deep, dark, cold sea. Waves flooded his world. The nameless cries merged into an all-encompassing cacophony, contorting into surreal images that drifted away and darkened into nothingness.

 

And in that utterly silent world, he saw him.

 

Not the hospital staff around his bed, frozen in time. They were heedless of what had drawn his attention, a radiant white figure gliding toward him. Stopping at the foot of his bed, the luminescent form met his eyes. He searched for his memory but found none. Perhaps this was happening right now. Every detail was so clear—down to his own reflection in those eyes. So real, he could scarcely believe it.

 

Is that really you?

 

A lightness permeated his grievously injured body as his pain eased away. He slowly sat up, shrugging off his broken vessel. The quiet overflowed with anticipation as he reached out towards the glowing figure.

Have you come for me?

 

The figure also reached out a hand. Their fingers interlaced. Their palms touched. It was as if all the pain and torture had never happened, and he smiled. The eyes gazing back at him brimmed with emotion—not the joy of a long-awaited reunion, however, but inexplicable sorrow.

 

The white figure mouthed, yet he understood.

 

Go back, Wu Yu. Go back. This is how it was always meant to be. You will live. You will go on. Away from the burning village. Over the scarred earth. And don't ever look back.

 

Wu Yu panicked. He clutched desperately at the translucent hand, scrambling for words but only able to stare as the white figure gave him a gentle but guilt-ridden smile.

 

Then the hand shoved him. Hard.

 

Thump!

 

What should have been soundless thundered in the operating theatre. His body jolted under the defibrillator paddles before landing back down with a boom. His previously lifeless limbs twitched.

 

“Heartbeat restored.”

 

“We’ve got a pulse!”

 

Cheers, applause, choked laughter, and tears.

 

Unknown to anybody else there, light pierced the deep ocean. An invisible force carried him upwards through the sea of blood, until he broke the surface and was enveloped in a blinding light. Wu Yu opened his tired eyes. The ruckus around him fell away along with the water, leaving behind a lone sigh dissipating into the void.

 

His name sank into the earth, but his spirit found life in death.

 

 

 

“Sir!” Too anxious to wipe his sweaty forehead, an officer rushed down the corridor and shoved a laptop at the commissioner. “This is the latest the cybersecurity team extracted from the darknet. It was posted within the last five minutes. We’re trying to trace the source but haven’t yet located the poster’s IP address. Here.”

 

Still beaming at the news of Wu Yu’s survival, Commissioner Feng did as requested. Then his face froze when he took in the contents of the screen: a webpage with a black background, an address made up of a series of symbols terminating in .clos domain, the ID of the poster another randomised string without an associated hyperlink. Staring at him in the middle of the page was a mugshot of a mild-looking man with neatly-trimmed brows casting a downward gaze. His features were eerily symmetrical—as if they had been deliberately and lovingly sculpted out of ivory. The corners of his pale lips naturally slanted downwards, hinting that they had never known a smile. The lines of his slender neck led down to a sharp, black collar.

 

Mere minutes ago, this man escaped the jaws of death.

 

Commissioner Feng’s fingers trembled as he scrolled downwards. Rows of big red text leapt out at him, stark against the black background. Each bloody word he absorbed sent his heart higher in his throat.

 

[Bounty]

Real name: Unknown

Code name: Artist

Sex: Male

Known area of activity spans the Golden Triangle. Worked for the police service of PRC for 12 years.

Latest bounty: 108.2409BTC

Reward for information on whereabouts: 5.4121BTC

Video proof of execution required. Additional BTC in exchange for limbs and head.

 

His fingers were stiff with shock. Under the concerned eye of his subordinate, he slowly set the laptop down. He had expected this. But not this soon, or so brazenly.

 

Deathly silence hung over the officers, all the while hugs were exchanged between the hospital staff. Cheers rose into the air, floating through the cold glass windows of the operating theatre, soaring across a city bright with the lights of countless homes. They drifted with, then dissipated alongside the night breeze—an unheard song fading into the horizon.

A year passed.

 

The day dawned over a border town in Shan State, Myanmar. Its market gradually came to life, the metal shutters of its shops rolling up in quick succession to reveal their wares: tiger bones, fake gemstones, bags of drugs that held more lime than heroin, crystals that were three parts meth and two parts sugar, a vast array of goods both legal and otherwise. Prostitutes who had knocked off work strode down the street in twos and threes in a cloud of cheap perfume, makeup, and the stench of alcohol and sweat. Playful jabs and teasing laughter sounded everywhere they went.

 

“Mr Qin”—a keen-eyed prostitute wriggled her hips enticingly and laughed—“how’s business? Why not join us and have some fun tonight?”

 

Mr Qin wore a t-shirt, shorts, and a pair of flipflops, a pair of silver-rimmed glasses adding a smidge of sophistication to his otherwise casual look. He was lying on a lounge chair outside a shop, a book in one hand and a cigarette pinched in the fingers of the other. The sign beside him detailed the nature of the shop’s business: Buddhist amulets to toyol, it boasted charms and talismans of all kinds. Sandwiched between one storefront peddling ephedrine and another selling opium by the gunny sack, the talisman shop was almost a breath of fresh air.

 

“I’m barely getting by. I can’t afford you.” Mr Qin quirked his eyebrow with a lazy smile. “Maybe when business picks up.”

 

The women giggled, playfully jostling each other. 

 

“We won’t charge you!”

 

“We’ll pay you instead!”

 

“Won’t you come and play?”

 

The other shop owners couldn’t just let that slide. They started hooting and joking in turn. Light taunts and teasing laughter filled the air, livening the street with an atmosphere of merriment.

 

Suddenly came the distant rumble of engines, the telltale noise swiftly drowning out the chatter. Everyone whipped around to see the blurry forms of vehicles emerging from the faint far-off fog that shrouded the town. The next second, a squad of jeeps charged down the hills, swarming the market amidst shouts of shock.

 

“What’s going on?”

 

“Are those cops?”

 

“Fuck ’em!”

 

These drug traffickers weren’t there to look pretty. In a blink of an eye, everyone had grabbed their homemade firearms and were charging up the street. But before they could fire a single shot, the windows of the jeeps rolled down to reveal not standard police-issues but the ominous mouths of machine guns. They spat a deadly barrage of bullets.

 

The shop owners helming the counterattack were riddled with holes. The street descended into a hell of shrapnel and flesh. Wails pierced the air as survivors fled in terror, emptying the street within moments. The jeeps screeched to a stop amongst the dead and dying. Bodyguards, a mixed bag from every part of the globe, burly and armed with machine guns smoking, rushed out of the vehicles to surround Mr Qin.

 

A towering man of European stock with a head of wavy brown hair hopped out. The ring of men parted as he walked through. He smiled, removing his sunglasses.

 

“Life’s been treating you well, Qin Chuan.”