Many considered Dawn City to be a place of opportunity, both mortals and adept alike, but it was also a place where the harsh realities of weakness were on brutal display.
As always, the city teemed with life, its streets a cacophony of survival. Merchants hawked wares slick with stolen enchantments, cutpurses melted into shadowed alleys, and the desperate bartered scraps of dignity for another day's breath, it was truly a festering city that never sleeps.
While the rich enclosed themselves in the upper district, safe and sheltered by luxurious houses, warm and comfortable beds, while they enjoy all warmth luxury, and power could afford.
The slums remained the same, almost never changing, as though covered by a cloud of sorrow and misery, making it seem as though time moved differently. People lived in dilapidated houses made of straw roof, where even the slightest of rainfall would be reduced to pile rumble.
The sewers ran through the slum, with leaks of slimy liquid that claimed the lives of the innocent year by year, but the people, too preoccupied with survival, do not notice the harshness of their surroundings, murder, rape, kidnapping, thievery, all were normal in these areas.
...
The air smelled oddly clean—maybe from last night's rain, maybe from something else. Even the slums carried the scent of wet earth instead of rot for once.
The ground was still soggy, puddles reflecting the dull sky like broken mirrors. The rain had come out of nowhere yesterday—no clouds, no wind to announce its arrival, just a sudden downpour in broad daylight.
It was the first rain of the year, and it had rained for three days without stop, putting a halt in plenty of activities within the city. But when it finally died down, the society began to function as usual, but the haunting coldness still lingered.
People traverse the streets, seemingly minding their own business, which was normal in these parts. And, like the past few months, nobody paid attention to the woman staring blankly at the empty sky.
Her strange pair of red eyes were dull and lifeless, so much so that whoever she once was, was nowhere to be seen. Her long hair that had once shimmered with vibrant crimson hues, now bleak and stripped of its former color. Each strand caked with packs of dried mud that clinging stubbornly to them.
Covering her were tattered rags that barely covering the bits of modesty she still had. The worn failed to conceal her completely. Leaving one of her pale white breast slipped free, dangling from the garment's torn edges.
But still, no one noticed the strange, now dark marking there, covered almost her entire body. The woman's sudden appearance had puzzled everyone, but it was impossible to connect the dots. The people here had seen plenty of strange and unusual things.
Death, robbery, thievery, the stench of humanity's true nature would be left lingering in the streets till the people would no longer stomach the arid stench. But this was by far the strangest, at first, some felt pity for her, wondering what she might have done to incur the wrath of the heaven.
She wandered the streets aimlessly, staring blankly, the rapists avoided her, the human traffickers left her alone, and so she did the only thing she was cursed to do, she wandered.
...
Time passed. A year and a half bled away, and the world moved on.
Then, like the first flicker of a dying ember, life returned to her eyes. A spark. A tremor. Then—Tears. Two crystalline trails streaked down her cheeks as her gaze sharpened, the crimson in her irises reigniting like a smothered flame given breath.
No one noticed, but life was gradually returning to the woman's eyes, bit by bit, she started to regain her lost light. Her eyes, once dull and lacking a trace of a sane mind, gently flickered for the first time in close to two years. And when eyes regained their crimson luster, two rows of tears streamed down her cheeks.
...
Fei Yue felt like she had been stuck in a trance, she couldn't move, nor could she think. It was being stuck in a dreamscape where your worst nightmare set to replay, over and over again, with no way to remedy the situation.
Now, sanity crashed over her like a tidal wave. Her knees hit the mud. A sob tore from her throat, raw and broken. She was awake. And with awakening came pain.
No one noticed as she crouched down on both her knees, with her hand availing her eyes, her emotions spilled out of her in an uncontrollable manner. Sanity had returned to her, she could think once more.
Gentle sobs echoed in the desolate silence. For the first time since all these began, she realized she was truly alone. The scene of that man, the same man that had robbed her of her sense of peace, and like a devil that hunger for chaos, he had once again returned, and this time had almost ruined her life completely.
The image of his face and those cold, abyssal dark eyes burned themselves in the canvas of her mind, a nightmare that would forever haunt her soul. She didn't know how it happened, but whatever that man in dark robe had done to her had been undone, but was she truly cured, the remained to be said.
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