In the darkness of night, a faint whisper of wind.
This was a small hillside on the outskirts of Jianghai City, ringed by mostly sparse woods. On the slope stood an old stone pillar, and by that pillar a young boy now sat, his hands working through a dull, monotonous drill.
Sitting cross-legged like an old monk, his ten fingers danced, forming one Buddhist mudra after another; in that shifting between utter stillness and utter motion, he trained the dexterity of his fingers.
Buddhist mudras took in every movement the human hand could make. In the quiet he felt the sound of his fingers rubbing against the air, and he did not know how much time had passed before he finally stopped, opened his eyes, and let out a breath.
There was no starlight in the night sky; the city's glow only sank into quiet far off in the distance. This was the hour when people slept the deepest. Yet to his eyes the outlines of the grass and the woods still emerged, made clear through the sound of the wind rasping over the earth — for a killer, this was absolutely the state he had dreamed of.
Training begun from a body with not a speck of impurity on it, the right direction, a clear mind — in only a little over three years he might already have reached a condition more ideal than his prime. Freed of a killer's shackles, he could instead become an even more terrifying killer. Which was, perhaps, rather ironic.
His physical strength naturally could not match his adult self, but where killing was concerned, being a child only lowered everyone's guard. The killer's instinct to stay wary of others at all times might have dulled somewhat, yet this body's sensitivity was more ideal than before. However...
"A truly monotonous and boring life..."
With a helpless smile, he murmured aloud.
To an adult's mind, a child's world was mostly boring. Even though he had long since settled in his heart just how much these two friends, Lingjing and Huaisha, mattered to him, there were times when their rather childish suggestions and decisions left him not knowing whether to laugh or cry. But long used to playing the weak, agreeable role, he instinctively did not want to spoil their fun, and forced himself to act like a child — while the wish to grow up fast piled up thicker and thicker inside him.
Perhaps that childish wish was the only thing he had in common with real children.
Nowadays, the only things that could still hold his interest were, perhaps, the taste of freedom and the killer's training he kept up every day without fail.
He had plainly been struggling to break free of a killer's bonds all along, yet now that he could truly command everything about himself, he found that habit had become second nature, and all he could do was keep repeating the drills that had made him a killer. Not that he thought this power could only be used for killing — to live at ease in this world, such strength was needed often enough. Besides...
Freedom...
Breathing the air around him, it was only this utterly unbound feeling that had never once grown tiresome. Even if spacing out all day made other people think he was a bit slow.
But what am I actually going to do in the future? What Shasha said about being a doctor sounds decent enough, but a killer as a doctor... doesn't that just make me Dr. Lamb?
Deftly fitting a pile of parts into a gun in the dark, he smiled a little at the thought. In truth, as a killer he had been a restless killer; back among ordinary people, he really was an ordinary man far too easily satisfied.
He finished assembling the pistol, took it apart, and was putting it back together again when a burst of noise came riding in on the wind. That was... gunfire...
Assembling the pistol in a matter of seconds, he closed his eyes and listened closely to what the wind carried.
About a li away, in the woods, there was a group of people, and the weapons being used were pistols and a light machine gun; they were... being hunted...
His eyes snapped open. Jianghai City was developing, and in some respects it was pretty rough, but China's gun control had always been strict. These people had submachine guns, and even so they could do nothing but run for their lives. Yet the one trailing them made so little sound that he could not pick out anything about him — clearly it was a pistol fitted with a silencer... Had some expert from the mercenary world come here?
The direction they were fleeing led right toward him. The distance was not great, and it was hardly impossible that they would run straight into him. So — should he get out of the way?
After a moment's thought, he screwed the silencer onto the muzzle.
Coming out here to train had been the plan. If he had to live it all over again and still dodge unrelated people for this reason or that, it would be far too boring.
Leaning quietly against the stone pillar, he melted into the darkness.
The sound of the submachine gun kept dwindling in the woods, showing that those being hunted were fewer and fewer. After a while Jiaming worked out that the hunter following them was in fact only one man.
Now this is getting interesting.
Chasing down a whole group with nothing but a pistol — with his own abilities, he could do that too. But from either a killer's or a mercenary's point of view, it was far too showy. Still, in the dark world, madmen like that were hardly rare.
Soon enough, the hunted group did burst out of the forest, and what surprised Jiaming was that these people were speaking English.
"Go! Go... fuck you—"
Four people came fleeing out of the woods, and ahead of them were a woman and a girl, one grown and one small; the older one had a head of blonde hair that stood out even in the dark — they looked like mother and daughter. The two bringing up the rear with guns were probably their bodyguards. One of the men let out a shout, stopped, and began spraying wild fire into the trees.
In Jiaming's eyes the man was a total idiot. He had already made it out of the woods; dark as it was, anyone looking closely could still make out a silhouette, while inside the trees nothing could be seen clearly. Stopping now just turned him into a target for the one in the woods, didn't it?
Sure enough, the submachine gun had spat flame for barely two seconds before a bullet struck his forehead, and the other bodyguard's head was blown apart two seconds after that. Then a man in black came out of the woods after them like a ghost.
The woman and the girl had only run halfway when the man raised his gun. With a soft "pfft," the bullet buried itself in the grass in front of the blonde woman, where her next step was about to land; seeing the turf burst open, she gave a small cry, lost her balance, and crashed heavily to the ground. The little girl ran two steps, at once turned back, and cried out through her tears, "Mommy! Mommy!"
"Run! Run!" The blonde woman pushed the little girl away and struggled to get up herself, but then came two soft "pfft, pfft" sounds as bullets struck the grass between her legs. She shrieked, and seemed to have lost the nerve to rise again.
"Heh heh, run. Go on, run..." The gunman's laugh was sinister, but the words came out in Chinese. Seeing that her mother could not escape, the little girl just stood there weeping and would not leave. The blonde woman struggled to crawl backward, and when her eyes slid to one side, she suddenly froze.
There in the darkness, beneath the broken stone pillar, the faint outline of a person showed.
The bodyguards who were with me are all dead. Who is this? Sitting there without moving a muscle — is he dead, or with that killer...
Fear surged abruptly in her heart, but the scene had caught the killer's eye as well; he turned his head, and at once spotted the ghostlike figure sitting by the stone pillar.
For a veteran killer who had survived countless brushes with death, where the enemy was, where the danger lay, what his surroundings were like — often he could sense it all without even using his eyes. Yet this figure before him seemed to him to have appeared out of nowhere. He had swept the area with a glance the moment he walked out of the woods, and his instincts had given him nothing at all.
A body that gave off no sense of danger ought to be a corpse — but how could a corpse have slipped past his notice? With no time to think it through, he abruptly swung his muzzle around, and in the very instant he was about to pull the trigger, a spark flashed in front of him as well.
With a soft "pfft," just like the bodyguards he had killed moments before, a bullet entered his brow and burst out the back of his skull in a great spray of blood.
His life stopped in that instant the spark flared.
"What I hate most is having a gun pointed at me..."
A child's voice, still in the middle of changing, sounded faintly in the night.