"Unlucky."
"Obviously, I had already lured that guy into the trap, poisoned him, filled the room with anesthetic gas, and even detonated the bomb, bringing down the entire abandoned building..."
"At that time, the steel bars and bricks pressing on him must have weighed at least a thousand tons."
"But even then, it couldn't take his life, just shattered half of his mechanical arm..."
"The life of an Apprentice Death God is just excessively tough..."
...
Number Three Nest City, the waste disposal area of the Lower City slums.
A warm, damp wind blew over towering black mountains of garbage.
The air was filled with the acrid smell of waste fuel... rusted mechanical prosthetics... and the scent of rotting meat and decaying infestations.
There was nothing of value here, only rotting food scraps, chemical waste detested by even dogs, and completely scrapped mechanical prosthetics along with indistinct biological corpses.
Even the poorest drifters wouldn't want to try their luck here.
After all, the chances of being killed by toxic gas or monsters are far greater than finding treasures.
Thus, a deathly silence became the main theme here.
Other than the howling wind... and the metallic collision sounds from a few old robots, there were almost no other noises.
But if you listen carefully, you could discover in an inconspicuous garbage mountain...
A small, ethereal voice was muttering to itself beneath the thick metal debris and abandoned bricks.
"Sustaining such serious injuries and still being able to chase me for two blocks is just abstract..."
"No wonder those apprentice death gods call themselves humans, pfft... what humans, they're just beasts wearing human skin."
"Luckily, I ran fast, otherwise, my little life would have been lost there."
"He shouldn't have caught up, right... not catching up is good."
As the voice spoke, it suddenly halted.
Soon after, fragments of bricks and scrap iron at the top of the garbage mountain tumbled to either side as if pushed from below, revealing a narrow hole.
Next, a small, sooty black figure darted out of the hole, body tense, like a cautious mouse surveying everything around.
After confirming that there was no one or any living creature around, the figure finally relaxed, collapsing onto a relatively flat iron plate, gasping for breath.
This was a human, more precisely, a small and frail human child.
She wore a tattered black robe, her hands and feet wrapped in white bandages, her whole body stained with ash and mud, looking filthy so that her original appearance was unrecognizable.
But from her slightly disheveled shoulder-length hair and slender hands, it seemed she was a girl no older than 16.
Since her bangs had not been trimmed for a long time, her small face was always hidden under the fringe.
However, the fringe couldn't completely cover the girl's eyes.
They were a pair of beautiful blood-red eyes, like crimson diamonds, glowing faintly under the shadow of night.
The girl's name was Yun You.
A year ago, she was an ordinary civilian child living in a city filled with neon lights and billboards, with a poor but not too bad family.
At that time, violence, bloodshed, crime, mechanical prosthetics... and apprentice death gods with superpowers had nothing to do with her.
But a year later now...
She had become a fugitive broadcasted on the radio, labeled as a "bad person" who would use poison and firearms explosives.
And all this was related to the "Apprentice Death God" she kept mentioning.
Today, it was [New Calendar 2077], according to the textbooks Yun You read in the past, it was the 2077th year since human civilization embarked on a new journey.
It was said that in the distant past, endless wars destroyed the old order, but humanity's civilization was reborn from the ruins and established today's society.
This indeed was a highly advanced technological society; humans conquered research on the body, countless types of mechanical prosthetics and brain-machine chips changed human survival ways, and giant cities named Nest City rose, occupying every corner of the world.
Some people's lifespan even broke through biological limits, continuing unnaturally and indefinitely.
But high-tech did not change the stubborn ailments within society.
Crime, hunger, oppression... and killing still festered in the cities, spreading like a virus.
Perhaps as punishment for man's depravity, supernatural events known as "Death Domain" also spread within cities.
No one knew where the Death Domain came from, people only knew it appeared as early as recorded history.
Like those supernatural tales in urban legends, Death Domain events would claim human lives, and the so-called Apprentice Death Gods specialized in handling those events.
Those guys possessed physical attributes far surpassing ordinary humans and wielded supernatural powers; thus, they became heroes in people's hearts... and the upper echelons of Nest City.
But they weren't Yun You's heroes; instead, they were her unforgettable enemies.
In an incident a year ago, they took away the lives of the girl's parents to cover up the dirty secrets beneath their glorious image.
So, for the uninspiring reason of revenge, Yun You left home, took black-market jobs in the city's corners for a whole year, learning to make or purchasing explosives, poisons...
Half a day ago, she set a trap with everything she had learned and bought, successfully luring an apprentice death god into it.
But ultimately, she underestimated the apprentice death god's abilities.
Neither the bomb nor the poison took his life.
Yun You failed again, almost losing her own life, pursued by the apprentice death god all the way to the garbage mountain before finally escaping.
A year's plan ruined all of a sudden, to be honest, it wasn't easy to bear.
But the girl wasn't discouraged.
"Well... it's quite normal for a first plan to fail, just consider it as gaining experience."
"Anyway, I am still alive, and being alive in itself is already something to be happy about."
Yun You rubbed her cheeks heavily, constantly comforting herself, and a slight smile formed at the corners of her mouth.
"Dad said, as long as you're alive, there's a way."
"Live on, and there will be a way..."
Saying this, the girl braced against the iron plate beside her, slowly stood up.
"Creak~!"
But just then, a light snapping sound of a bone, accompanied by severe pain, suddenly appeared in Yun You's lower leg.
She stumbled and nearly fell.
But fortunately, she managed to grab onto the iron plate in the end, although her palm was sliced open with a "poof," at least she stabilized herself without falling all the way down.
"Hiss..."
The pain made Yun You involuntarily draw in a cold breath.
She frowned, not caring to look at the wound on her hand, she sat back down on the iron plate, tore off the bandage wrapped around her lower leg, and looked at the place where the pain emanated.
She saw a small hole, the size of a fingertip, on her pale, smooth calf.
The flesh and blood inside looked like they had lost life, turning into wisps of grayish-blue, dissipating with the wind.
Although it didn't cause massive bleeding nor produced any symptoms of inflammation and swelling and couldn't be considered a simple wound...
Yet it truly appeared there, eroding the girl's body, affecting her mobility, and even showing signs of slowly spreading outward.
"Damn it."
"This damned affliction... why is it acting up again..."