A young man stood on his knee, holding the hand of an extraordinary beauty, their faces obscured by the setting sun's soft golden light. The beauty nodded in agreement.
The moment was like a beautiful painting, a painting for an eternity.
Laughter and cries, a man held a baby high in his arms as he laughed proudly. "Wei Fei..." a soft voice came from afar. The scene, a joyful moment, seemed to last an eternity.
The joyful cries slowly changed, as if corrupted they turned into mournful cries. Darkness consumed the scene.
Wei Zhi snapped his eyes open. His left eye vision was completely dark. Only his right eye could blurrily see something. As his eye focused, a rough gray stone ceiling covered his vision.
"He woke up!" A grating voice of an elderly woman shouted as gasps could be heard. "Fellow Ji Fei, you are alive!" An old bald man arrived to help Wei Zhi sit up. The man was Chen Fan.
"We thought you would never wake up. Your body was a bloody mess." Chen Fan's face beamed with a flash of joy momentarily before growing wrinkled and exhausted.
"How long have I been out? What is this place?" Wei Zhi looked around. His face was swollen, a large purple bruise covered his left eye. He made out the black metal bars covering from floor to ceiling. The room looked like some sort of prison cell. A dimly lit hallway connected several cells. He could make out shadows of other prisoners.
"Those bastards." Chen Fan gritted his teeth in fury. "The guards sold us as slaves to evil immortals. It has been two days already."
Wei Zhi sat with his back to the cell wall. The wall was roughly carved out of stone and felt cool to the touch.
The cell was cold and Wei Zhi was only covered with a tattered sleeping robe. However, a warmth coming from the jade pendant alleviated his discomfort and pain.
"Fellows..." Just as Wei Zhi was going to ask a few more questions, the creaking of a door interrupted.
Steps sounded in the hallway, causing other prisoners to stir. Everybody knew what was coming.
A guard dressed in black robes with red engravings on the cuffs walked down the stairs with a cruel, twisted smile. However, he stopped at the cell near the entrance. He noticed that this cell had less mist rising from it than the others. Inside, a burly man sat alone on top of a pile of corpses.
The guard glared with disgust. He flashed a double-handed incantation, causing a black chain to snake into the cell, binding the burly man tightly. The man started to bleed as the chain buried into his skin. However, his screams were muffled as the chain also tied his mouth.
"That is better. We cannot risk coming up short." The guard continued to walk down the hall, throwing moldy bread to some of the cells.
In one cell, women picked the bread and gave it to their children. The women looked sickly and pale. They were prioritizing the children.
"Come out, piggies. It's feeding time. Your grandpa is here with some delicious garbage." The man kept gleefully throwing the bread to the cells. Eventually he reached the elders' cell. He threw just a moldy loaf. "You old farts don't need much food." He then left humming a sinister song all the way out.
Chen Fan took the loaf. He walked to Wei Zhi. "Fellow, take this bread. You need it the most to recover your strength." However, as he offered the bread, Wei Zhi shook his head in rejection. The gesture made him feel a bit of warmth. "Split it with everyone. My wounds may look bad, but I have had it worse before. I'll be fine."
"Brother Ji..." Chen Fan was overwhelmed at Wei Zhi's kindness and sense of justice. He looked at the bread as he wanted to say something. However, he split the bread and gave a portion to everybody in silence.
Everybody ate their share in silence. From their faces it was obvious that they were too exhausted. Even going around eating took a lot of effort.
It was impossible to say if it was night or day. The elderly folk basically slept all the time and woke up for meals.
Wei Zhi noticed that the air in the cells was heavy. He could see some kind of mist swirling around everybody. The mist appeared and disappeared in a rhythmic cycle as if it was somebody's breath.
Wei Zhi sat and slept the entire time in the back of the cell.
After some time, some of the elders started to notice black blotches appear on their skin. In the beginning they looked like age marks. However, as they appeared and extended through the arms and legs, the elderly grew anxious.
As the blotches expanded, they became painful and started to smell like rot.
The elderly grew agitated. After the guard delivered the regular food, the other elders looked at Wei Zhi in silence. Each elder spoke softly as if relaying secrets with Chen Fan.
Wei Zhi could see the suspicion in their eyes.
"Fellow Ji, how come your body is so clean while we are rotting?" asked Chen Fan, his face twisted in pain. "I say the food is poisoned. Fellow Ji barely eats!" yelled another elder. "Maybe he knew the entire time. What if he is one of them!" The elderly started to voice their paranoid thoughts, the situation getting out of control.
A scene of elderly men yelling at him flashed in Wei Zhi's mind. He recalled a time where the executive board of his company rioted against him and sacked him. He recalled the screams, the shame, the humiliation.
"Pipe it down!" Wei Zhi slammed his hand on the floor. "Stop wasting your precious energy on nonsense." He shouted in a grating voice as blood fell from his mouth. He started to remove his robe from his upper body.
As the robe dropped, the other elders gasped. Wei Zhi's torso was covered in painful-looking lumps. Some were purple while others looked white to pale green in color.
"It feels like a coal burning in my lungs." He started to dress back. He then coughed up a mouthful of blood. However, he wiped it away and sat calmly looking at the other elders.
The other elders felt shame wash over them. They blamed Wei Zhi for their suffering when he was enduring his own agony in silence.
"I'm sorry, brother Ji. It's them who want to see us suffer like this. I will never give them the pleasure ever again," said Chen Fan as he sat beside Wei Zhi. Other elders followed suit.
Wei Zhi closed his eyes and waited quietly. He remembered that after the board riot he was accused of embezzlement and thrown into solitary confinement for a couple of years. He was able to maintain sanity by letting go and absentmindedly waiting.
Time passed. Perhaps another day or two. Wei Zhi opened his eyes at the sound of mournful cries. He looked to his left to find one of the elder women flat on the floor, the other women crying.
"Perhaps it is for the best. At least she is now free from this suffering," Chen Fan said to the crying woman as he patted her back.
Time moved relentlessly, taking the elders one by one.
On this day, only two persons sat in the cell. One of them had lumps all over his body. A large hump like a small mountain stood out from his back. The other man was almost completely black. The skin on his lips had already fallen long ago. His yellow teeth contrasted gruesomely against his rotting face.
Footsteps echoed in the hall. The familiar feeding time was coming. However, this time Wei Zhi noticed more than one person.
The usual guard arrived in front of the cell. "Senior brother, there are two who survived the full cleansing." Behind him, a middle-aged man with pale skin and pitch-black hair seemed to emerge from the shadows.
"Very good. Let me check the results." The middle-aged man flashed an incantation and thick gray smoke swirled from him, quickly wrapping around Chen Fan, lifting him up in the air close to the cell door.
Wei Zhi's eyes were red. He recognized the middle-aged man. Fury rose from his body like a volcano ready to erupt. However, before he could do anything, the middle-aged man sighed. "It definitely works, but it's not quite at the level I need. Oh well, let me see the other one." The smoke sent Chen Fan's body slamming to the wall. An arm detached and landed in front of Wei Zhi.
At that moment, seeing the arm and the corpse of Chen Fan, Wei Zhi lost it.
He started screaming as he lunged at the middle-aged man. Metal bars stood in his way, but he did not care as he slammed his body against them in an effort to grab the middle-aged man.
Wei Zhi's grating voice blasted unintelligible curses as he screamed, blood spurting out of his mouth.
The middle-aged man gave a chuckle. He waved his hand and strands of gray smoke wrapped around Wei Zhi, lifting him for inspection.
Wei Zhi struggled and screamed. However, after the time it takes for a single breath, the middle-aged man gasped.
"Top quality material!" he said as his eyes widened. "Bring this one down to the refining altar." The middle-aged man waved his arm and left hurriedly. The smoke receded.
The guard quickly used the chain spell to subdue Wei Zhi, who was then dragged down the stairs to the darkness below.
"Foundation Establishment puppet is not impossible with this quality of materials." A twisted smile appeared on the middle-aged man's face as he walked up the stairs, ready to begin Wei Zhi's demonic baptism.