Across the burning city, the air was thick with smoke and tension. Sirens cried in the distance, and tremors occasionally shook the buildings. The sky itself looked bruised—an unnatural shade of red streaked with ash. But Xing Yu didn’t care.
He didn’t even blink as another explosion rattled the glass behind him as he drove his car
His fingers flew across the cracked screen of his car console, pulling up the local cab network. Eyes bloodshot from stress, he cross-referenced time stamps, license plates, and camera logs from the school vicinity until finally—
There.
Cab number 7329. Driver: Jin Tao.
He snatched his phone.
Dialing...
Nothing. Dead.
He tried again.
Again.
Seven more times.
The tenth try—click the call connected.
"Hello?" came the strained, hoarse voice. The man was panting hard, his voice muffled by background noise and what sounded like wind and flames.
"Hello, is this Jin I’m speaking to?"
"Yes... yes... oh my god..." the man groaned, hissing softly through clenched teeth.
It sounded like he was hurt. Badly.
"I’m calling to inquire about your recent passenger—"
Before he could finish, the man snapped.
"The world is fucking burning! Why the hell should I sit here and answer your damn questions, huh?! Do you even know what’s going on? I’m stuck in the middle of hell, bleeding out, and you think now is a good time to play 20 questions?!"
Xing Yu clenched his jaw, fingers tightening around the phone.
The conncetion between him and jian had been cut off abrubtly. Now he cant feel anything. No pain nothing. But that doesn’t mean that jian was safe. He could be bleeding profuly pr worse mortally injured.
And now this idiot was wasting his time ranting.
"I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars," Xing Yu said flatly, voice ice-cold.
The line went dead quiet.
He could hear the man breathing, a long, harsh exhale like someone trying to convince himself this wasn’t a dream.
"...Is this a scam?"
"I mean it. Wait."
Xing Yu didn’t hesitate.
He opened his banking app and transferred fifty thousand dollars on the spot to the number tied to the cab’s payment account.
A second later, he added, "Check your messages. That’s half. You’ll get the rest when you answer one question—just one. Where did you drop off a young man and an older man you picked up at the café opposite to Riverstone High School?"
There was a long pause.
Then the man gulped so loudly it echoed through the receiver.
"F... fuck, it’s real," the driver whispered, almost reverently.
"Just answer," Xing Yu pressed, his tone strained with desperation.
The other end of the line went quiet for a breath.
Then the cab driver’s voice returned, this time tinged with casual familiarity.
"Oh... the gold nugget kid!"
Xing Yu’s heart stopped.
"What?"
"Yeah!" the man chuckled. "The kid paid me with a gold nugget. I thought I was being scammed or something, but I got it tested later. Real gold, man! Damn thing’s worth a fortune!"
Xing Yu nearly dropped the phone.
His vision blurred at the edges, and a sharp pressure dug into his chest. It felt like all the air had been knocked out of him.
Gold.
Gold—as humans called it.
But to them, to Jian’s kind—it was blood. Solidified blood.
Jian had used his own blood to pay for a cab ride.
His own blood.
Xing Yu’s voice dropped to a growl, trembling with fury and fear. "Tell me where you dropped him, human!"
He lost control of his tone completely. His fingers dug into the phone like he was strangling it, his breath ragged.
A soft click echoed from the cab driver’s side. "Yeesh, you don’t have to shout, alright? Damn."
But Xing Yu barely heard him. Jian... Jian had been that desperate. Desperate enough to pay with his own blood.
The image was too much.
Was he scared?
Was he—
The driver cleared his throat awkwardly. "Look, I dropped them off at a small orchard in the outskirts. One of those sleepy villages. What was the name again... Ah, yeah! Li Ying Cun—Pear Blossom Village, or something like that. It’s just beyond the last toll gate. Real quiet place. They said they had a house there."
Soon the call cut without any warning. Right now xing yu did not care about the cab driver. All he could think of was finding jian’s current location.
Xing Yu’s hands flew over the console as he punched the name Li Ying Cun into the search bar, adding keywords like "orchard" and "fruit farm."
Dozens of results flashed on screen—pear orchards, plum fields, even a grape terrace nestled in the hills—but none gave a clear answer.
Which one? he cursed silently. Which one is Jian at?
His eyes skimmed the map desperately, tracing each winding road, narrowing the distance from the city. Still, there were too many. He was running out of time. The world wasn’t safe anymore—not with the skies burning, not with alien claws tearing through the city.
With shaking fingers, he redialed the cab driver.
Ring.
Ring.
Then—
"The number you are trying to reach is currently switched off. Please try again later."
The generic female voice echoed like a punch to the gut. Then came the caller tune, light and airy, mocking his dread with its artificial cheer:
~ Thank you for calling... please leave a message after the beep... ~
Beeep.
Xing Yu’s eyes burned. He quickly send in the rest of the fifty thousand to the person thinking that he would attend the call if he did.
He called once aagain but the same busy tone was the reply he got.
He slammed the phone down against the dashboard—once, twice, before hurling it across the seat. It hit the door with a crack and fell silent.
"FUCK!" he roared, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly it creaked.
The tires screamed against the asphalt as he floored the gas, the engine whining as if it shared his urgency. Trees blurred past. Streetlights flickered, twisted from the earlier quake.