The world dissolved around Ye Jun again after he finished enduring his Seventh Tribulation.
The white void slowly turned dark, the dark of a city sky bleached out by streetlights below, and the cold came in before the rest of the scene did. It was a familiar cold.
'I did not miss that.'
Ye Jun felt the shift inside him before the world finished forming.
His consciousness began to shift, as it appeared in two places at the same time. One who lived these terrible memories again and the other who watched from behind, like an audience.
He opened his eyes in the alley behind a corner store on a winter night. Eight years old and skinny enough that the cold went straight through him.
Across the street, a liquor store sign flickered in red neon.
A small figure sat next to him against the dumpster, wrapped in a too-thin blanket, breathing too fast and too shallow. Sam, eight as well, maybe nine. A fever had been eating him for two days.
