Chapter 1: Emergency Aid in the Ruins

The rain in Lagos felt like it was trying to tear the entire skyline apart. Murky torrents of water, choked with scrap metal and debris, roared through the ruins like a pack of wild dogs devouring the city's last shred of dignity.

Zura stood in the mud, hands empty, knuckles white from tension. The crowd around him ebbed and flowed like a tide, their eyes filled with suspicion and contempt. They watched the combat medic stand beside a miner impaled by a rebar rod, yet he didn't reach for any equipment. To them, it looked like some kind of twisted ritual.

The Ancestral Silver Needle was pressed against the inside of his chest, pulsing with a faint heat that synced with his heartbeat, as if it were starving for the touch of flesh. Rain streamed down his temples, mixing with cold sweat. He closed his eyes, inhaling the scent of rust and iron—the smell of life leaking away, the warning bell of approaching death.

There were no words, only the roar of the rain and the ancient whispers growing clearer in his mind. Those voices traveled through a thousand years of fog, murmuring in his ear, guiding his way.

Tina knelt in the floodwater, her pant legs soaked in grime. The freezing rain seeped through the fabric, sending a chill climbing up her spine. Shaking violently, she screamed Zura's name, her voice sounding thin and desperate against the storm.

Tina wiped the rain from her face, her finger leaving a dark streak of mud across her cheek. "Teacher, please! He's still alive—you have to do something now!"

Her voice was sharp and fractured, carrying the specific kind of desperation found only in medical students. She looked at the unconscious miner; his chest rose and fell in shallow gasps, and his arterial pulse was nearly imperceptible. Every breath felt like he was sucking out the very last of his oxygen.

To the onlookers, Zura’s stillness was madness, perhaps even a provocation. But in Tina's eyes, it was a level of focus that transcended common sense. She knew that time was life, and every second of hesitation pushed this unlucky miner closer to the abyss.

The noise of the crowd buzzed around them like flies. Some began to curse; others pulled out phones to record, their flashes blinking blindingly through the curtain of rain. But Tina’s gaze remained locked on Zura’s motionless back, praying silently for any response—even just a sigh.

Zura didn't answer. He slowly crouched down, his knees sinking into the mire, and extended his right hand. His fingertips lightly brushed the patient's exposed skin. The moment they touched, three seconds of time stretched into infinity, and a series of vivid images exploded in his mind.

He saw how the rebar, coated in mud and blood, had ruthlessly pierced the abdomen. He saw the aorta rupture under immense pressure, blood erupting like a waterfall. He saw the miner’s cries for help in the depths of the shaft, and the darkness swallowing the last sliver of light.

This wasn't imagination; it was a regression of memory, the power of "Empathy" granted to him by the Inheritance of Artifacts. The trajectory of the blood flow flashed across his retinas—the location of the rupture, the angle of the tear, the state of the surrounding tissue. Every detail was presented with the precision of a high-definition image.

He saw the path to death, and he saw the possibility of reversal. Two red lines intertwined in his vision: one leading to nothingness, the other to survival.

Zura opened his eyes. A silver glint flashed deep within his pupils—a cold, calm light that stood out sharply in the dim, rainy night. He no longer needed external sutures because an invisible guide had coalesced at his fingertips. He gripped the needle with one hand—the Ancestral Silver Needle manifested from the void as if it were alive, its cold light carving an arc through the air.

The crowd gasped, a wave of exclamations breaking out, though they were muffled by the rain. Elder Kwame stood deep in the curtain of water, his gaze profound. He didn't step forward; he simply watched in silence.

As a Tribal Elder, he knew this wasn't a magic trick or a fit of madness. It was the forbidden power flowing from an ancient bloodline, a gift given to the guardians by the land and its memories.

He gave a slight nod, a silent acknowledgment of the young doctor. The rain soaked his robes, but it couldn't wash away the solemnity in his expression—a gravity as stubborn as the wild grass growing beneath the ruins, refusing to be extinguished.

The needle and thread blurred into afterimages in the rain. Zura’s movements were so swift they surpassed the limits of human reaction, every stitch landing precisely on the predicted edge of the rupture. The crowd's skepticism turned to shock. Some began to whisper, accusing him of playing ghost and using sympathy to run a scam.

In the shadows of the ruins, Musa—a spy sent by Amina—watched coldly. He straightened his soaked cuffs, his eyes devoid of awe, filled only with calculation. He was waiting for this farce to end, waiting for proof that Zura was nothing more than a fraud, or waiting to record a secret significant enough to make Amina, the Chairwoman of the Chamber of Commerce, take notice.

To him, medical resources were bargaining chips, and Zura's supernatural ability was the ultimate variable. He pressed the record button on his device, the red indicator light pulsing faintly in the dark. A cold smile curled his lips—a smile without warmth, the satisfaction of a predator watching prey walk into a trap.

"He's using that needle to trick people," Musa whispered to his accomplice. "Get it on record. It's a fake."

"Shut up and watch," the accomplice hissed. "If he actually stops the bleeding, this info will fetch a high price."

As the needle pierced the wound, a jolt of icy pain shot through Zura's fingertips—the price of forcibly reclaiming a life. The pain traveled through his nerve endings straight to the cerebral cortex. He held his breath, the rain washing over his taut back muscles. Sweat and rainwater mixed, dripping onto the patient's chest with a faint tapping sound.

He couldn't afford a single millimeter of error. That silver needle wasn't just sewing blood vessels; it was stitching together a collapsing life structure. The air around them seemed to freeze. There was only the sound of the rain and a faint "sizzling" from the wound—the sound of blood regaining its order, a hymn of chaos returning to harmony.

As the final stitch fell, the edges of the wound gradually closed. The gruesome gash began to heal, and the irreversible hemorrhaging finally stopped. A miracle happened in that moment. There were no cheers, only a loosening of the deathly silence, as if a tight string had finally found room to slacken. The mockery on the onlookers' faces froze, replaced by a blank, incredulous stare.

At the moment of the final suture, the miner's pupils suddenly contracted, and consciousness returned like a rushing tide. He snapped his eyes open, but there was no gratitude in them—only ferocity and vigilance, like a wounded beast. He stared intently at Zura's left hand—uninjured, yet possessing a strange spirituality. His lip twitched as he muttered a curse at these "handless" frauds.

He tried to sit up but lacked the strength, his body convulsing in agony, churning the mud into a thicker slurry. His gaze was one of grudge, as if he were identifying a specific kind of danger. On this rainy night, a memory had been forcibly implanted in him; he remembered not only the pain, but the monster who could "see" the process of his death.

Hatred bred in the silence, colder than the rain and harder than steel. It would take root and grow in the days to come, becoming a latent bomb.

Tina stood up and brushed the mud off herself, her movements stiff. She looked at the silver needle remaining by the wound, gradually vanishing beneath the skin, and felt a surge of awe she had never known. This wasn't just emergency first aid; it was the completion of a ritual. She looked at Zura, the anxiety in her eyes gone, replaced by a profound understanding.

She realized she had witnessed more than a medical procedure; she had witnessed an awakening—the reconnection of an ancient bond between tradition and modernity, between man and the land. The rain continued to pour, but there seemed to be an invisible barrier in the ruins, shielding them from the erosion of death.

Tina took a deep breath, her lungs filling with the scent of damp earth. That was the smell of Lagos—the scent of being alive, bitter and resilient, filling every pore.

"Teacher, the needle... it won't come out," Tina whispered, staring at the silver glint, her voice trembling.

"Don't touch it," Zura replied without looking up, his tone calm. "It's waiting for the bleeding to stop."

Musa, Amina's spy, stepped out from the shadows. The rain splashed against his leather shoes with crisp, snapping sounds. His eyes were sinister, his footsteps almost silent, like a hyena scenting blood and closing in.

He approached the edge of the ruins, noting the miner's ID number and state of consciousness, quickly calculating the value of Zura's ability in his head. To Amina, the Chairwoman of the Chamber of Commerce, an uncontrollable healer meant a loss of resource control. But a controllable anomaly? That was a new lever to move the market.

He looked up, his gaze passing over Zura's shoulder toward the brightly lit skyline of Lagos in the distance. His boss was there, his future was there, and a coming storm was there. The distant neon lights blurred into smears of color through the rain, looking down coldly upon the mud.

His figure gradually merged into the darkness, leaving behind a trail of wet footprints that stretched into the unknown, slowly submerged by the rising water. Just as the rain would eventually wash away the miracle of this moment, only hatred and ambition would continue to grow in the dark.

A guttural sound escaped the miner's throat as his eyes snapped open. It wasn't the terror of a survivor, but the ferocity of a beast. He locked onto Zura's empty wrists, as if seeing some unforgivable profanity in those missing limbs.

Rain slid down his coarse cheeks and dripped onto Zura's bare shoulder, making her shiver, though she didn't dare make a sound. Musa flipped through his notebook, the sound of paper rubbing together sounding jarringly loud in the storm. Every note he took felt like another nail being driven into Zura's coffin.

"Do you see him?" a voice pierced through the rain from the depths of the darkness, low and raspy. Musa froze, slowly turning and dropping to one knee, his forehead nearly touching the floodwater. Amina did not show herself; there was only the sound of high heels clicking against the water, coming closer, each step stepping on the nerves of everyone present.

"Take him away," Amina's voice sounded as if it came from hell. "And the girl. I want her in front of me. Alive."

Zura felt a cold chill climb up her spine, more piercing than the rain. The miner's gaze shifted over her shoulder, briefly intersecting with the shadow in the distance. In those ferocious eyes, a strange, bone-chilling fanaticism flashed.

He didn't call for help; he didn't ask for a doctor. He simply used those ash-gray eyes, newly sewn back to life, to memorize the silhouette of Zura's missing hands. In the mud and desire of Lagos, once some things take root, they can never be pulled out. The storm was coming, and Zura had nowhere left to run.