Chapter 1: Awakening on the Rag Mountain

Dusk in Lagos was torn apart by a stench mixed with the smell of scorched rubber and rotting cotton yarn. The setting sun hung like a clot of blood about to solidify over the shantytown roofs patched together from corrugated iron and plastic sheeting, and its last sliver of light struggled to pierce the turbid air, leaving only an ambiguous, murky yellow glow.

Amina woke beside a pile of refuse in the deepest part of the Ajara Rag Mountain, her head splitting with pain, as if someone were striking her temples in rhythm with a rusty, blunt instrument, every pulse accompanied by a violent stab of agony.

What filled the air was not only the smell of rot, but also the lingering warmth of diesel generators roaring day and night, mixed with dust and sweat, drilling into her nostrils and provoking a wave of physical nausea.

The instant her consciousness returned, she felt an extremely thin streak of blue light flash in the depths of her vision. It was the long-dormant Sewing Spirit Eye awakening, accompanied by a faint ringing in her ears, as complex tailoring structure diagrams automatically surfaced in her mind one after another.

She looked around. The chaotic piles of fabric before her were no longer disordered waste, but were resolved by the blue light into one clear node after another. Those seemingly shabby scraps automatically arranged themselves into warp and weft lines in her field of vision, like a geometric maze waiting to be solved, with the direction of every fiber and the stress point of every seam clearly visible to her eyes.

"Why is this pile of junk suddenly glowing?" Amina murmured to herself, her voice so hoarse it sounded strange even to her own ears.

"Hey, you, the new woman, don't touch my goods!"

Several dark-skinned, wiry secondhand dealers darted out of the shadows, waving rusty iron bars whose ends were smeared with dark red rust and looked ferocious and dangerous in the murky light. They interrogated her in Pidgin mixed with curses, spittle flying in the cramped space.

They closed in around her, their turbid eyes fixed on the bundle of scraps beside Amina that was about to be thrown into the burning pit, greed and hostility fermenting in the cramped space as the sour, rotten smell grew stronger. Amina shrank back instinctively, clutching the bundle of fabric tightly with both hands, her knuckles white from the force.

Cut off by the language barrier, she was left isolated and helpless, able only to curl up in a corner by instinct, her back against a cold concrete wall, waiting for this wave of impact to pass. Fear climbed her spine like a cold snake. She closed her eyes, trying to build a barrier in her mind.

Just then, a tall young man in a neat shirt squeezed through the crowd. Although his shirt was also stained with a little dust, it still kept its ironed smoothness, which stood out starkly among the oil-covered dealers. He stepped honestly in front of Amina, raised both hands to signal everyone to stop, his movements slow yet carrying an unquestionable firmness.

"Move aside, move aside! This is a market, not your gladiator arena." Kwame dispersed the rough dealers in slightly stiff but clear English. His gentle eyes turned to Amina, his gaze interwoven with scrutiny and curiosity. "Are you lost? Or... are you that legendary new tailor?"

Amina raised her head trembling, looked at the unfamiliar face before her, and spoke tentatively, her voice as faint as a mosquito's hum: "I... I don't know where this is."

Kwame breathed a sigh of relief, his tense shoulders slumping. He pointed toward the market entrance in the distance, where a huge neon sign hung, its letters flickering with the unstable voltage: "This is the Ajara secondhand market in Lagos. I am the logistics supervisor here, Kwame. You have no money on you and no passport. The situation is a bit troublesome."

Just as everyone was arguing over whether the pile of fabric was worthless, even planning to burn it directly to eliminate the risk, the Spirit Eye in Amina's eyes ran at full power. That pile of scraps, which in ordinary eyes could only be used to plug leaks, instantly deconstructed in her vision into a stunning haute couture shirt pattern.

Streams of blue light flowed along the direction of the fibers, precisely marking the stress point at every seam, like blood vessels pulsing beneath the skin.

Ignoring the astonished looks around her, she picked up a pair of rusty tailor's scissors from the ground. The instant her fingers touched the fabric, her material sense revealed the high-density resilient fibers hidden inside these "rags." This was no ordinary cotton and linen, but some specially treated high-tech blended waste with an extremely strong shape memory, enough to support the embryo of a top-tier brand.

Amina cut the fabric at an unbelievable speed under everyone's gaze. The scissors opened and closed with crisp snipping sounds, the rhythm so fast it could barely be followed. The shabby fragments became fluid tailoring structures in her hands, and wherever the scissors passed there was not a single crease, as if magic had taken effect.

The onlookers shifted from mockery to shock. They had thought she was playing some trick, but now they watched a structurally perfect shirt prototype without a single crease take shape amid the ruins. Those originally ugly patchwork seams, under her reconstruction, became futuristic geometric decorations, flickering with a strange luster in the dim light.

Kwame's eyes widened. He leaned close to the fabric, even holding his breath: "This... how did you do this? This cloth was still on yesterday's burning list."

Amina shook her head. Though ripples stirred inside her, she remained calm on the surface. Sweat slid down her temple and dripped onto the cloth, evaporating instantly: "This is structural reorganization, not magic. You simply failed to see its potential."

Elder Samuel, the market elder, hurried over at the news, the old man in traditional kente cloth wearing a stern expression. His footsteps were heavy, each step seeming to proclaim his authority. He examined the half-finished piece, tapped the ground with his cane with dull thuds, and the echoes reverberated through the narrow market.

"The Ajara market has traditions and it has order. You cannot break the rules at will. Explain the source of your creation, or this pile of things will be confiscated."

Amina stayed calm under the pressure. She took a deep breath and pointed to the reconstructed lines: "Elder, this is an elevation of traditional craft, not a desecration. Please look at the fiber direction of this cloth. I preserved its original texture and only optimized the pattern so it better fits human ergonomics. Is that not respect for craftsmanship?"

Samuel was silent for a moment, the sternness in his eyes easing slightly. He let her pass for the time being, but required Amina to leave the work behind as collateral. The heavy air seemed to lighten a little as the elder turned away.

At that moment, in the shadow of a corner, Mbala held up his phone, his finger sliding lightly across the screen. The cold light of the screen lit his face and made him look even gloomier. He stared fixedly at Amina's technique, a flash of eerie greed and coldness passing through his eyes, as if he were searching for some fatal flaw. In the distance, the roar of the diesel generators continued. The Lagos night had only just begun.

Amina stared at that pawned shirt, her fingertips lightly stroking the coarse fibers. Although Samuel had withdrawn for now, the air of the market had not truly thawed. The dealers and porters around her still crowded on all sides, their eyes having shifted from initial jealousy to an indescribable mix of awe and probing.

They did not know where this thin foreign woman had come from, but her needle and thread seemed to possess a vitality beyond language, awakening dead fabric into flowing curves.

"Boss," a young helper leaned in cautiously, his voice carrying the roughness peculiar to Lagos, "this shirt... who are you going to sell it to? Or... could you sell it to us? Even just a fragment."

Only then did Amina realize the awkwardness of her situation. Here, currency was not numbers, not letters of credit, but physical transactions, bundles of personal obligation, and a subtle game of power. She could not connect to the banking system, could not settle through Alipay or PayPal, and could not even explain the concept of "design copyright."

On this Rag Mountain, knowledge was a dangerous currency, and her ability of X-ray reconstruction was both her weapon for survival and the root of the covetousness it would draw.

She tried to communicate in simple English and gestures, asking about a nearby bank or exchange office. The helper shook his head and pointed at the gray sky overhead: "The banks are downtown, but you don't have enough cash for a taxi. And the exchange rate is fluctuating badly right now. If you can't take the naira in your hands out of here, it won't be worth anything tomorrow."

Amina's heart sank. She counted the small amount of cash she still had on her. At current prices, it would only cover a few days of the most basic survival needs. She needed more fabric to prove her value, she needed to build trust, and even more, she needed to find a breakthrough in this closed system.

She looked at the mountains of old clothes piled high, and the potential high-value combinations surfaced in her mind again, but in reality, selecting every piece of cloth was like groping through a swamp, time-consuming and full of uncertainty.

Just as she sank into thought, about to pick up the scissors again, a chill crawled up the back of her neck along her spine. She turned her head and saw Mbala still standing in the shadows, having never left. His phone screen had gone black, but his eyes were startlingly bright, like two ghostly fires burning alone in the darkness.

He was no longer the minor figure hiding in a corner and peeking. His presence had become heavy and oppressive, like an invisible boulder pressing down beneath the noisy background sounds of the market.

"What are you doing there?" Amina tried to break the deadlock with her voice, keeping her tone as steady as she could.

Mbala did not answer. Only the corner of his mouth twitched slightly, revealing a hair-raising smile. He raised his phone, no longer sliding across the screen, but opened the camera mode instead. The focus frame of the lens flickered once in the dim light and locked dead onto the unfinished shirt in Amina's hands. That was not recording. That was hunting.

Behind that cold lens, Amina saw a malice deep in the bone, as if he had already seen through some cost behind X-ray reconstruction, or worse, as if he intended to steal this ability, even at the price of destroying Amina.

The crowd around them seemed to sense the collision of these two auras. The clamor dropped abruptly, leaving only the monotonous roar of the diesel generators. Amina felt her heartbeat amplified in her eardrums and realized that her position in this transaction was far more dangerous than she had imagined.

In the very second before Mbala pressed the shutter, a burst of hurried, chaotic footsteps came from deep within the market, like some enormous beast awakening. Amina gripped the scissors tightly, the cold of the metal stinging her palm. She understood that the real predicament had only just begun, and that man was her greatest enemy this night.