248 Enter Jin Tao

Jin Tao sat within the verti-car, looking out of place. It wasn’t that he was unused to the car, of course. He was uncomfortable in his own skin.

For the last month he’d been tossing and turning, coming in and out of consciousness until finally waking up the night before. He still hadn’t been able to shake that feeling, the sense of being somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.

Everything that had happened since entering the Avenue has felt like a dream, every day stretching by like a year. It had been an eternity of pain, where his body struggled to absorb and persist against the poison of the Fantascia Genetica. He’d been ripped apart, and put back together.

He’d survived it mainly by virtue of his dogged willpower. He’d refused to let his body get the better of him. That wasn’t to say the painful experience hadn’t permanently burned itself in to his memory. When he final came around, he understood that it hadn’t been a nightmare.