The Messengers of Sanctuary

34 - Lianmin

Zhi Lianmin was a pyrokinetic that depended on light for sanity. She had been the only daughter of a lonely researcher who had died of insanity long before she could remember him. Min wasn't the type of person to look too hard at her past, she lived in the moment, her only goal being survival.

Most demons had a story of how they became what they were, and most of them refused to tell it except on the longest night of the year when everyone huddled around the fires and sat in fear of the darkness around them.

That night teased out all sorts of secrets.

At first, Min hadn't really realized that people became demons. It was just what she was for as long as she could remember. In fact, Min had been fairly certain for most of her life that she'd been born this way.

But then she heard about old Wen Yan who'd been bitten by a sub-demon a few years back. And then there was Mao Heng who'd become a demon during an emergency blood transfusion after being bitten by a zombie. The list went on, Pan Sheng, Cao Ning, Yuan Qi, Shen Xiaohui...as far as Min could tell, everyone had been human at one point.

And as far as Min could tell, she hadn't ever been that way. She was barely fourteen years old, most called her lucky for surviving the outbreak as an infant. She'd forgotten any terrors she might have seen, any nightmares that would have plagued her were lost to memory.

But others looked at her with resentment. Even when they could see past her demonic bearing, they would see all the other children who hadn't made it. There were plenty of kids just barely younger than her, but disaster had taken so many of them from the world early.

Disaster was something that Min knew very well.

That was her thought process as she finally woke up, the lanterns in the hall turned on, her wrists shackled with metal cuffs. The tian in front of her grinning maniacally - was that just her neutral face?

Min felt her blood run cold as she blinked blearily at the scene of destruction in front of her. There were so many corpses. Corpses that lay there groaning at their wounds. Some of which had their guts spilling all over, some of which with their throats clawed out, pools of blood at their sides.

Min finally tasted the lingering blood in her mouth and felt bile rise in her throat. This was why Min was afraid of the dark. She didn't fear what was lurking there, she didn't fear the concept. But she did fear what the darkness had the power to do to her.

She closed her eyes and turned toward the tian, her face not even trying to hide the pain that lurked there. "Can't you just get rid of me already? Send me to your afterlife?"

The woman laughed bitterly, an amused smile crossing her face, "after killing all these people, do you really deserve mercy?"

"My name is actually Lianmin, you know, Mercy?" Min glanced at the carnage, refusing to look away as she took it in once more, "but it doesn't matter. You could save them, but you're not doing that, so in a way really, you're no better than me."

"Ah, so we're going for the logical fal'cie approach then. Doesn't matter either way to me."

"So why aren't you helping them?" She shivered, a slight hint of flames dancing along her arms.

"Considering how much effort it took for us to get a powerful enough demon here to infect them, don't you think angel blood is a bit of a waste?"

At that, Min closed her eyes, no longer even surprised.

"You know," The tian broached as she grabbed the shackles around Min's wrists, "we didn't expect you to have such a purebred line of demon blood in you, we were expecting you to be some lesser demon that was just a bit too cocky for her own good. But considering how long it took you to lose control, you must be some pretty high crap."

Min didn't respond and the tian smirked, pulling at the shackles and leading her down a side hall of the compound.

"Ah, don't be like that, the dungeon thing was just a threat to get you to do something already, we knew about the knife the whole time."

Min glared at her, "and how did you know that?"

"Oh, that doesn't matter. I'm more concerned with what you poisoned the tip with, that was a pretty big rash. It was hilarious to watch Yun jumping around like a dying human as he tried to get the stuff out!"

Min glanced away, "It was my blood. It burns most people, so I figured it wouldn't be too much of a longshot."

The tian whistled in a long, drawn-out way, "Never would have guessed. Our blood burns people too, we must've gotten it from you guys." She took a sweet roll out of her sleeve and started chewing on it contemplatively.

Min simply gave her a shocked look, "So you don't have some unnatural hatred for me out of some misguided religious precedent?"

The tian swallowed her bite of roll, "ha, no that's just the folks they display for the humans. The rest of us don't care about that crap. We accept that we're simply a lucky mutation of the demons. Most of us are really salty about that fact though." She grinned and took another large bite, leading Min down the hallway.

They approached a large sturdy door and it was made clear that this was her destination. Min sighed, "So I'll never be seen again then?"

"Nope, they'll ship you off to some place to get you out of our way and then you'll never see this place again."

The woman typed a code into the door and it opened, just like in the stories about old-world technology. Min paused, glancing at the woman. "Wait, what's your name?"

"So you'll have someone to curse?" She laughed at that one, chewing another bite of her roll, "Yeah sure don't see why not. This one is Cao Meili, a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lianmin"

She nodded, "It's Zhi Lianmin." Then she allowed the tian to escort her into the room filled with metal boxes, she opened one of them and shoved her inside rather roughly,

"Hey, you're a decent one, just thought I'd tell you that. You seem to actually get that you're a monster, unlike half the idiots that go through here."

"We're all monsters," Min said quietly, observing the two candles on the inside of the metal box. "But yes, perhaps it will be better if I'm sent somewhere where I can only hurt the undead."

Meili grinned, "See that right there? That's why you're decent."

Min nodded and sat down inside the metal crate.

Meili paused for a moment and then took something out of her pocket, it was a medallion, shaped somewhat like a Celtic knot. She pressed it into Min's hand, "Don't do anything stupid, okay?"

And then she closed the crate, and Min was left in the candlelight wondering what kind of stupid thing Meili was expecting her to be planning.

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