He came back to himself in a warehouse he’d never seen, three men broken on the concrete around him, his knuckles raw with a violence he had no memory of committing. Wei Měng’s body had carried him toward Luoyang; his own body, left behind, had apparently not stayed still. Sirens were already closing in by the time he understood what he was looking at.
Two lives, and now a stretch of hours neither of them could account for.
Somewhere past the warehouse door, someone was watching — patient, unhurried, exactly the kind of attention a man doesn’t want when he can’t explain himself. Whether he was a victim of what had happened to his body or the cause of it, the officers arriving wouldn’t care to ask. Only the answer he gave next would decide what happened to him.
What does a man say, when the truth would only convict him faster?
Chapter Fourteen of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is now live on WebNovel and Royal Road.
The Madman’s Map
About this chapter
Chapter Fourteen finds Lü Yueguang cornered by a system that has no room for the truth of what he is. The Madman’s Map is a chapter about the stories a desperate man tells to survive the ones told about him — the calculations made in a locked room, and the price of every lie that buys him time. It asks how far a careful man will bend the truth when the truth itself has become the danger.
About Tales of Alive
Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is a historical novel by 吕恩豪, set between contemporary Shenzhen and Han Dynasty China. Book One follows a man trained to read the past who finds himself forced to live inside it. New chapters publish every Sunday on WebNovel and Royal Road. Every court session, every meal, every execution has a source. What the author cannot prove is marked clearly. The rest, they will stand behind.
Continue reading
- Chapter One — The Weight of Plastic and Dust
- Chapter Two — The Vessel of Wrath
- Chapter Three — The Weight of the Bargain
- Chapter Four — The Echo of the Breaking
- Chapter Five — The Bureaucrat’s Halberd
- Chapter Six — The Long March
- Chapter Seven — The River of Rot
- Chapter Eight — The Shards of Home
- Chapter Nine — The Ghost in the Glass
- Chapter Ten — The Dangerous Bargain
- Chapter Eleven — The Shadow on the Road
- Chapter Twelve — The Ink and the Ache
- Chapter Thirteen — The Awakening of the Beast
- Chapter Fifteen — The Slick and the Silent
Share what this chapter stirred in you.