He woke in the holding cell to find it wrecked around him: the iron door folded like paper, men down and groaning, someone outside shouting for another ambulance. His own knuckles were split and bleeding. Whatever his body did while he was a thousand years and a whole life away, it had done it here, in front of witnesses, and left him holding the bill.
There was a piece of charred wood in his hand, still faintly warm, that had no business existing in this century.
By the time the corridor filled with boots there was already a description going out, a face to watch for, a suspect who had put a room full of people in the hospital and could not explain a second of it. Running solves nothing when the thing you’re running from is riding in your own skin — but staying meant walls, questions, and the next pull coming while he was chained to a chair.
So he would move. Toward the north, toward the sources, toward whatever was lit that night on the river. And something would be moving behind him the whole way.
Chapter Seventeen of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is now live on WebNovel and Royal Road.
The Shadow in the Terminal
About this chapter
Chapter Seventeen sets Lü Yueguang loose in an airport terminal — a modern room built for departure and for watching, all cameras and uniforms and crowd. The Shadow in the Terminal is a chapter about flight: what a man is willing to risk, and who he is willing to endanger, to keep chasing a truth that only he can see. It asks whether he can outrun the consequences of living in two times at once, or whether the thing at his back — the stranger wearing his body, the hand that keeps arranging the board — is already closer than the crowd around him.
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 Fourteen — The Madman’s Map
- Chapter Fifteen — The Slick and the Silent
- Chapter Sixteen — The Signal and the Ash
- Chapter Eighteen — The Flight of the Fugitive
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