NOVEL WEB Chapter 1: Prologue: Carved Into the Walls
"If I have to become the floor to survive it, then carve my name into the walls."
There are two types of people in this world.
The ones who are born broken...
And the ones who break others to feel whole.
Jié Dè was born of neither. He was something worse:
A thing abandoned before it had the chance to break.
An accident. A charity case.
A filthy, unwanted weight dumped into the arms of a mother who couldn't love, and a father who didn't want to.
He didn't remember the day they found him, wrapped in a stranger's blood-soaked hoodie, stuffed between a garbage bin and a rotting wall in the Guiyang outskirts. But the stories painted him well: a baby with dead eyes and silent lungs, staring up like he was waiting to be claimed by something worse than death.
They gave him a name.
Jié Dè.
Calamity's Own.
It was a joke to them — the kind bureaucrats laugh about after stamping a ruined life into paper. But the name stuck like rot in old cloth. It became his truth.
Guiyang, China — Year 2086
The world had gone to shit a long time ago.
No great apocalypse. No divine punishment.
Just slow decay.
Industry devoured cities, governments fed on corpses, and the strong learned to eat without chewing.
Those too slow to climb got buried beneath someone else's step.
In the southern slums of Guiyang, survival wasn't earned.
It was stolen.
The Li family took him in — if you could call it that.
His so-called father, Li Qingsheng, was a bitter ex-cop turned security thug with fists like bricks and a tongue made of razors. A nationalist asshole who believed Jié was some imported stain on his name.
His mother, Li Xiujuan, was a silent corpse who never left her chair. A ghost of a woman locked in her own grief — three miscarriages, a ruined marriage, and Jié was the final nail in the coffin.
They didn't need a son.
They needed someone to blame.
And Jié?
He became the perfect ghost. Silent. Obedient. Disposable.
Siblings
They weren't blood. But they were real in every way that mattered.
Li Xiǎorú – The Last Light
Age: 12
Jié's little sister. Soft-spoken, wide-eyed, too pure for a world like this. She clung to a battered stuffed rabbit with one ear missing and stuffing spilling out like wounds. Jié would burn the world to protect her — and almost did, once.
She was the only one who looked at him like he was still human.
"She smiles like she doesn't know we live in hell. Or maybe she does… and chooses to smile anyway."
Liū Yanyue – The Scar That Walked Away
Age: 17 (when she disappeared)
The eldest. Once the brightest light in the Li household, now a phantom that Jié worships and curses in equal measure. She was the only one who ever defended him — until she ran away without a word.
But before she vanished, she whispered in his ear:
"They didn't adopt you to love you. They adopted you to feel less broken."
He never forgot that.
Some nights, Jié dreams of her standing in the doorway, eyes filled with blood and smoke, saying:
"When it comes time to choose… kill the floor, not yourself."
He doesn't know if it's a memory or a wish.
The Apartment
Three rooms. One bulb.
A floor that creaked like it wanted to scream.
Jié slept on a mold-eaten mattress, surrounded by crumpled pages torn from bootleg cultivation manhua. He devoured them like gospel — tales of crippled trash rising to immortality, devils turning gods into dogs.
He didn't believe them, not really.
But they gave him something the real world didn't.
Hope.
Or maybe just the shape of it.
One Night — The Crack Appears
The beatings didn't hurt anymore. Pain was normal. Predictable.
But that night, as the belt snapped across his back for a comment he didn't say, Jié looked up.
There was a crack in the ceiling.
Small at first. Then larger. Like a wound tearing open.
And within it — a circle.
A glowing glyph. Pale and perfect, pulsing like a heartbeat frozen in glass.
The air shifted.
The mold peeled back.
The world blinked.
Jié didn't scream.
He smiled.
The Door
It wasn't a hallucination. Not a dream.
This was real.
A door had opened in the ceiling — no frame, no logic, just a perfect circle in a world made of rot and regret.
He should've been scared.
Instead, he felt seen.
Something wants me.
Not love. Not salvation.
No—this was worse.
But it was his.
His sister, Xiǎorú, slept in the next room, clutching her broken rabbit, eyes bruised and lips split from a fight she never started.
Jié looked back once.
Then stepped into the door.
Ascent
He didn't fall. He didn't rise.
He was taken.
The world folded like paper soaked in blood.
His lungs compressed. His vision stretched.
His mind screamed without sound.
Then silence.
And the last thing he heard before the elevator swallowed him whole?
"Ascension is not a gift. It is a transaction."
"To be chosen is to be consumed."