The beautiful creatures are often the most dangerous," she murmured.

I knew my childhood had been rough, and many times I had felt so alone. Daiyu must have experienced a different kind of loneliness. But in the end, maybe lonely was lonely.

This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.