Chapter III – 無間地獄 (Mugen Jigoku) – Ceaseless Suffering

The ruins never slept. Wind groaned through hollow towers as Kaodin scavenged under the watchful eyes of Cee-Ar-Tee and Cee-Too.
The world itself seemed to hum—a dull metallic rhythm that almost resembled breathing.

Each morning began in silence. Each night ended the same.
Kaodin’s hands had learned to move without command, steady and unthinking, sorting through shards of old-world scrap, fixing, scavenging—hunting for anything that might buy them another day of survival.
He no longer questioned how he lived. Only that he still could.

Sometimes, when the work was done and the wind quieted, he would sit cross-legged among the rubble and breathe.
Slow. Measured. Deep.
He didn’t know why, but the rhythm calmed him—anchored him. When his concentration deepened, something faint stirred in his core—a pulse, a tingle, a warmth that spread through his chest until his limbs felt lighter.
He exhaled softly, unaware that what he nurtured in that stillness was the first flicker of Qi—life energy echoing from a forgotten age.

When the storms came, they took shelter beneath fractured stairwells and concrete ribs of fallen towers.
Cee-Too would chatter endlessly, showing off small treasures he’d scavenged: bottle caps, a cracked data chip, a copper wire twisted into a spiral.
“Treasure,” he’d say proudly, eyes gleaming with innocent delight.

Kaodin smiled faintly. For all his circuitry and synthetic blood, Cee-Too’s curiosity seemed endless. His laughter echoed through the hollow dark like a melody from a time when laughter still meant safety.
Sometimes Kaodin caught himself wondering—between this machine’s warmth and his own growing detachment—who among them was truly human.

He glanced at Cee-Ar-Tee, sitting quietly near the stairwell, gaze fixed on the flickering horizon. The older android didn’t speak often, but when he did, his words carried the weight of reason older than Kaodin could comprehend.
Between the two—logic and innocence—Kaodin felt suspended, a stranger between worlds.

Beyond the horizon, the world had once been something more.
He’d heard fragments from old data logs, from half-buried memory cores Cee-Ar-Tee occasionally restored during scavenging runs.
A world reborn from its own ashes—still reaching for the brilliance it had once lost.

They called this land the Kingdom of Thailand, long before its fall.
In the centuries before the collapse, vast monazite sands were discovered beneath the soil—veins rich with thorium, the element once promised to power humanity’s future.

But the promise had withered. Greed and ignorance ruled stronger than vision.
The chance for salvation slipped quietly through time’s fingers.

Had the old leaders seen further, Kaodin thought, perhaps the world would’ve been lit not by oil and decay—but by the pulse of nuclear light itself.

Monazite sand had once been the heart of progress—fueling sciences that revived the dying age: cybernetics, robotics, quantum computation, wireless energy, neural interfacing.
And those miracles? They came with a bill no one wanted to pay.
Only a handful ever understood how to handle thorium without killing themselves.
Even fewer had the means to refine it properly.

Knowledge turned into the rarest commodity—hoarded, stolen, bought in blood and smoke.
And power, as always, demanded bodies to burn.

Centuries later, the remains of that era slept beneath their boots—its genius rusted out, its promises swallowed whole by time.
What lingered now were the bones of old machines… and scavengers scratching out a living on the ruins of their ancestors’ mistakes.

Kaodin shut his eyes as the wind whistled through skeletal towers.
For a moment, the sound almost passed for breathing.
Or maybe, he thought, it was the world itself—dying, but still trying to remember life.