Chapter 10: The First Blood Moon
~1.8k words · 2026-06-22
Kai's finger hovered over the send button when the world lurched.
Not physically. The ground beneath his apartment remained solid. But something deeper—something spiritual—twisted like a wrench in his gut. His qi sense screamed a warning a split second before the sky turned red.
Through his grimy window, the sun shifted to a deep, pulsing crimson. The clouds caught fire, burning with an inner light that cast everything in shades of blood and rust. His phone screen flickered, messages cutting off mid-sentence.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: BLOOD MOON EVENT INITIATED]
[DURATION: 12 HOURS]
[ALL MONSTER SPAWN RATES: 500%]
[ALL HUMAN STATS: REDUCED BY 30%]
[FIRST WAVE: 60 SECONDS]
"Shit."
Kai was on his feet before he finished the thought, his body moving with a fluidity it had never possessed before the tutorial. His dantian pulsed, qi flooding his meridians as instinct took over. He grabbed the nearest weapon—a broken broom handle—and cursed.
Sixty seconds. Where was he supposed to go? His apartment was on the fourth floor. The fire escape was rusted to hell. The streets below were already filling with—
He looked down and froze.
People were changing.
A woman three blocks away convulsed, her skin splitting along invisible seams. From the cracks emerged not blood, but darkness. Her form扭曲ed, expanded, reknit itself into something with too many limbs and a head that swiveled independently of its body. Her System window flashed: [CLASS CORRUPTED: HUMAN → ABOMINATION OF THE FIRST BLOOD].
She wasn't alone. Across the city, Kai's qi sense picked up dozens of similar transformations. One every few blocks. Maybe more. The corrupted ones moved with jerky, unnatural precision, turning toward the nearest untainted humans.
Twenty seconds.
Kai's phone buzzed violently. He glanced down: a single message from his mother.
*Don't leave the apartment. I love you.*
His throat tightened. She lived across town. Fifteen minutes by car. An hour on foot. In the middle of a monster invasion, that distance might as well have been a continent.
Ten seconds.
He made a choice.
The fire escape groaned under his weight as he threw himself through the window, landing on the rusty platform with a clang that echoed through the alley. His hands gripped the railing as he vaulted over, dropping three stories and rolling on impact. The pavement scraped his palms raw, but he was already running.
The city screamed.
Sirens blared from every direction, a discordant symphony of panic. Cars swerved, crashed, exploded. People ran without direction, trampling each other in their desperation to escape enemies they couldn't see. The System's notification had given them warning, but warning meant nothing when you didn't know where the monsters would come from.
Kai knew.
His qi sense painted the world in shades of danger. He could feel the corrupted ones moving through the chaos, their signatures like rotten fruit in a basket of fresh produce. They were drawn to high concentrations of humans. To fear. To the bright, unguarded life force of the newly awakened.
"Move!" He grabbed a man frozen in the middle of the street, yanking him out of the path of a car that had lost its driver. The man stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes before stumbling away without a word of thanks.
Kai didn't care. He was already calculating.
His mother's apartment was north. The closest corrupted one was two blocks east, moving west. If he ran straight, he'd intersect with it. If he went around, he'd lose ten minutes he didn't have.
He ran straight.
The first corrupted one emerged from a convenience store, its body a nightmare of displaced anatomy. It had been a teenager once—the remnants of a school uniform hung from its twisted frame. Now it had four arms, each ending in claws that scraped sparks from the concrete. Its face was split horizontally, a second mouth opening where its eyes should have been.
It saw Kai and *hungered*.
The creature moved faster than anything its size should have, closing the distance in three bounds. Kai's broom handle came up on instinct, but he knew—*knew*—it wouldn't be enough. The thing's claws would shred wood and flesh alike.
His dantian exploded.
Qi surged through his meridians in a pattern he hadn't consciously chosen, a defensive circulation Mentor had drilled into him during the tutorial's eighth hour. His hand moved, not to block, but to redirect. The broom handle caught the creature's first claw and *twisted*, using the monster's own momentum to throw it off balance.
[QI MANIPULATION SKILL UNLOCKED: DEFLECTING PALM (UNRANKED)]
[USE QI TO REDIRECT INCOMING ATTACKS. EFFICIENCY: 12%]
The notification flashed and vanished. Kai had no time to read it.
The creature recovered faster than expected, its extra limbs lashing out in a pattern that should have been impossible to track. But Kai's qi sense showed him the truth—the monster wasn't attacking randomly. It was reading his muscle tension, predicting his movements with predatory precision.
He couldn't outfight it. He had to out-think it.
Kai dropped.
Not backward, not to the side. Straight down, his knees buckling as he let gravity take him. The creature's claws passed over his head, and in that split second of overextension, he lunged forward. His shoulder slammed into its chest, and he *pushed*.
Qi erupted from his dantian, flooding his arm, his shoulder, his entire right side. The force of the discharge sent the creature stumbling back, its claws scraping uselessly against his qi-reinforced skin.
[QI REINFORCEMENT: BASIC APPLIED]
[ENHANCING PHYSICAL ATTACKS WITH QI. DAMAGE: MINIMAL.]
Minimal wasn't zero.
Kai didn't wait to see if the creature would fall. He was already running, his legs pumping as he turned north and didn't look back. Behind him, he heard the monster's enraged scream, followed by the sound of someone else's terror.
He couldn't save everyone. He had to reach his mother.
The streets became a gauntlet.
Every block brought new horrors. A man whose class had been [Healer] now crawled along the walls like a spider, his hands leaving trails of black ichor. A woman who had probably been [Mage] now floated three feet off the ground, her body wrapped in chains of solidified shadow. They attacked everything that moved, their corrupted instincts overriding any remaining humanity.
Kai dodged, blocked, and ran. His broom handle shattered against the third monster's hide. His knuckles were bloody after the fifth. His qi reserves were dropping faster than he could replenish them, each circulation of his dantian feeling thinner than the last.
He was a quarter of the way to his mother's apartment when the sky changed again.
The Blood Moon pulsed, and a new wave of notifications flooded his vision.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: WAVE 2 DEPLOYED]
[ELITE VARIANTS SPAWNING]
[SPECIAL OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE BLOOD MOON]
[REWARD: CLASS EVOLUTION TICKET]
Class evolution. The words burned in Kai's mind. He didn't know what that meant for most people, but for him—for someone with an unclassified class that the System didn't understand—it could be everything.
Or it could be a trap.
He pushed the thought aside. Survival first. Rewards later.
The elite variants were worse.
He encountered the first one at a crosswalk that had become a battlefield. A group of five survivors had barricaded themselves behind an overturned bus, fighting off a swarm of the lesser corrupted. They were losing. A man with a sword—[Warrior], Level 3—was bleeding from a dozen wounds. A woman with glowing hands—[Mender], Level 2—was trying to heal him while fighting off a creature with her other hand.
They didn't see the elite until it was too late.
It dropped from the sky, landing in the center of their barricade with enough force to crack the asphalt. Unlike the other corrupted, this one had retained its humanoid shape—almost. Its skin was the color of dried blood, and its eyes burned with an intelligence that made Kai's blood run cold. It wore the tattered remains of what might have been a business suit.
It looked at the survivors and *spoke*.
"Your suffering will nourish the harvest."
The words weren't English. They weren't any language Kai had ever heard. But he understood them perfectly, the System translating the meaning directly into his mind.
The creature moved.
The [Warrior] died first. His sword arm was torn off before he could raise it, his scream cut short as the elite's hand punched through his chest. The [Mender] tried to run, but the elite was faster, its fingers closing around her throat with casual brutality.
Kai should have run. He knew he should have run. His mother was waiting. His qi was nearly depleted. He had no weapon, no allies, no plan.
But the [Mender]'s eyes met his, and he saw in them the same desperate hope he'd felt when Mentor had first appeared in the tutorial.
He couldn't walk away.
His dantian screamed as he pulled every last drop of qi into his meridians. He didn't have a plan. He had a feeling—a resonance, deep in his core, that told him what to do.
[SYSTEM ALERT: QI DEPLETION WARNING]
[CONTINUED USE MAY RESULT IN PERMANENT MERIDIAN DAMAGE]
Kai ignored it.
He stepped forward, and the world slowed.
His qi sense expanded, not outward but inward, revealing the patterns of his own body with crystalline clarity. He saw the pathways of his meridians, the nodes where qi gathered, the weak points where the pressure was building to dangerous levels. He saw, too, the elite's internal structure—a web of corrupted qi that pulsed like a diseased heart.
And he saw the flaw.
A tiny knot in the elite's spiritual network, where the corruption hadn't fully taken hold. A remnant of the human it had once been, fighting against the transformation.
Kai focused every ounce of his remaining qi into his right index finger and *poked*.
The elite froze.
Its eyes widened—the first sign of emotion it had shown—as the knot unraveled. Its corrupted qi destabilized, the feedback loop spiraling outward until its entire form began to vibrate. It opened its mouth to scream, but only silence emerged.
Then it crumbled.
Ash and shadow scattered on the wind, leaving nothing behind but a faint shimmer in the air. The [Mender] dropped to her knees, gasping, her hand clutching her bruised throat.
Kai swayed.
His vision blurred. His dantian ached with a hollow, scraping pain that told him he'd pushed too far. He needed to rest. He needed to recover. He needed—
His phone buzzed.
He pulled it out with trembling fingers, squinting at the screen. A single message from an unknown number:
*She's not at home. She's at the evacuation center. But you need to hurry—something's wrong with the building.*
Kai's blood ran cold.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: WAVE 3 DEPLOYED]
[BOSS VARIANT SPAWNING]
[LOCATION: DISTRICT 7 EVACUATION CENTER]
His mother was in District 7.
Not physically. The ground beneath his apartment remained solid. But something deeper—something spiritual—twisted like a wrench in his gut. His qi sense screamed a warning a split second before the sky turned red.
Through his grimy window, the sun shifted to a deep, pulsing crimson. The clouds caught fire, burning with an inner light that cast everything in shades of blood and rust. His phone screen flickered, messages cutting off mid-sentence.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: BLOOD MOON EVENT INITIATED]
[DURATION: 12 HOURS]
[ALL MONSTER SPAWN RATES: 500%]
[ALL HUMAN STATS: REDUCED BY 30%]
[FIRST WAVE: 60 SECONDS]
"Shit."
Kai was on his feet before he finished the thought, his body moving with a fluidity it had never possessed before the tutorial. His dantian pulsed, qi flooding his meridians as instinct took over. He grabbed the nearest weapon—a broken broom handle—and cursed.
Sixty seconds. Where was he supposed to go? His apartment was on the fourth floor. The fire escape was rusted to hell. The streets below were already filling with—
He looked down and froze.
People were changing.
A woman three blocks away convulsed, her skin splitting along invisible seams. From the cracks emerged not blood, but darkness. Her form扭曲ed, expanded, reknit itself into something with too many limbs and a head that swiveled independently of its body. Her System window flashed: [CLASS CORRUPTED: HUMAN → ABOMINATION OF THE FIRST BLOOD].
She wasn't alone. Across the city, Kai's qi sense picked up dozens of similar transformations. One every few blocks. Maybe more. The corrupted ones moved with jerky, unnatural precision, turning toward the nearest untainted humans.
Twenty seconds.
Kai's phone buzzed violently. He glanced down: a single message from his mother.
*Don't leave the apartment. I love you.*
His throat tightened. She lived across town. Fifteen minutes by car. An hour on foot. In the middle of a monster invasion, that distance might as well have been a continent.
Ten seconds.
He made a choice.
The fire escape groaned under his weight as he threw himself through the window, landing on the rusty platform with a clang that echoed through the alley. His hands gripped the railing as he vaulted over, dropping three stories and rolling on impact. The pavement scraped his palms raw, but he was already running.
The city screamed.
Sirens blared from every direction, a discordant symphony of panic. Cars swerved, crashed, exploded. People ran without direction, trampling each other in their desperation to escape enemies they couldn't see. The System's notification had given them warning, but warning meant nothing when you didn't know where the monsters would come from.
Kai knew.
His qi sense painted the world in shades of danger. He could feel the corrupted ones moving through the chaos, their signatures like rotten fruit in a basket of fresh produce. They were drawn to high concentrations of humans. To fear. To the bright, unguarded life force of the newly awakened.
"Move!" He grabbed a man frozen in the middle of the street, yanking him out of the path of a car that had lost its driver. The man stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes before stumbling away without a word of thanks.
Kai didn't care. He was already calculating.
His mother's apartment was north. The closest corrupted one was two blocks east, moving west. If he ran straight, he'd intersect with it. If he went around, he'd lose ten minutes he didn't have.
He ran straight.
The first corrupted one emerged from a convenience store, its body a nightmare of displaced anatomy. It had been a teenager once—the remnants of a school uniform hung from its twisted frame. Now it had four arms, each ending in claws that scraped sparks from the concrete. Its face was split horizontally, a second mouth opening where its eyes should have been.
It saw Kai and *hungered*.
The creature moved faster than anything its size should have, closing the distance in three bounds. Kai's broom handle came up on instinct, but he knew—*knew*—it wouldn't be enough. The thing's claws would shred wood and flesh alike.
His dantian exploded.
Qi surged through his meridians in a pattern he hadn't consciously chosen, a defensive circulation Mentor had drilled into him during the tutorial's eighth hour. His hand moved, not to block, but to redirect. The broom handle caught the creature's first claw and *twisted*, using the monster's own momentum to throw it off balance.
[QI MANIPULATION SKILL UNLOCKED: DEFLECTING PALM (UNRANKED)]
[USE QI TO REDIRECT INCOMING ATTACKS. EFFICIENCY: 12%]
The notification flashed and vanished. Kai had no time to read it.
The creature recovered faster than expected, its extra limbs lashing out in a pattern that should have been impossible to track. But Kai's qi sense showed him the truth—the monster wasn't attacking randomly. It was reading his muscle tension, predicting his movements with predatory precision.
He couldn't outfight it. He had to out-think it.
Kai dropped.
Not backward, not to the side. Straight down, his knees buckling as he let gravity take him. The creature's claws passed over his head, and in that split second of overextension, he lunged forward. His shoulder slammed into its chest, and he *pushed*.
Qi erupted from his dantian, flooding his arm, his shoulder, his entire right side. The force of the discharge sent the creature stumbling back, its claws scraping uselessly against his qi-reinforced skin.
[QI REINFORCEMENT: BASIC APPLIED]
[ENHANCING PHYSICAL ATTACKS WITH QI. DAMAGE: MINIMAL.]
Minimal wasn't zero.
Kai didn't wait to see if the creature would fall. He was already running, his legs pumping as he turned north and didn't look back. Behind him, he heard the monster's enraged scream, followed by the sound of someone else's terror.
He couldn't save everyone. He had to reach his mother.
The streets became a gauntlet.
Every block brought new horrors. A man whose class had been [Healer] now crawled along the walls like a spider, his hands leaving trails of black ichor. A woman who had probably been [Mage] now floated three feet off the ground, her body wrapped in chains of solidified shadow. They attacked everything that moved, their corrupted instincts overriding any remaining humanity.
Kai dodged, blocked, and ran. His broom handle shattered against the third monster's hide. His knuckles were bloody after the fifth. His qi reserves were dropping faster than he could replenish them, each circulation of his dantian feeling thinner than the last.
He was a quarter of the way to his mother's apartment when the sky changed again.
The Blood Moon pulsed, and a new wave of notifications flooded his vision.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: WAVE 2 DEPLOYED]
[ELITE VARIANTS SPAWNING]
[SPECIAL OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE BLOOD MOON]
[REWARD: CLASS EVOLUTION TICKET]
Class evolution. The words burned in Kai's mind. He didn't know what that meant for most people, but for him—for someone with an unclassified class that the System didn't understand—it could be everything.
Or it could be a trap.
He pushed the thought aside. Survival first. Rewards later.
The elite variants were worse.
He encountered the first one at a crosswalk that had become a battlefield. A group of five survivors had barricaded themselves behind an overturned bus, fighting off a swarm of the lesser corrupted. They were losing. A man with a sword—[Warrior], Level 3—was bleeding from a dozen wounds. A woman with glowing hands—[Mender], Level 2—was trying to heal him while fighting off a creature with her other hand.
They didn't see the elite until it was too late.
It dropped from the sky, landing in the center of their barricade with enough force to crack the asphalt. Unlike the other corrupted, this one had retained its humanoid shape—almost. Its skin was the color of dried blood, and its eyes burned with an intelligence that made Kai's blood run cold. It wore the tattered remains of what might have been a business suit.
It looked at the survivors and *spoke*.
"Your suffering will nourish the harvest."
The words weren't English. They weren't any language Kai had ever heard. But he understood them perfectly, the System translating the meaning directly into his mind.
The creature moved.
The [Warrior] died first. His sword arm was torn off before he could raise it, his scream cut short as the elite's hand punched through his chest. The [Mender] tried to run, but the elite was faster, its fingers closing around her throat with casual brutality.
Kai should have run. He knew he should have run. His mother was waiting. His qi was nearly depleted. He had no weapon, no allies, no plan.
But the [Mender]'s eyes met his, and he saw in them the same desperate hope he'd felt when Mentor had first appeared in the tutorial.
He couldn't walk away.
His dantian screamed as he pulled every last drop of qi into his meridians. He didn't have a plan. He had a feeling—a resonance, deep in his core, that told him what to do.
[SYSTEM ALERT: QI DEPLETION WARNING]
[CONTINUED USE MAY RESULT IN PERMANENT MERIDIAN DAMAGE]
Kai ignored it.
He stepped forward, and the world slowed.
His qi sense expanded, not outward but inward, revealing the patterns of his own body with crystalline clarity. He saw the pathways of his meridians, the nodes where qi gathered, the weak points where the pressure was building to dangerous levels. He saw, too, the elite's internal structure—a web of corrupted qi that pulsed like a diseased heart.
And he saw the flaw.
A tiny knot in the elite's spiritual network, where the corruption hadn't fully taken hold. A remnant of the human it had once been, fighting against the transformation.
Kai focused every ounce of his remaining qi into his right index finger and *poked*.
The elite froze.
Its eyes widened—the first sign of emotion it had shown—as the knot unraveled. Its corrupted qi destabilized, the feedback loop spiraling outward until its entire form began to vibrate. It opened its mouth to scream, but only silence emerged.
Then it crumbled.
Ash and shadow scattered on the wind, leaving nothing behind but a faint shimmer in the air. The [Mender] dropped to her knees, gasping, her hand clutching her bruised throat.
Kai swayed.
His vision blurred. His dantian ached with a hollow, scraping pain that told him he'd pushed too far. He needed to rest. He needed to recover. He needed—
His phone buzzed.
He pulled it out with trembling fingers, squinting at the screen. A single message from an unknown number:
*She's not at home. She's at the evacuation center. But you need to hurry—something's wrong with the building.*
Kai's blood ran cold.
[SYSTEM BROADCAST: WAVE 3 DEPLOYED]
[BOSS VARIANT SPAWNING]
[LOCATION: DISTRICT 7 EVACUATION CENTER]
His mother was in District 7.