I woke up like I always did, on a thin bedroll that could only barely soften the hard stone floor of my prison cell. The Old Woman was deep in her sleep as well, shivering slightly from the morning chill. A meal in her would do her good. I grabbed the spare food tokens–wooden tags with a symbol or other stamped on it– from underneath my bedroll and banged the door to my cell until a guard came.

He opened the hatch, revealing his upper face. I gave the man four tokens and he nodded. He closed the hatch and left.

I waited patiently, easing myself into idle imagination to keep myself busy. It was nothing fantastic. The phantasms showed me standing over the still-warm corpse of Yo Lan, that hateful bitch.

The guard came in short order. Instead of delivering the food from the hatch halfway down the door, he simply opened it and gave the four bowls of ‘food’ to me, nodding at me in thanks. “Still taking care of her?”

“Who else is going to?” I replied. I didn’t really recognize this one; probably new here. After all, why else would he converse with an inmate so amicably?

“That’s good,” he said, before turning around to leave, locking the door after him. I turned to the Old Woman, still huddled in several blankets. It took much work to have them smuggled to her, but it was worth it. She had been shaking like a leaf the moment winter set in, utterly incapable of dealing with the slight drop in the temperature. How she had survived for all these years beggared belief, but I didn’t quite concern myself with that.

I placed the bowl in front of her. The soft tap on the ground awakened her. With my help, she got up into a sitting position. I nodded towards the bowl, and she gave me that geriatric smile that old people liked to give. Thankfully, she still had all her teeth; otherwise she really would have been dead by now.

I sat down in front of my own three bowls and got to work. There was rice and animal entrails, the leftover stuff that butcheries would only give to vagrants, that only barely had good nutritional value.

I had found that in good enough amounts, it could already pass for a filling meal. Working to feed the Old Woman wasn’t nearly as straining as people believed, but it paid to be strong enough that doing so wasn’t too much of a hassle. I wasn’t exactly a self-sacrificing type, a ‘Martial Hero’ that people always talked about, fictitious beings of great physical power and moral compass.

If there was one thing that I shared with a ‘Martial Hero’, it was that I was strong, and in prison, that meant everything.

Right before the cells opened and the guards came to file me out, I hid all the dozens of extra food tokens underneath the Old Woman’s bedroll, on the edges that she wouldn’t sleep on.

The guards took me to the cave mouth on the mountain that the prison was built against, gave me the tools of the trade – a rusty pickaxe – and sent me in to prove my worth.

Inside, I met Yo Lan, cocksure as ever. “Hey, Yi-Yi!” She said sweetly, striding towards me, pickaxe over one shoulder. “I think you should join our group. Someone as hardworking as you deserves that much at least.” It was a pathetic attempt to strong-arm me into earning them free food tokens.

“Fuck off,” I said, ignoring the scandalized look on her face. “You lazy shit.”

“Do you shit from that mouth?” she asked testily. “You do always say the most distasteful of things.”

I tried to walk past her, but her pickaxe blocked my path. I spoke lowly. “Do you want to keep that hand?”

“I know you think you’re strong,” she began, “But numbers may overwhelm. Keep that in mind, Yi-Yi.”

Not one to be cowed, I said “My name is Kang Yilan. Get it right.”

Tense seconds passed, in which I was prepared to heft my pickaxe and defend myself, but nothing came to pass. Instead, Yo Lan pulled the tool out of my way and let me pass. “You will suffer for refusing to give me face so brazenly, Yi-Yi. You know exactly who I am, so don’t be surprised about what will happen.”

I ignored her words and kept going.

I worked for two hours before I decided that I had enough to earn a surplus of four tokens, putting in four times the work of an average inmate in half the time.

I returned with more bowls for the Old Woman, and we both ate our fill silently, simply enjoying our company. If there was anyone I didn’t hate in this hellhole, it was her.

Still, I could not set aside the unease for the days that were to come. Yo Lan’s words had wisdom in them. In a single bout, I would win, but if they played dirty, I would not.

Anything could happen in prison, though.

000

I was strong, so it meant that I gave as good as I got.

To my misfortune, however, that didn’t matter when there were over ten people ganging up on you. The first three bitches that tried something were quickly met with punches to their throats, falling down like puppets with their strings cut. I poked another one’s eye out with my knuckle, but they were too many. One grabbed my right arm, but before I could reach her with my left arm, someone grabbed that one, too. I could have still overpowered them if there was only one person for each arm, but two more came and tackled me down, pinning every single limb of mine. Five people were on top of me, all there to just prevent my movement.

The remaining one stood above me imperiously. “Poor poor Yi-Yi,” she sneered. “You refused to give face,” she said plaintively. “What was I to do, let you disrespect me?”

Fucking Yo Lan.

My eyes darted about wildly. We were in the prison courtyard, but I couldn’t see any guards from this angle. Did Yo Lan pay them off? It would be like her to offer her ‘services’ to the head warden, to be another deterrent for a prison uprising.

“So, what?” I growled. “Now you kill me?”

“Kill you?” Yo Lan laughed. “Now, why would I waste a perfectly good body-guard like you? You’re strong, and you interest me. You’re like a wild beast; powerful and impressive, but ultimately dangerous to myself.” She came closer. I tried to shake the people off me, but their grips redoubled. “What do you do with such a beast?” She strode over to the wall where a guard had left a rod, a thick, iron-made instrument meant only for harsh punishment. “You tame them.”

I tried to spit on her face, but managed to only hit her foot. “You better just kill me, because I will never fucking work for you.”

She was still smiling. “You’ll change your tune soon enough.” She hefted the rod over her head and struck me in the leg. It broke, and with the pain, new strength arrived. I threw the people holding my right arm away, but before I could continue, the abuse began in earnest. More women arrived, with rods of their own. All I could do was curl up and protect my head, screaming myself hoarse as more bones broke, no doubt on my way to becoming a cripple.

Perhaps Yo Lan had only meant for my punishment to be superficial, but with my insult directed at her, she had completely changed her mind. Good. I’d rather die than serve anyone.

And I would make good on that conviction in a few more minutes of beatings.

Despite myself, I couldn’t help but feel happy.

No one could break my spirit. No one.

000

The next sequence of events, I could not recall with much certainty. I remembered guards arriving, scattering Yo Lan’s gangsters. I remembered getting dragged somewhere. And now, I was inside my cell, most of my body still broken and bruised.

My cellmate sat huddled in a blanket, back to the wall. She was ancient. No one would say how long she had been imprisoned, and it never really crossed my mind to ask. All I knew was that she would die in this prison one way or another. The head warden never kept count on any of the prisoners’ terms, and because we were all women, the government didn’t really think it worthwhile to conscript anyone to military service, so once we entered, we never really left.

When I looked at the Old Woman – as that was what we had all taken to calling her – I despaired. I knew that in a couple of decades, I would be just like her, too weak to defend myself, too weak to put in any work at the mines for food tokens. Ever since I arrived, and her former cellmate died, I had taken to working for enough food tokens to feed both of us, and she had been exceedingly grateful all the while.

She never had much to say besides the usual show of gratitude when I gave her a bowl of rice and beans, and I never had much to say to her, either. It was all very cold, which suited me just fine.

I chuckled, despite myself. It hurt like all hell, like the Buddha had descended to press his all-encompassing palm on me, squishing me against the ground slowly. “We…” I resisted coughing. “Both… die… now,” I said. As I spoke, I noticed that my teeth were all intact, at the very least. Small mercies, considering how all my bones would soon heal wrong in a few months, and I would never be able to fight the way I once could. That was, of course, if anyone bothered to earn enough food tokens to not have me starve to death before then, since we would burn through our savings within two weeks. Healing without food was impossible, so I did not have much trust in my chances of survival. That wretched Yo Lan should have just killed me. “So…rry…” I owed her that much, at least.

We were both going to slowly starve to death, soon.

Fuck. Yo Lan.

I closed my eyes for just a moment, but in that moment, the Old Woman stood up, standing straight, unaided, like she was fifty years younger than she actually was. Now I knew I was at death’s door, seeing phantasms like these.

“You will not die, Kang Yilan,” she said, her voice old and matronly, like it usually was. “But this will hurt.”

Was this real?

The moment she came to me and stepped on my right leg, pain lanced straight through every portion of my body, liquid agony sending me into harsh moans at every heart-beat. I screamed gutturally, cursed even. This wasn’t a phantasm. The pain was too real.

She stepped on another leg, and I could only see a blinding white, screaming louder than I thought I could scream. “Fuck you, you old motherfucking bitch!” I screamed, tears coursing down my face without end. “After all I’ve done?! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” I repeated profanities over and over again. She continued to cause me agony after agony, clamping down on my legs, at the exact points where my body was fractured, like she knew exactly how to send me into the deepest depths of pain.

When she was done with my legs, she continued upwards, to my spine. The moment she even touched my spine, the pain had actually magnified, almost maddeningly so, so harshly that I was internally begging for respite.

Immediately, I reproached myself. I couldn’t let this pain break my spirit. I wanted to die unbroken, if not in body, then in spirit. It was the only pride I could hold onto.

Finally, she stopped. “I believe you’re distracting me,” she chided. “While I do appreciate your drive, I’m afraid you will just have to let go, for a short time of course.”

“Fuck… you,” I ground out, clenching my jaw impossibly hard, not caring if my teeth would break.

She simply sighed. With a mighty strike to the back of my head, my pain disappeared and I saw only black.

000

When I woke up, the lack of all-encompassing pain caught me completely off-guard. I was staring at the familiar ceiling of my cell, the same ceiling that I had woken up to every morning for over a year. Slowly, my mind tried to process my most recent memories. The beat-down followed by the Old Woman’s ‘gentle’ ministrations.

I was completely healed. She healed me.

I turned to her, seated on her blanket, legs crossed and a serene expression on her face, one which put her age back at least twenty years.

“You set my bones,” I said, before I could even think about the words. “And you healed my wounds!” I looked around at my body. No scars whatsoever. I tried to stand up gingerly, only to surprise myself with the strength I could put in the maneuver. I felt almost weightless, disbelief still clouding my mind.

She shook her head. “Set your bones, I did. But your wounds, your body healed on its own.”

It was a testament to the weirdness of my life that I didn’t quite disbelieve that. I was always much stronger than anyone else around me, and whenever I was wounded, it never really scarred beyond a slight discoloration. Still, the expertise required to set bones was high. “You’re a doctor.”

“In a fashion,” she responded, still maddeningly cryptic.

“Who are you?” I finally asked.

She was smiling, refusing to say anything. Really, if she hadn’t just prolonged my life, I would have already beaten the shit out of her, geriatric or no. “Who I am does not matter,” she said. “It is who you are that does,” she stood up smoothly from her cross-legged position without using her hands. “You’re a special child, more special than you think.”

I considered her carefully. She was not just some old woman. She had been holding out on everyone. Old women didn’t move like that, and yet she still affected an ancient aura. “What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I think you can save the world.”

I sat down, overwhelmed by what I was hearing, and the circumstance I had found myself in.

000

A special child, she called me. Well… she wasn’t wrong. I knew I was much stronger than the average person. It had been that way for as long as I could remember.

I was strong from birth. Strong enough to kill my mother as she birthed me, at least. My… father never really recovered from that, and from then on, my life had gone to shit, in my crib, no less. My father was a carpenter, a master at his craft, but for all of my life, I never saw a trace of that mastery. All he ever did was make sub-par furniture, and spent all of his coin whoring, gambling and drinking. When he was feeling particularly enthusiastic, he would… teach me how to fight.

Any other time, he would just slink down on his bed, depressed and unwilling to move an inch for entire days.

While I still hadn’t gotten over all the rage in my soul, I was self-aware enough to see how it damaged every relationship I had tried to get into. I had never had a friend in my life. I scared all the kids in my village, and the grown-ups told me I was bad luck.

When my father had finally gone too far, flirting idly with the village chief’s wife, a delegation of men had come to beat him to an inch of his life.

They went an inch too far.

I was sixteen at the time, watching from underneath the table as five men reduced my father’s bones to fragments, and his organs to meatpaste as they went off on him.

I just watched.

It was fair, after all. The bastard had never been there for me, so I would not be there for him in his final moments. When his head slumped over and his eyes looked at mine, I saw not regret, but relief. He wanted to die.

When they were done with him, one of the bastards dropped their rod. I picked it up, and slammed it into the back of the largest man’s head, killing him instantly, for daring to make my father’s last moments joyful.

Two more died before the guard came to arrest me. The hearing was short, and the magistrate had thrown me into the prison without a second thought, seeing me like every other villager had seen me as; a devil child.

The Old Woman looked at me so expectantly, almost as if she was expecting me to summon fire or punch a hole through the wall.

Yes, I was special. After all, how many demons did you see wearing human skin? “You’ve got the wrong girl,” I said to her. “If the world needs saving, try finding a princess or a warrior. I’m not a hero.”

“I can make you one,” she said simply. “You don’t need to be a saint to be a hero, youngling.”

“Fuck off,” I keep myself from shouting. “I want no part in this bullshit. Fuck that.”

“Is that how you speak to someone who healed you?” She asked sweetly. I clenched both fists, almost so hard that I dug my fingernails into my palms.

“You owed me,” I said. “I’ve kept you fed for a whole fucking year. I haven’t missed a single day, and now I find out that you’ve lied to me all this time?”

“Lie?” She giggled. “I spoke no lies. I simply appeared in a certain way, and you drew your own conclusion.”

Was she trying to have me kill her? I strode towards her, baring my teeth. “If you can talk shit, you can take a beating, Old Woman.” I aimed a punch at her shoulder. Smoothly, she stepped aside and delivered a harsh slap to my face. The force of it threw me off my feet, crashing into the wall of the cell.

I was on the ground before I knew it, staring up incredulously at her. The pieces clicked, and I had my conclusion. “You… fucking… Martial Warrior!”

They were supposed to be myth. Supermen and superwomen that could destroy brick with their fists, scale houses in mere seconds and could travel by jumping from tree branch to tree branch without losing speed! It was absurd, but what I was seeing was just as absurd.

“You are not nearly as dumb as your brutish demeanor would suppose, youngling,” she cooed. “I am beyond proud.”

“What do you want with me?” I asked. After all, if she wanted something from me, someone as strong as her didn’t have to secure my loyalty verbally. She just had to physically force me, and I would do it because I had no choice.

“Soon, a man will attempt something which will cause the deaths of millions,” she said. “Several thousand thousand people could die, and I believe that the answer to this problem lies with the new generation. You.”

What fucking bullshit. “You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “Because if you did? You’d have someone else be the lead in your little opera bullshit.” Honestly, for all I knew, she could also be insane.

She raised her right hand, showing me five fingers. “I will kill five people for you. For every one person, you will give me a year to ready you for what is to come.”

I held back my boiling fury at the presumptuous nature of her attempt at a ‘quid pro quo’. “You think I’m just some sort of mindless killer, don’t you?”

Her smile was mocking. “Is that not how you view yourself?”

“You’re getting on my nerves,” I said.

“Oh well,” the Old Woman said, before sitting down. “I’ll give you some time.”

Talking like my agreement was only a matter of time. What a bitch. “I can’t believe I fed you for over a year.”

For a moment, she remained silent, before speaking. “You’re… a good person, Kang Yilan,” so this was how she sounded like when she was sincere. Good to know.

“Whatever.”