The midnight bells echoed across the city as rain slanted through the neon glow.
Deep in an old alley south of town, outside a convenience store about to close, the vagrant Old Li was rummaging through a trash can. Rainwater ran down his neck, icy cold. Suddenly, his fingers touched something cold and hard: a palm-sized bronze fragment, its edges jagged and irregular. Unreadable markings covered its surface, and at its center seemed to be a half-closed eye.
“Good stuff...” Old Li muttered, wiping the grime from the fragment with his sleeve. At that very moment, the engraved eye seemed to open a tiny crack, and a flash of dark red light flickered across it.
Old Li shuddered all over, an uncanny gleam appearing in his eyes. He stopped searching for food, clutched the fragment tightly, turned, and vanished into the rainy night.
Three days later, a brief report appeared in the corner of a local newspaper: A vagrant had broken into a mansion in an upscale neighborhood late at night and killed two security guards with his bare hands before being shot dead. Strangely, in the moments before his death, he kept muttering, “The fragment must be whole...”
