Later generations thought "Longevity City" was just an insult, used for those who wanted to die but couldn't, and wanted to live but couldn't either.
They didn't know the city had really existed.
There truly was such a city, standing atop a gray-red wasteland. To suppress something that should never have existed, it had to feed a human life to the seal every sixty years, like feeding a beast that could never be sated. The people in the city didn't stay because they didn't want to leave. They stayed because they couldn't. As long as the city stood, the world would be at peace. If it fell, not an inch of land anywhere would remain fit for human life.
A city cursed by the blood moon. Fifteen people whose fates were already written.
Some begged for death and could not get it; some clung to life and could not keep it. Some guarded the most precious of promises; some clutched the emptiest of accounts.
The blood moon was coming. Everyone in the city thought they would live to see tomorrow.
Until that night, when they realized they had long since become pieces on someone else's board.
I was the only one who survived this city.
To be precise, I was one of the only people in this city who failed to die. On the night of the blood moon, the city had thirteen thousand four hundred and twelve people. I remember how every one of them died. I've remembered for over four hundred years, and I can't forget.
Whose story do you want to hear?
The story of the one who begged for death and survived? Or the one who fought to live and died?
Either will do. Then let's start with the one who begged for death.
