In the beginning, there was the rat.

My name is Shu Hundan. If you're reading this book, chances are, you've heard of me before. Or perhaps you are one of the many who already know of my story. I will assume that you are both, yet pretend you're neither. This makes for a better telling, I've been told. I also find it more comfortable to speak to you this way. A story is best told fresh, after all, as many things in life are.

I was born in the underbelly of the dragon that is Shanghai. The beast of the east, it was once remembered. A monolothic city, whose whims and wishes were catered to by all the World; a place of hopes and dreams, to which people flocked, in search of riches, in search of fulfillment, in search of anything that may fill the gaping hole that throbbed in their chests. In this city that never slept, in this city of a million lights and a billion colors, a place that shone with the dreams of many millions, was I born, in the deepest, darkest crevices in which man may live.

We believe that the apocalypse brought out the worst in humanity. Yet I concur and say that I've lived with the worst since the day of my birth. I was a destestable child, born to a detestable family, abandoned for my own good. By five I was alone, and I learned that none would ever care. A month later I'd learned to steal, an hour after the pain of a beating. By six I had stabbed and lied, by seven I had stabbed and lied - better, and by eight, I had become abominable. Worse than most survivors ever did in the years of brutality they endured.

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For someone to gain, someone must lose. And the world decided that we would always be the losers. We were left to fight for the scraps, to reach out our hands for the last kernels of grain the universe thought little enough of to bestow to us. I am not justifying my behaviour here, I have to stress. I stabbed and beat and stole to survive, and was stabbed and beaten and stolen from for another to live. No matter what the reason, what we did to each other was unforgivable.

I think that's important to say, especially now, where most of us have done evil to some degree. We live in a den of sinners. To forgive that sin ourselves would be to legitimize the evil we did. I say that we live with it. 

But that's not what you're here to listen to.

Where was I? I was eight, then nine, then ten and eleven and twelve. In none of those years did I live a normal life. To know how to read and write, that was a blessing for me; most did not. I saw an eight-year old ask another boy to read the label of a can he had found. The child was starving, and wished to know if it was motor oil he had stolen, or a can of bean sprouts. The child was promptly beaten, and his can stolen. I saw it on the streetside a while later, the oil leaking out. Then I was thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen.

I turned fifteen in the year 2018. This was the year everything changed. You know, it's ironic. To most, the apocalypse is a trauma most will never overcome.

To me, it was an opportunity. The only opportunity I would ever be given. This is the story of my death and my rebirth.