Chapter 1 No More Letting Them Bleed Me
“Reina, I am so disappointed in you!”
The woman sat on the couch. With one arm, she held her trembling younger daughter, and with the other, pointed at her older daughter, Reina Ashworth.
She yelled, “Stella only changed your application, and you’re overreacting like this? How can you be so cruel?”
Reina narrowed her eyes at the mother-daughter duo in front of her. Her heart turned cold. She ripped up the admission letter and threw the pieces at Stella Foster’s head. “Cruel? Mom, do you even know where she changed my application to?”
“Where?” Helen Foster actually had no clue what her younger daughter had done.
Reina sneered. “Catgirl Club. Mom, if she likes that kind of trash, fine. But why did she change my application to some training school like that?”
Anyone could tell by the name that it was run by some entertainment club inside the base—one that served men.
She had finally awakened a Harvesting Ability. She could have applied to the base’s official ability academy. This was her one shot at a better life, and her sister had just ruined it.
“What’s wrong with Catgirl Club?”
Stella covered her swollen face and said in a pitiful voice, “The pay is high, and there’s no danger. You can even meet important people in the base. I was thinking about you!”
Hmph. It’s just a useless Harvesting Ability. What’s so great about it?
Once I earn enough points to awaken my own ability, I’ll be much better than Reina.
A smug look flashed across Stella’s eyes.
In Greenfinch Base, the rule was simple: 18-year-olds only get one shot at a school application. If you mess it up or pick the wrong one, you don’t get a do-over.
She wanted Reina to miss the ability academy, stuck at the bottom, beneath her, forever.
Helen’s eyes lit up as she nodded along. “Stella’s right, Reina. She’s thinking about you. Going into the wilderness is dangerous. If the club accepts you, you’ll definitely earn more than going out to do harvesting work.”
“Once you make money, we’ll buy gene-awakening potions. Your sister and brother can awaken abilities, too. Then the three of you can support each other. Our family can finally establish ourselves at Greenfinch Base.”
Being abandoned by that man had always been Helen’s biggest pain. She constantly dreamed that her kids would rise above everyone else and slap that heartless man in the face.
Reina almost laughed in anger at what Helen and Stella said.
Stand firm in the base by selling my body? What the hell is wrong with them?
Reina honestly wanted to crack their heads open and see if their brains were just full of trash.
She didn’t want to waste any more breath on them. She turned around and went to her room to pack.
She was leaving this house.
She was done letting them bleed her dry like leeches.
Last night, Reina had an incredibly vivid dream. In it, she saw Stella tampering with her school application.
After she refused to enroll, Stella and Helen teamed up to drug her and sold her to the Catgirl Club.
She ended up locked in a basement, used like a human blood pack to be drained every single day until her body gave out and she died a miserable death.
It was so creepy that when she woke up this morning, she found out the first part of the nightmare—the changed application—had actually come true.
For her own safety, she had to leave, even if it meant renting a tiny place somewhere else.
As she was packing, Helen and Stella burst into the room.
Seeing the suitcase, they tried to stop her. “What are you doing? Where do you think you’re going?”
Reina zipped up her backpack and said calmly, “The school is sending graduates on a mission outside the city. If I don’t go, I won’t get my diploma.”
Helen relaxed a little but still eyed Reina suspiciously. “Really? You’re not lying to us?”
“What do I get from lying to you?” Reina slung the backpack over her shoulder and walked toward the door.
Helen blocked her again, looking suspicious. “So you’re not going to the Catgirl training school?”
“Nope!” Reina shoved past her mom and headed for the door.
“If you aren’t going there, where are you going?” Helen grabbed Reina’s arms, holding tight while shooting a quick glance at Stella.
Stella hurried over and said anxiously, “The Catgirl Club is a great choice. Don’t give up on it! If they accepted normal people without abilities, I’d sign up myself.”
As she spoke, she reached for Reina’s backpack.
Reina dodged her, slapped her hand away, and gave them both a freezing look. “I’ll say it again: I’m not going there. Don’t mess with me, or you’ll have to fend for yourselves.”
Ever since she was ten, she’d been the one heading outside the city on missions to pay for everything—eight whole years.
Back then, she didn’t even have an ability yet. Every time she returned, she suffered from severe contamination.
Her skin would rot, her cheeks swelling up. If the school hadn’t provided free treatment, she’d be dead.
Meanwhile, her siblings were only two years younger than her, but they didn’t even know where the outer city gate was.
The worst part? When Reina’s dad left, he’d given Helen a large sum of child support to raise Reina until she came of age.
But Helen never spent a cent of that money on Reina. Instead, she used it to support a man and had twins with him.
Yep. Stella and her brother were Helen’s children with another man. Reina’s father had left after finding out Helen was cheating on him.
At the time, Helen still clung to Reina, so he left 18 years’ worth of child support and moved to another base.
Stella’s real dad died when the twins were five; apparently, he’d gotten into a huge bar fight over a woman and been killed.
Reina had learned all of this from Elise, her nanny.
“Reina, listen to me,” Helen said.
She started to panic and tried to fix things. “I’m just worried you’ll run into danger out there. H-How about you skip that mission?”
“No. I already agreed. I have to go.” Reina walked out without even looking at them.
She hailed a taxi on the street and went straight out of the inner city.
Greenfinch Base had two defensive walls, which divided it into the inner city and the outer city.
Inside the inner city lived ability users and their families, as well as government workers and their families, as well as mercenaries and security forces.
There were also farming families, but the farmland inside couldn’t support hundreds of thousands of people. That’s why the base often organized ability users and civilians to go out and gather edible plants and animals.
The outer city was mostly home to poor, ordinary folks and refugees from other bases, with a population two or three times that of the inner city.
Because of that, the outer city had worse security and a much higher death rate.
Beyond the outer city walls lay a vast wilderness and forest. Countless brutal mutant beasts and mutant creatures were hiding out there.
It was dangerous, but it also meant opportunity. If you were strong and lucky, you could still live pretty well out there.
Reina paid 50 points at the gate and hopped onto a harvesting team’s truck.
It was a beat-up box truck packed with dozens of people. Most were wearing rags and carrying baskets or backpacks.
They looked numb from the harsh life they lived. Some had skin rotting from demonic energy contamination. These were the people from the very bottom of the outer city.
After bumping along for a few hours, the truck finally stopped.
Reina hopped down with her bag and looked around.
The land around them was wide and empty. All the mutant plants had been cleared away.
The ground was leveled flat, and right in the middle was a huge courtyard with 33-foot-high walls topped with an electric fence.
Nine circular earthen buildings rose at the center.
Each building had a diameter of about 330 feet and stood roughly 65 feet tall. It had six floors, with dozens of rooms per floor, and it could withstand attacks from level 3 and below mutant beasts.
This place was a base camp for harvesting teams and also a gathering spot for wilderness mercenaries.
All kinds of scavengers and harvesters stayed here.
If you had the money, you stayed in the buildings. If you didn’t, you pitched a tent in the yard.
Some didn’t even have tents and just slept in a corner for the night.
Luckily, it was the warm season. Even without shelter, they wouldn’t freeze to death. The problem was mosquitoes and ants. Because of that, very few people slept outside. Most people at least squeezed into a tent with friends.
Reina definitely wasn’t sleeping outside. She’d just turned 18. Even if she were an ability user, sleeping alone in the open would be dangerous.
She checked her smartwatch. She still had a little over 500 points left—enough for a day or two in a building.
If she stayed longer, she could also trade in plants and animals with low contamination.
That wouldn’t be hard. After all, she had a harvesting ability, so getting low-contamination mutant plants wasn’t a problem.
