I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 217: Jisoo eye

And further out, past even that, in a low stretch of the city tucked between two rises in the terrain— black. Not just dark, not just shadowed, but a flat heavy black that seemed to be sitting on the buildings rather than just covering them, water glinting faintly somewhere within it, the whole district giving off the kind of stillness that didn’t read as empty so much as waiting.

I scanned past all of it, straining, and caught— barely, right at the edge of what my focused vision could manage, a thin pale line cutting across the horizon. The wall. Still miles out. Still impossible to make out any real detail on, but there, holding the whole shape of this place together at the edges.

"Haaa..." I let out a slow breath, balanced up on the crane arm with the wind pulling at my shirt. "I’m actually grateful for this passive. ’Focus eyes’ you just focus your eyes a bit and you can see way farther than you should."

I stood on the crane arm for another long moment, just looking, letting my eyes do its work while the night sat quiet around me. North held my attention the longest— the jungle canopy spreading wide and the dark thing that last few rows of buildings, impossibly dense.

Though, the jungle looking part has my attention, Trees that had no business growing that tall, canopy so thick it swallowed the rooftops underneath completely.

Then an unexpected roar came.

It rolled out of the jungle like something had decided the whole city needed to hear it, low and enormous, and every bird in that canopy launched upward at once in a dark churning number that spread across the sky before scattering in every direction.

Even from this distance, with the ’focus eye’ pulling my vision in tight, the scale of whatever had made that sound didn’t fully compute.

I shifted west. The swamp stretched wide and flat, dead trees rising from the still water, the whole surface pale under the moonlight.

Something then moved underneath it— massive, slow, a displacement of water so large that even from hundreds of miles away I could see the ripple.

I held my gaze there for a second, watching, then decided that was enough of that.

I tried pushing my focus north again, past the jungle this time, past the camp smoke I’d spotted earlier— and hit nothing. Just dark. Strange darkness, something weird, something that didn’t resolve no matter how hard I pushed the passive. "I somehow can’t focus past there," I said to no one.

I stood on the crane arm one more moment, then grabbed the support beam, slid down in long controlled drops to cut the fall distance, and jumped across to the rooftop where I’d left Jisoo.

She was lying down on MY mattress she’d apparently stole and magically fit it inside her bag.

"...ಠ_ಠ"

She looked up at me, completely unbothered. "Ay, you done? Fun up there?" She stretched, arms over her head, propping herself up on one elbow. "You can go check more if you want. Honestly pretty chill down here."

I gritted my teeth, walked over, and scooped her up before she had time to read the situation and brace for it.

She squealed— high, sharp, completely involuntary, and grabbed my shoulder hard enough to bruise as I tucked her against me and sprinted for the crane.

Wait. Was that not cute Jisoo? That was real Jisoo for sue, but She just squealed...

I hid that away somewhere private and kept climbing, her grip locked on my shoulder with the full strength of someone who had just discovered they did not enjoy surprise crane climbing.

We made it to the top. I found a flat section of the arm stable enough to sit on and set her down, and she stayed put, glaring at the back of my head as her breathing evened out.

Then she looked around.

I watched it happen— the moment her eyes started really taking in what was up here. The jungle to the north, the swamp to the west, the full spread of the boxed city caught between its own, slowly unraveling.

Her expression shifted from annoyed to genuinely confused in real time. "Wait. What the fuck— why is there a massive jungle over there?" She pointed north, then swung her arm west. "And over there— that’s not just a swamp, that’s basically a river or ocean, and— is that a mutated elephant? A giraffe? Swimming? And that’s an alligator, that’s an alligator the size of a fucking buil—"

"I actually just brought you up here for the view," I said. "It’s nice. Peaceful... but ehy did you use that skill?"

She stared at me. "How could I not use the skill? This is the best vantage point we’ve had this entire trial."

She pointed north again, lower this time, past the jungle canopy toward where I’d spotted movement earlier. "And there— there’s a camp. Big one. Multiple fires, organized layout. That’s got to be the one from the radio." She nodded to herself, already listing it.

Then her gaze drifted east, toward the dried section of the city— pale and cracked and silent, then the north again, further, toward the part I hadn’t been able to focus past. The dark one. The one that didn’t resolve.

She squinted.

A sudden electric spark hit her without warning— a sharp blue-white crack that appeared around her temples and her eyes at the same time, and she lurched backward with a sound that was more pain than surprise, both hands flying to cover her face.

I got a hand behind her back immediately, keeping her from going over the edge. She didn’t sit back down— she was moving, shifting her weight side to side, clearly trying to walk off something that couldn’t be walked off.

"Ah! ah!!! fuck— my eyes!! Si Hon, something over there— it looked at me when I looked at it, it looked directly back at me!? What the fuck!!!"

"What? What looke—"

"This—" She pulled her hands down and turned toward me, and her eyes were wrong— irises looking swollen somehow, pressure behind them, the whites threading red from corner to corner. "This thing is impossible, this section might actually be—"

She stopped.

A light hit us, slowly.

Slow gold beginning to press up from the far eastern edge of the sky, spreading in a low warm band along the horizon and catching the clouds above it in shades of orange and pale pink.

Sunrise.

It moved the way sunrise always moved, patient and enormous, like it had nowhere to be and nothing to prove.

Jisoo stopped mid-sentence.

The tension in her shoulders dropped. The pained squint softened. She stood there with her eyes still red-threaded and her hands still half-raised, and she just... watched the light come up over the ruined city, over the jungle and the swamp and the dried quarter and the dark section that looked back when you stared at it she said... washing all of it in the same slow gold.

I reached out carefully and guided her back down onto the crane arm beside me.

She sat. Exhaled. Watched the sunrise for a long moment, the color catching in her eyes even through the damage.

Then, quietly: "We should regress. Go a different direction. North is impossible."

"No," I said.

She turned her head and looked at me. "ಠ_ಠ. Si Hon."

"Sup?"

"ಠ益ಠ."

"North," I said.

The sun kept coming up over all of it, indifferent to both of us.