Chapter 107: My City, My Story

London, the capital of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, possesses many widely recognized traits. Economically, it serves as the world’s premier financial center, controlling 45% of global foreign exchange transactions and holding pricing power over major commodities such as gold, silver, and crude oil.

Politically, since it became the capital of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, it has functioned as a political symbol; almost every politician in the world has been influenced, to some degree, by this city. Furthermore, it boasts the highest number of museums, libraries, and stadiums in the world, and it remains the only city to have hosted the Olympic Games three times.

It sounds as though, ever since the Romans built this city two thousand years ago, it has stood as the proudest of human achievements, as if truly favored by the gods and perpetually bathed in sunlight.

The story begins one month ago, starting amidst a heavy fog. It was not the legendary, blood-soaked, dark mist associated with Jack the Ripper, but rather the indifferent, shadow-laden haze found in the tales of Oliver Twist.

Adonis Keith stared at the thin mist outside his window, pondering a question that almost every human has contemplated at some point: how should one spend their life, given that death is inevitable for all?

He was born into a merchant family. As a young child, he traveled across the sea from Greece with his father, and ever since, the city had captured them. He grew up here, studied here, and lived among coffee and bread like a true Londoner.

He did not know who his mother was. Whenever he asked his father, the man would fly into a rage. The instinct for self-preservation kept the young Adonis from ever asking a second time. Gradually, he realized he was different from others; to him, "mother" was merely a concept.

His father brought many women home. Some stayed for a night, others for a month or two. One Greek woman with emerald eyes and black hair even stayed for several years. The woman, named Calliope, was kind to him; as a boy, he had even thought of calling her "Mom." But without exception, these women all left.

They passed through his life silently, leaving not a ripple behind. He still remembered the day Calliope moved out. She let her waterfall of black hair fall over her shoulders, and beneath her white Panama hat, thick sunglasses hid her eyes from him. She wore a light-colored dress, looking as if she were going on a trip and would return after the holiday with seashells or coral from Hawaii for him. That was indeed what he thought. But after Calliope leaned over to kiss him goodbye that day, he never saw her again. It was only many years later that he suddenly realized that day had been his final farewell to her.

From the day Calliope left, he closed the door to the outside world once more. He gradually became accustomed to hiding behind a mask of indifference and silence, observing this detached world. His father, busy with business negotiations and signing contracts, never cared about his son's alienation; he always believed that as long as he earned enough money, he could be an excellent father.

It seems that those who fear communicating with their own kind often develop a obsessive love for something else. His reclusive nature led Adonis Keith to become enamored with philosophy. He loved engaging in cross-temporal dialogues with those philosophers who, through their thoughts, had become immortal alongside human civilization—from the pre-madness Nietzsche to Schopenhauer, who shared a similar family background. He read far more books than he had ever met people.

After receiving his university degree, he removed the family crest—intricately patterned like a camel—from his chest. He stopped going out. Compared to the complex and cumbersome world, his quiet study was his eternal utopia. He would spend days and nights tirelessly in the library, which his father had barely entered since its construction. Those books, which the buyers considered more decorative than practical, filled every one of his days.

He often read obscure and difficult passages throughout the night, falling asleep with books as his pillow, regardless of the time. Some say philosophy is a waking dream; he would wake at hours where day and night blurred, the fog outside his window making him feel as hungry as a lion wandering alone in the wilderness.

The fog outside felt as if it had returned to 1952: the lingering smog, the towering chimneys, burning coal fueling steam engines, gears turning incessantly, and the black bell tolling at midnight.

Twenty-four-year-old Adonis Keith picked up a slip of paper from his desk, glanced at it, and tucked it into his pocket. The word on the paper was "Death." This was his habit: before heading out, he would draw a slip of paper and ponder all the questions stemming from that word until he returned.

He stood up, put on his coat, and walked out of the study. This vast and magnificent building was a gift from his father for his eighteenth birthday. It originally included servants and a housekeeper, but Adonis was accustomed to thinking and living alone, so he resided here by himself. Apart from the cleaning staff who visited once a week, no one else ever came.

Although he lived alone, he did not rely on pizza deliveries or junk food; he preferred to prepare the ingredients in his refrigerator into meals himself.

Carrying enough supplies to last a week, he walked out of the Marks & Spencer supermarket. The air of refinement cultivated from his upbringing in an affluent environment made the cashier glance at him a few times, but his cold demeanor left no room for anything to begin.

Adonis sometimes felt he should be considered a nihilist. No matter what methods others used to tell him how to re-endow life with absolute meaning or eternal value, he would, after a time, begin to reflect on whether these values were merely another form of nothingness.

He held an indifferent attitude toward everything, remained skeptical of social rules, and lived coldly and detached from the crowd.

He walked through the dense fog, as if on an endless trek. The fog made everything seem alien. He walked along the streets for a long, long time—so long that he had recited the final chapter of Simon Critchley’s *The Book of Dead Philosophers* in his mind without arriving home.

Adonis was lost. As a trainee philosopher, he found this almost expected. The only thing that made him feel a bit down was that he was now past the age where simply standing at an intersection looking dazed would prompt a police officer to take him home.

There were no grand Victorian buildings in sight, so this could not be the West End. He walked up to a building, waved away the mist, and clearly saw the graffiti-covered, dark-colored walls standing close together. He realized he had gone too far; this must be the East End, the only place where such traces of artists could be found.

He set down his paper bag; his right hand was sore from holding it for so long. One should not go out in this weather. He took a piece of bread from the bag, tore off a small piece, and popped it into his mouth to savor the sweet aroma of wheat. While chewing, he admired the graffiti painted on the walls in vivid inks.

Perhaps the common ground between philosophers and artists is that what they pursue is not understood by the world.

If not for what happened next, perhaps Adonis would have continued walking along these graffiti-covered streets until he found a police station or a taxi rank. He would have returned to that house to continue his reflections on the world. In the near future, he might become a true philosopher, or perhaps he might not.

"Stop! Raise your hands! Give me the money! Hurry!" An out-of-place voice interrupted Adonis’s thoughts.

In a nearby alley, a man who looked like a drifter—wearing a dirty punk T-shirt and a black mask—was pointing a gun at a woman with a panicked expression.

"Please, don't hurt me. I'll give you all the money." The woman raised her hands, her body trembling uncontrollably.

"Hurry up! Throw the wallet over! Don't make me say it twice!" The man’s voice was rough. His shouting made Adonis guess this was his first time doing something like this; people always used such volume to mask their own emotions.

Adonis stopped and listened to the sounds from the alley. He was no messenger of justice and had no intention of stepping forward. The only thing he could do was call the police, but given that he was currently lost, he didn't think the police would believe he wasn't joking. So, he decided that after the robbery concluded, he would go over to offer some humanitarian comfort to the victim.

Generally, a robber would start running as soon as they got the wallet, so Adonis moved a bit further away from the alley’s exit. He did not want to run into an emotionally unstable novice robber head-on.

"What is that!" The young robber suddenly saw something in the woman’s paper bag. His pupils constricted; it looked like a black gun handle.

"It's a toy..." The woman instinctively reached out to take the item from the bag; it was a toy she had bought for her son. If only it weren't a toy gun—if only the woman had considered her current situation—if only the robber could have been a bit calmer. Unfortunately, there are no "ifs" in this world.

In his panic and fear, the robber made a decision that left everyone in regret.

A gunshot rang out in the alley. Before Adonis could even react to what was happening, the man in the mask sprinted out of the alley.

Adonis walked into the alley. He saw the woman lying in a pool of blood. She was struggling, reaching her hands toward the sky as if trying to grasp something, but in the end, she grasped nothing, for the blood on the ground had already begun to grow cold.

He walked over. She must have been a housewife; her gray dress still bore the jam she had smeared on bread that morning. The shopping bag contained her husband’s shirt, her child’s toy, and dinner for the family of three. He could imagine that if the man hadn't fired, tomorrow she would have smiled while making breakfast, kissed her child, and stood on the balcony watching the child board the school bus.

She had been young, and she was going to grow old. Whether her past life had been filled with more joy or suffering, she had lived in this world, breathing the air of the same earth as Adonis under the same stars.

The bullet had struck her chest. Her heart, which should have been beating, had stopped. Bright red arterial blood flowed continuously from the wound. Blood loss had turned her face pale, and her eyes, like dull glass beads, held no trace of life. That body, which represented a wife and a mother, lay motionless. Even if the person she loved most and the person she hated most stood before her, she would offer no response.

Facing death for the first time, Adonis reached out, lost and at a loss for what to do.

Death is a short word. When it is spoken, those who have not seen it can only guess and fantasize based on past experience. But when death appears before your eyes, you realize there is no beauty to be found in it. The living can only feel the fear of one’s own kind falling into the unknown, like standing on the edge of a cliff.