The Phoenix of the Slums

The stench of rotten food, smoke, and sewage hung heavy in the humid air of Donghai’s slums. It was the kind of place where dreams went to die—unless you were Li Tianming.

Barefoot and shirtless, Tianming crouched beside a broken-down noodle cart, his lean body glistening with sweat and grease. His fingers moved quickly, fixing the cart’s axle with a bent wrench he’d salvaged from a junkyard.

“You’re a miracle worker, Tianming,” said Old Ma, the cart’s owner, a frail man in his sixties with a smoker’s cough. “Come by tomorrow, I’ll have leftover noodles for you.”

Tianming flashed a tired smile. “I don’t fix things for food, Uncle Ma. Just remember my face when I’m famous.”

Old Ma chuckled, thinking it was a joke. But Tianming wasn’t joking.

He looked up. In the distance, the neon skyline of central Donghai pulsed with life. Towers scraped the clouds—homes of the rich and powerful, those who would never set foot in these slums. But one day, he swore, he would stand above them all.

As he walked back toward the abandoned train container he called home, a voice stopped him.

“Li Tianming?”

He turned, immediately alert.

A man in a black suit stood under the flickering light of a streetlamp. His face was partially hidden by a hat, but his posture was rigid, trained—like a soldier or a killer.

“Who’s asking?” Tianming asked cautiously.

The man stepped forward and handed him a plain white envelope. “You’re not who you think you are.”

Before Tianming could speak, the man vanished down the alley like a shadow swallowed by the dark.

Heart pounding, Tianming opened the envelope. Inside was a single old photo. A baby—him, unmistakably—wrapped in silk, lying in the arms of a woman with tears streaming down her face. On the back, a message:

“Forgive me. One day, the truth will return to you.”

Tianming stared at the photo, his fingers trembling. Questions swirled in his mind like a storm. Who was the woman? Why did she give him away? And who sent the photo?

His stomach twisted—not from hunger, but from something deeper.

Destiny.

He didn’t know it yet, but tonight, everything had changed.

And somewhere in the towering heart of Donghai, the Li family—the empire that tried to erase him—was about to learn that the boy they abandoned wasn’t dead.

He was just getting started.