Chapter 100 You have no idea how long I've been waiting; I'm almost going crazy with anticipation...
Pipa paused for a moment when faced with Lan Yunzhi's researching gaze.
"Should I...remember anything?" he asked tentatively.
Lan Yunzhi stared at his expression for a while, and it was unclear whether he believed her or not, but the burning passion in his eyes gradually subsided.
Then suddenly he gave a nonchalant smile.
"It's okay, anything is fine, as long as you're here, by my side, in front of me..."
As they were talking, the young man suddenly lowered his head and put his ear close to the loquat.
My chest feels heavy.
The loquat was surprised to feel the other's weight; although it wasn't all of it, its presence was undeniable.
This was the first time this had happened, and the boy instinctively tried to push the other person away.
Before they could even make a move, they suddenly heard the young man murmur softly, "Is just for a little while okay?"
"..."
"I haven't heard a heartbeat like this in so long, so real, it's like a dream, but I know it's not. You have no idea how long I've waited, I'm almost going crazy..."
As Lan Yunzhi spoke, a hint of weariness gradually crept into her voice.
His voice grew softer and softer, becoming more and more like he was talking in his sleep.
Finally, Pipa heard the other person's even breathing.
The room was very quiet.
Pipa raised her head slightly and glanced down at the young man's profile out of the corner of her eye.
The shape of her eyes, nose, and mouth... including the red beauty mark under her eye, truly resembled the image of Lan Yunzhi from my memory.
Can……
Young Master Lan never frowned like this in his sleep.
He never showed such a childlike unease on his face.
The young master Lan, who once lost his family and fell from grace, would not have acted this way. Now that he is in this situation, there is no reason for him to do so.
Unless... unless the person in front of me isn't...
Fragments of her dream flashed through her mind, and Pipa's heart stirred. As if possessed, she moved closer to the sleeping young man's ear and whispered, "A-Nian—"
Even he himself didn't know why he did it.
Just looking at this scene, I felt a strange surge of emotion welling up inside me.
He regretted it as soon as the words left his mouth, but fortunately the young man seemed to be sleeping soundly and did not notice anything unusual about himself.
A Nian...
Li Nian...
In my dream, there was a young man whose face looked remarkably like that of Young Master Lan. The bright red wedding invitation bore his and Yu Qingzhou's names.
Pipa remembered that in that dream where daylight never came, the next day was supposed to be the wedding day for the two of them.
—What happened next?
Pipa couldn't see it. He kept entering his dreams, only to be met with endless darkness and Lan sitting alone in her room.
So it seems he hasn't seen Lan in a long time.
Just as the other person said, that day really seemed to be the last time we met.
Now that things have come to this, Pipa can no longer regard everything related to Yu Qingzhou as a mere dream.
However, the question is, if everything in the dream is real, what is its relationship with the reality we live in?
Past lives, present lives, or something else...
Why did everyone arrive at the same place as if by prior arrangement?
Is this a recurring entanglement?
—And the most important question is, how can I get rid of all of this?
That's right, it's about getting rid of it.
Loquat wants to get out of her current situation.
Even if that Taoist priest Yu really was my past life, even if I saw bits and pieces of the past through his eyes, I, as an ordinary person, still couldn't empathize with him.
Pipa considers herself to be just a timid and cowardly mortal in this life.
They lacked both the swift and decisive methods to vanquish demons and the unwavering belief in protecting the righteous path.
His earliest dream was to stay by his mother's side; his mother's happiness was his happiness.
But my mother died.
During the famine that year, Pipa accidentally saw the corpse of Aunt Li next door and developed a high fever after returning home.
That's not entirely true. That day, he not only saw the dead Aunt Li, but also Uncle Li cutting flesh off her body with a knife and axe.
Uncle Li squatted there with his back to him, intently chopping at Aunt Li's legs.
So they didn't notice that the neighbor's child was peeking through the fence, nor did they notice that Aunt Li, who was originally lying flat, coincidentally turned her head to the side during the pulling of the blade.
The dead man's face was facing the direction where the loquat was.
The instant their faces met, Pipa seemed to see Aunt Li giving her a smile that only a dead person would have.
What a bizarre sight!
A husband preparing to eat his wife's corpse, and a dead man who is being hacked at by the husband while giving himself a strange smile.
The loquat was so frightened that it fell seriously ill.
In his dazed state, he actually heard his parents arguing.
I seemed to hear bits and pieces of vague words like: meat...exchange...eat...and so on.
Then came the loud sound of a heavy object falling.
Pipa didn't know what had happened and was panicking. She tried to get up to check, but she couldn't move at all.
Instead, due to the sudden surge of anger, he fainted again.
In the following days, Pipa was always half-asleep, and he felt his mother come to his bedside, help him up, and feed him soup.
The soup was very fragrant, with a long-lost aroma of meat floating in the air.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, almost instinctively. At this time, his mother would always pat his shoulder and tell him to slow down.
With the meat broth and her mother's meticulous care, the loquat recovered day by day.
However, my mother was visibly growing weaker and weaker.
It was as if... as if she had ripped off her own flesh and blood and used it little by little to fill her son's body.
Finally, one day, when her mother brought over the meat soup, Pipa resolutely refused to drink it anymore.
"Mom, I'm all better now. You should drink the broth. You look so weak, I'm so scared..."
Pipa dared not say it, but he was actually afraid that his mother would turn into Aunt Li's kind of person.
However, her mother simply touched Pipa's cheek with her thin, bony hands and urged him to drink the soup.
There's still some in the pot, you drink it first, and Mom will have more when you finish it.
Upon hearing this, Pipa became suspicious: "Mom, where did we get so much meat?"
Then he belatedly realized that he hadn't seen his father in a long time.
Recalling what she had seen in Aunt Li's backyard a few days ago, a terrifying thought suddenly arose in Pipa's mind: could the meat in this bowl be—
His body suddenly trembled, and the soup bowl fell to the ground with a loud thud, startling both the mother and child.
Seeing the blank expression on her mother's face, Pipa panicked and didn't know what to do.
I...I'm sorry, Mother, I don't know what happened...
His mother, regaining her composure, smiled gently at him: "It's alright, there's still some. Wait a moment, I'll go get more."
As she spoke, her mother bent down to pick up the bowl that had fallen to the ground.
Unexpectedly, his head tilted to the side, and he fell down.
And then he couldn't get up...
Later, Pipa found her father's body in the storage room behind the house. He was lying on the ground with a noticeable wound on the back of his head. It was probably from a fall, but whether it was an accident or something else is now impossible to verify.
His father was still too heavy for him to carry. After thinking for a moment, he found a mat and covered him with it.
Mother is very light, which makes sense. She was already so thin, and then so much flesh was cut off. How could she possibly gain weight?
He carried his mother for quite a while, not knowing where they were going.
As we walked, we arrived at the riverbank.
As the weather gets hotter, everyone is starving, so they conserve their energy by sleeping all day and only going out to forage at night, making them no different from wild animals.
Loquat thought.
That's perfect, otherwise the mother and son wouldn't be able to leave the village so openly and come to such a far place.
After sitting for an unknown amount of time, a boat suddenly appeared in the distance.
At first, Pipa thought it was just a hallucination from staying there too long. She never imagined it was real, and even less that it was a group of human traffickers.
Human traffickers come to the village to collect children and women.
The loquat is a child, and its mother is a woman.
Pipa thinks both are quite suitable.
But the leader refused, saying that they were involved in human trafficking and didn't care about collecting corpses.
Pipa nodded and earnestly began to negotiate: he could sell himself and use the money to hire the other party to help dig a hole, without burying him, as the other party could do the burying himself.
The leader seemed to be hearing this novel request for the first time, and actually agreed.
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