Chapter 111 That day, you killed yourself with your own hands.
Pipa turned around and saw a young man of similar build to herself.
However, he is noticeably taller and more upright. He has no scar on his forehead and does not need to tilt slightly to maintain balance when standing.
Apart from that, they are like two people molded from the same mold.
"Young Taoist priest, is this... finally willing to see me?" Pipa smiled and took a few steps closer to the young man.
Yu Qingzhou stood still, her eyes seemingly filled with a faint sadness as she looked at the boy.
"You've grown so much already," he murmured, as if sighing.
Pipa was somewhat surprised. These words implied that they had met long ago, and when Pipa was very young.
"Young Taoist priest, what makes you say that?" he asked. "Have we perhaps met before?"
That's what they say, but Pipa doesn't remember ever doing that.
If it really happened, the only way we could meet is in a dream like this, but he really has no recollection of it at all.
"Indeed, we met, a very, very long time ago..."
Yu Qingzhou spoke softly, like the beginning of an old, tired story, followed by an unexpected twist: "But not in a dream."
It's not a dream...
—What is that?
My head suddenly started to throb, as if something long buried was stirring and trying to break through my flesh and blood.
Pipa couldn't help but hug her head, her body slightly hunched over.
Until someone bent down in front of him.
Pipa looked up and saw Yu Qingzhou's lips opening and closing through her interlaced fingers.
He spoke incomprehensible words, word by word.
“Do you remember?” he said.
—What do you remember?
"The day you buried yourself with your own hands...the day you killed yourself with your own hands."
"I... killed myself?"
Pipa repeated the other person's words with difficulty, her heart filled with doubt and uncertainty.
“Yes,” Yu Qingzhou echoed, her expression gentle yet sorrowful. “It all started from that time. We were trapped here as punishment for touching the taboo.”
Upon hearing this, Pipa suddenly recalled the voice she had heard in her dream not long ago, the one that had been echoing above her head at that time...
Perhaps it is...
The pain suddenly intensified, and the boy involuntarily bent his knees and collapsed to his knees with a thud.
"Is it painful?" Yu Qingzhou's voice came through, filled with deep worry and a hint of regret. "I really shouldn't have dragged you into this—"
Before he could finish speaking, the boy suddenly stretched out his hand forward with all his might, as if he wanted to grab the other person with all his might.
But the fingertip passed straight through the void.
He failed to reach the other person.
As a result, he fell to the ground in a disheveled state.
Yu Qingzhou instinctively reached out to help, but her fingertips stopped just half an inch away from the other person.
He knew he couldn't touch the other person.
Just like the boy, he was also unable to touch him.
Because it is impossible for two people to be exactly the same at the same time.
Despite their differences in appearance, they do share the same soul, or rather, each possesses a fragment of the soul.
There is a natural attraction between fragments.
It was an instinctive longing for completeness.
However, once successfully integrated into a whole, the fragments themselves cease to exist.
To live broken, or to die whole...
It was never really a problem.
At the moment of his death, Yu Qingzhou suddenly remembered everything. It was at that moment that he saw the newborn baby, who was born in a very ordinary, even simple, farmhouse courtyard.
In one corner of the yard grew an inconspicuous loquat tree.
However, Yu Qingzhou found it very familiar.
Before Yu Qingzhou could even glance at the loquat tree, a woman's shrill scream suddenly came from one of the rooms.
Upon hearing this painful cry, Yu Qingzhou felt a sudden jolt, and her body floated uncontrollably toward that spot.
Upon entering the house, the first thing he saw was the baby's pale face.
His mouth and eyes were tightly closed.
His face, which should have been rosy, had turned a deathly bluish-gray.
A strange impulse compelled Yu Qingzhou to reach out and touch the poor child before her, whose very birth had sealed his fate.
Unexpectedly, Yu Qingzhou lost consciousness the moment her finger touched the baby's forehead.
When he opened his eyes again, the world crashed into his vision upside down, and he was exposed to this unfamiliar world without any cover.
A tremendous fear suddenly enveloped him, forcing him to open his mouth and let out a cry that, while not loud, was nonetheless inspiring.
What happened afterward was mostly as Pipa remembered, though not entirely the same.
For example, he was actually a very lively child when he was young.
So lively was Yu Qingzhou always worried that the other person might accidentally fall from a height and break the child's still not strong neck.
Fortunately, nothing happened.
However, as the child grew up, Yu Qingzhou's consciousness became increasingly blurred.
He gradually forgot where he came from, why he was here, and why everything before him felt strangely familiar, as if he had experienced it a thousand times in a dream...
One day, Yu Qingzhou forgot her own name.
The sun shone brightly that day. He looked at the child he had watched grow up, and saw that familiar face appear high in the branches, obscured by the trembling shadows of the trees.
An ominous thought, a bad omen, flashed through his increasingly dull mind.
With the crisp crack of the branch breaking, his soul seemed to leave his body in an instant.
The earth trembled violently.
He was in pain all over from the fall, especially his head.
As he got up from the ground, a young woman rushed out of the house in a panic and anxiously hugged him to check on him.
He inhaled the earthy, sun-kissed scent of the woman's embrace and felt inexplicably at peace. Overcome by drowsiness, he drifted off to sleep...
I woke up again not long ago.
A familiar stirring awakened Yu Qingzhou from her slumber.
Yu Qingzhou quickly recognized that it was the buzzing sound emanating from the Qingxiao Sword.
—And Qingxiao was the birthday gift that he had once given to Li Xiao.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
