Wei Lingsheng set down his brush. A few drops of ink fell onto the paper below, spreading in silence. His mind was elsewhere. Song Huiya's words from that morning still turned in his ears, cold and deliberate. He sifted through his memories the way a man searches a ransacked room, looking for proof of what was real and what was performance. Which moments had she manufactured? Which kindnesses had been calculated? Life before Bu Liu Mountain felt like someone else's story. It surfaced only in fragments, most of it worn down by time. His family had broken apart early. He had finally found shelter, and then his teacher died, and the world pushed him back onto the road. His past was not something he could look at directly. But when he forced himself to sort through what remained, most of it had Song Huiya in it. For the first six weeks after arriving at Bu Liu Mountain, he was waking from nightmares regularly. He slept only when exhaustion overtook him in the afternoons. At nig...
Ji Pingxuan's world was coming apart at the seams. He stood before the door for a moment, then stepped inside. Two bowls sat on the cracked wooden table. Two sets of clothing soaked in a bucket in the corner. Windows shut. Everything exactly as it had been three years ago. He sat down, lifted a bowl, and let his mind drift back. He had been adopted at six. By nine, the whispers of strangers had begun to teach him his own history. He learned the shape of the disaster that had taken his family before he was old enough to understand what disaster meant. His faith shattered. From that day, a slow and methodical self-destruction began. Late at night, thinking of his parents buried in a mass grave wrapped in straw mats, he felt something murderous move through him. But daylight always came. He stepped outside, looked across the street at the man who had taken him in, and understood that deep hatred collapses under the weight of incompetence. The feeling had nowhere to go. So it beca...