Chapter 85#
Second floor of the small wooden cabin, at night.
Ji Yang had just finished showering and blow-drying his hair. He stood before the bathroom sink, looking at himself in the mirror.
He tried to find traces of the resemblance Nie Xu had spoken of, in the person reflected back at him. Whether it was due to viewing himself through his own perspective, he couldn’t sense much of a resemblance at all. Instead, the longer he looked, the more it felt like an illusion — as if he were seeing the version of himself from before he’d transmigrated into the book.
Back then, his hair had been shorter than it was now, and for the sake of livestreaming, he had dyed it all sorts of colors.
Ji Yang unconsciously began to dig back through his memories.
But there was something strange.
He realized that many of his memories were actually somewhat blank.
He couldn’t recall anything from before elementary school, nor did he remember clearly how he had escaped from that father of his — one who loved to throw punches and kicks so much it was genuinely sickening. He also couldn’t remember what he had been doing in the time leading up to his final livestream.
Previously, he hadn’t thought anything was amiss.
He had simply assumed he wasn’t the type to dwell on the past, that many things just didn’t register with him. But now, thinking back carefully, something felt unsettlingly hollow in his chest.
A knock came from outside the bathroom door.
Nie Xu’s voice arrived simultaneously. “Don’t stay in there too long.”
“I’m done.” Ji Yang pulled himself out of his thoughts, walked over, and opened the door.
Nie Xu’s gaze swept down to his hand. He frowned, caught hold of it, and asked, “Is this how you wash?”
Ji Yang looked down.
He realized that, lost in thought, he had placed his bandaged hand directly under the running faucet. Now the gauze was completely soaked, and the freshly scabbed wound had started seeping blood again.
Ji Yang: “It’s fine. Just needs to be rewrapped.”
Nie Xu said nothing. In just a few deft motions, he unwound the gauze, tossed the soggy pieces into the trash can nearby, and led Ji Yang into the bedroom to rewrap it.
Moonlight streamed in through the glass roof onto the floor bed.
Ji Yang gazed at it for a moment.
“What are you thinking about?” Nie Xu crouched on one knee in front of him, looking up.
Ji Yang waited until Nie Xu finished tying a knot on the bandage, then collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh. “Nothing. Too many things going on, all tangled up. I might be getting a little cognitively impaired.”
“You need rest. Don’t overthink.” Nie Xu stood up and motioned for him to get under the covers.
Ji Yang casually tugged the blanket and rolled over, dizzy and lightheaded, curling himself into the corner.
Before closing his eyes, something came to mind and he said, “You should sleep here tonight. Don’t bother going back to the You residence. It’s not like you haven’t slept here before.”
“Alright,” Nie Xu answered. “Go to sleep quickly.”
Ji Yang fell asleep. Fast.
It felt like he had only slept a moment before waking again.
Ji Yang heard a woman’s voice.
“Baby.”
“Over here — come catch me.”
The woman from the photograph suddenly appeared vividly before his eyes.
In a square courtyard.
The woman had run herself tired. She stopped and sat by the stone table, smiling, opening her arms wide toward him.
“Mom.” Ji Yang stumbled toward her.
Someone nearby laughed and teased.
“I never would have thought that someone with your temper would be this patient once she became a mother.”
The woman bent down and pinched his little cheek. “Who told Yangyang to be so cute? ‘Yang’ — it’s a homophone for ‘bright sunlight rising’ — the way water ripples when kissed by the sun. I hope his heart will always be brilliantly luminous, that his spirit will be vast and boundless, riding the wind and breaking the waves.”
The person beside her spoke again. “You don’t regret giving birth to a child with the Ji surname?”
The woman said softly, “It’s because of him that all of this feels meaningful. The decision I regret least in my entire life is having him.”
She pulled Ji Yang into her arms, coaxing him to sleep.
Ji Yang seemed to catch the faint fragrance of flowers, the wind gentle and soft, like the embrace of a mother he had never remembered.
He could tell he was still dreaming, but he was greedy for that moment of beauty.
As though he had truly possessed it, once.
But in the blink of an eye, the scene shifted.
Ji Yang found himself standing inside the old tube-shaped apartment building where he had lived for over a decade — in that tiny room of less than ten square meters. The rust on the bunk bed frame, the peeling patches on the wall corners, the thin sliver of light from the small window — all exactly as he remembered.
He’d transmigrated back?
The shock was no less than if a billion-dollar company had gone bankrupt overnight.
Ji Yang stood in the center of the room and saw another version of himself — the him from before transmigrating. He looked about fifteen, sneaking behind the door panel.
Voices carried from the living room.
It was that gambler of a father, loud as ever: “I’ve raised this kid for nearly ten years. You say he’s not my son and that’s supposed to be that?”
Another voice Ji Yang didn’t recognize.
Sounded like a man.
“He isn’t. He’s a descendant of the Ji family in Fanzhou. He wandered down to Jinzhou as a child, and you swapped him in to take the household registration of your own dead son — the one who shared the same name — so you could extort the family whose car hit and killed your son, on a regular schedule.”
Ji Yang’s “father”: “I don’t care if it’s Fanzhou or Lanzhou! Bottom line — if you want to take him, give me three hundred thousand.”
The man: “One million. I’ll give you one million. I want you to make sure he never leaves Jinzhou for the rest of his life. He dies right here.”
Ji Yang had absolutely no memory of any of this happening.
From a god’s-eye perspective, he watched the version of himself from the past.
But the him behind the door had his fists clenched tight. Ji Yang could almost feel the shock, the fury, the bewilderment.
The scene shifted again.
He was in the living room.
He saw himself eating with the man he had called “Dad” in his memories.
He could see the visible tension in his own body, while across the table, the man — whose face was ravaged beyond repair by drink and meat — served him food solicitously, urged him to eat faster, then looked him over with a truly repulsive gaze. Face flushed red from drinking, the man reached out, trying to touch him, muttering: “You really do look fine…”
Before the hand made contact came a blood-curdling scream.
The fork in his hand had pierced clean through the back of the man’s hand. Trembling slightly from a combination of force used and the terror of having hurt someone.
Ji Yang watched his younger self put on a bold front, ignoring the man’s cursing and wailing, and bolt straight back to the room. He grabbed the backpack that had long since been packed with two old changes of clothes, then charged back out.
Open the door, close the door — bang — everything happened in the blink of an eye.
He hadn’t actually left right away. Peering through the crack in the door, he saw the man holding up his bleeding hand, storming to the cabinet in the living room, and roughly prying open that lunchbox.
Finding it empty, the man swept everything off the table in a rage.
He was on the phone.
The moment the line connected, he started cursing: “Fuck me — that little brat ran! I was planning to drug him, sell him off — a place like that, he can’t escape, and he’d fetch a pretty penny. Who knew he’d be so damn clever — grabbed the two hundred he’d just earned collecting bottles and bolted! Motherfucker… Find him? Where the hell am I supposed to find him now? That kid’s been wild as anything, sometimes doesn’t come home for ten days at a stretch…”
Ji Yang wanted desperately to question him.
“Who was on the other end of that call?”
“The one who offered a million?”
“Why did you say I was a descendant of the Ji family in Fanzhou? Which Ji family?”
So many, many questions — none answered.
The scene changed again.
Still in the same district of the tube-shaped apartments, but a grittier, more dilapidated area to the east.
The fifteen-year-old Ji Yang lived together with several other children his age — those whose families had died out, or whose relatives didn’t care about them.
A derelict concrete building that couldn’t keep out the wind, the floor covered in a layer of dried grass.
Ji Yang sat cross-legged on it, watching three barefoot boys rush in from outside.
All talking at once.
“Ji Xiaoyang! Your dad’s been asking around about where you are these past two days. Has he regretted kicking you out?”
Ji Yang heard himself reply: “He regrets not selling me for a better price.”
“Then you’re not going back to school?”
Ji Yang: “Not going.”
“Eh, might be for the best anyway. School’s full of people who look down on everyone. And you look young for your age. If it weren’t for the fact that you actually hit hard when you fight, who knows how much crap you’d have to put up with.”
Someone nearby chimed in: “Oh, by the way — I heard the family living upstairs from your old place came back today. Big commotion. Your dad’s probably too busy watching the show to come after you. Didn’t you say you needed to go get your household registration? Wanna go today?”
“Let’s go!” Ji Yang sprang up from the straw.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Ji Yang slipped back to the place he used to live. He didn’t dare take the stairs — he clung to the water pipe on the back of the building and climbed straight up to the second-floor window.
The moment he stepped onto the balcony railing and looked up, his eyes locked with someone leaning out from the floor above.
“Holy shit!” Ji Yang’s foot slipped, and he nearly fell from the second floor.
Fortunately, his reflexes were sharp enough to catch himself.
“What are you looking at?!” Ji Yang hissed through gritted teeth, glaring at the person. The other looked older than him — probably in his early twenties. Ji Yang threatened: “Make a sound and you’re dead!”
The young man upstairs, who had the bearing of an adult, said nothing.
Ji Yang heard someone asking from further inside: “A-Xu, what are you looking at? You’ve been staring for ages.”
The young man replied offhandedly: “Nothing. Just spotted a cat.”
“A stray cat?” The questioner’s tone carried a smile. “Your adoptive father specifically sent you to accompany the young master back this time. Why do I get the feeling you’re distracted? Hey, I’ll say this — this young master, even though he’s an illegitimate child, the previous madam and child of the Ji family’s main branch are both dead. Make the young master happy — what future is there to worry about?”
The one called A-Xu replied: “My adoptive father took me in as his godson. That alone is the greatest future I could ask for.”
“You and your stubbornness,” the other person continued. “I’ve heard about what happened to your family back then. You’ve been repaying that debt for years — isn’t that enough?”
A-Xu didn’t answer.
Ji Yang caught fragments of the conversation but found it all confusing. He didn’t stay hidden — he rolled over and slipped inside the room.
Ji Yang successfully got the household registration.
But on the way out, he ran face-to-face with the returning gambler.
The man lunged at him with a twisted expression, and Ji Yang grappled with him on the spot.
Inside, pots and pans crashed and clattered.
Outside, there was a festive commotion.
Ji Yang could hear the neighborhood’s noisy gathering downstairs, hear footsteps upstairs — a whole string of them, descending one after another.
It seemed the family upstairs had come back for a visit and was now preparing to leave.
Ji Yang was shoved against the window by the man.
Glancing down outside, he caught sight of a boy around his own age, bending to get into a black sedan parked at the curb.
At that moment, the boy suddenly turned his head and looked up toward the window. Ji Yang wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a look of malicious satisfaction.
“Rich people are all sick,” Ji Yang muttered.
The Ji Yang of that age still carried a healthy dose of cynical bitterness with nowhere to vent it.
The man grabbed a wooden stool, heedless of anything, and swung it down.
Ji Yang dodged sideways — and in that same instant, his father toppled forward without warning. The stool shattered against the wall into splinters.
Ji Yang stared at the person who had appeared silently in the living room and completely blanked.
“How did you get in?” Ji Yang finally found his voice.
The young man stepped over the body on the floor. “Walked through the door.”
Ji Yang instinctively retreated.
Because at this distance, he could clearly feel the indefinable quality radiating from the other’s person.
One look told you he was no ordinary man.
Those eyes — as though nothing in the world could shake them — like a cold weapon from an old world, or the kind of presence that had dwelled in the abyss so long it had fused with all the surrounding darkness.
Ji Yang recalled the overheard phone call, and the more he thought about it, the tenser he became.
“Are you going to kill me?” Ji Yang asked.
The person approached step by step, until Ji Yang’s back was against the wall. He stopped, reached up, and plucked a stray dead twig from Ji Yang’s hair. Then, speaking lightly: “If you’re leaving, leave now. Don’t climb through windows next time.”
Ji Yang stood frozen.
The person who had spoken was already turning to leave.
Ji Yang looked down from above.
The man who had stood before him just a minute ago was already on the ground floor below.
The moment he walked past, two rows of men in black suits standing by the car all bowed their heads in acknowledgment and followed him into the vehicles one by one.
The cars drove off.
The tube-shaped apartments were still the tube-shaped apartments. Nothing had changed. As if the whole thing had been an illusion.
“Ji Yang.”
“Ji Yang.”
“Yangyang.”
Ji Yang was woken by the voice at his ear.
He was gasping for air, eyes flying open — he was still in the bed in the small wooden cabin.
The sky wasn’t even light yet.
Looking up through the glass ceiling, he could see a sky full of stars.
Ji Yang let out a long breath of relief.
It was a dream.
He raised his arm and draped it over his eyes.
“Another nightmare?” Nie Xu touched his sweat-damp hair and reached sideways to switch on the small bedside lamp.
Ji Yang lowered his arm and saw the man propping himself up on one side.
No.
It wasn’t a dream.
A premonition stirred in him — that it had really happened.
His mother, appearing in the dream; the memories lost from his previous life — this time, he had no grounds to convince himself those memories belonged to someone else.
So there really was no such thing as transmigrating into a book.
In his previous life, he had also been a child of the Ji family. He had even met Nie Xu — a Nie Xu who was only about twenty-one years old.
How could he have forgotten?
Ji Yang stared at the man under the lamplight.
That Nie Xu gave Ji Yang a very different impression. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the person he called his adoptive father was Ji Yansong. They were like two extremes of life. Ji Yang had grown up in the streets, while Nie Xu had risen and fallen through endless dark nights.
If transmigrating into the book was false, then what did the ending Ji Chengyi had described actually signify?
Nie Xu’s voice was low. “What’s wrong? Are you unwell?”
Ji Yang sat blank for a long moment, then slowly leaned in closer.
He reached out and wrapped his arms around Nie Xu’s waist, tightening his hold, pressing his face against Nie Xu’s chest.
His voice was hoarser than he had ever known it to be. “Mm… a little.”
“What did you dream about?” Nie Xu let himself be held, his voice softening in the darkness, as though coaxing.
Ji Yang: “Didn’t you say that child from when you were young was me? I dreamed that we actually reunited before.”
In a past life.
In the place called Jinzhou.