Eternal

Nan Changgeng picked up the glass of water from the coffee table and lowered her eyes, taking a few small sips. The water had gone cold. The icy liquid slid down her throat into her stomach, and the brief relief felt immediate.

Some sufficiently clear physical sensations could cut through emotion and remind a person, in a very real way, that she was alive.

“I understand.”

She set the glass down and stood up. Her gray-blue eyes were calm as the sea. “I’ll do my best.”

“Then I wish her luck.”

Lin Yan saw her out with a smile. Watching Nan Changgeng’s retreating back, a faint glimmer passed through her gaze. Quietly, without any fuss, she raised her hands, pressed her palms together before her chest, and silently prayed.

“Please bless her.”

May the god she had offered up truly save her.

…

Nan Changgeng knocked on the door across the hall.

After waiting a long while, just as she was about to lift her hand and knock again, the door slowly opened a crack.

“I’m fine, Teacher; please don’t come bother me.”

Nan Changgeng said nothing. Before the other person could react, she pushed the door open.

Yu Mao stood in the doorway, her face white as paper. She looked up at Nan Changgeng, then stumbled back half a step in a daze.

“Changgeng… I’m sorry.”

Before Nan Changgeng even asked why she had come over, she already understood why.

“I’m sorry. I brought trouble to you.”

She was clearly on the verge of collapse. But her collapse was quiet and soundless, like a poorly assembled Lego model; it did not need a tremendous crash to fall apart and scatter across the floor.

Those glassy black eyes were soaked with moisture, beautiful in a way that felt artificial; even her panic and helplessness carried a stiff, mechanical quality.

Nan Changgeng’s heart tightened. The resolve she had built up for so long seemed ready to come apart at the first glance.

Her eyes burned faintly with heat, and she forced it back with all her strength. She did not want to torment Yu Mao with her own tears.

“No need to apologize. I came to ask you something.” As she spoke, she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

Yu Mao blinked, her expression settling a little at once. “What is it?”

Nan Changgeng couldn’t help the curve of her lips. Just as she had thought, the best way to handle Yu Mao was to tell her she was needed.

“Won’t you ask me to sit down first?”

Yu Mao’s eyes widened a little more. She quickly shook her head, grabbed the sleeve of Nan Changgeng’s coat, and pulled her over to the sofa.

That slight tug, together with the girl’s expression, always made her feel as if a cat were biting her clothes and dragging her along.

Only after she sat down on the sofa did she get a chance to look around Yu Mao’s place.

The decor was plain, with a faintly hotel-like feel. It was probably a standard developer layout, with no personal touches at all.

The bedroom door was open. Yu Mao hadn’t closed it when she came out, and from Nan Changgeng’s angle, she could see inside clearly… She saw a huge poster of herself on the wall.

The moment she sat down, she quietly stood up again.

“Can I take a look inside?” She pointed toward the bedroom.

“Okay.” Yu Mao didn’t hesitate at all.

The two of them moved from the living room into the bedroom. Once inside, the poster that covered half the wall looked even more shocking; worst of all, Nan Changgeng’s gaze swept across the room and found that every wall was covered with her photos and posters of all sizes.

Her scalp prickled.

…If she had to live in this room herself, she’d probably develop a complex about her own face.

Besides that, there was a bookshelf in the room lined with her albums, various magazines, and some old memorabilia. Right beside the shelf was a cello.

She didn’t look too closely. Her gaze was drawn instead to the tiny specks of blood on the small sofa by the window.

“How did this happen?”

“Nosebleed.” Yu Mao flipped the unmade blanket on the bed up toward the headboard, then patted the foot of the bed. “Sit here.”

Nan Changgeng’s expression grew a little complicated, but she sat down as told. “Are you feeling okay?”

“My body is fine.”

Yu Mao’s expression was serious as she stood two meters away from her. “What do you want to ask me?”

Nan Changgeng pressed her lips together. After a pause, she said, “I looked through your teacher’s blog entries, and that’s how I found out our first meeting was at the welfare institution… Do you remember why you woke up when I played for you then?”

That was the biggest question she had.

“I remember.”

Suddenly, her throat felt dry. She swallowed, studying the woman’s expression intently as she tried to gauge her emotions. After confirming that confusion was the dominant look in those eyes, she relaxed and began to organize her thoughts.

“Before you came, I had been drifting in a void of darkness. There was nothing there, and I couldn’t feel time. I felt myself constantly disappearing; when the last trace of consciousness was gone, I would die completely.”

“Then your music appeared. I heard it and followed the place the sound came from, drifting over there; then I returned to my own body, and the first thing I saw was you.”

It still didn’t answer where the special quality in her music came from.

“So that’s why you care about me so much?” Nan Changgeng forced herself to sound lighter and tried to joke. “Like a chick that hatches and mistakes the first living thing it sees for its mother.”

Yu Mao tilted her head. “The first? But there was no one else to begin with. There was no one around me, and you were standing right in front of me.

“It was you who woke me up and kept me here.

“Changgeng, I was born for you.”

Only when Yu Mao could sense Nan Changgeng did her world function. She couldn’t live without her music, without her voice; she had to keep sensing that she existed at all times, or her world might at any moment sink back into nothingness.

Nan Changgeng’s heart gave a sudden jolt.

It was like being struck by a nonlethal bolt of lightning; every organ, every drop of blood, every cell in her body shuddered, and a tremendous surge of emotion rose from the shaking. She even felt as if the leaky empty box inside her had been filled for an instant, so full it almost overflowed and hurt.

For that, she couldn’t help feeling a little ashamed.

Yu Mao was such a pitiful child.

And yet her pity was her painkiller.

Lowering her eyes to avoid the girl’s direct gaze, she happened to notice the white wrist guard on her wrist. It seemed Yu Mao had never taken it off.

Then she suddenly remembered what Lin Yan’s records had said; Yu Mao had once tried to slit her wrists.

Her breathing caught slightly. She reached out toward her. “Can I see your wrist?”

Yu Mao couldn’t let the hand reaching toward her come away empty, so she obediently held out her wrist.

At last the wrist guard was removed, revealing a straight, long, pale scar. It wasn’t hideous; one could imagine just how sharp the blade had been.

Her fingertips gently traced it from top to bottom.

“Why did you do this?” she asked.

“Because my body felt awful.” Yu Mao thought back to that sensation. “It was like a shallow-water fish swimming into the deep sea; there was this feeling of being crushed. But when I got close to death, I could let some of that pressure out. Otherwise, it felt like I was going to burst.”

Near-death was the brief gasp of oxygen she took just before she was about to drown.

It seemed the world was constantly rejecting her, constantly pressing in on her. She could only catch her breath in the gap between life and death and keep dragging out her existence here through one rebirth after another.

“I think I should have died a long time ago.

“My being alive at all is itself a miracle. You’ve shown me favor more than once.”

Whether it was her picky eating, her inability to smile normally, or the habits and instincts left in her from being a cat, they were only remnants of the way she used to live, carried over after death and rebirth; in truth, much of Yu Mao’s humanity had already vanished.

She had been awakened.

Like a spirit summoned after death by a necromancer, she might not have lost the ability to think, but her entire being belonged to the summoner.

To change her habits, perhaps only the summoner’s own hands could shape her; even Yu Mao herself could not do it.

Nan Changgeng could barely keep her expression steady, unable to suppress the heaviness and urgency in her heart.

If Yu Mao had simply fallen ill, then as long as it was something science could explain, there would at least be a solution or a direction. Even if it were a mental illness, at least that was within her understanding; it wouldn’t leave her feeling so uneasy.

But all of this was too strange and unfathomable… No one knew better than she did that she was just an ordinary person. What right did she have to be placed on a shrine and asked to bestow grace and save a life?

She had no confidence at all. The more mysterious and distant Yu Mao’s account became, the more panicked she felt.

Perhaps Yu Mao had sensed the emotional fluctuations she couldn’t control, because the stability she seemed to have regained cracked once more. Her breathing turned ragged; apparently uncomfortable, she crouched down on the spot.

“Changgeng… my life is almost at its end. I’m sorry; I miscalculated. I came to you the wrong way, exposed my own secret, and interfered with your life…”

As she spoke, her breathing grew more and more chaotic. With both hands braced against the floor, she shifted from crouching to slumping down, as if taking in oxygen had become difficult and her abdomen could no longer tolerate even the slightest pressure.

She still looked up at Nan Changgeng with stubborn intensity. Her face was shockingly pale; even her black eyes seemed veiled by a layer of white mist. She looked thin, dim, and translucent, as if someone could erase her from the world with a single stroke.

“I just wanted, in the end, to be a little closer to you, and see… what else I could do for you… I’m sorry…”

The more she said, the harder it became for Nan Changgeng to hold herself together, and the more Yu Mao suffered from the pain she sensed from her; even speaking had become difficult.

Nan Changgeng’s forced composure finally collapsed bit by bit. A sour, bitter lump gathered at the base of her tongue and clogged her throat; tears surged into her eyes, and with a single blink they fell.

She stood and took two steps to Yu Mao’s side, then in helpless haste pulled the girl into her arms, her voice trembling with panic. “I… I’ll take you to the hospital, okay… No, no, that won’t work. What should I do? Tell me what I should do…”

This was the first time she had really held her. Her hand rested on Yu Mao’s shoulder; she was so thin it hurt to touch her, her bones sharp and hard, and yet it made Nan Changgeng think of stone that had almost weathered away, ready to crumble into sand at the slightest impact.

Such a young life had already withered to this extent.

Under ordinary circumstances, Yu Mao should have been happy because of this closeness; but right now, all she could receive was an even deeper, heavier flood of pain.

A tear fell the moment she lowered her head, dropping onto Yu Mao’s hand. It was warm, carrying a corrosive poison; it melted into Yu Mao’s bone marrow in an instant through the pores, making her fingers spasm uncontrollably.

Yu Mao lowered her head and watched that tear roll from the back of her hand into the fabric of her clothes. Then she slowly raised her stiff hands and covered her face, hiding her eyes. Her joints sounded like rusty machinery, like taut bowstrings being drawn tight.

Maybe she was trying to control herself, or maybe she wanted to escape and hide. Yu Mao herself could no longer tell what she was thinking; she was only in pain. Too much pain.

Her throat had already grown hoarse from excessive repression, like clouds and mist in the forest torn into thin strands, ragged and chaotic.

“I’m begging you, don’t hurt… don’t hurt…

“Let me give you everything… everything. I’m begging you to ask something of me.

“Please use me, consume me, devour me, wring out all my value, and fill your pain with all your strength.

“Devour me and fill yourself…

“Fill…”

Nan Changgeng’s breath shook with the effort of restraint; she covered Yu Mao’s mouth at once, and a hoarse cry broke out along with more tears. “Enough. Stop talking.”

Her fingers suddenly felt warm. Sticky blood was gushing from beneath her nose, running over her hand and spreading in a startling red across the white skin.

“Okay, pain.” Yu Mao blinked slowly, blankly, her voice muffled against Nan Changgeng’s palm, using blood in place of tears as it flowed.

She was like nothing more than a soul, rising above all the empty distractions of flesh and blood. Whether love or pain, it burned to the absolute limit.

Nan Changgeng let go, staring at the blood slicking her palm, too stunned to speak. Humanity’s most primal fear of blood made her heart pound violently; at the same time, her mind grew even clearer.

To ask; to have something she could ask of her.

“You said you wanted to know what I need you to do for me. I’ll tell you; I’ll tell you now.”

She gripped the girl’s shoulders hard, trying to force the words out with greater strength and clarity.

A flash of light passed through Yu Mao’s eyes, and she seemed to revive for an instant. “Okay…”

Nan Changgeng took a deep breath. “I want you to love me forever. Forever. Do you understand?”

How could a human life, so short, produce forever? She was making an impossible demand, asking Yu Mao to stay by her side for as long as she lived in order to prove that love continued to exist.

“Forever love?”

Yu Mao parted her lips, and sudden brilliance burst across her expression, as if the last wisp of gauze had ignited into a blazing fire meant to herald destruction.

“I understand!

“I love you, and I’m loving you now! Changgeng! I want to give you eternity!!”

The fervor inside her body broke through all pain. She wanted to smile, still failed, and no longer cared. Straightening up, she grabbed Nan Changgeng by the collar and looked straight into her eyes.

Nan Changgeng saw the manic heat in her eyes; alarm bells kept ringing in her mind, and she sensed the situation had gone far beyond anything she had expected. Unease swept over her entire body.

“So good… Changgeng, so good. What you want, I can give you without wasting a single bit. The final value, just right…

“I’m loving you, Changgeng.

“You remember…

“I will walk toward death to prove that my love has reached eternity!”

She said each word one by one, as if she meant to bite every syllable to pieces in solemnity. Blood surged from her nose again, then from her eyes, the corners of her mouth, her ears…

Nan Changgeng watched her eyes grow dim little by little, from clear and bright to gray and lifeless. Her throat was seized and choked shut by overwhelming fear; her eyes were rigid, her whole body trembling, unable to force out a single word.

Yu Mao could no longer see her face clearly.

She felt herself falling once again into that void, using those gray-blue eyes, calm as a quiet sea, as an entrance; as if submerged in a whirlpool, rolling and sinking, her heart extraordinarily peaceful.

The remaining love, purest of all, was like liquid flowing through the night; it eroded her hollow and then filled it again.

She longed to… in silence, without a sound… melt away all her flesh and blood and offer it to a god.

Like one destined to rush toward death, like a moth destined to throw itself into the flames, she would love her with no way back at all.