Chapter 6 — Obsession at the Banks of Reincarnation

The Old Lady of Forgetfulness looked stunned, turned the bowl completely upside down, and held it up to the light for a long while to examine it.

This is not right. This old woman has been brewing soup of oblivion for three hundred years, and never once has there been a single mistake.

She turned toward the thick, swirling fog and called out loudly, "Old Bai! Come over here and take a look at this!"

A hunchbacked ghost servant crawled out from the shadows, took the bowl, felt its surface, and inspected it closely. The deep wrinkles on his face grew even more profound and tightly knit.

"How strange," he murmured.

He handed the bowl back to the old woman. "The soup has been drunk completely, yet the memories remain entirely intact. This can only mean one thing: a lingering obsession that refuses to dissipate."

"What kind of obsession?"

"A karmic bond from a past life that has not yet reached its conclusion, pressing down so heavily upon the soul that it refuses to depart. Naturally, it is impossible for such a spirit to forget."

"The River of Forgetting can reflect the past lives of any soul. Follow me, and you will naturally discover whose face lies hidden beneath this fate."

The Stone of Three Lifetimes stood tall beside the banks of the River of Forgetting, its grayish-green surface as smooth and flawless as a polished mirror. I pressed my palm against its cold stone. The water of the river was biting, chilling me to the bone and nearly freezing my very soul. Suddenly, lines of flowing characters began to materialize across the surface of the river, recording every single fragment of my past. I lowered my gaze and watched slowly, when all at once, the massive stone trembled violently. Before I could even collect my senses, a colossal suction force dragged my entire body straight into its depths.

When I opened my eyes once more, I found myself lying snugly inside a soft swaddling cloth. A small face peered down at me from above the edge of the fabric. A little boy of about five years old was grinning widely, revealing his teeth.

"Little sister!" he cheered.

He stretched out a tiny finger and gently poked me on the cheek. "Mother told me I have a baby sister! May I call you Ying Er?"

I stared up at him. That face felt vaguely familiar, yet it seemed as though it were separated from me by a thick, heavy layer of fog, making it impossible to recall where we had ever met before. I blinked rapidly, and scene after scene began to flash swiftly before my eyes. As the days and months passed, I gradually learned how to speak and how to walk. Gui Yang would crawl all over my wooden cradle day after day, lining up small handmade toys before me one by one. There was a little dog molded out of clay, a grasshopper woven skillfully from blades of field grass, and a tiny wooden sword carved from a slender piece of bamboo.

"Look at this, Ying Er, I brought this for you to play with."

"Ying Er, once you grow a little taller, older brother will take you to the temple fair, alright?"

When I was born, Mother suffered a difficult labor that left her in frail health, and Father grew to resent me because of it. Only my older brother loved to run into my chambers. Sometimes he brought back novel little trinkets, and other times he offered me pastries that he had carefully saved for me. Peaceful days drifted by quietly for several years. That was until the year I turned five, when a wandering Daoist priest appeared at our estate. He wore a simple gray Daoist robe and carried a horsetail whisk, pacing in a circle around the courtyard before suddenly raising a hand to point directly at me.

"This child cannot be allowed to stay!" he proclaimed.

"She is cursed by the malevolent Star of Solitude and Slaughter. If she is permitted to remain within the manor any longer, she will surely bring about a bloody disaster!"

Father’s expression shifted instantly in terror, and the servants standing nearby began to whisper anxiously among themselves. Only my older brother rushed forward, throwing himself in front of me to shield me with his own body.

"You are talking nonsense!" he shouted angrily.

"Ying Er is my little sister, not some cursed creature!"

Yet his desperate words carried no weight. Taking advantage of the moment when my older brother was away enjoying the spring outing, Father handed me over to a wet nurse all the same, instructing her to take me away to a distant rural estate to be raised in obscurity. After all, I was his own flesh and blood, and he could not truly bring himself to abandon me entirely. However, Father could never have anticipated that before entering our household, this wet nurse had made her living as a child trafficker. The moment they stepped beyond the city gates, she casually sold me away to the highest bidder.

The days that followed are a blur in my memory. A multitude of children were locked away together in a dark, damp room; some wept endlessly, some cried out from hunger, and others were beaten mercilessly. Eventually, I was delivered to a vast, imposing mansion. A heavy-set man handed me over to a eunuch, who roughly ripped the jade lock from around my neck.

"It matters not who you were before this day," the eunuch rasped. "From this moment onward, you shall be known as Number Nineteen."

From that day forward, I learned to sever all human emotion, rigorously trained to become a ruthless instrument of death. Among all the children of my cohort, I was the only one who managed to survive. When I reached the age of seventeen, the master eunuch handed down a strict command. A young aristocrat who had fled his noble home had accidentally stumbled upon the eunuch’s deepest secrets. Armed with a short dagger, I slipped into a dilapidated temple beneath the cover of night.

Inside the temple, a campfire flickered weakly. Beside the flames sat a man, yet he was as frail and withered as an old man. I lunged forward from the absolute darkness, the tip of my blade slicing dangerously close to his neck. His footwork was astonishingly fast, dodging away by the narrowest margin each time my steel approached. With another fierce slash, my blade struck true, cleaving the mask across his face cleanly in two. As the fierce orange light of the fire illuminated my uncovered features, the man’s movements suddenly froze entirely.

I had no time to ponder the delay; seizing this fatal opening, I drove my dagger straight toward his vital point. Yet he made no effort to evade the blow. Warm, crimson blood splattered across my hand. He lowered his head to gaze down at the grievous wound upon his chest, the corners of his lips curving upward into a gentle smile as his hand lightly pressed against my cheek.

"Ying Er," he whispered, his voice trembling and impossibly soft. "You have grown to be this tall..."

The torn fabric of his mask slipped away entirely from his face. In the flickering glow of the fire, his features finally stood revealed. It was the very same face that, when I was five years old, had rested beside my cradle to tease my cheeks; the face of the youth who had once proudly lifted me up to show me off to his companions. It was the face that had always greeted me with a warm, unwavering smile whenever our eyes met.

He fell backward onto the cold stone floor. I knelt there upon the dirt, watching the pool of blood beneath him slowly expand in the silence. I remained beside him while the crackling of the dying fire was the only sound left in the world, not knowing how much time had finally slipped away.