Chapter 107: Awakening from a Dream

Cheng Yao’s mind was in a daze.

He had never imagined that he would fall into a school campus. Not only did the distinctive teaching building remain, even the trees along the roadside seemed unchanged from the past. The row of parasol trees he had planted upon graduation were still saplings, as though they had never grown. Yet he remembered that thirty-five years ago, when he had returned to the campus with Bai Xiao, those little saplings had already become towering trees.

For one distracted instant, Cheng Yao’s grotesquely spread ribs suddenly drew back, and he returned to his normal human form.

The monster’s mouth was freed. It had been squeezed out of shape and had lost the ability to tear and devour, but it did not care. Its eyes gleamed as it seized the opportunity.

Ignoring its broken hands, the monster slammed its head into Cheng Yao’s forehead.

Bang!

Their skulls collided with a thunderous crack. Blood ran from both their foreheads—Cheng Yao’s bright red, the monster’s blue-black.

The monster continued to bear down on him.

The mouth formed from hair changed shape, becoming a sharp sword that stabbed at Cheng Yao’s heart from an insidious angle.

Squelch!

The blade pierced Cheng Yao’s chest, and blood gushed forth.

His body twitched instinctively, but he made no greater movement.

He looked at the monster before him. His eyes gradually dimmed, like a fire going out, leaving behind only a little ash.

Cheng Yao remembered that he had entered the monster clinic that night precisely because he wanted death as an escape.

He had fulfilled Bai Xiao’s wish, caring for her parents and seeing them through their final years.

At the time, he had failed to decipher Bai Xiao’s lip movements. It was not until the day he killed Fang Xi, when the memory sealed deep within his mind resurfaced, that he remembered what Bai Xiao had said to him at the end: take good care of yourself…

For the past thirty-five years, he had remained healthy. His work had gone smoothly, and he had maintained normal relationships, dining with friends and colleagues and supporting both families’ parents…

He had taken good care of himself, hadn’t he?

He had fulfilled Bai Xiao’s wish, hadn’t he?

Could he go and see Bai Xiao now?

No… The dead could not return. After death, there was probably nothing at all.

Even doctors could not bring the dead back to life. There was most likely no world beyond death.

Death was the end of everything.

He would never see Bai Xiao again.

If he had never met and fallen in love with Bai Xiao, if he had never planned that anniversary trip…

If Bai Xiao were alive, what would she look like today, on her sixtieth birthday?

Not this ugly monster before him.

She should have been an optimistic old woman, dancing in the square like Yuyu, or enjoying her grandchildren like Huihui.

If not for him…

If it had not been for him…

This was the death he had longed for when he stepped into the clinic.

Cheng Yao’s body relaxed.

The wind passed through the campus, setting the saplings whispering.

His gaze passed through the monster and settled on the teaching building.

He seemed to have returned to the moment he had first met Bai Xiao. In his imagination, time flowed backward.

This time, Bai Xiao was not there…

Plop…

A piece of rotting flesh landed on Cheng Yao’s face.

The monster raised its head. Its newly healed face began to rot again, its muscles falling away, its eyeballs drooping, held in place by only a few nerves.

But this time, the monster did not calmly attack Cheng Yao in that revolting state. It let out a shriek, its voice filled with unwillingness.

Not only its head, but also its hands and torso began shedding rotting flesh. The long hair piercing Cheng Yao’s chest continued to advance, yet seemed to have run out of strength, moving forward only sluggishly.

The monster roared, “No! Impossible! You can’t do this! Father! Father!”

Cheng Yao’s deathly still eyes shifted.

The monster before him was just like Fang Xi, shrieking the word “Father.”

Cheng Yao could feel its terror.

It was the terror of death, identical to Fang Xi’s.

He thought of Mao Mao.

When Mao Mao died, she had become a monster and entered the monster clinic.

He realized something, but remained unmoved.

The monster’s eyeballs nearly struck Cheng Yao’s eyes, its pupils pressed against his.

Cheng Yao saw his own reflection in them.

It was the aged face of a sixty-year-old man.

“You can’t do this! You want to die, don’t you? If you want to die, give everything to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!” the monster howled, though its voice was already weak.

Cheng Yao smiled. The vibration in his chest caused still more blood to spill out.

He coughed, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, but did not answer the monster.

“You want Bai Xiao to live! I can live in Bai Xiao’s place! I can become Bai Xiao! We can agree on a time! I promise you, I will become Bai Xiao!” the monster pleaded frantically.

Large sections of white bone showed through its body. Its voice was no longer produced by vocal cords; it appeared directly inside Cheng Yao’s mind.

“She will live to a hundred! She will have a happy life! I will become the Bai Xiao you wish for!”

Cheng Yao only looked at the monster as though it were already dead.

A monster was still a monster. Even if it had been born from his deepest wish, it still did not understand what he wanted.

He would die together with it.

The monster began screaming hysterically. The sword formed from its hair suddenly drove through Cheng Yao’s chest. The hard bones of its body pressed down upon him, piercing him with hole after hole.

“You can’t do this! You can’t—Father! Doctor! Help me! Doctor!” the monster shrieked.

“Doctor?”

Another voice nearly overlapped with the monster’s cries.

Cheng Yao had lost too much blood. His head swam, and he thought he was hallucinating.

But he soon realized that he had heard correctly.

“What the hell is this?!” Boss Yue shouted.

Cheng Yao suddenly felt the weight on his body lessen. The foreign objects piercing him were flung away, tearing flesh from his body in the process and causing even more blood to flow.

“Uncle Cheng?!”

In a panic, Boss Yue tossed aside the plastic bag in his hand. Slices of meat and meatballs scattered across the ground.

He hurried to Cheng Yao’s side and tried to stop the bleeding. “Hang in there! Wasn’t I supposed to be at the clinic? What is this place? Doctor? Where’s the doctor? Somebody come save him!”

Boss Yue was frantic. He pressed down on the wound in Cheng Yao’s chest while looking around wildly.

Then he saw the mass of flesh and bones he had kicked away.

The moment he had pushed open the clinic’s glass door, the scene before him had startled him. He had vaguely seen someone being knocked to the ground and, on instinct, kicked away the thing pinning that person down.

He had thought it was some kind of wild animal, yet it had also seemed somewhat human.

Only after kicking it away had he glanced down and realized that it appeared to be a skeletal frame. He had taken it for a specimen.

His attention had quickly been drawn to the wounded man on the ground, and he had been shocked by the man’s identity.

Now that he looked more carefully, Boss Yue discovered that the object resembling a skeletal specimen still had scraps of flesh clinging to it. A length of intestine hung from its ribs, and an eyeball had fallen from its socket…

His scalp prickled. He realized that the situation was far more complicated than he had imagined.

It was not a specimen skeleton inside the clinic that had collapsed and struck someone.

The monster had been attacking Cheng Yao.

Wait!

“What kind of place is this? What happened?” Boss Yue asked in confusion. He looked at Cheng Yao, who was still bleeding, and gritted his teeth. “Uncle Cheng, hang on. Don’t move. I’m calling emergency services right now. Hold on!”

Boss Yue released one hand and reached into his pocket for his phone with his bloodstained hand.

The moment he let go, more blood gushed from Cheng Yao’s wound. The sight made Boss Yue’s heart race, his blood surge, his adrenaline spike.

He had just opened the emergency call function when he heard a rustling sound.

Boss Yue looked up nervously.

The mass of bones and flesh was crawling across the ground.

His body went rigid.

The monster raised its head. Its hollow, eyeless sockets turned toward Boss Yue.

Somehow, he could read the venomous emotion within them.

His vision blurred. In the next instant, the monster charged at him in an impossible shape, lunging toward both him and Cheng Yao.

Without thinking, Boss Yue hurled his phone at it. The phone struck the monster’s head, and Boss Yue stepped forward, placing himself between the creature and Cheng Yao.

With a sharp crack, the phone embedded itself in the monster’s eye socket.

The monster’s momentum did not falter.

Boss Yue still did not hesitate. He raised both hands, caught the monster’s charging head, twisted his body, and flung it behind him.

Half-crouched on the ground, Boss Yue shielded Cheng Yao. He stared tensely at the monster lying where it had crashed, sweat pouring from his forehead.

“Uncle Cheng, do you have a phone? Damn it, where did the doctor run off to? What the hell is this thing?” Boss Yue could not stop talking. In truth, he had no idea what he was saying. All his attention was fixed on the restless monster.

The monster writhed on the ground and charged again, unwilling to give up.

Boss Yue repeated his earlier move, reaching out to grab it—but his hands closed on empty air.

The monster’s skull spun in midair, avoiding his grasp. Its spine stretched out and wrapped around Boss Yue’s arm, while its head flew straight toward his face.

Boss Yue’s mind went blank.

He suddenly realized that he was probably going to die here.

To die for no reason.

To die an utterly unjust death.

No—he had been killed by someone else.

That phone call from the doctor urging him to come…

Just as the monster’s skull was about to strike Boss Yue’s head, one hand thrust upward from below and slammed into the monster’s jaw. Another hand seized its spine and crushed the bones wrapped around Boss Yue’s arm.

Boss Yue stared blankly as the airborne monster was caught by that hand.

He felt as though he had narrowly escaped death and shuddered. In the blink of an eye, the monster before him vanished, replaced by the beautiful face of a young woman.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, full of heartbreaking sorrow.

“Cheng Yao…” she whispered shakily, her voice twisting through a hundred shades of emotion. “Are you going to kill me? Kill me again?”

Boss Yue did not understand. He turned his head and saw a blood-covered man kneeling beside him, one hand outstretched, gripping the monster.

It was the young Cheng Yao.

His face was blank, as though he had drifted into a trance, as though he had fallen into memory and forgotten what expression he ought to wear. His hand had also gone still.

“Uncle Cheng?” Boss Yue belatedly reached out to support him. “Uncle Cheng, your wounds… and this…”

Boss Yue discovered that the wounds on Cheng Yao’s body had stopped bleeding. The blood on the ground had not yet dried, but no more was being added.

A severely wounded person stopping bleeding was hardly a good sign.

But it was not the most urgent matter before them.

Boss Yue glanced at the woman whose face alone remained normal.

Cheng Yao seemed to awaken at the sound of Boss Yue’s voice. He looked at Boss Yue, who was suppressing his fear despite his disheveled, embarrassed state.

The woman also turned toward Boss Yue, her gaze vicious.

Boss Yue instinctively leaned back to put more distance between himself and the woman.

But the instant his body moved, the woman before him vanished.

“No—”

The monster wearing the woman’s face had disappeared as well.

The echo came half a beat later, reverberating through the silent campus and proving that what had just happened was real.

Boss Yue’s phone, its corner shattered, suddenly appeared out of thin air and fell to the ground, smashing another section of its screen. That, too, proved that what had just happened was real.

Above the High Heavens.

But the monster was gone.

Boss Yue’s heart jolted. He hurriedly searched in every direction, thinking the monster might be hiding somewhere, waiting to ambush them.

Unable to find any trace of it, he grew even more anxious. “Uncle Cheng, where’s your phone? Where’s the doctor? What is going on? He called me and urged me to come…”

He muttered to himself while warily scanning his surroundings. Seeing Cheng Yao sitting motionless with his head bowed, staring at his own hand, Boss Yue reached into his pocket.

His fingers found an old phone soaked in blood.

He wiped it against his clothes several times, but could not clean away the blood completely. Still, he could make out the screen.

Boss Yue opened the calling application and was about to call an ambulance when the old phone became unusable beneath a constant barrage of message notifications.

None of the messages had been read. Several group chats contained hundreds of unread messages. There were also messages from Tong Bin, Jiang Yifan, Cheng Yang, Yuyu, Huihui, and others.

Boss Yue stopped trying to call an ambulance.

He looked at Cheng Yao and confirmed that, beneath the blood covering his body, the wounds had already healed.

Boss Yue let out a breath of relief, then simply dropped onto the ground and placed the phone in front of Cheng Yao.

Resting his blood-covered hands on his knees, Boss Yue said, “Tong Bin invited people out to eat, didn’t he? He said he’d invited Cheng Yao too… So I guessed… Well, it isn’t impossible. After all, you went to see the doctor. I know the doctor is a little unusual.”

Boss Yue looked at Cheng Yao. “Uncle Cheng, that thing just now… it wasn’t your late wife, was it? I’ve heard Old Master Bai and some of the other elderly neighbors in the complex talk about her. Old Master Bai’s daughter was a good woman. You’re a good man too. Old Master Bai often said he hoped you would take good care of yourself. You took such good care of him and the others, and you seem to be doing all right yourself, but… Old Master Bai was very worried about you. He said that if Shengsheng were still alive… His daughter was called Shengsheng, right? When Old Master Bai died, I kept thinking: please don’t let anything happen to you…”

As he spoke, anger suddenly rose within him. He slapped his thigh with his blood-covered hand.

“I asked the doctor whether he could treat you, and he said he could. This is how he treats people? That’s outrageous! Is he deliberately messing with people? Where is he? Is he hiding because he’s afraid to come out?”

Boss Yue rose from the ground and shouted angrily, “Doctor! Doctor! Hey! Don’t hide!”

After calling out several times, he lowered his head and looked at Cheng Yao. “Was the person who came looking for him last time tricked by him too? I even suspected that guy was causing trouble at the clinic. If this is how he treats people, then he deserves to be beaten! And he actually called me to hurry over without even explaining what had happened! I even bought beef and lamb to make hot pot and cheer him up!”

Cheng Yao moved his gaze away from the slightly blurred phone screen and quietly watched Boss Yue fume on his behalf.

Then he suddenly began to laugh.

He laughed until he doubled over and saw the impression left by a ring on his left ring finger.

Amid his laughter, that hand gradually grew old, and the ring mark disappeared into the wrinkled, slackened skin.

…

“You… don’t worry… Don’t be afraid… You have to take good care of your parents. Take care of them for me… Husband… I… You… You have to take good care of…”

Take good care of yourself.

You have to be well.

…

Cheng Yao laughed until tears spilled from his eyes. Then sobbing replaced his laughter, echoing through the campus that belonged to the past.