Chapter 111: “There is no savior, no, none.”
The arrow reminded An Wujiu of the sacrifice at dusk. Suppressing his discomfort, he left the bed and followed the directions step by step out.
He could feel the cold wind in the corridor lifting his cloak and saw the arrow bend. An Wujiu, supporting himself against the wall, turned and arrived at the temple.
What An Wujiu couldn’t see was that the huge stone statue behind the stone screen had come to life. Thousands of snake eyes on its body were following An Wujiu’s slowly moving form, each glowing with a ghostly blue light.
As he walked forward, An Wujiu suddenly heard the sound of stone cracking, so he slightly turned his head toward the source of the sound.
The sound ceased.
What he didn’t know was that the tip of a tentacle from the statue had already reached his face, just inches away from his temporarily blinded eyes.
An Wujiu vaguely sensed danger but pretended to be unaware, turned his head, and continued to walk forward.
The tentacles remained still and did not follow him.
The stone door of the temple was already open. Following the arrow’s guidance, An Wujiu left the temple and headed towards the sacrificial mountain.
The uphill path should have been easier than at dusk since he was alone this time without the coffin on his shoulders. However, An Wujiu felt it was even more burdensome. It seemed as if many hands were dragging his legs and ankles, making it difficult to proceed.
The sound of the wind and snow roared past his ears, and An Wujiu vaguely heard a different sound.
It was his mother’s voice.
“Remember how your father died.”
As the broken voice faded away, a horrifying crimson image suddenly flashed in An Wujiu’s darkened vision.
It was his father lying in a pool of blood, his eyes lifeless, a smile of happiness at the corner of his mouth, and nothing else. His chest was left with a gaping hole, blood gushing out, while he clutched his still-beating heart in his hand.
An Wujiu shook his head in confusion, but the image wouldn’t fade. He tried to close his eyes, but his father’s cold body still lay before him.
The forgotten shadows of his childhood slowly returned to An Wujiu’s mind, whether he wanted to recall them or not.
His father had ended his own life.
He had witnessed it all but had forgotten everything.
An Wujiu’s mind was like a shattered mirror, each fragment reflecting the same image—his father opening that dusty book in front of him, reading strange words, destroying all his books, and his lifetime of research.
“It’s all fake… All fake…”
His father’s madness was incredibly calm as he calmly destroyed the data, the blue flame of the lighter burning those precious documents.
“No one can be turned into their enemy; no one can resist his return.”
Young An Wujiu approached his father in a daze and asked, “Dad, who are they?”
His father didn’t look at him, as if he didn’t exist, muttering to himself.
“There is no savior, no, none.”
His expression was so calm, yet the veins on his neck twisted and bulged as if worms were trying to crawl out.
Amid An Wujiu’s countless calls, his father finally lowered his eyes to look at him.
The next second, he plunged a knife into his own chest.
In the fragments, his father muttered.
“He is coming back…”
It was also at such a dusk that the blood-red sunset cast on his pale and handsome face reflected on the book that fell to the ground.
He remembered the frenzied tears at the corners of his father’s eyes, his black-and-white eyes turned into a fanatical, gloomy blue.
The scene was so vivid, An Wujiu saw his father dig out his heart and murmur softly.
He said, God, I offer my heart to you.
Please spare my wife and my children.
Even running against the biting wind, An Wujiu couldn’t escape these scenes that had tormented him for countless nights.
The collapsed building blocks were gradually reassembled, and the shattered porcelain was restored to its perfect form. He remembered his father’s death but could not bring him back.
Following the red arrow’s guidance, An Wujiu stumbled towards the mountaintop.
His mind was full of past memories: strange symbols and languages on the walls, his mother crying uncontrollably, holding his cold father after returning, only the three of them at the funeral, his young and ignorant sister looking at the tombstone from their mother’s arms, asking where dad was.
He held a large bunch of white peonies in his hand and was grabbed forcefully by his mother, who ordered him not to mention his father’s death again.
The men in black suits were standing at the school gate, his mother pulling his hand, and walking quickly through the crowded streets as if escaping something.
His mother bought many forged IDs, dug out the citizen chip behind his ear, burned all documents and storage devices related to the “Human Innovation Project,” and kept moving with him and his sister.
After burning, she followed that book, from one new house to another, always screaming in pain at midnight, and one dead nightingale after another at their doorstep.
The blind An Wujiu had reached the sacrificial cemetery at the mountaintop, now facing Andrew’s tombstone.
But in his eyes, he saw rows of small wooden tombstones carved in his childhood backyard.
Those were made by An Wujiu for the dead nightingales.
How strange, it was such a cold winter, just like now.
Why didn’t those nightingales migrate?
An Wujiu stood stiffly in front of Andrew’s tombstone, letting the red arrow dissolve, outlining the lines of the tombstone, with a bloody handprint in the middle of the tombstone.
He understood this was the system’s hint, so he reached out his hand, his palm overlapping with the bloody handprint.
“Good evening, my dear grave keeper.”
A voice sounded very similar to the voice during the sacrifice at dusk.
For some reason, although the voice was low and hoarse, An Wujiu instinctively thought it was the same person as the rabbit before.
“Do you want to know if the people you sacrificed during the day were good or cultists?”
An Wujiu remained silent, his mind in chaos, as if every nerve was twisted together, painful and struggling.
The word “cultist” had appeared since his first instance, and he had never taken it seriously.
But it turned out, his father was also a cultist.
Perhaps even his mother was no exception.
“You speak.”
An Wujiu’s voice was barely audible, standing upright in place, colder than the tombstone.
The voice laughed, with unconcealed contempt in the laughter.
“He was a good man, does this fact disappoint you?”
An Wujiu turned around, the arrow already pointing to the way back.
“I expected this long ago.”
The cold wind whistled, and the light of the blood moon spread across the entire land. An Wujiu’s journey was filled with memories of his bloodstained childhood. He recalled why his mother burned down the entire house—it was because he pointed out the sun symbol on the wall and told her he dreamt of a god the previous night. His mother instantly went mad.
She covered his mouth and kept ordering him, “Shut up!”
No matter how An Wujiu cried, his mother couldn’t recover from her frenzied anger. She scolded him tearfully for his stupidity and told him never to speak of such things again.
“Don’t say it! Don’t look! Don’t listen! Don’t do anything!”
His mother’s painful shouts echoed in An Wujiu’s mind, making the path down the mountain extraordinarily rugged, and An Wujiu almost fell to his knees.
“Listen to me, never look directly into those blue eyes! Remember, or you’ll die like your father! Your sister and I will die too; we will all be left unburied!”
Blue…
From then on, there were no blue items in their home. His mother wouldn’t even allow him to look at the clear sky.
She said the sun was dangerous, and the blue sky even more so.
An Wujiu never saw a clear sky again. Later, he was locked up in a room like a coffin, never getting a chance to see the real sun.
What he could see were only digitally simulated images.
As long as he completed the tasks assigned by those people, he would get a reward of “sunbathing”—spending an hour in a virtual “sun room.”
Data—everything was data.
Plants were virtual, sunlight was virtual, fun was virtual, and even friends were virtual.
When he was trapped in that white lab without daylight, An Wujiu realized he had only one friend.
When he closed his eyes, he could visualize “his” appearance: scales emitting a faint glow, kaleidoscopic irises, and a long tail extending like many vines.
To test An Wujiu’s regenerative ability, they precisely cut his tendons and shattered many of his bones using sophisticated machinery. An Wujiu, like a shattered vase, was placed on the experiment table, lying there coldly, half-dead, moving his parched lips in a murmur.
“He” would appear, staring at him on the brink of death. Though “he” had no physical hands to reach out and save him, An Wujiu was already satisfied.
He kept his lips tightly shut, silently confiding all his pain to “him” in his heart.
“It really hurts.”
“I can’t take it anymore…”
“Can you… kill me…”
“He” remained silent, using his shifting pupils to blur An Wujiu’s last consciousness.
An Wujiu didn’t know “his” name. He never revealed his name; he was just a nameless god who accompanied An Wujiu through countless terrible nights.
Staggering back to the temple, An Wujiu was utterly disheartened, as if he was just an empty shell. His subconscious keenly sensed someone watching him, but he saw nothing.
In a moment of desperation, he thought it might be better to be killed by the cultists, at least he wouldn’t be so exhausted.
These flood-like memories were about to crush An Wujiu’s nerves. He finally understood why he had lost his memory, or why the electronic female voice that appeared when he woke up, the instigator, made him lose his memory.
Because these were things he couldn’t bear.
Even a glimpse of the iceberg was enough to sink an apparently sturdy ship.
If he had known earlier, with his extremely split personality, who knew if he wouldn’t have gone mad directly.
But until he returned to the room, opened the door guided by the red arrow, the death he expected didn’t come.
An Wujiu collapsed on the bed, feeling scorching hot all over. Even wrapping himself tightly in a blanket was to no avail. It was as if he had been thrown into a pool of boiling water, his body and soul being stripped apart, his body struggling, while his soul could only watch himself drown from the shore.
A magnificent and bizarre dream engulfed An Wujiu.
In the dream, he became the little boy again, the one who could recite those ancient symbols by heart every night before bed.
At seven years old, he was the sole witness to his father’s self-sacrifice, a fragile priest on the verge of collapse, unable to shake off the shadow of his father’s death.
He was like every soldier who survived a cruel battlefield, repeatedly experiencing those indelible traumas on countless peaceful nights, the scenes and sounds continuously recurring, causing his survival to become a psychological deviation.
So every night, he would think of the words and symbols his father wrote in blood on the wall before he died; he could recall the content of the book his father had on him, the page that opened when it fell.
The young and twisted him recited the content of that page over and over again.
Until one night, the god described on that page of parchment, trapped in a distant place, really appeared before his eyes.
In the end, he still disobeyed his mother’s command, opened his abyss-like eyes wide, and stared directly at the summoned being.
However, it wasn’t blue; there was no blue anywhere.
Mother.
Those were emerald-like eyes.
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