The car suddenly slammed on the brakes. Diệp Nhất Vũ’s face went deathly pale, and he froze. A few seconds later, the car started moving again and crashed into the mountain. Diệp Nhất Vũ buckled his seat belt and fell into a coma. Giang Ý Như’s body shattered the window and rolled down beside the muddy, filthy road. Under the cold moonlight, she opened her eyes wide, then died.
When the memory ended, a deathly silence fell over the room. Everyone stood dazed, their eyes empty. Giang Ý Như remained standing there in silence.
Lan Linh was the first to scream in anguish. “It had nothing to do with me! I made a mistake, but I didn’t kill you! How can you blame me? I had nothing compared to you. You were a princess, and everyone cherished you and was grateful to you! I was like a beggar, forced to live off your charity! It wasn’t fair! We were clearly switched at birth. I should have been the writer, I should have been the princess, and I should have been the one Tần Tuyên loved so passionately! You married Tần Tuyên and then found out you had a brain tumor. He’d never known the sweetness of romantic love. Giang Ý Như, do you think that was fair? I only secretly wished for a little fairness, without hurting you. That night Tần Tuyên got drunk and went into the wrong room. I thought it was fate, wasn’t it? You were dying, and he was in so much pain. I just wanted to comfort him!”
“Chi Chi was the one who pushed you down the stairs! She’s dead! You got your revenge. You’re a ghost now, and if you keep this up, you’ll be torn to pieces…”
Diệp Nhất Vũ suddenly shouted at her, his voice full of hatred. “Shut up! I won’t let you talk about her like that!”
Lan Linh looked at him mockingly. “Diệp Nhất Vũ, why are you playing the innocent puppy here? I just found out you had a secret crush on Giang Ý Như. You pursued her twice, and you kept coming to my room, didn’t you? What about all those nights you trembled on top of me? You heard Giang Ý Như wanted revenge on me, so you felt sorry for me, didn’t you? You deliberately crashed the car so that…”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Diệp Nhất Vũ screamed in despair. His knees gave way, and he fell to the ground, beating himself frantically. “I’m despicable! I’m filthy! I let my dirty body blind me! Ý Như, kill me! I regret it! Every day is unbearable! If I hadn’t crashed the car, you might still be alive! Even just one more day! Kill me!”
Giang Ý Như slowly turned her head and looked at the four parents standing like stone statues nearby. She stared at them as if asking, “Why didn’t you come out? Why did you hide in your rooms? Why didn’t you save your daughter?”
Giang Ý Như’s mother let out a long moan. “My daughter! How could I not save you? But you couldn’t live anymore, and I couldn’t lose a child when I had no other children left!”
Lan Linh’s mother sobbed. “I never gave Lan Linh a mother’s love when she was growing up. She’s suffered enough already. Ý Như, forgive me…”
The two fathers also lowered their heads, dazed as if dead.
At last, Giang Ý Như looked toward Tần Tuyên. Ever since the scene ended, Tần Tuyên had been staring at her, never taking his eyes off her face for even a second. Now they faced each other. Tần Tuyên looked as calm as still water. After a long silence, he picked up a knife from the table and lightly cut his own face. Blood seeped out.
He said softly, “No matter what, Ý Như, at least I’ve finally seen you again. The person in that memory wasn’t me. I don’t remember any of it. That wasn’t me.”
“From beginning to end, Tần Tuyên loved only one person in his life: Giang Ý Như. From the first glance to the very last moment of his life.”
“Ý Như, during the three years you were gone, how much I missed you. I kept reliving the moments when we first met, remembering the smile you gave me, the confidence you showed when discussing a problem, and the kindness and generosity you showed everyone.”
With every sentence he spoke, he cut his face again, as if he needed the strength and the sting to dare to confess what was in his heart. Soon, his face was covered in blood, but he was still smiling, his eyes filled with overwhelming love.
“Ý Như, if you hate me, take me with you, okay? Take this life, this soul, all three hun and seven po—I won’t resent you for any of it.”
Suddenly, Lan Linh sneered. “How ridiculous. Do you know, the day you died, he couldn’t face the truth and lost his memory. He even made up a memory that never happened, convincing himself that you died of a sudden brain hemorrhage.”
She stared at him, then slowly began to speak. “That day, you carried me downstairs. When you turned the corner, you saw Chí Chí behind her, and when you reached the door, you heard a strange noise. Did you really not know what it was?”
Tần Tuyên’s body began to shake violently. His pupils dilated, and panic and despair filled his eyes. Then he threw his head back and let out a roar, as if from a hell with no escape.
I glanced at the people in the room and said coldly, “The universe has its own laws. Wrongdoing doesn’t go unpunished; the time simply hasn’t come. You all benefited from Giang Ý Như, showing her love and gratitude on the surface, but when it mattered, you weighed the costs and abandoned her.”
“You think you’re innocent, so you keep enjoying the benefits without a care, even fooling yourselves into thinking you’re the least guilty of all. You didn’t kill her directly, but each of you played a part in her death. This was a murder committed collectively, in silence and mutual understanding!”
The next morning, when the servants arrived at the villa for work, they were shocked to find everyone in the house sitting rigidly around the dining table, silent. Each person bore strange injuries, their eyes weary and aged, like living corpses.
That day, I promised Giang Ý Như that if she agreed to let go, I would see that everything was handled fairly. She agreed and was very satisfied with my plan.
Chú Quan asked, “What arrangements did you make?”
At the “Ling Ling Jade Shop,” Chú Quan sat in a cramped little chair, sarcastically sipping low-quality tea as he asked me curiously.
Chú Quan was an old friend of the Chúc family and a renowned metaphysics master beyond these parts, with incalculable wealth.
I gnawed on a duck neck and whispered conspiratorially, “I can’t tell you that.”
Chú Quan’s face darkened. “Are you trying to play mind games with me, you little brat? If you won’t tell me, then that last message from your father…”“Even that has become a secret from me now.”
I shot him a look, then smiled faintly. “It’s really nothing. I just locked them in an ‘awareness prison.’”
“An awareness prison?” Chú Quan asked skeptically. “Never heard of it.”
“Of course you haven’t. It’s my own new invention, as the new head of the Chúc family.”
“It’s a form of virtual punishment. I implanted a virtual temporal anchor between the fifth and eighth levels of their consciousness, keeping them in a state of quantum non-awareness and distorting their perception of physical time into a psychological flow of time. In the awareness prison, one minute equals eighty-one years.”
I continued, “That day, I arranged for them to experience survival in the awareness prison: Lan Linh spent eighty-one years as a fake young lady, living through a life of being looked down on, beaten, and humiliated by everyone; Diệp Nhất Vũ spent eighty-one years mining coal in a pitch-black mine, unable even to straighten his back; and the Giang parents and the Lan parents became filthy beggars, fighting over scraps of garbage for eighty-one years. As for Tần Tuyên, I made him deal with his sister’s rotting corpse, pay me double my fee, and donate all of Giang Ý Như’s assets before his virtual prison sentence began.”
“He was locked in a tiny, sealed room, living alone for eighty-one years. At Giang Ý Như’s request, he kept every memory intact, and spent his days living in the past, suffering until his insides felt like they were on fire. He wanted to die, but couldn’t.”
After listening, Chú Quan sighed. I held out my hand and asked, “Where’s Dad’s message?”
He handed me his phone. A few lines were written on the screen: “The theory of relativity says that traveling faster than light may let you pass through time and space. Consciousness! Spiritual power! Brain waves! They’re the only things in the world that can exceed the speed of light!”
I sank into thought.
As Chú Quan was leaving, he asked me, “Hey, you’re the new head of the Chúc family. Are you still taking jobs?”
I nodded. “Sure, sure.”
Tần Tuyên gave me two million. As usual, I kept only two thousand and donated the rest.
I’m dirt poor.
Chú Quan said, “Good. The tycoon Du Thành is recruiting people from the metaphysical sects. He says he’s run into a difficult problem, and the reward is one hundred million. The Daoists, Buddhists, Six Trigrams, and feng shui practitioners have all gone. Are you interested?”
I nodded like a chicken pecking at grain. “I’m in, I’m in.”
Chú Quan thought for a moment, then said, “All right, I’ll sign you up. But they’re all major sects. What are you entering under?”
I smiled. “The Ling Ling Jade Shop!”
—THE END—