He opened his eyes.
In other words, he felt that it opened.
Dark.
An endless, endless darkness with no light.
His body felt so light that it felt as if he was falling off a cliff into infinity.
He moved his hands. He clenched his palms with a cold piece of cloth.
He blinked his eyes. He breathed in, the familiar smell of disinfectant...
Hospital?
He raised his hands, found her face in the endless darkness and touched it. Yes, his eyes were open, but everything was dark.
He bit his lips, knowing that the consequences of that action would cost him dearly. He still didn't know what was going to happen.
Being blind..?
[This is temporary but nya...]
The familiar voice came to his ears.
"System?"
[Can't you see? The doctor said it was in expectation, your vision will improve again as you recover ]
[However, your health is very bad]
[As a result of the scans I did, you literally scratched your body, it's battered! ]
Yun quietly sat back and rested.
"Well..."
So the part the AI attacked was not his memory or consciousness, but his body.
"How long does it take to recover approximately?"
[Should be around a few months]
It went silent.
Until you feel a weight on you for a moment.
The cat's body was in his lap. The cat approached his face, focusing on his eyes [Your eyes have changed, maybe they will never improve]
The damage was visible.
[You may need to use glasses]
Even though Yun could not see, his jewel-like eyes were now a pale color. And inside it was filled with particles of white color like shards of glass. Like a spider's web, fine threads were spreading imperceptibly.
[It...]
[Yun, actually, history is ridiculously repeating itself all the time, right?] The system muttered silently as he stared at the familiar hospital room.
[School students say it's their second home, yours was a hospital and funerals haha...]
Yun "..."
"I feel like it's getting pretty ridiculous too" was getting used to the bullshit of his life.
Even death is starting to feel ridiculously normal?
"How is Uvli?"
[Really... you're the first to pretend you don't care and care too much] the cat grunted and then spoke again [Unconscious. It needs a trigger.]
"Are you interested in him?"
If it was up to him, this job was doomed to fail for a few more months.
[Leave it to me nya!]
"Ask if you want to clear its memory too"
Maybe the bad memories should be left behind and moved on. The future should not be polluted with the past.
"Alright and you?"
The sound he heard was far from the familiar sound of the system. A soft voice like velvet. It's oddly comforting. The sound he had heard so many times before that he hadn't noticed. When he was blind, his hearing seemed to have increased severalfold.
"Nanren?"
There was a slight gasping sound. Was he sighing?
"What about us Yun? Should we erase our past from our memories?" His tone was strange. Quite strangely, too. It contained emotions he had never felt before.
"Everyone has wounds and pain in their past, but isn't that what makes us who we are?" he asked lightly.
Nanren did not answer his question.
"And what if these experiences turn us into demons?" The soft voice trembled. With feelings she doesn't understand. He didn't understand what Nanren meant.
He hesitated, hesitantly making a guess.
"Do you remember?"
Asked.
Because Lin Mei was also remembering her previous life when she first met. What if his intervention in AI reminded him of Nanren's past life?
The answer he got was silence.
Silence is sometimes equivalent to acceptance.
Yun was also silent. He didn't know what to say. In this moment of hesitation, he vaguely thought of Limma's words and the information the system had passed him on earlier.
Being hostile to his older brother, Nanren grew up as an orphan, unaware of his family. Childhood abuses by his uncle had caused him to become withdrawn. Later, he severely injured his uncle, unable to bear the pain. Of course, that was Nanren in the book. So Nanren's previous life, which he now remembers.
Nanren was taken into custody while his uncle, who was seriously injured, was admitted to the hospital. After a while, he was imprisoned with the death of his uncle. However, due to his underage, his sentence was reduced. Moreover, the current situation was in self-defense. Thus, when he was released, he was stuck in the street empty-handed, not knowing where to go or what to do. This is how Nanren's past was briefly summarized in the fiction.
He was given to the orphanage. He was later found by his family. But Nanren, long tainted by other people's poisonous minds, was already embarking on an irreversible path.
Every time his family approached him with good intentions, it made them feel that they had a reason to use him only for profit. He didn't want his family to get close to him, but he was also secretly jealous seeing his loving interactions with his older brother.
She saw the way her brother looked at her as ridicule, humiliation and pity. This situation was gnawing at him deep inside, shaking his disorganized mind even more.
He then slowly takes the path of a villain and irreversibly tarnishes his track record in the worst way possible.
He ends up insanely committing suicide in a mental hospital.
So the person standing in front of him right now wasn't the Nanren from before, freed from the pain of his past. No matter how much the Ji family prevented all this by adopting him, he was now standing before him with the memories of that past life.
Maybe it was better to forget everything really. To leave behind a part of us that makes us who we are, to rip this painful wound away.
"Everything is in the past, we are in the present" not only did he tell Nanren, he reminded himself.
His family is alive now, the apocalypse is over, all problems are solved.
"It's all over."
"What about the traces left behind?"
Scratches on our soul?
Nanren had a past that he did not leave behind. It was simply unacceptable.
Wounds...
"It will close in time," Yun said.
There was silence once more as Nanren said, "But his trace will always be there."
"There are no perfect people"
No one would be buried like a perfect jade.
"Oh…" Nanren didn't respond to his sentence.
After a while, she sighed again and asked hesitantly, "Can I... hug you?"
If Yun could see, he guessed that his eyes might already be steamy and red. He shook his head.
The tiny body in their memory was now taller than he was. As he hugged her, Yun felt somehow lost in his arms. Her head was touching his chin, her long arms holding tightly to her waist. He felt his head sink into his shoulder. His shoulder was vaguely wet. Maybe she was crying.
He caressed her shoulder and caressed her trembling body.
He had goals and ideals. His longing was for family love. But unlike him, Nanren had grown up lacking in what he had longed for.
Far from intimacy, love and in a hungry way.
Yun struggled to reach the old days, those peaceful moments, but Nanren never had any peaceful moments to strive for.
"Everything is over, but every end is a new beginning"
Let's make a fresh start with a new, cleanest slate.
Let's open a white page in our life.
-To be continued-