Xun Long was dreaming again.
She was trapped in a car, snow and rain swirling from heaven and earth, forced to watch the accident repeat itself over and over.
Strange.
Such hot snow, brushing against her skin. From somewhere came a faint, barely audible low moan and someone, it seemed, was crying.
An inexplicable weight settled on her body, as if someone had secretly crawled up beside her, half their body pressing down on her, and then grabbed Xun Long’s hand.
The touch was warm and sticky. Xun Long tried to pull her hand back, but it was only gripped tighter.
Is this what sleep paralysis feels like?
Xun Long struggled, but the ghost refused to let her go, clinging to her obsessively. It wanted her hand, wanted her lips, its desire tinged with a trace of timidity.
The accident had happened a year and a half ago. This was the third month since Xun Long had returned to her hometown after rehabilitation.
It was the height of summer. Cicadas droned through the scorching days, and at night the wind blew into her room through the open screen window, carrying the scent of the camphor tree in the courtyard.
After the accident, Xun Long had completely lost her left eye, and her right leg was still slowly recovering, she could barely feel it at all.
Walking was still extremely difficult. Most of the time, she sat in a wheelchair.
Her body, nearly falling apart, was so frail that she wasn’t even as sturdy as her grandparents in their eighties. She feared the wind, the snow, the light…
Someone who had once feared nothing at all now feared so many things.
The small room she’d lived in as a child had been fitted with air conditioning, but the cold cut to the bone, and Xun Long could count on one hand the number of times she’d turned it on.
On sweltering summer nights, Xun Long didn’t even need a bamboo mat.
Melatonin had become her salvation, but even her sleep was disturbed by this heat and these warm touches.
Something grabbed her and pressed her into somewhere softer.
Someone murmured by her ear, calling Xun Long “big sister.”
Xun Long had no younger sister. She was her parents’ only child, an orphan who had lost her parents early and been raised by her grandparents.
She had long since lost touch with her cousins on her mother’s side, and wasn’t close to those on her father’s side either.
After she returned to Flying Immortal Town, a scattering of relatives had come to visit her, most of them with pity in their eyes, as if they held more authority than fate itself, delivering the verdict that Xun Long’s life was over.
Her eyeball had been removed, one of her legs couldn’t walk. Even if she had studied her way to success, even if her job had been good, what use was any of it?
Besides, Xun Long’s accident had come hand in hand with career failure. Her friend Ding Hanxing, both her classmate and fellow townsperson had turned around and absorbed all her resources, smoothly rising in her place.
Normally, failure in one’s career is at least balanced by success in love.
But in the eyes of colleagues who had joined the company the same year, Xun Long had been one step away from promotion.
That blizzard car accident had not only devastated her body, it had swept away everything she had painstakingly built.
If it were me, I wouldn’t want to live.
Someone had said that, but no one would ever say it to Xun Long’s face.
On an anonymous industry app, people brought up Xun Long, many saying she had merely made a wedding dress for Ding Hanxing’s success.
The two of them had tested out of a run-down village town together, and their names appeared side by side in countless competitions. It was said they were so close that back in school they even swapped clothes.
After graduation, Xun Long and Ding Hanxing joined the same company. Whichever of them got promoted, the other should have been happy for her.
No one expected it to end like this.
Xun Long still felt so hot. She wanted desperately to see what was causing the warm dampness on her face.
Half in a daze, she seemed to hear the notification chime of the app.
The anonymous posts discussing her mingled with the pitying gazes of her relatives like unremarkable sheets of paper that could nonetheless slice through skin, cutting her to pieces a thousand times over.
Who was fanning the flames?
Something covered her mouth and nose, a soft sensation pressing against her cheeks. Xun Long couldn’t breathe properly and nearly suffocated.
The female ghost seemed to finally come to her senses, reaching out to smooth things over for Xun Long.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… sob sob, you’re still so beautiful like this…”
Flying Immortal Town was a town surrounded by mountains, with just two streets one new, one old.
Xun Long lived in a lantern shop on the old street. There were two rooms in the back courtyard: one for her grandparents, and one for her.
The kitchen was connected to the lantern shop, with no range hood; when cooking, the wind carried away the cooking fumes.
All the shops on this street were connected to their back courtyards. The roof tiles had been renovated many times, and cats from other households often walked along them, lying there sunbathing in winter.
Everyone knew each other, so if you forgot your keys, you could climb over the wall and return home through a neighbor’s back courtyard with their permission.
Jin Zhuo did this plenty as a kid, and of course she’d also stack up bricks to peek at Xun Long next door.
Even when the bricks beneath her feet wobbled precariously, it didn’t diminish her longing to see what Xun Long was doing.
Every time she got caught, her mom would wordlessly grab a willow switch and whip her, cursing that she’d been born into the wrong life, how could there be such a lecherous child in this world?
At the same time, she’d feel relieved that Jin Zhuo was at least a girl. If she were a boy, climbing walls to peep would be even more shameful.
Jin Zhuo had never had the sense of shame a normal person should. She lusted after beauty openly and brazenly whether it was clouds in the sky or the fat dog raised by the old lady across the street, she could find them beautiful.
Plump is beautiful too.
Grandmother Xun next door had a granddaughter, Xun Long, who was exceptionally pretty, so pretty that Jin Zhuo couldn’t find words for it.
She simply couldn’t stop looking at her.
Sometimes she thought: if I looked like that, everyone would love me.
But Xun Long’s ambitions lay elsewhere; her looks seemed to be merely one insignificant advantage among her many.
She was better at studying. She tested out of Flying Immortal Town early and went to the county seat.
Later, Jin Zhuo heard she’d become the top scorer of the college entrance exam, founded clubs in university that won first place in competitions everywhere, earned huge prize money, went to work at an impressive company after graduation, and even a million-yuan annual salary would be considered low for her.
Xun Long became a cloud on the horizon, while Jin Zhuo was a pebble at the bottom of a water vat forever gazing up, never able to catch up.
People from two different worlds. Even the childhood friendship across the wall was just Jin Zhuo’s wishful thinking. Xun Long was indifferent to her, the same as she was to any other kid on the street.
She didn’t spare her a glance, and probably didn’t remember her either.
That was fine, though. After all, it was Xun Long. Jin Zhuo was never sad about it.
To be noticed by Xun Long, your looks had to match hers, and so did your education, if not a ten-million annual salary, then at least a million to start.
Such a perfect pair might appear together in interviews with elite university graduates. Whoever mentioned Xun Long would bring up her lover, who matched her in every way.
Like Ding Hanxing. Jin Zhuo knew of her too.
Sometimes she thought, if Xun Long really did like women, only Ding Hanxing would be worthy.
Same age, went to middle school together, went to university together, appeared on page A and page B of the news.
Their looks seemed well matched too both beautiful. Xun Long was like banana leaves in night rain; Ding Hanxing was like thin mist over distant mountains.
Not like Jin Zhuo, who grew up in an ironworks, always dusty and grimy, with mediocre grades and an unremarkable education.
Salary… well, now she ran the family shop at home doing tourist experience activities, and was planning to build a tea-drinking space.
Did she have a job? Technically, yes. Though “unemployed drifter” might describe her situation more accurately.
Occasionally, Jin Zhuo would think of Xun Long, hoping that this famous success story from all the surrounding villages would come home for the New Year, so that she, living so close by could steal a few more glances at her.
She never expected Xun Long to come back like this.
A beautiful pearl crushed by the outside world; even after being pieced back together, it remained broken. Everyone said Xun Long’s life was finished.
There was pity, and there was also a subtle, gloating satisfaction. Jin Zhuo knew why.
The phoenix that flew out of the chicken coop had its wings snapped finally there was something about her worth pitying. How wonderful.
But Jin Zhuo didn’t consider herself any better than those gloating people.
As a child she peeked over walls; as she grew up she climbed them; and now she had finally entered Xun Long’s room, climbed into her bed.
The woman left lame and half-blind by the car accident sat in the lantern shop during the day, painting lanterns. Old oilcloth hung down, and faded colored fabric shielded the shop from the eyes of passersby. It was never easy for Jin Zhuo to get a look at Xun Long.
On a bright summer night, under the moonlight, Jin Zhuo pressed close to Xun Long’s side, using Xun Long’s slender, beautiful fingers to soothe her lonely body.
Xun Long’s parents died early. Her uncles all had families of their own, with many children, and no spare means to raise her. She grew up with the grandparents who made lanterns.
Flying Immortal Town had only the one lantern shop.
In earlier years, lanterns for weddings and funerals were ordered in equal measure. Now there were too many kinds of lanterns for happy occasions, and no one came to the shop to commission paper lanterns anymore.
Funerals, though, still followed the old customs: the main lantern had to be ordered in advance, painted according to the client’s requests, inscribed with the deceased’s birth characters.
Xun Long had made lanterns with her grandparents since childhood, and her brush calligraphy flowed like drifting clouds and water. Jin Zhuo’s mother admired her immensely and looking back at her own daughter, who spent all day chasing cats and teasing dogs, calling “tsk tsk tsk” or “here kitty kitty,” she only despaired more.
And so Jin Zhuo gained a little sister many years her junior, a pity the girl didn’t turn out like Xun Long either.
Jin Zhuo thought: Xun Long is one of a kind. Mom could never give birth to another.
If climbing into someone’s bed could accumulate experience, Jin Zhuo was already getting the hang of it.
From fear at the beginning to enjoyment now having apologized, she was once again lying pressed against Xun Long’s cheek.
The moonlight tonight was bright, streaming in through the window frame.
Jin Zhuo wanted more.
Xun Long took sleeping pills every night just to fall asleep anyway, she wouldn’t wake up. Just once more…
Just once more, and I’ll…
Dark clouds swallowed the moonlight, and the room suddenly went pitch black.
A sudden grip startled Jin Zhuo; her heart nearly leapt out of her throat.
Xun Long… was she awake?!
Jin Zhuo didn’t dare move, wanting to slip quietly away.
The clouds drifted past and the moonlight fell again. A hand seized her wrist, and Jin Zhuo stared, frozen, into Xun Long’s gaze.
The woman’s left eye, the one that had been removed was covered by medical gauze during the day. Aside from her grandparents, no one had ever seen what lay beneath the gauze now.
Jin Zhuo’s little sister had imagined it, saying it must be terrifying, like a vengeful spirit from a horror film, an eye with nothing in it at all.
Before, when Jin Zhuo climbed into her bed, Xun Long had been in a drugged sleep, eyes closed. Now her eyes were open, the left one split in a narrow seam and in the dim room, it was indeed somewhat frightening.
But what was more terrifying was—
She’d been caught!
By the moonlight, Xun Long studied this somewhat familiar face.
Jin Zhuo’s breathing was heavy, her heartbeat loud as hail hammering on an awning.
Xun Long recognized her, and as if anger had tipped her into laughter, her weak voice carried the hoarseness of someone who had nearly suffocated in a dream.
“Jin Huo… Jin Zhuo,” she paused. “What are you doing?”