Who would break into her home? There was nothing worth stealing here anyway.
Su Xiaoyuan realized this quickly.
If she hadn't seen the Puppet Human standing in the shadows by the wall, she would have suspected she'd drunk too much and walked into the wrong house.
Right, the Puppet Human!
When she'd left, she'd told it to do some simple chores, like taking out the trash…
Her heart suddenly lurched. She hurried to the cabinet, pulling open drawer after drawer, then checked the trunks, the boxes, under the bed.
So many things were missing. Some she could remember, some she couldn't even recall—perhaps only when she thought of them on some future day would she realize what had been lost.
Su Xiaoyuan turned to the Puppet Human, her voice trembling: "Fu Tingyun… do you know where my things went?"
"I know. I disposed of them." The Puppet Human's tone remained flat, devoid of emotion, which made it seem all the more cruel.
Su Xiaoyuan's tears welled up in her eyes, her lips quivering, but she held back her sobs and even tried to keep her voice calm: "Did you throw them away? Where did you throw them, Fu Tingyun?"
The Puppet Human pressed its lips together: "Burned them."
"So many things—if you burned them, where are the ashes?" A sliver of hope still lingered in Su Xiaoyuan's heart. "Are you joking with me, Fu Tingyun?"
"No," said the Puppet Human. "Burned with spiritual fire. No ashes."
The girl's mouth crumpled, and she made a face that was half smile, half cry: "Then did you see… my little cat jade? It was green, about this big…"
She gestured as she spoke, her slender fingers trembling uncontrollably.
Fu Tingyun remembered what she was describing—a thumb-sized natural stone with natural veining that resembled a crouching beast. It held not a trace of Spiritual Qi, as if she'd picked it up from some riverbank.
In his eyes, it was of course the trash among trash.
"I burned it," he answered.
"You thought those things were all garbage, so you burned them?"
"Yes."
Su Xiaoyuan nodded numbly: "I don't blame you. It's my fault… I didn't say…"
She let out a choked sob, and two round teardrops rolled down like dewdrops on lotus leaves, splattering against the ground and soaking into the bluestone floor.
Fu Tingyun felt as though a bitter drizzle had begun to fall somewhere in his chest.
He lacked ordinary human emotions and had a weak sense of right and wrong, but he wasn't entirely ignorant of the world.
He understood that he had done something despicable—and he had done it with immense, unfounded malice, fully awake and deliberately.
He had vaguely looked forward to her returning, to discovering what he'd done. He had wanted to make her sad, to make her cry.
But now that he actually saw her weeping in sorrow, a flood of unfamiliar emotions surged through him—everything except happiness and satisfaction.
If he could, he would take out the Universe Bag from the drawer and return it to her.
But it was already burned. There was no going back to start over.
For the first time in his existence, Fu Tingyun tasted regret.
Su Xiaoyuan didn't cry for long. She simply picked up the bag that had fallen to the floor and set it on the empty little table, then handed the oil-paper bundle of pastries to the Puppet Human: "I brought you some pastries. Take them and go eat outside."
The Puppet Human didn't reach out to take them.
Su Xiaoyuan didn't ask a second time. She set the oil-paper bundle on the table, walked over to the bed, took off her shoes, and lay down.
"Sorry, Fu Tingyun, please go out for a moment."
The Puppet Human received the command but did not move, still standing before her bed.
Su Xiaoyuan waited a while, and not hearing him move, raised her voice a little: "Please go out, Fu Tingyun. I want to be alone for a while!"
She lay facing the wall, not looking at Fu Tingyun's face, afraid that if she saw that face, she wouldn't be able to stop herself from jumping up and scratching it to pieces.
She understood this wasn't his fault. He had only followed her command, "take out the trash"—he simply couldn't tell what was trash.
If anyone was to blame, it was herself. She had known full well that he was a defective product she'd bought for twenty Spirit Stones, yet she had given him a task beyond his ability.
If it had been a cat or dog that wrecked the house, she could have cursed at it, smacked its bottom a couple of times.
But what could she do about an artificial idiot?
It was like buying a secondhand, no-brand appliance on Xianyu, and it short-circuited and caught fire and burned the house down—who could you blame but your own bad luck?
She knew she shouldn't take it out on him, but perhaps because the Puppet Human looked so much like a real person, seeing that face made it truly hard not to.
After a moment, she finally heard the Puppet Human's footsteps behind her, then the sound of the door being pushed, and the soft click of the door closing.
Su Xiaoyuan curled herself into a ball, covered her face, and couldn't hold back her sobbing.
Those things really weren't worth much—not even a thief would bother stealing them. In others' eyes they might truly be garbage, but every single one of them she had brought back herself, carefully chosen, slowly accumulated.
When she had first transmigrated here, the system quickly went dormant, and she was alone in this strange and bizarre world, knowing no one.
She couldn't adapt. Every night she cried herself to exhaustion before falling asleep.
She didn't know whether, compared to being thrown into an absurd world and given an obviously impossible goal, letting her die completely in that car accident would have been a kind of mercy.
Until one day, passing by the creek on Huanhua Island, she saw a stone that looked like a kitten, washed it clean, picked it up, and placed it on the windowsill.
She was like a little mountain sparrow suddenly flung from spring into deep winter, struggling to flap its wings as it was about to freeze to death, carrying back a tiny withered twig.
She began to live seriously, using those little twigs, little stones, little bits of rubble to slowly build herself a small nest.
Then she gained friendly fellow disciples, kind teachers and elders, and made her best friend.
Although she often encouraged herself, telling herself that there's always a chance, that maybe she would succeed? Maybe she could go home?
But deep down she had always known this was just self-deception.
She could never go back to her real home. She had less than a year of life left. This was the endpoint of her life.
So she tried her best to live each day well, to slowly scrape together a home in this strange world.
Now the home was gone.
Most of the lost things she could buy back, but she no longer had the strength to start over again.
…
Fu Tingyun pushed the door open and walked outside, sat down cross-legged, and prepared to eliminate distracting thoughts and enter Meditative Inner Observation as usual.
But the girl's suppressed sobbing lingered in his ears and would not fade.
She cried for a very, very long time, finally crying herself to exhaustion and falling asleep, only to wake again before long and continue crying.
Fu Tingyun had expected her to be angry, to be sad—he had even somewhat looked forward to her flying into a rage, losing her temper at him—but he had not expected her to be so heartbroken and despairing.
He did not understand what was so special about these material objects that made her so attached to them.
He had lived in the Wuji Palace for as long as he could remember. If someone set fire to it, he would kill that person, or make them compensate several times over—but he would not grieve.
To him, anything could be cast aside without hesitation when necessary. Even himself.
If one day he could no longer suppress the Abyss of Desire in his Dantian, causing the seal of the Chaos Realm to collapse, he would not hesitate to sacrifice his own body to the formation.
It would be no different from snapping a sword in two.
Most of the items he had burned were ordinary trinkets that could be bought anywhere. Anything bearing traces of her handiwork, he had kept.
Yet she was still so sad.
Fu Tingyun felt a strange restlessness.
Ever since the Soul Transfer went wrong, everything seemed to have slipped beyond his control.
The sound of sobbing from the room gradually faded.
Fu Tingyun waited until her breathing grew deep and even, then gently pushed the door open and returned inside.
The young woman lay fully clothed on the bed, curled into a ball facing the wall.
The blanket remained neatly folded, set aside at her feet.
As if she would not even deign to use the blanket he had folded.
Fu Tingyun shook the blanket open, draped it over her, and tucked in the corners.
The young woman let out another hiccuping sob in her sleep.
Surely simply buying new ones would suffice…
At that thought, a flash of insight struck Fu Tingyun.
Could it be because she was poor?
Recalling how she had rolled around in delight clutching a Sea Essence Stone worth five hundred coins, Fu Tingyun grew increasingly certain of his guess.
He could give her money.
Currently trapped in this Puppet Body, he could not easily go to the exchange house to withdraw funds, but he could use the Divine Soul Seal to transfer his money to her through the exchange house.
He was not entirely certain how much property he owned in his own name—those matters were usually handled by his Second Senior Brother—but he had never been short of money.
Fu Tingyun took a cloth from the rack, wet it, steamed it until warm, and walked to the bedside to gently wipe away the crisscrossing tear tracks on the young woman's face.
He could give her a great deal of money. More than she could ever spend.
That would surely make her happy again.