TL: Hua

Chapter 59

Ji Jingche was stunned by this abrupt, disjointed question. Subconsciously, he replied, “…It’s hardly possible.”

Then, as if realizing something, he suddenly cut his voice short.

“But did you ever wonder why you mistook Ji Yan for ‘me’ back then? Was it because children’s features don’t differ that much? But why did that starship involved in the crash happen to have a child who looked so similar and was of a similar age?”

The biological mother of Ji Jingche and “Ji Xuan” had died in a starship crash; it was also during this disaster that the lives of Ji Yan and “Ji Xuan” were swapped. However, by the age of five or six, a child’s features are already quite distinct. Those events were too far in the past, and Ji Jingche had forgotten why, when he first saw Ji Yan being brought back by the rescue team, he had identified him as his brother without a shred of doubt.

Was it as Ji Xuan said, that the young Ji Yan originally looked exactly like him, or was there another reason?

The answers to these three questions felt too eerie no matter how one looked at them. Ji Jingche’s thoughts seemed frozen; he didn’t dare to delve deeper. Ji Xuan, however, didn’t care whether he could provide a proper answer. He simply continued walking toward that chaotic, filthy land outside the spaceport.

“After the crash, I don’t know why, but I ended up on a garbage planet.”

The air was sticky and humid. Pits in the concrete ground were filled with oily black sewage. Even though Ji Jingche tried carefully to avoid them, his military boots inevitably stepped in, splashing droplets that seemed to emit an unspeakable stench onto his shoes. One look at it made Ji Jingche wish he could just discard his own foot along with the boot.

Ji Xuan, however, was oblivious to it all, leading the way with total composure.

“The person who took me in died not long after. After all, in a place like this, surviving to his age was a rare feat.” While searching through the memories the system had once transferred to him, he provoked Ji Jingche with a playful tone. “I had no survival skills, so I could only scavenge for food on the garbage mountains. But those mountains are the food source for most people; I didn’t just have to fight my peers; I had to fight adults and wild dogs.”

Heavy clouds gathered above, weighing the sky down into a dark gloom. The shantytown was already low and crowded; once the meager light was swallowed, it turned completely into a coffin box, suffocating those within.

An emaciated man curled up in a strange posture in the shadows of a shack, his body twitching involuntarily. In the distance, several people in rags had just dug food out of the garbage mountain and were fighting each other, tearing bloody wounds into one another’s hands.

“Once, I was so hungry that I stole an energy paste from a vendor, but I got caught.”

“He broke one of my ribs. I lay in the trash heap, looking at the eternally gray clouds in the sky, thinking I would die there.”

Ji Jingche’s breathing suddenly became rapid, and his stomach tightened. He couldn’t imagine how a young child felt, waiting for death in such a desperate situation. Meanwhile, he was likely in a clean, bright dormitory on the Capital Planet, worrying about some trivial assessment.

“And then?” He heard his own voice, sounding incredibly parched.

“Then I didn’t die,” Ji Xuan said dismissively. “The boss there dragged me back and sloppily wrapped me up with some low-grade medical gel he’d found somewhere. I was tough; I pulled through.”

He stopped walking and looked toward a dilapidated shack. Various scraps of metal and boards had been haphazardly cobbled together into a tiny shelter. Adjacent to it was a repair shed where two Betas, seemingly just reaching adulthood, were lying shirtless under an old aircraft. Their exposed skin was stained pitch-black with engine oil.

The aircraft was an old relic that had been phased out on the Capital Planet ten years ago.

“After I returned to the Capital Planet, I wired money to the boss, but his two apprentices said he died shortly after I left.”

“Ji Jingche, when you looked down on me for being useless, did it ever occur to you that for me to even stand alive before you, I had already exhausted all the strength and luck of an age that should have been innocent and carefree?”

He turned around to face Ji Jingche directly. In those eyes that were usually calm and waveless, there now seemed to be a storm of blades and frost.

“Did you ever think that while Ji Yan was in the Ji family learning etiquette, receiving an elite education, and whining about minor setbacks, I was fighting for my life over half a tube of expired energy paste? While you were rising through the military ranks, enjoying flowers and praise, I was barely surviving on low-grade medical gel and a pitiful will to live?”

Ji Jingche’s face turned deathly pale. His lips moved, but he couldn’t make a sound.

Ji Xuan stepped closer. He was slightly shorter than Ji Jingche, and he looked up slightly as he spoke, yet the icy chill in his eyes gave Ji Jingche the illusion that he was being judged from a height.

“You allowed me to return to the Ji family, but every moment you looked at me like an ill-timed, filth-stained object. Were you blaming me for disrupting everyone’s peaceful, beautiful lives and causing you all so much trouble?” Ji Xuan paused, letting out something like a sigh. “But did you ever think that ‘Ji Xuan’ didn’t actually care about being a young master of the Ji family? He didn’t care about engagements, nor did he care whether the person who enjoyed a privileged life in his stead for over a decade was there by coincidence or design. He was determined to leave here and travel thousands of miles back to the capital planet, simply wanting an answer, wanting a home?”

A clap of thunder exploded in the sky. The cold light reflected on their faces, making Ji Xuan’s face look fragile and pale.

“But now, I suppose it’s no longer needed.”

As those words fell, all the emotion that had surfaced on his face vanished instantly. A barrier of impenetrable ice rose around him; the storm in his eyes subsided, turning into a bottomless abyss.

Large raindrops began to pelt down without warning. At first, it was just a few sparse drops drumming dully against the scrap metal, but it quickly merged into a torrential downpour, washing away the filthy oil on the walls.

The rain-soaked Ji Jingche’s hair and clothes; a freezing chill seeped in.

He wondered: Had they ever given “Ji Xuan” the home he wanted? Had they ever given him the warmth and answers he looked forward to?

Ji Xuan raised an umbrella and looked at him quietly for a few seconds, as if confirming whether he had anything else to say.

Ji Jingche stood frozen in the rain, his vision blurred by the water.

He opened his mouth, and rain poured in, tasting of bitter rust. He wanted to say it wasn’t like that, that he wouldn’t treat him that way anymore, that when they were little, he had looked forward to “Ji Xuan’s” birth and loved his doll-like little brother, but all the words were stuck in his throat, crushed by a massive sense of powerlessness.

Ji Xuan expressionlessly turned around and walked toward the spaceport.

Ji Jingche instinctively took a step forward, as if trying to reach out and grab something, but his fingertips only touched the cool rain and a desolate void. He could only watch as Ji Xuan’s silhouette blurred into the dense curtain of rain, never looking back.

He had lost his only brother.

It didn’t begin today, nor was it many years ago, but rather from the moment Ji Xuan returned to the Ji family—when a hopeful “Ji Xuan” returned home, only to be invisibly ostracized by their indifference and scrutiny.

His knees buckled, and Ji Jingche collapsed into the muddy puddle. The expensive fabric of his clothes was soaked in filthy mud, but he didn’t notice. In a shack far off, two teenagers were hurriedly spreading a sheet of plastic over the roof. A faded plastic bucket was placed under the eaves, and the sounds of complaining about the leaks drifted from the drafty “house,” one after another.

He seemed to see the “Ji Xuan” of long ago. His brother had once stood under a leaking shack, frantically trying to catch every drop of rain, shivering in the cold night as he curled his thin body.

Ji Jingche remembered when “Ji Xuan” first returned to the family. Those eyes were always cautious and timid, yet occasionally, when no one was looking, they would quietly reveal a hint of curiosity and hope. He remembered him standing helplessly before him, twisting his clothes, his dry lips opening and closing until he finally plucked up the courage to call out “Brother,” a word he had prepared for so long, his face radiant with joy and excitement.

Brother…

He would probably never hear it again.

–

Ji Xuan folded his umbrella and gave it a flick, the rainwater splashing a trail onto the ground.

There were only two flights from the garbage planet each day; the next one wasn’t until evening.

He sat bored in the waiting room, staring at the rain through the murky windows.

Stop crying, he said.

The system, which had been crying the whole way, sniffled and said timidly, [Host… wuuuu… your acting is so good…]

Don’t blow your nose in my head, Ji Xuan said helplessly.

[Sorry…] The system whispered aggrievedly, but it obediently stopped crying.

However, a moment later, Ji Xuan spoke again: Actually, just cry it out. Don’t hold it in until you start hiccupping.

The system took the advice and burst into loud wailing.

Ji Xuan gazed at the continuous curtain of rain outside. The water traced distorted lines on the dirty glass. The light in the waiting room was dim; yellow, gray, and green mold spots and water stains mottled the walls, and the air was thick with a pungent, mixed odor.

The memory that had been interrupted by Pei Yingye before flooded back. He remembered the boy who appeared in the grass, who, after he had asked his question in confusion, had started crying hysterically just like this.

“Everyone else is here to kill me. Why are you the only one crying?”

“Because… I… I don’t know what to do…” He sobbed, letting out a hiccup, his voice trembling. “Should I go? What if… what if they didn’t want me in the first place?”

“But… the garbage planet is no place for a human. I don’t want to go on like this.”

Ji Xuan lowered his eyes. His crow-feather lashes cast a shadow in the light, giving him an unreadable expression.

He watched the boy quietly, his voice soft and slow: “But tears won’t solve anything.”

“…Then what am I supposed to do? I have no money, and I have no skills. If I leave this place, I… sometimes I feel like it would have been better if Boss Zhai hadn’t saved me back then. Dying like that would have actually been…”

Perhaps Ji Xuan was in a good mood that day; otherwise, had it been anyone else, he would have sent them packing with a flick of his sword long ago. He stood to the side, watching until the boy had finally cried his throat dry, his nose, eyes, and mouth all blurred together by tears, before he slowly spoke up, “You can only move forward. Whether you’re crawling through the mud or surviving by a hair’s breadth, there are no ‘right’ choices in this world to begin with.” He rested his hand on the boy’s head.

“Try to keep living, just in case.”

After that day, he never saw that boy again.

Or rather, he never again saw anyone who appeared in the Demon Realm without rhyme or reason.

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