Where…?
An Fei stamped her feet and shivered as the bitter cold bypassed whatever fragile resistance her clothes provided and brutally ravaged her body. She quivered uncontrollably as her vision nearly fell into a bluish haze from the overpowering cold, and fervently began searching her surroundings. She sought for anything that could provide her with a hint of warmth, but found nothing save for a sea of snow.
The white expanse stretched for as long as her eyes could see in every direction.
There were no barren trees nor shelters, natural or man-made, within her sight. However An Fei strained her eyes or searched the infinite sea, she found nothing but snow, and more snow. The young girl continued to walk forwards for a few seconds, and her brows creased as her hand rose of its own accord to rub fiercely at her heart.
Somehow… all of this felt familiar…
There was snow encircling her in every direction, and the biting cold continued to debilitate her condition without any regard for the concept of mercy. An Fei had no choice but to keep moving forwards despite her body screeching from the pain of freezing over.
If she stood in place, she would perish rather quickly and painfully from hypothermia. At the least, continuing to move and reducing contact with the snowy ground would slow the rate that she froze over, though she couldn’t do much about the sadistic glacial wind. An Fei grit her teeth and propelled her legs forwards, shielding her eyes as best she could with her arms.
She didn’t know how long she had walked for, but the trace of her footprints stretched over a significant portion of the snowy expanse. The young girl struggled to keep herself standing as she took one agonizing step after another.
She swept her hands over her eyes to peer into the distance, but immediately froze.
Stranded in the horizon and veiled by the impossibly thick curtain of falling snow, An Fei could barely perceive black, rectangular objects in the distance. A pair of flashing magnesium beams pierced through the indomitable veil, and landed directly onto her body after a few blind sweeps across the snowy field.
“There she is! Don’t let her escape!”
“Go, go, go!”
Several pairs of heavy, white-light magnesium beams locked directly onto An Fei’s figure huddled in a winter parka, causing the latter to squint her eyes from the sudden stimulus. When the echoed rapport of energized cries finally tickled the base of her ear, the young girl’s brain swiftly made the connection between what she saw and her sense of uncanny familiarity.
“No!”
She didn’t want to return to the winter plains of Siberia!
An Fei broke into a run back in the direction that she had explored from, her mind filled with great distress. As she ran desperately, the winter field before her gently overlapped with the barren, snowy plains in her memories.
The feeling of desperation and fear surged through her veins, shrugging off the biting effects of the cold and energizing her movements –
Pu!
A powerful surge of heat and pain lanced through her right thigh, and a petal of fresh blood burst into the snowy wind. The young girl collapsed onto the snow, her eyes widened with dread and despair.
“Hit! Took her down with one shot!”
The English words that were unfamiliar yet deeply imprinted into her memories resounded in her ears and mind as the pursuers swiftly approached her position. The closer they marched, the louder the sound of the stomping of boots and shaking of metal echoed in An Fei’s ear, and the words uttered became more vulgar.
“F*ck, she’s bleeding out real’ bad. Dune, you idiot – did you hit a major artery?”
They matched exactly with the ear-splitting roar that trampled all over her memory.
“No need to worry about that, Captain. Haven’t you read her file before? She took several rounds to the chest from a .308 marksman rifle and still managed to run. Here, watch!”
The man chuckled as he jammed his hand into his chest pocket. After he rummaged around for a few seconds, the countenance underneath the dense snowing mask curled into a predatory smile as he retrieved a loaded handgun.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Argh!!”
“Dune, are you an idiot? What are you shooting a downed target for!?”
“Like I said, Captain, don’t worry. She took a .44 cal to the thigh just moments before, but still is springy as ever. See?”
The oversized caliber bullets smashed directly along the spine from the base to the curve just below her neck, causing a torrent of excruciating pain to stab An Fei. The captain and gunner continued to argue as they watched the young girl spasm and writhe in pain, neither making a move as they tossed crude comments after another.
“I know. I’ve read her file,” the captain remarked with a dull tone.
“She’s still a kid, alright? Go easy on her, for God’s sake.”
“The contractor wanted her ready for questioning. I just broke her in a bit – saving them work, you know?”
“It’s called breaking international convention, Dune, you f*cking idiot!”
The jeering voices continued to argue over her head, but the words now blurred into smudged snippets of human voice and sound. The snow field before the young girl gradually blurred into darkness, and she heard the elderly man’s words once more.
She could give up and die. The dead didn’t have to suffer any more pain, and it would save the lives of a few young girls around her age.
As the elderly man had stated, she could sacrifice to save the lives of others. It was an easy process, one simple and painless.
An Fei repeated the words to herself multiple times in a row, savoring the sweet and tantalizing temptation. The harsh reminder of the experience of bullets fragmenting her spine and nearly paralyzing her entire nervous system caused sweat to drip from her neck, and her heart to quiver in pain.
The inevitable sensation of ice and pain slowly but surely crawling through her body, lashing her nerves with brutal torture with every movement was more than tempting. And yet, An Fei felt dissatisfied by the offer.
She wanted to give up, to surrender to the painless fate. But more than that…
“Revenge.”
Retribution. Vindication. Equal torment.
The people who enjoyed hunting her down from all over the world, the people who enjoyed the show of her misery, the people who stood by and did nothing, as well as the man who started everything – she wanted revenge. The young girl wanted nothing more than to rip them apart with her hands, to watch their expressions distort in the same misery and pain that she experienced.
An Fei took a shaky breath, and before the narrowed gaze of the elderly man, took a step back. The young girl clenched her fists to suppress the scorching heat threatening to capsize her heart.
“When I needed them, needed their sacrifice, nobody dared offer their hand,” An Fei bit her lip to the extent of drawing blood.
“Nobody sacrificed for me, so I won’t sacrifice for them. I won’t, not until I have my revenge!”
The elderly man released a despondent sigh, and shook his head at the young girl’s words.
“Someone who truly desires revenge will never mention his craving for vindication until he has already achieved it,” the elderly man chastised with a stern expression.
“You do not seek revenge. Where are the people who have wronged you, in the first place? Instead of leaving the painful past behind, you fling yourself to be burned constantly by its flames, conditioning your soul to seek retribution and revenge! You complain of suffering, but the one responsible for your torment is none but your own will!”
The staff smashed onto the ground for the third time, and shattered into innumerable splinters that scattered across the ground. The elderly man spread his arms, and An Fei witnessed the world around her crumble.
“Forget it. You have made your choice, and now I shall make mine.”
The screams and wails of despair ceased, and the shelter crumbled into burning dust and ruins. The Young Masters indulging in debauchery were revealed to be charred corpses flung haphazardly on the ground, accompanied by the bouquet of eighty corpses prepared to adorn their feet.
“What… what is this…”
Powdered, charred blood decorated the ruined walls of the shelter, the ground, and the scattered bodies. An Fei lurched backwards at the sudden difference in her surroundings, but found herself immobile by her arm. She gazed towards her hand, only to find it grasping the handle of a steel butterfly sword.
The elderly man with his arms outstretched was no longer standing besides her, but impaled on the chest before her by the same butterfly sword clenched in her grasp. The steel blade was rammed deep into the frail and defenseless frame, piercing through the heart until the bloodied tip revealed its triumphant glare amidst the scattered flames.
The elderly man gently cracked open his eyes and displayed a wry smile at the horrified expression on the young girl’s countenance.
“Ultimately, you made the same choice as them. I do not blame you, for your circumstances do not permit any other development. One can only become what their path has defined them to be,” the wrinkled hands gently caressed the young girl’s cheeks, leaving twin streaks of blood.
“Illusion. Dream. Reality. Other than a memory, what else can encapsulate all three concepts in a unified whole?”
“Who… who are you?”
An Fei trembled at terrifying mixture of the compassionate and kind gaze displayed on the elderly man’s countenance and her butterfly sword wedged deeply in his chest. The elderly man reached to extract the deeply rooted blade, and collapsed onto the ground. As the eyes lacked their lustre, the young girl heard a set of powerful words reverberate deeply within her heart.
I am only someone who has seen the past. I came to witness, and I have recorded it under the great stars of destiny.
“I came, I saw, I record…”
An Fei repeated the words softly to herself, her gaze vacant as her mind soared through her memories. Suddenly, her chest felt cold and rather exposed, prompting her to lower her gaze.
Slicing directly through her heart from her back and emerging from the front was the other butterfly sword.
As she stared dumbfounded at the bloody spectacle that had bloomed, she felt a familiar hand caress the top of her head, and a faint whisper in her ear.
“It’s rather a pity. If you didn’t cross this threshold, the Immortal Beings would never take notice nor manipulate you as their puppet on broken strings,” the young girl gently murmured.
“Killing you isn’t painless or easy as you think. As we fragments kill and assimilate the other, we too experience their accumulated suffering and miseries. Don’t be too sad – it’s a better fate to die by my hand than to the overwhelming cruelty of the Realm towards mortals. You’ve tasted Uncle’s punishment before, haven’t you? Do you really think you can handle more of it on a daily basis?”
The young girl gently retrieved the butterfly sword from An Fei’s chest, and she witnessed the blade slide out of her body with outstretched eyes. Before the sorrowful gaze of the young girl, An Fei collapsed onto the ground besides the elderly man’s corpse.
As her consciousness began to fade into darkness, she thought she heard someone calling for her name from amongst the shadows.
But who was this Lingxue? Was she not An Fei?
