The room was very quiet.
The clock on the wall had passed midnight, the sound of cicadas outside the window was gone, and Shen Xiaoxiao’s breath was just a bit ragged from trying not to sob.
Jiang Yan didn’t press her, but Shen Xiaoxiao started speaking again.
She asked Jiang Yan, deliberately casual, “Sister Jiang Yan, you don’t know how my health got better, do you?”
Jiang Yan gave a quiet “Mm.”
Shen Xiaoxiao said, “It’s a long story.”
“If I want to tell it all, it has to start from when my parents died.”
She spoke of her parents’ deaths: “My dad was called Shen Dong’an. When he died, my sister and I were thirteen.”
“I remember it all so clearly. It was New Year’s Eve. Dad left early in the morning, saying he was competing for a project. If he succeeded, he’d get to build a lot more schools—he’d already picked the locations in the mountains and was just waiting for this.”
“But he didn’t make it back.”
“During the negotiations, he was stabbed several times by the other party—a person with mental illness. He’d had several attacks at home before but the family always covered it up, so nobody outside knew, and Dad didn’t either. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have agreed to a private negotiation.”
“After Dad was taken away in an ambulance, his subordinate called Mom. Mom didn’t tell us anything, not wanting us to worry. She just said Dad needed cash and she had to go deliver it,” Shen Xiaoxiao’s nose was getting stuffier, but she kept talking, rambling on, “Since it was New Year’s Eve, all the housekeepers were on holiday. Mom was too worried about Dad to cook, so she told us to eat some bread and milk, then rushed to the hospital.”
“—Sister Jiang Yan, are you still awake?”
Jiang Yan replied she was listening.
So Shen Xiaoxiao continued.
“Dad died very quickly,” she said softly.
“By the time he got to the hospital, his heart had already stopped. Mom got the death notice as soon as she arrived. She stayed at the hospital a long, long time—she didn’t come home until dusk.”
“She must not have known what to say to us, or how to say it. I’m not a mother, I can’t really imagine what she felt, but I know she must have been in terrible pain.”
“My mom was called Wen Yu—when she opened the front door and went through the garden, she fainted. Our garden was being renovated, and her head struck the sharp edge of an unfinished fence.”
“My sister and I were still waiting at home for our parents to come back for New Year’s, but Dad was dead, and Mom was dying just outside, separated from us by one door.”
“If either my sister or I had noticed her, she wouldn’t have died—but we didn’t, so we lost her too.”
“My sister made dinner that night. It wasn’t until she wanted to step outside to wait for Mom and Dad that she found out,” Shen Xiaoxiao said. “Even now, I don’t know how she felt, seeing that. By the time I heard, the ambulance had arrived; my sister pushed me out of my room to let me see Mom one last time.”
“That New Year’s Eve, we lost both our parents. In a single day, my only family left was my sister. It took me a long time to come to terms with it. Then I started remembering every bad thing I’d done to my sister—the schemes, stealing love, all the ugly things. I couldn’t stop looking for traces of Mom and Dad with my sister.”
“But when I checked our parents’ old phones, all the photos were of the three of us—selfies I’d taken by grabbing their phones. My sister wasn’t in any of them.”
Shen Xiaoxiao seemed to be recalling something painfully sad, and her tears fell even harder.
“I’ve never been so afraid. My conscience came back the moment my parents died. I didn’t dare look at my sister, didn’t dare talk to her, but my sister actually treated me even better—she became even kinder.”
“I tentatively asked if she could sleep with me. She jumped right under the covers with her pillow. Then I asked if I could go to school with her, if we could be in the same class. She hesitated for a long time, but agreed.”
“Afraid we’d be pitied, we left Jiangcheng for a very remote town.”
Hitting a nerve, Shen Xiaoxiao sniffled, fighting to disguise the sob in her voice. She spoke carefully: “That’s where I faced bullying.”
“Albinism, poor grades, a disability,” Shen Xiaoxiao said. “I was picked on.”
“I was laughed at, people drew on my papers, and strange boys raced my wheelchair down the hall—I nearly went tumbling down the stairs.”
“Each time, my sister intervened. Nothing like this had happened in our last school, so she didn’t know what to do. She tried using Dad’s reputation, then tried throwing money at it, but I was just stubborn—I didn’t want to mention anything about our parents. More than the bullying, I was afraid of being labeled an orphan, and scared of retaliation. So my sister started preparing a school transfer for us.”
“It was a boarding school. Classes ended late. The night before we transferred, my sister went to the principal’s office for paperwork, and left alone, I was pushed down the stairs by two bullies,” Shen Xiaoxiao said. “I wasn’t hurt badly. When I stood up, I saw my sister running over, pale as a ghost. That night, she carried me home.”
“She cooked me dinner, and in the middle of the night, she left and didn’t come back until after midnight.”
“The next day I saw the news—those two bullies who pushed me had been hung by ropes in the school’s woods overnight, so scared they lost their minds. My sister was taken away by the police, and later our master found her, and the Supernatural Administration Bureau bailed her out.”
“That night, my sister originally meant to just scare them, but in her rage her spiritual binding power surged. She tightly wrung out their souls, yanking them almost out of their bodies over and over. In the end, their souls were ruined and they’d remain idiots for life, while their souls follow them through each rebirth…”
“Those two had it coming,” Shen Xiaoxiao exhaled, “they led the bullying ring—not sure how many kids they hurt. But my sister took the burden of heavy karma and had to work for the Bureau for twenty years.”
“When Master came to take my sister home, she saw me too, and discovered my chronic frailty was because my spirit was deficient from birth: I was a natural spirit-vessel, doomed to die unless I learned psychic arts. So Master took me as a disciple too.”
That ended the story.
Shen Xiaoxiao forced a playful note: “See? My health’s all thanks to my sister.”
“For the next twenty years, alive or dead, I have to stick by her side.”
Tonight, Shen Xiaoxiao’s tone was unusually solemn and earnest—it was something Jiang Yan had never witnessed before.
The mood in the room was heavy. Shen Xiaoxiao’s long sigh brought the talk to an end.
She closed her eyes.
“Feels better having said it. Sister Jiang Yan, I want to sleep now.”
Jiang Yan wished her good night.
Ten minutes later, Shen Xiaoxiao’s breathing was more even. Jiang Yan rolled her neck and found a comfortable position to lie in.
She was about to sleep, when the little girl still clinging to her waist suddenly poked her in the back with a finger.
It tickled.
Jiang Yan raised an eyebrow in the dark.
The little girl whispered, “Heard another story—worth staying up this night.”
“But do you know what this is?” Little Jiang Yan fished out a paper figurine from under her blanket. “Little Bai gave it to me, said we can send messages with it and be safe.”
“Why is it getting hot?”
It was hot because someone else was listening in.
Jiang Yan was a little exasperated: “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Little Jiang Yan fired back, “How could I remember everything? Besides, you never asked!”
Jiang Yan pulled out her phone, opened Shen Huanhuan’s chat window, and asked: “You heard all that?”
Shen Huanhuan replied quickly: “Mm.”
She said, “At first I was just checking if anyone was in danger tonight, didn’t expect Xiaoxiao would talk about all that.”
Honestly, Jiang Yan was curious about Shen Huanhuan’s attitude. She could tell that Shen Huanhuan genuinely loved her sister, felt no hatred at all, but couldn’t guess the exact nuances.
So she asked: “Was your relationship really like that with Shen Xiaoxiao when you were kids?”
Shen Huanhuan denied it: “Not nearly as bad as she says.”
“Most people will justify their actions in memory to make themselves the hero, but not Xiaoxiao—she twists her memories to make herself feel more guilty and sad.”
Jiang Yan asked: “What do you mean?”
Shen Huanhuan replied thoughtfully: “Xiaoxiao really was sick, she was in real pain. Her pain was caused by other spirits trying to invade her body, her soul was being squeezed. No one could endure that kind of pain.”
“The reason she stuck so close to our parents was because they were steeped in merit, surrounded by purple qi. That can’t stop knives, but it can ward off ghosts, so only near our parents could Xiaoxiao keep ghosts from trying to steal her body.”
“Only then did she stop hurting.”
Jiang Yan nodded: “So that’s how it was.”
Shen Huanhuan: “Yeah.”
“Xiaoxiao was just too little then, didn’t understand anything. Our parents didn’t believe in anything supernatural, so no one knew what was hurting her, and Xiaoxiao didn’t either. So she translated the disappearance of pain into psychological effect—her relief around parents turned into intense love and possessiveness for them.”
“Wanting to feel good is instinct. Besides, our parents were only around for a few days each year, so Xiaoxiao only got those days to feel comfortable. If I were her, I couldn’t have kept from clinging either.”
“And anyway,” Shen Huanhuan paused in typing, then continued, “even supposing Xiaoxiao really did fight for all her parents’ love—so what?”
“If you have to fight for love, at root it’s just because there’s not enough love to go around.”
“If our parents gave us more, enough to fill a person up, Xiaoxiao wouldn’t have had to struggle for extra.”
At this, Jiang Yan smiled: “You see things clearly.”
“Not really—just common sense.”
Nothing came for several minutes after that. Then, finally, Shen Huanhuan wrote very earnestly:
“This was all years ago. Even if there was confusion or sadness then, I never felt hate, but Xiaoxiao always cared so much.”
“She keeps replaying it in her mind; it’s been so long she’s forgotten the pain itself, so now she has an illusion that it wasn’t actually so bad back then.”
“She’s always making these re-imaginings, thinking maybe it was mild and she could’ve endured it. But I tried it at our Master’s—it felt like a million ants boring into my bones, eating away at my veins. In that pain, I kept smashing my head against the wall, even instinctively tried to kill myself.”
“But Xiaoxiao lived like that every year—because she loved us.”
Jiang Yan stared at the screen, little Jiang Yan climbed on top of her to peer too, and after a while muttered quietly,
“This person is so strange. Even if her sister was in pain, she was neglected for real all those years. And she’s rich, yet still works herself nearly to death—all for her sister, and not a word about all that.”
Jiang Yan gave her a sideways glance and moved her off: “Don’t press on me.”
Little Jiang Yan snorted twice: “Stingy.”
After a moment, Jiang Yan repeated the question she’d earlier asked Shen Xiaoxiao, now posing it to Shen Huanhuan: “Have you ever told Xiaoxiao all this?”
Shen Huanhuan replied, “Many times.”
“But every time she covers her ears and runs away crying.”
“Later I thought—”
She sent a sticker: Shen Xiaoxiao as an otter scratching her face, grinning carelessly.
“There are all kinds of ways for sisters to get along in this world. Maybe this is just ours.”