The little swallow felt deeply guilty toward those six children.
It had only wanted to fulfill others’ wishes, to make their dreams come true, but after those wishes were granted, things played out far from the pretty picture it imagined.
These children weren’t puppets—they were human.
Rather than saying they gained their souls at age eight, a truer statement might be—when they were eight, they ceased to be human. Because they never felt love, their souls drifted away, and their bodies turned back into puppets.
Without a soul, there was no possibility of reincarnation for them.
With the collapse of this energy field, what vanished into the ether was a swallow and six children.
Shen Huanhuan’s expression was sorrowful. After listening, she let out a heavy sigh.
Shen Xiaoxiao no longer felt happy about clearing the level, either.
She looked down, kicking a pebble by her foot. After a while, she softly asked, “If those parents wanted children so badly, why didn’t they love them after they were born?”
Shen Huanhuan answered seriously, “Perhaps the root is being ‘too desperate.’”
“Being too desperate is, at its core, a kind of imbalance.”
“With such a strong sense of purpose, their longing for children is excessive. They lose all calm. To them, a child is a tool for old-age care, a device to make them fit in, a goal that must be achieved, an object for their need to control. Therefore, they must have a child—without one, it simply won’t do.”
After she finished, Shen Huanhuan lifted her head to look at the little bird.
“If I’m not wrong, your power has a glaring flaw: you’re only able to sense how much parents long for a child, but not why they long for one.”
The little swallow hung its head and nodded dejectedly.
“If I’d known all that, I would never have let those children be born.”
“Yang Shumei was the one who wanted a child most,” it said sadly. “All I sensed was her yearning for a child; the hope was so overwhelming, like a tide, I could barely stay afloat. But I didn’t realize that was longing for her first child—she never really wanted to give birth. And Liu Zhengxing—if I knew his longing was only to control his wife, I wouldn’t have given him a child either. They simply shouldn’t have had children.”
“So I made a terrible mistake.”
“I know nothing of humans, yet tried to grant their wishes. In the end, I couldn’t see their true intentions at all. Why are human feelings so complicated? Why preface the longing for a child with so many conditions—are you really still longing for a child?”
The swallow, in all its incarnations, had always been born from nature—mountains, rivers, plants, trees—a spirit with only the purest thoughts. Its love was pure love, its hate pure hate, without a bit of mixture. It could never untangle such complex emotional knots.
The comment section of the livestream fell silent.
There was nothing accusatory in the swallow’s words, not even in its soft, indistinct voice, but the chat seemed stumped by its question, remaining blank for a long while.
Half a minute passed before Yu Renwan comforted the bird:
“You’ve blessed thirteen people, and taken back six children. That still means seven of them became truly human. Seven is greater than six, and that’s seven families made whole because of you. That’s really not bad at all.”
The swallow rolled over in Jiang Yan’s palm, wings covering its ears.
In its view, even one child failing to become human was its failing. Thanks to its power, the children it blessed were especially precocious, extra sensitive to feelings, more able than anyone else to perceive their parents’ love.
But that sensitivity might have become a double-edged sword for them.
—They cared more about parental love than anyone, were built up by it, and tormented by its absence.
As time passed, the sky above the energy field began to gently sway. White clouds shattered into bright, transparent flakes, drifting down like a sea of smoke. Under the sunlight, it looked as if it were raining stars.
The energy field could not last much longer.
At this, the swallow flew from Jiang Yan’s palm, a bean-sized tear quietly slipping from its eye.
It fluttered its wings and said cheerfully, “You’re all good people. You can go now.”
But at that moment, Shen Huanhuan suddenly pulled a talisman from her pocket, spoke its incantation, and pressed it to the ground.
Instantly, golden light flashed everywhere. The crumbling sky froze, the fragments suspended midair like fireflies gathering in a magical forest, dreamlike and ethereal.
Shen Huanhuan looked to the swallow. “This was a prize I drew in the Yao Management Department. It can stabilize a yao’s soul for ten minutes. I’d never met any yao, so it seemed useless—but just now I realized, all of this feels destined. This talisman was drawn for you.”
“Before this field collapses, tell us about Yangzhou. There are many people watching here. We still don’t know Yangzhou’s story, and your tale with Grandpa and Grandma is unfinished, too.”
“Let this story come to an end before you fade.”
The swallow hesitated, then turned and flew toward the Animation Zone. The others hurried after it.
Now the enclosure was wide open, but there was no one inside—just two houses standing alone. The first was the Ma Liang and His Magic Brush exhibit; the second, the Pinocchio exhibit.
The swallow pushed open the second house’s door with a flutter and went in.
After exchanging glances, the others followed inside.
The interior was distinctly divided into six separate areas, each different from the next.
In one area, fairy-tale books and duck plushies were piled around—a little girl lay on a giant dog, kicking her heels as she read; this was Jiang Suisui. Another corner was empty save for a piano. A girl in a yellowed white dress sat quietly at the bench, leafing through sheet music—Meng Jinru. There was also a giant portrait of a boy and his mother riding a carousel. Luo An sat before it, legs swinging, his back tiny and lonely.
The black corner belonged to Liu Yitian, who’d covered the walls with lights—the glaring white bulbs illuminated his black room in stark brightness. The red zone was for Ding Fuya, whose room was filled with rows of desks, each piled with textbooks, as if waiting for someone.
When the group entered, the children were startled for just a moment, then sprang up enthusiastically and ran toward the door.
Among them was a little boy not counted among the five—but whom everyone knew well.
Yangzhou waved. “I told you we’d meet again.”
Yangzhou was the boy they’d met at the park’s very beginning, only now he wore no top hat and wasn’t clutching all those balloons.
Jiang Yan recalled the information the Supernatural Administration Bureau had found and asked, “Didn’t you have a language disorder?”
Little Yangzhou nodded. “Not after I got here.”
“My muteness was from stress trauma—but now I don’t even have a soul anymore, so all those wounds vanished with it.”
The swallow landed on his shoulder, whispering a few words in the boy’s ear.
After a moment, Yangzhou looked up, suddenly enlightened.
He glanced around and gave a warm smile:
“Of course I’d love to share my story.”
“But I’m not like the others—my parents were always good to me. After all, they were the swallow’s benefactors in its first life—they couldn’t possibly have been bad people. They were wonderful.”
Hearing this, Shen Xiaoxiao looked confused and hurried to ask, “Then why didn’t you become human? Did you ride the roller coaster on purpose? Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“If they were so good,” Shen Xiaoxiao pressed, “why didn’t you feel their love?”
“Because we were poor,” little Yangzhou said plainly.
Shen Xiaoxiao fell silent.
She stared in surprise at the small, thin Yangzhou.
His lashes were long, sooty-black, like little fans. He blinked and said seriously, “My family was really, really poor. The whole village was poor, but ours was the worst off.”
“When it rained, there wasn’t a single dry place in the house. Moist everywhere, just like outside. My shoes filled with water; my bed planks soaked. No mattress—just a piece of cloth on damp wood.”
“When it rained, I could feel the drops on my face. On top of not being able to sleep, I had to be on my guard for snakes or rats crawling inside. No matter how often Dad chased out the snakes, I was still scared. Scared they’d come back, scared the roof would blow away, scared I’d float down the mountain in the rain and never return.”
“But we weren’t always so poor.”
Yangzhou continued slowly, “Dad was once the village’s best carpenter. He was especially filial, gave nearly all his earnings to his parents. When the land was divided up, Grandpa and Grandma left him the best plot, but thinking of his two aimless older brothers, worried they’d never marry if they lacked property, he gave them his land and took the worst for himself.”
“When Grandpa and Grandma died, those two uncles took the land for themselves, as well as the leftover money. No one in our region cares about legal inheritance—if you snatch it, it’s yours. Dad didn’t want to fall out with them, so he let it go.”
“As for Mom, she always had a hard life. She was blind in one eye, so her uncles bullied her from childhood. She was weak, too. In a village like ours, women had no say in who they married—whoever Grandpa ordered, she had to marry. No one proposed to her; her uncles treated her worse and worse.”
“Mom was always beaten by her uncles, not even allowed inside to eat. Dad used his savings to ask for her hand—two thousand yuan. That sum was astronomical in our village, but Dad was called a fool for it. Still, he always said he was the lucky one—he’d seen Mom sharing half her hard crust of bread with a stray kitten at her doorstep.”
“He said she was the kindest person in the village. Mom said he was, too.”
“After they married, Dad worked harder than ever, Mom took on sewing. They scrimped to build a brick and tile house, and started hoping for a child. Still, she never conceived. Mom loved kids, often dazedly watching others’ little ones. In the end, when a swallow came to nest under our eaves, I was born that year.”
“To give us a better life, Dad not only worked jobs in our village, but started taking jobs in neighboring ones. One time, he went into the deep woods to check on timber and was attacked by a wild boar—lost half a leg. If Mom hadn’t begged her brothers with money to look for him, he’d have died out there.”
Perhaps that moment was fate’s turning point. Little Yangzhou rubbed his face.
In a low voice, he said, “From that day on, our family was doomed.”
“Dad missed the best time for treatment—becoming disabled with chronic nerve damage. He could no longer work as a carpenter. My uncle borrowed our house under the excuse of building his son’s wedding home. Dad and Mom couldn’t fight it, so they went to the village chief, hoping for justice. But the chief had taken my uncle’s gifts and wouldn’t help. The village was deep in the mountains; we had no means to appeal.”
“In the end, Mom found a broken-down shack in the woods. She moved us in.”
“That place wasn’t a home, really, but it was all we had.”
“Life there was so hard. When everyone’s just surviving day-to-day, who has time to show love? Don’t you all think so?”
Yangzhou put the question to everyone, serious.
Silence all around.
But soon Yangzhou smiled, and answered himself.
“But I still felt love,” he said.
“Mom bought little chicks, learned to raise them, made eggs for me—boiled, steamed custards. Dad learned to patch my clothes, too. Even with one leg, he’d climb onto the roof and pile straw thick above my room, weighed it with stones. The rain always blew it away, the stones always slipped off, but I knew he didn’t want me to get wet.”
“They did their best to give me the best they could.”
Yangzhou had always spoken of love, but had not explained why he stopped feeling it. Maybe the story was too sad, or too tangled. But now, he finally fell silent.
After half a minute, he exhaled and began to speak faster:
“The village chief once launched a blood donation drive. Mom went, gave blood, brought home a donor card. Dad tried to stop her, worried about her health. But she said, as long as she gave blood, our family would get priority for emergency cases. That’s what the chief told her—no one could change her mind.”
“She donated every three months for two years. We didn’t know it should be at least six months apart, but Mom trusted the chief. Then once, she forgot something at his house and went back—overheard him talking to the town’s ‘doctor’ and realized the man wasn’t a real doctor. Her donor card was fake.”
“They were selling Mom’s blood.”
“She was too scared to confront them and didn’t even fetch her things—just hurried home, told Dad and me, swore never to donate again. When the three-month date came, the chief called and urged her, saying everyone else had finished, only she was left.”
“Mom hung up.”
“I thought that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. At the year’s end, the chief showed up at our house: his daughter had been hit by a motorcycle and needed blood immediately. Mom’s type was a match. He cried and pleaded.”
“There were so many people in the village, he could have asked anyone, but he chose her first. And it was right,” Yangzhou said, eyes closed, “that day, Mom went with him to the hospital, ignoring my crying behind her.”
“Once wasn’t enough—the chief came back a second, third time.”
“To save that girl, Mom even snuck out secretly, avoiding me and Dad. She knew we’d worry, but she was stubborn—she went each time.”
Now Yangzhou took a deep breath; his eyes closed, his voice trembled, nose reddening.
Such a young child, already learning to hold back his tears.
Jiang Yan reached into her pocket and handed him a tissue.
Yangzhou mumbled thanks. “Thank you.”
Jiang Yan shook her head.
After wiping his tears, Yangzhou put an end to his mother’s story.
“After the chief’s daughter was discharged, Mom no longer had to sneak out.”
“Half a month later, the rice at home ripened. She swept me up enthusiastically, and we ran together to the fields.”
“It was a fine, sunny day,” Yangzhou said.
“My mother fell there, in the rice field. Cause of death: unknown.”