Chapter Text
The moon was bright and the stars were sparse. In a small village surrounded by mountains, inside a dilapidated thatched house, the night wind blew into the room through the broken window. On a simple plank bed lay a sallow-faced, emaciated young girl.
The young girl’s forehead was covered in dense beads of cold sweat, her brows tightly furrowed.
The person on the bed suddenly sat up, gasping heavily for breath, her dark, bright eyes filled with terror.
Before her death, the pain of being stabbed in the abdomen by refugees, one blade after another, still made her body tremble.
Su Yin looked around the room once and immediately understood. She had been reborn, and the memories she had once lost had also returned together.
She was called Su Yin. She came from Blue Star’s Hua Country and had been born with her memories into an ancient farming family surnamed Su.
When she was two years old, a high fever caused her to lose her memories of Blue Star. Until the year she turned sixteen, when the village was stormed by refugees, her family abandoned her, her mother, and her little aunt, allowing them to be humiliated by the refugees.
During the process of resisting, they angered the refugees, and she was stabbed to death alive by several refugees, one blade after another.
Her soul drifted in the air, watching with her own eyes as that group of brutes divided and ate her body.
The young and strong men in the village fell one after another into pools of blood. House after house burned, and within the firelight were the miserable screams of women and children.
The young girls were tortured in pain before death, and after death their bodies were ruthlessly dismembered. There were even brutes who used spears to pierce through the bodies of child after child, stringing them together and standing them high at the village entrance for amusement.
That group of brutes laughed and joked, enjoying the pleasure brought by slaughter.
The village that had once been quiet and peaceful became a purgatory overnight.
Before the morning light rose, a ring of light appeared above her head and sucked her soul in.
Before being sucked in, Su Yin remembered the memories of her previous life on Blue Star.
The moment she thought of what she had suffered before death, Su Yin only felt that the room was stifling. She got out of bed and opened the door to get some air.
“Creak”…
Three doors opened at the same time.
Her mother, Yang Chunxiang, and her little aunt, Su Baozhu, were both stunned.
The three of them looked at one another.
Su Yin looked in surprise at the woman walking out from the room next door.
“Mother.”
By the moonlight, Su Yin noticed the beads of sweat on her forehead, as well as the fear in her eyes that had not yet faded.
Fear?
Could it be…
A thought leapt out.
While she was still dazed, Mother Su pulled her into her arms, tears spilling out of her eyes as she murmured in a low voice, “Still alive, all still alive.”
Su Yin’s eyes widened slightly.
“Bang”…
The door opposite closed. Her little aunt, Su Baozhu, turned and went back to her room. Before leaving, those eyes filled with hatred and fear unexpectedly met Su Yin’s.
Looking at that closed door, Su Yin withdrew her gaze, and a bold guess formed in her heart.
Right now, she had no time to pay attention to her. She had to first confirm her mother’s situation.
She pulled her mother outside the courtyard. Outside the house, everything was silent. Occasionally, insects chirped. Mother and daughter squatted by the edge of the field ridge. Moonlight scattered over both of them, but it could not drive away the indescribable lingering fear and unease in their hearts.
“Mother, why did you say still alive? Haven’t we always been alive and well?”
For a moment, Mother Su did not know how to answer. Only after her emotions eased did she open her mouth.
“Daya, Mother just had a nightmare. I dreamed, dreamed that we all, all died.”
When she said this, her mother’s voice trembled slightly. She had not yet recovered from the fear of death.
As expected, Mother had also been reborn.
Then her little aunt, who had died together with them and had walked out of the room at the same time as them, was probably also reborn.
After Su Yin understood, she held her mother’s hand. “Mother, that was not a dream. It was real.”
“Real? How is that possible? Aren’t we alive and well?” Mother Su murmured, unable to understand.
“Mother, I also experienced the refugees storming into the village.”
“What!” Mother Su froze.
“You, Little Aunt, and I, the three of us were all caught by the refugees. I was stabbed to death by the refugees, one blade after another. All of this was not a dream. It was something we truly experienced once. It is only that Heaven showed mercy and allowed us to come back again and change our own fate.”
Su Yin tried her best to use words her mother could understand, making her understand that this matter was not simply having a nightmare.
Rebirth, to Su Yin, who had once lived in an age of explosive information, was not difficult to understand at all.
But for her mother, who was trapped in a mountain village and had only ever gone as far as the town twenty li away in her entire life, she could not understand what rebirth was, or why one would be reborn.
“Rebirth?!” Mother Su murmured these two words, as if digesting and understanding their meaning.
“Yes. It is rebirth. Starting over once. Living again once.”
Mother Su held her daughter and wailed loudly, venting her fear, her sadness, and the sorrow of being abandoned by her family.
“Mother, don’t be afraid. Right now, everything is still in time.” Su Yin lightly patted her mother’s back, gently comforting her.
After Mother Su calmed down, she looked at her daughter through tearful eyes. She did not know whether it was her own illusion, but her eldest daughter, Daya, seemed to have changed, become different.
“Daya, we have to immediately tell your father, your grandfather and grandmother, and the village people.” Mother Su said anxiously.
“Mother, calm down. How are you going to tell them? Do you want to say that you were reborn, and the village will soon be looted? Do you think Grandfather and Grandmother will think you are mad? Will the village people believe what you say?”
“The village shaman will probably say you are possessed by a ghost. When the time comes, they will tie you to a frame and burn you alive as a ghost or monster.”
It was not as if such things had never happened before.
In the neighboring village, there had been a little girl who woke up after falling into the water and started talking nonsense. Her family treated her as if she had lost her mind.
The village shaman directly declared that the little girl had been possessed by a wild ghost. In the end, that little girl was tied up by the village people and burned alive.
Mother Su also thought of the matter of that little girl from the neighboring village. Her body trembled, and she became completely at a loss.
“Daya, what should we do?”
“Mother, this matter of rebirth cannot be told to anyone. Remember, it cannot be told to anyone. Once other people know, you and I will both die. Do you understand?” Su Yin said seriously.
In their deaths in the previous life, Grandfather, Grandmother, Eldest Uncle, and the others had made no small contribution.
If she were still the original Su Yin, that Su Yin who had been bullied by the whole large family, weak and incompetent, then perhaps she would have been just like her mother, completely at a loss, and might even have foolishly confessed everything to the family.
As for now…
A trace of ruthlessness flashed through Su Yin’s eyes.
Mother Su nodded continuously. “Daya, if that was not a dream, but that what-you-call-it, re-, rebirth, then what should we do now?”
There was still roughly half a month until the refugees stormed into the village.
Actually, in the previous life, everyone in the village had had a chance to escape. Unfortunately, most of them did not believe it.
Before the refugees stormed into the village, the second son of the Li family, who had always been outside working as a traveling peddler, hurried back home. He told everyone in the village that the outside world had fallen into chaos.
Minzhou, Yunzhou, and Ganzhou were suffering from droughts everywhere, locust plagues had erupted, and the land for a thousand li had become barren. A large number of refugees from several nearby prefectures and counties had surged in, burning, killing, robbing, and looting. Before long, it would affect Meizhou, where they were located.