At thirty, Susu became a top-tier time traveler, slipping effortlessly into one identity after another.
Whenever she changed identities, scenes of her stepfather locking her in the attic and leaving her to starve replayed in her mind.
She traded her life savings for an ancient Buddhist bone relic, hoping to transmigrate back to childhood and change her fate.
But no matter how many times she rewrote the past, fate twisted back to its original course: her mother grew paranoid, her boyfriend became a controlling monster, and her mentor revealed a hideous true face...
On her final journey through time, she stopped resisting the hunger and darkness of the attic.
Susu sat cross-legged with her eyes closed, letting her awareness sink into the burning in her stomach and the sobs caught in her throat
The relic quietly dissolved into her flesh and blood, and the attic’s iron lock vanished in the sunlight without a sound.
Then she heard a voice in her ear, one she had ignored as a child: “That day, someone fed the cat three days’ worth of food beneath the attic.”
