Even If I Don't Go

Pei Yu often thinks, if she hadn't destroyed her senior sister's hand, would everything have been different? Those hands once ran through her scattered hair, once led her through the crowd at a bonfire night, once probed the temperature of her forehead over and over again when she had a fever, and once brushed her cheek very lightly at countless moments when she thought no one would notice her - as if to confirm that she was still here, as if to confirm that she was still alive and well. Later, she imprisoned the senior sister and locked her hands until the muscles in the tiger's mouth collapsed, and she couldn't even hold the chopsticks. The senior sister said nothing. Even though she was harmed like that, she still didn't say anything. On the day when the ladder to heaven broke, the senior sister sacrificed herself and turned into golden light spots all over the sky. Pei Yu knelt under the ladder, unable to even grab the last piece of her clothes. Tens of thousands of years later, Pei Yu opened a small medicine shop in Qingwu City. She forgot where she came from, and only remembered fragments - a snowfield, a river lamp, and a figure in white standing on a high step looking back at her. She raised a lame, one-eyed orange cat, and she took people's pulses and prescribed prescriptions every day. Her life was ordinary and practical. She thought this would be it for the rest of her life. Until that day in a restaurant, she saw a woman sitting by the window. The man's cold expression, the arc of his wrist when grinding the medicine, and the habit of checking the temperature of the cup when pouring tea, all looked very much like the man whose face he could never remember. That man's name is Jiang Xun. Jiang Xun couldn't remember what happened in his previous life, and he never felt whose shadow he was. "When you look at me, you are thinking of me. Not because I look like her, not because you owe me something. You have to make the distinction clearly." Pei can tell the difference. She just didn't know how to tell Jiang Xun - the regrets and longings that she had sealed away for tens of thousands of years had regenerated flesh and blood every time she crushed medicine for her, made ginger tea for her, and said "Don't leave tonight" every time it snowed. --- Purpose: The true salvation is not to ask for forgiveness, but to still choose to move forward despite the debt that cannot be repaid.