The Creatures That We Are

Chapter 574: Tattlers

Guang Huan noticed the ashen look on Gao Xinxin’s face, like she had just heard about a great tragedy. Her thin frame started shaking violently, and she almost couldn’t stay upright. Eyes red, she kept shaking her head and backing away.

Gao Yang stepped forward to support her, only to have his hand slapped away.

Gao Xinxin turned on her heels. Gao Yang caught up with her with two big steps and grabbed her hand.

Gao Xinxin started screaming hysterically. Guang Huan could catch a few snippets even across the road. “Let go...liar...can’t be...”

Guang Huan panicked. What happened? Did they get into a fight? But that didn’t seem likely. The siblings were close. Gao Yang sent him a message to ask about his sister every two or three days, and Gao Xinxin could never say more than three sentences without mentioning Gao Yang.

Last night, Guang Huan had joined the siblings and helped their father propose. They had dinner and went to the karaoke together. Everything had seemed fine. Why were they fighting now?

Guang Huan hesitated, debating with himself if he should mediate between them, but his instinct told him that this was serious.

Indeed, Gao Xinxin lost it completely and started hitting Gao Yang with her tote bag. When Gao Yang grabbed it from her, she took off her backpack and threw it at him. He didn’t move away.

The backpack fell to the ground, but Gao Xinxin wasn’t done. She clenched her fists and pounded Gao Yang as hard as she could. Gao Yang didn’t even attempt to dodge, but stayed where he was like a punching bag.

“Look, isn’t that Gao Xinxin from the art class?”

“Who’s the cute guy? Her boyfriend from another school?”

“Ha, must be. Are they fighting?”

“He must be here to break up with her. Tsk, even a haughty girl like her gets dumped...”

“Hurry, hurry. Take a picture of them. This is huge!”

Across the road, Gao Xinxin suddenly dropped to her knees like she had lost all her strength. Gao Yang knelt down too and pulled her into his arms, silent and emotionless like a robot.

Gao Xinxin buried her face into his chest, her sobs quieting.

“Heck, it’s like they’re playing out a drama.”

“Picture! Hurry!”

Guang Huan felt a stab in his heart. He put away his phone, which he had used to buy movie tickets, and he blocked the two girls’ view. “Stop.”

“Who are you?” The girl raising her phone looked irritated.

“Must be another lap dog of Princess Gao,” the other girl mocked. “He’s trying to be her knight in shining armor...”

“Piss off!”

Guang Huan, who had never lost his temper with anyone for his eighteen years of life, growled; his expression could only be described as fierce.

Terrified, the girls almost dropped their phones. They grumbled a few words before quickly walking away.

...

Gao Shou and Lin Yue didn’t even have ashes to be buried. The only thing that could prove that they had climbed up the Green Mountain was a blurry snippet of surveillance footage captured at the bottom of the mountain, in which they entered the shot one after the other.

Nainai had fabricated it with Shapeshifter, which was enough to fool Gao Xinxin.

The siblings took a three-day leave. They put their parents’ clothes into a small paper box in place of their parents’ bodies. Since the tragedy happened so suddenly, they didn’t have proper mourning portraits of their parents. Going through their phones, they found a good two-shot of their parents when their father proposed to their mother on November eleventh. They turned the photo black-and-white and used it as the mourning picture.

Early morning on the thirteenth, the siblings took a car to the countryside and had a traditional funeral with the help of their uncle, Uncle Qing, and a few other family friends.

In the Mist World, some didn’t hold a funeral for the dead, choosing instead to incinerate the bodies. Gao Yang only realized later that it was because the dead were elite monsters, and the bodies would’ve retained obvious traits of their monster forms. That would trigger a wanderer’s logic modification and self-preservation mechanism, and they ended up choosing to quickly incinerate the bodies so that everything would quickly go back to normal.

Gao Yang’s parents didn’t even have a body left, and thus the funeral could be held normally.

Their uncle hired a funeral service to build a mourning hall and hold a banquet. The siblings knelt on the sides of the altar in white funeral apparels, kowtowing to every visitor amid the cacophony of percussion and firecrackers. Came night, they attended a ritual held by a taoist, circling the coffin inside the mourning hall, seeing off their parents’ spirits.

The taoist mumbled words in strange tones like a nonsensical drunken spiel or off-tune singing, yet the heartbreak of being separated from the dead it conveyed still put tears in people’s eyes.

Gao Yang had once been doubtful of the purpose of a funeral. The dead were gone. No matter how boisterous and grand the funeral was, it would have nothing to do with the dead. Perhaps the dead would even find it noisy.

But in the past three days, Gao Yang came to realize that he had been wrong.

Funerals were meant to mourn the dead, but also to save the living.

Many, including Gao Yang, couldn’t accept the heartbreak of losing their loved ones, and having tasks to complete had become a lifeline.

That was the point of a funeral.

The past three days, Gao Yang hadn’t dwelled on his thoughts even once, and he didn’t have the time to. He kowtowed when he saw a visitor, and there were so many traditional rituals to go through that he woke up early in the morning and ended the day late without realizing the passage of time, falling asleep as soon as he hit the bed.

After the three-day long funeral, Gao Yang realized that he no longer needed Psychic Armor to live with his pain.

It turned out that outside of death, nothing was insurmountable.

Humans were cold by nature, for sure.

His parents were buried in a mountain cemetery in the rural area with his grandmother, and his grandfather was also buried there.

The day of the burial, the weather was pleasant as a typical autumn day, and the sun warm.

Gao Xinxin and Gao Yang knelt at a hill covered in freshly-dug soil, watching their uncle, Uncle Qing, and a few hired help bury the coffin with shovels, then a small mound was created.

Their uncle put away the shovel and wiped his forehead, saying in gratitude, “Thank you all for your help the past few days. Don’t leave just yet. I’ll treat you to food and drinks at noon.”

The cemetery quickly became empty save for Gao Yang, Gao Xinxin, and their uncle.

The siblings remained on their knees before the burial mound, their expressions numb.