Alice in the Land of Steam

Chapter 1285: You, me and lonely love?
The banquet was like a flame of passion, which bloomed and then died in an instant. In the quiet night, even the sound of breathing was so pungent, burning the heartbeat that was so close. The blue-haired girl slept alone in bed, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. In her mind, she recalled all the mysteries about her life, and those emotions that she tried to remember but could never understand, seemed to surge in with the quiet night at this moment, making a distant cry.

Sometimes she thought of the long years she spent in the apple orchard, loneliness soaked the leaves like dust, and the veins like blood vessels were faintly visible under the skin of the ripe fruits, as if to indicate the rough journey of life. At that time, she had not yet realized that there was a huge gap between herself and the world. She tried to blend in with the crowd, but was abandoned by them. She was accused of being a witch and forgot the way home forever.

No one remembers that she had been here, just as no one remembers when she left. The human village wasted away in the monotonous work day after day, and the girl was completely immersed in her own world, forgetting the passage of time. The long branches were full of spider webs in the corners, and the corpses of insects under the white stones were buried in a thick layer. A gloomy and lonely apple tree grew in the world beyond the known and knowable. No matter how the human footsteps expanded, and how the brick and tile houses extended, it always stayed at the edge of the world, as if everyone here had reached a certain consensus invisibly, unanimously believing that civilization and longing should stop here.

Sometimes I think of the elderly and wise wizard Moriah, but the most profound impression of him is not that he concluded at the first sight of himself, "You do not belong to this world, child", nor that he said to himself in an old tone with a mixture of regret and gratitude, "You came a hundred years early, but this is the prophecy, so it is not unexpected", but that he suddenly realized that he should have died by then, but he was worried about a lonely and confused soul in the world, so he lived for ten more Easters to punish himself for the 177 prophecies he made in the past 251 years of his life. Those prophecies were all accurate, but because they lacked the shadow of the girl, they were all failures.

At the last moment of his life, he baptized the shepherdess with his own blood, leading her out of a hazy and illusory dream and back to the world. He once taught her how to use a crystal ball for divination, foresee fate through the movement of stars, and see countless lost futures in dreams. He was sure that this knowledge was enough to help the child complete the most magnificent cause in her life, but he forgot that sometimes people do not live in this world for a mission. The emotions he ignored eventually attacked the girl more violently than the prophecy, so that when she stood on the busy street for the first time, she felt at a loss, as if she had fallen into an exquisite trap called the past. It was not until then that she realized how strange the world was.

Not surprisingly, she couldn't help thinking of Lingge, thinking of how she met him through the crowds of the world at the Carnival on Mount Sedin, thinking of his eyes that were cold and vigilant at first, but later only had a warm smile, and a promise that she had never mentioned deliberately, but always made her sleepless. She suddenly became anxious, just like being pricked by a needle when sewing clothes. The pain is not to torture you, but to remind you of the injuries you have suffered at every moment.

In a time of endless repetition, the shepherdess thought that she had already walked into the heart of the young man, taking away all his tears and anxiety. Unexpectedly, many years later, a kind hug brought her back to the past, giving rise to the same sad mood, and suddenly realized that she had never really understood him. So all the sufferings that she had been forced to stay away from because of gaining emotions came back, vowing to make the girl pay the price for her recklessness. The spider webs on the branches would rot, and the insect corpses under the white stones would melt, but she was tormented repeatedly in bed, still thinking of the young man's pretending smile in her heart.

However, the more intense the emotional expression, the more uneasy the shadow mystery in her heart became. She thought about Ling Ge all the time. She thought about him hugging her waist from behind and gently stroking her hair with his chin, but she found that she couldn't see the expression on his face; she thought about his thin figure sitting under a tree with small flowers floating on it, looking up and smiling at her, but it was hard to tell how much of that smile came from copying; she was worried that the young man would lie in bed and unable to sleep all night like herself, but suddenly she found that she could no longer imagine such a scene. Ling Ge gradually became blank in her memory. He never existed, but he was everywhere; he was real, he was fictional; he was a living being, he was an abstract concept...

The girl kept thinking about everything about him, his face, his personality, and his soul, but all the details could not piece together her deepest impression of him, as if it did not exist in the first place. The more she tried to understand, the more incomprehensible it became. She was almost driven crazy by this phenomenon that went against common sense, until time passed in vain in endless longing and waiting, and the moon outside the window cast a compassionate gaze at her, she finally calmed down.

"It's okay." She was unexpectedly calm. "At least I can truly understand him now."

The moment this thought came to her mind, Saint Xia Liya suddenly felt lonely, with a sense of emptiness that had crawled out of a bottomless abyss, tightly wrapped around her fragile heart like a dead vine. The girl got up from the bed and woke up her young friend from his sleep. This little creature with soft white hair had always been simple and ignorant, but at this moment it keenly captured the surging emotions in its master's heart, as if it was born with a potential and understood everything about humans without a teacher. When hesitation and confusion appeared in its eyes, as if it was unsure of what changes and what kind of sorrow and joy this emotion would bring to its master, the girl slowly leaned over and stroked its hair.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It will be fine.”

This sentence made the lamb feel dazed. In its simple mind, which could not remember too many things, and even could not remember how many years it had lived, this sentence was the only thing that impressed it. Because a long time ago, when the villagers of the border village searched the forest for several days but still could not find the trace of the apple orchard, they had unthinkingly labeled the beautiful girl in front of them as a "swindler" and a "witch". But the latter did not refute, but bought a newborn lamb from the only villager who trusted her with ten apples. She held the lamb in her arms and set off on the unknown way home. On the forest path that was now covered with dead leaves and animal tracks, she kept repeating this sentence, as if repeating the most mysterious and powerful spell since humans saw magic. Although the young lamb was ignorant of everything in the world, it realized that she was not comforting anyone, but comforting herself.

The journey of life is full of ups and downs. Only the most determined can wade through the quagmire and see a glimmer of light under the tenacious will. But words are easy to comfort, but confidence is always dissipated. Those repeated words are not essentially out of peace of mind, but a deeper sense of emptiness. It is precisely because of this that the lamb is hard to rest assured, and is even more unwilling to let its owner face it alone. But it is powerless to stop it, because everything always comes too fast and ends too late. With warm words, the companion who has always been with her is sent back to sleep. Although she can't bear to see the sad eyes before it closes its eyes, the girl still leaves the room alone, groping barefoot in the corridor without any lights, and finds the young man's room with her gemstone eyes that shine brightly even in the dark. She stood outside the door and thought for a long time, until the darkness was about to disappear, she was sure that she should go in, not because she had made up her mind long ago, but because fate always repeats endlessly. If Saint Xia Liya didn't go in today, she would go in one day in the future. Since time and space have become blurred, it seems less necessary to set a clear deadline for something that is bound to happen.

She did not knock on the door, but took out the key like a master, unlocked it gently, and walked into the room that had long been destined to be her private territory without hesitation. As soon as she entered, she smelled his scent, heard his breathing, and felt his heartbeat. This omnipresent thing filled the room, like a heavy sadness surrounding her. The girl climbed onto the young man's bed, hugged him gently, curled up in his arms, and tried to merge her body with his. The world had weight in her arms, just like the great goddess at the beginning of creation had already hidden all the knowledge about the universe, the world, fate and mortals here, just waiting for later generations to discover. The girl realized that she was inheriting the great cause from her mother, and she couldn't help trembling, but suddenly she heard the young man whisper in her ear: "Saint Xia Liya, you shouldn't do this..."

"That's all I want to do." The girl answered him, "You said you wouldn't stop me."

In an instant, the promise that had been forgotten by the young man came to his mind, like the wail of the tide. In a long night, he recalled the repeated time he spent in this world, and realized that he was experiencing the suffering and great deeds that he had never avoided since the birth of mortals. He remembered a tragedy that happened in the snowstorm. The piety and kindness of the protagonist were the only ones he had ever seen in his life, but the rewards and prices he incurred were also sad. The ideal that he had been pursuing all his life, in the end, was nothing more than the word forgiveness. At the funeral, the priest who was responsible for collecting the remains of his adoptive father sighed when he saw the eyes that still had a hint of compassion before his death, "He doesn't look like a dead person." But the one who least looked like a dead person died first, so what was left behind?
An irresistible mysterious force separates the young man's reality from his wishes, which comes from Mr. Yang Ke's eyes full of love, sadness and compassion before his death. Although he has sunk into the distant lightless sea and is unable to entrust any great power to the world, he can still resist the loneliness approaching his last attachment to the world. So, in this night that is longer than the beginning of creation, the young man is attracted by some kind of spirituality and sees everything in the dark, but it is difficult to see through. He whispered to the girl in his arms whether it was just a momentary impulse, but it is not too late to regret it now, because the goddess favors every innocent and ignorant child, but she only gave him a pitying answer: "If this is what you want to say, Lingge, please don't be afraid of anything."

She whispered, "I will always be by your side."

Fate brought everything back to square one, just like the beginning of the world, when everything was born. The shepherdess was so happy that she almost melted at night. After breaking free from an illusory dream, she quickly fell into another more illusory dream. She almost forgot whose hands and feet, whose body temperature or whose kiss, she tried to remember the firmness, coldness and passion shown by the young man in bed, but was always disturbed by a sudden impulse, just like a newborn baby whose umbilical cord was cut, and she has lost the way back to her hometown forever.

The young man recalled the day when he first saw the girl. The prophecies of the Moriah people changed in cycles of centuries, but never mentioned a certain event that happened between the two young people on this night. So at this moment, he realized that humans are actually just trapped prisoners, and they can never escape from this maze born for love. In the endless time from the beginning to the end, they once lost themselves, and then found themselves through this mysterious ritual, and they were determined to explore why humans were born and why they had to die. The fire in the young man's heart died down after a fierce tremor. He hugged the girl's thin waist with his hands, and begged her not to leave him in a whisper before falling into the eternal illusion, but he got no response.

In a distant dream, Saint Shallia seemed to hear someone praying, filled with confused sorrow and sad despair. He could have had the most ordinary life, but was forced to ignite his soul like firewood, and thus suffered in the cracks of loneliness. Saint Shallia was the sinner who created everything. She longed to use her tenderness to call back the lover who had appeared countless times in her memories and dreams, but she forgot that he was the most pious saint in the world.

The origin and end of all this can be traced back to the first birth of human beings, when there was only a vague definition of love, loneliness, and the loneliness of love: learning to be alone is the beginning of love, and learning to love is the beginning of loneliness.

The next morning, she woke up from her dream, gently kissed away the tears from his eyes, and told him how she had a beautiful dream, but she didn't want him to wake up.

Give me some meow