My sister, whom I raised, has turned evil after faking her death for three years.

Jiang Ran knelt on the cold floor tiles, her arms still in an embracing position, but the person in her arms had disappeared at some point.

The surrounding scenery faded slowly, like an old photograph soaked in water. Before she could wipe away her tears, the image had already refocused.

She initially didn't believe her sister really had stomach cancer. Her sister later adopted her and spent seven years with her, cooking for her, combing her hair, and singing lullabies to lull her to sleep on countless nights. How could such a sister possibly have stomach cancer?

But the scenes she saw became more and more cruel each day... Her sister never went back to the dessert shop. She locked herself in that small rented room, the curtains were drawn tightly, and sunlight shone through the gaps onto the several boxes of painkillers on the bedside table, which were already mostly empty.

He couldn't eat anything. He would manage to swallow a little bit of rice porridge, but soon he would vomit it all up. In the end, he could only hunch over and dry heave, his stomach empty, yet he still couldn't stop the spasms. His face went from pale to sallow, and then from sallow to an almost ashen color. His eye sockets were deeply sunken, his cheekbones were high and prominent, and his lips were dry and cracked.

My sister is really sick...

My sister is dying...

This realization was like a rusty, dull knife, cutting into Jiang Ran's heart again and again.

Then the screen began to shake violently, and her gaze began to drift uncontrollably backward, as if an invisible hand was pulling her by the back of her collar and dragging her away from that dimly lit room.

She desperately reached out to grab the door frame, to grab the wall, to grab anything that would allow her to stay with her sister, but her fingers passed right through everything and she couldn't grasp anything.

She could only watch helplessly as her sister's small figure, curled up in the corner of the bed, grew farther and farther away, becoming increasingly blurry. She called out to her sister in despair, but he couldn't hear her.

She struggled desperately, tears blurring her vision, but the figure kept getting further and further away until it was finally swallowed up by the darkness.

When she could see clearly again, she found herself standing in a hospital room.

The air was thick with the smell of disinfectant, and the fluorescent lights overhead cast a pale white glow on the stark white walls.

A person was lying on the hospital bed. The arm exposed outside the blanket was so thin that it was almost just a thin layer of skin covering the bone. The veins on the back of the hand were bulging, the fingers were slightly curled, and the fingertips were a faint bluish-purple due to long-term lack of blood.

That face... she could hardly recognize it as her sister's face.

Her already small face had become so thin it was barely the size of a palm, with high, protruding cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and pale, cracked lips with several bleeding cuts.

She lay there quietly with her eyes closed, her breathing weak and labored, each breath seeming to require all her strength.

On the screen of the electrocardiogram monitor by the bedside, slow and irregular green waveforms flickered. Drops of medicine dripped from the IV drip, flowing down the transparent tube into her thin, bony arm.

Jiang Ran's gaze fell on the calendar on the wall. Three whole months had passed since her sister received the medical report.

She stood by the bed, looking down at her sister's face, which was almost unrecognizable from the pain of illness. She remembered when she was seven years old, she had a high fever, and her sister sat by the bed all night, wiping her forehead with a cool towel. Every now and then, her sister would touch her forehead to hers to check her temperature. As dawn approached, she groggily opened her eyes and saw that her sister's eyes were red and she was still clutching the warm towel in her hand.

She recalled how, every time she fell ill over the years, her sister would stay by her side without leaving her side, cooking porridge for her, feeding her medicine, and getting up in the middle of the night to tuck her in, never once saying she was tired.

But when my sister was so sick, there wasn't even a single person to pour her water...

The beeping of the electrocardiogram monitor suddenly became more rapid, and the green waveform on the screen jumped violently a few times before gradually becoming calmer and weaker.

Jiang Ran suddenly looked up at the wave that was disappearing little by little, and all her reason and composure collapsed in that instant.

  

She rushed to the bedside, reaching out to grab her sister's hand, to press the call button, to do anything that would keep her alive.

But she couldn't touch her; she could only watch helplessly as the waveform became flatter and straighter.

Just when she thought she was about to helplessly watch her sister die in front of her again... just when the waveform was almost turning into a straight line, a sliver of starlight suddenly drifted in from outside the window.

The light was very small, so small that it would be easily overlooked if one didn't pay attention. In this dim and dilapidated hospital room, the light was so faint that it seemed as if it could be swallowed up by the darkness at any moment.

But it didn't. It passed through the glass, through the air, through the silence filled with the smell of disinfectant, and slowly, gently landed on Su Qing's chest, then silently melted into her.

The next moment, the entire ward lit up as if it had been set on fire.

Countless tiny points of light emerged from the void, enveloping the hospital bed and the person on it in a warm, pale golden glow.

The waveform on the electrocardiogram monitor, which was about to flatten out, suddenly jumped, then resumed its strong beating. The medicine in the IV drip turned into a transparent pale gold in the light, flowing into Su Qing's body through the tube.

Jiang Ran stared wide-eyed as her sister's cheeks became full and soft again, as her withered hands, which had been reduced to bones, became plump again, and as her dry hair became black and smooth again, spreading out on the pillow like a piece of silk soaked in moonlight.

She watched as her sister blankly raised those eyes that she would see every day for the next seven years, and raised that fair and slender hand with calluses on its palm, looking at it repeatedly for a long time.

Su Qing threw off the covers and got out of bed, stepping barefoot on the cold floor tiles, and walked to the simple mirror in the corner of the ward.

She watched her sister stare blankly at herself in the mirror for a long time, then raised her hand to touch her face, and looked down at her hands, which were smaller than before. She muttered something like, "What was that light just now? How did it change my body?"

Then, watching as her sister seemed to suddenly remember something, she picked up her old, well-worn phone from the bedside table, opened the navigation app, and entered an address.

The blue cursor on the screen circled the map a few times before finally locking onto a building that Jiang Ran knew all too well… It was where she lived as a child, that dilapidated apartment building, that dimly lit balcony…

The screen began to shatter at that moment, like a broken mirror, with fine cracks spreading from the small phone screen and quickly covering the entire ward.

The surrounding scenery shattered and fell piece by piece, revealing the bottomless darkness below.

Jiang Ran stood in the center of the collapsing dream, looking in the direction where her sister had disappeared. She was filled with questions but hadn't had a chance to ask them... Why did her sister go there? Why did her sister go looking for her? She still didn't know the answers.

Then she opened her eyes.

Above them was an unfamiliar ceiling, not the stark white fluorescent light of a hospital room, but a small, warm yellow chandelier emitting a soft glow.

There was no smell of disinfectant in the air; instead, there was a faint fragrance of gardenias.

Her fingers twitched, touching the soft cotton sheets. There was an IV tape on the back of her hand, and the electrocardiogram monitor next to her was steadily beeping.

She's back.