Hoo—!!
Like drowning, An Jing covered her throat and coughed heavily. Behind her, Zhu Ying also spat out a little seawater with a fishy smell.
This was a gravel beach. Usually, no one came here. Only occasionally, children who felt bored would come here in groups to explore.
To reach this place, they had to climb a stone mountain on the island, then pass through a long natural cave to reach its end.
And that end was this gravel beach.
Children who secretly played here would usually get a beating if adults found out.
After all, the cave was very narrow. Adults had to bend over to pass through, and the stones inside were brittle, with the risk of collapse.
But on an island, children with nowhere to go had few places to seek thrills, so this prohibition was repeatedly ignored.
This seemingly fragile cave actually still existed until An Jing grew up.
For her, who was brought here by older siblings when she was little, passing through the cave to reach this place, though still on the island, felt like arriving at a new world.
In her memory, there were some shipwrecks on the gravel beach. The elderly said they were left by the Japanese fleet. Because they angered the Sea God, they were torn apart—but actually, they probably just encountered a storm at sea.
“Huff… Fresh air.” Zhu Ying propped her hands on her knees and panted.
“What just happened? It felt like I fell into the sea.”
“I also felt like… drowning.” An Jing cleared her uncomfortable throat—there seemed to be sand still stuck inside. “Hoo… hoo… I almost suffocated.”
“So where are we now?” Zhu Ying, having recovered, gently patted An Jing’s back. “Xiao Jing, how are you? Feeling better?”
“Hoo… Much better. Don’t, don’t pat. You’re patting too hard.”
“Not at all—” Zhu Ying hummed playfully. “Your clothes changed back, huh?”
“Ah? Oh… Changed back to the school uniform. And you? Also changed to… Eek?!”
“What’s wrong with me? Huh?” Zhu Ying looked down and screamed, covering her body. “Pervert Xiao Jing, make some clothes appear quickly!”
“What does that have to do with me…”
“This dream is clearly controlled by you. You must have done this bad thing!”
“Hey, hey, I never thought of that.”
“Then that means you thought of it subconsciously?”
“No, no!” An Jing flatly denied, shaking her head in panic, and created a set of clothes for Zhu Ying. “You always want to take a bath with me, but now you’re shy…”
“Of course! I only want Xiao Jing to see, not others. What if someone else is around?”
“Cough…”
An Jing scratched her head and turned around to see Zhu Ying wearing the same school uniform from Xiao Cheng No.2 Middle School as her. She sighed in relief. “All good now?”
“There’s nothing inside!”
“Eh?”
“Bad Xiao Jing actually wants to make me—”
“No, no, wait—” An Jing said. “Hmm—how about now?”
“There is something now, but it feels weird. I feel like you touched me all over just now.”
“No way!!”
“Hmph~ This ability can only be used on me, okay.”
“I didn’t use it!!” An Jing argued vehemently.
“Alright, alright. Isn’t Xiao Jing just like that? She looks serious, but actually—she thinks about things worse than me.”
“Definitely not worse than you…” An Jing’s eyelids drooped.
“So, where are we now?”
“Still in the dream, I think. I remember this gravel beach, but it’s different from my memory—looks cleaner, and there are no messy wrecks.”
“Can we get out from somewhere? Let’s see the village’s situation.”
“If I remember correctly, from that way, lift that vine, and there’s a cave entrance behind it…” As An Jing pointed in that direction, they saw an eight- or nine-year-old boy nimbly crawl out from behind, stepping barefoot onto the gravel beach—as if he didn’t feel the sharp stones at all. And An Jing and Zhu Ying were wearing shoes.
“Your grandfather is here.”
“It’s grandfather when he was little…”
Before An Jing could greet him, he had already spotted them and ran over with shining eyes.
“Hello…” An Jing still couldn’t bring herself to call a little boy “Grandfather,” so she treated him as a child with the same name. “Little one.”
“Good morning, Lord Deity! You appeared again!”
“Has it been a long time?”
“Five days!” The boy raised one hand. “After you pushed back the tsunami last time, you disappeared!”
The boy seemed much more polite than last time. Probably adults had taught him in the past few days how to speak if they saw the deity again.
Zhu Ying gently tugged at An Jing’s clothes. “Xiao Jing, let’s find a place to sit. I’m tired.”
“I know a place to rest!” Yu Tongshen eagerly ran a few steps ahead. “Lord Deity, and Great-Grandmother, please follow me!”
“Don’t call me grandmother…” Zhu Ying gritted her teeth.
“Just call her sister,” An Jing hurriedly said.
“Oh—! Then can I also call Lord Deity sister?”
“Sure, but what will you call her?”
“Deity Sister, and Great-Grandmother Sister?”
“…” Great-grandmother isn’t necessary.” An Jing pulled at the corner of her mouth.
“How about Priestess Sister?” Zhu Ying asked with a smile, but An Jing felt an inexplicable pressure in the air.
“Okay! Priestess Sister!” Yu Tongshen ran and hopped, leading them to a relatively flat piece of land. It was far from the sea, backed by the stone mountain, and had much fewer gravel. The gravel here seemed to have been deliberately cleared.
On the open space, there was a raised platform with a few benches on it, apparently brought by the children from home.
“Is anything planted here?”
“Those are watermelons, Priestess Sister!”
“Can you plant watermelons so close to the sea?”
“We just wanted to try, but it seems possible!”
“Watermelons grown in sandy soil taste the best.” An Jing nodded lightly. “But it’s rare to have them so close. Normally, high tide wouldn’t flood them, but if a typhoon comes, they’ll still be flooded.”
“So we’re just trying. They’ll grow if they can, and if not, it’s okay.” Yu Tongshen handed two benches to An Jing and Zhu Ying, then casually sat cross-legged on the ground.
An Jing turned her head to look at Yu Tongshen’s dark little face, and suddenly noticed a flicker of exhaustion on his smiling face.
Looking more closely, his eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept well recently.
“Yu Tongshen, have you been sleeping poorly lately?”
“Lord Deit—I mean, Sister, you really know.” Yu Tongshen shyly brought his hands together and tucked them between his legs. “Lately… I’ve been having nightmares. I dream that we can no longer live on this island…”
“Ah, you dreamed the Japanese came?”
“Not the invaders, but monsters… very big monsters.” Yu Tongshen gestured to An Jing. “Very, very big, yellow. They could move on the ground without moving their legs. They had only one extremely thick arm, and with just a ‘smack,’ houses crumbled. There were several of them, smashing houses into pieces like that…”
Zhu Ying tilted her head, unable to imagine what kind of monster that was. “Strange monsters. Never seen anything like them.”
“Uh…” An Jing touched her forehead. “After all, it’s a nightmare. It’s normal for the monsters in dreams to be bizarre.”
“And there was a very big, very tall thing like a thick needle stuck into the ground. Then the huge monster took something with its long arm and dropped it heavily onto the ground…”
An Jing and Zhu Ying exchanged a knowing glance.
Because they both thought of the same thing.
Yes, the mechanical monsters from the dream world.
But why could the little boy, who was her grandfather, dream of those things?
Did that dream world not only exist in the future?
Or maybe, for the dream world, there is no distinction between past and future?
“I also dreamed of two huge monsters swimming from the sea onto the island. They were terrifying. They looked like they wanted to eat people…”
A nightmare—in reality, it would be forgotten in an instant. But in this dream world, nightmares were events that could very well happen.
And no matter what, nightmares are reflections of reality. Perhaps the child’s overly rich imagination formed exaggerated and bizarre dreams, or perhaps the child’s perception was too sharp, so they could actually see something.
“So you can’t sleep because you’re scared by these nightmares?” Zhu Ying leaned on An Jing’s back and asked without any dignity.
“I always wake up scared. Either I’m killed, or I’m eaten… It’s really scary…” Yu Tongshen’s face turned pale. “And lately, I keep having the same dream. Deity Sister, are there really monsters? If there are… you can protect us, right?”
“Gods aren’t omnipotent. Or rather, there is no such god as you imagine in the world.” An Jing shook her head. “You can’t casually rely on others’ power. If… it’s just a nightmare, maybe you can try to defeat them in the dream?”
“But I’m scared… I can’t defeat them… I absolutely can’t…”
“It’s possible that such monsters were born from your nightmare. If you keep being afraid, they will really come into ‘reality.'”
“…” Yu Tongshen was silent, then suddenly looked up. “Deity Sister, and… I also dreamed that I was saved by adults, put on a ship, and taken far, far away. And in the dream, I knew I could never come back, never return to the island…”
A homeland they could never return to…?
A flash of insight seemed to pass through An Jing’s mind, but it was immediately interrupted by Zhu Ying.
“Xiao Jing!” The girl with a chubby face patted Yi’s shoulder hard and pointed into the distance in surprise. “Look!! Over there! A huge ship!!”