Chapter 667: The Truth Buried by My Own Hands
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 667: The Truth Buried by My Own Hands
Municipal Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital.
Sister Bai and I arrived here.
In truth, there were no fewer than three hospitals closer to that home that possessed a complete obstetric and gynecological diagnostic system.
Yet, they had still chosen to come to the most famous hospital they could reach. At least in their perception, this was likely the kind of place the wealthy would frequent.
However, after I had gained a deep understanding of the direct bloodline relationships within those families and factions, I realized that even branch members possessed private hospitals completely different from those of ordinary people—a level that commoners could never touch.
Sister Bai led me into the hospital. Even at this hour, the maternity ward was incredibly busy.
My gaze followed one of the nurses until she turned and vanished from my sight.
Then, I shifted my focus to a newborn baby.
Wristbands and identity tags had been swapped; the neonatal management process was riddled with errors...
It seemed another child’s life had been traded.
I had thought such occurrences were rare, but now it seemed that wasn't the case.
The moment I arrived, reality gave me a front-row seat to such a performance.
Just a moment ago, I truly wanted to grab that nurse and ask her if she had any moral compass left, to ask her if the money she took didn't burn her hands!
But in the end, I gave up...
Would questioning her do any good?
No...
And I didn't want to cause a scene and invite trouble here.
But looking at those swapped identities, changing them back was nothing more than a simple task for me.
Swapping the tags, altering the records—these methods required only a few minor spells to accomplish.
"Xiao Han... you can't fix them all this way."
"I know I can't fix them all, but so what? I'm just experiencing the feeling of setting their lives back on track. It’s the power to personally correct a person's destiny," I said.
"If everyone within the world carries Ley Line shackles from birth, their trajectories written by a script and pushed by luck, with the final end always being the return of life to the Ley Lines..."
"Then, by combining these traits—using the Ley Line information gathered from the Ley Line Identification Art, the understanding from Heart Sense, the control of Time Sense, and the deductions of the Qi Observation Art—I can use the present as a base to deduce the unwritten futures of these children."
"Is that possible?"
"Why wouldn't it be?" I looked at Sister Bai with a smile. "Using our current position as a base and employing the hallucinatory experience of the previous Ley Line timeline regression, the past is a fixed and unchangeable fate, while the future is a possibility filled with the unknown. We can know the upper and lower limits of a child's remaining life, and we can know their most likely ending."
"What kind of family raises what kind of child, and what kind of personality a child has when facing certain events—they are destined to make specific choices. It may seem like they have countless options, but in reality, there is only one. They converge into the only path of the future, and that is that child's most likely life script."
Sister Bai followed me like that, listening to me explain principles she didn't quite understand, watching me make seemingly foolish choices along the way.
She didn't press me on why I hadn't directly sought the truth I cared about, because while I was sharing these views, Sister Bai had already caught the underlying meaning in my words.
Thus, Bai Yu knew that the truth had become irrelevant.
What truly mattered was what Xiao Han could learn and gain from this experience.
Once she realized this, Bai Yu felt completely at ease. She knew that once Xiao Han developed such a mindset, everything else had to make way for it.
In other words... Xiao Han had moved past it.
So, the problem now wasn't how to face those parents, but how to further master that obscure technique—a technique that could grasp the life script of an ordinary person.
"Time to handle some trivial matters."
I stopped and murmured to myself when I reached an unremarkable newborn care area.
The ability to backtrack through past scenes appeared again. Sister Bai and I watched with cold detachment until a familiar figure appeared in the delivery room. Watching that newborn child's life being swapped, I merely recorded some information in silence.
"Xiao Han... what do you plan to do about this?"
"I'll send a text message to inform them of the truth. As for the rest... it's up to those two pairs of parents to handle," I said with a shrug.
Then, I took out my old phone, charged it again, added some credit, and composed a text message to send out.
The content was concise and clear: the process, the result, the solution... The choice was left to them. As for whether they believed it or not... that was naturally up to their own judgment.
Afterward, I left and headed to another care area.
According to the Ley Line Identification Art, I was the child born here.
But... I couldn't recall anything from my infancy.
Because of... Innate Spirit Vision.
My infancy was my most helpless and desperate period. At that time, I didn't even realize it was my new life.
It wasn't until I gradually "adapted" and realized I was still "alive"...
Back then, I thought I was sick, unable to see anything clearly. Endless information crashed violently against my cognition. Anything—even the ceiling above, my own arm, or anything else—as long as it could be seen, was nothing but "color blocks" and "mosaics."
Only when I went a step further did I realize I was in a containment facility for the mentally ill caused by Innate Spirit Vision.
And then I learned I had parents...
I should be grateful I wasn't taken away for research as the first case of recovery from Innate Spirit Vision-induced mental illness.
But I no longer wished to delve into those matters. One must always look forward. Occasionally glancing back at the past is merely a seasoning for the future; getting trapped in the past is an act of irresponsibility toward oneself.
"Xiao Han... with a time span of nearly twenty years, will the Ley Lines really still remember?"
"They will, though it will only get blurrier." I took Sister Bai's hand again. After completing the Heart Sense resonance, many thoughts no longer needed to be spoken.
The Ley Lines clearly remember every detail of past history, and human-written history depicts those past memories once more.
For the bottom-layer people whom no one cares about, tracing back less than a year already blurs their faces. Yet historical figures recorded in books, even after centuries, will not be missing a single hair.
Once I learned of this discrepancy, I understood that to a world, some people truly are insignificant, while others continue to shine brilliantly within the sealed Ley Lines.
The role of luck is to help the Ley Lines complete the engraving of memory.
This is the treatment of a Child of Destiny; even if their lives return to the dust, their image remains immortal within the Ley Lines.
At this moment, I took out a coin—the very Fate Coin transformed from the qualification for that luck seed phantom.
The threads of luck attached to it acted like a carving knife, engraving my face into the Ley Line regression. Although I wasn't in this hospital in the past, through this coin, I "saw" an overlap with this place in the distant past of the Ley Line timeline.
In a blurred scene, amidst a blurred crowd, I saw two infants who were out of place compared to all the other children.
I walked over. Without needing to distinguish them, I knew which one was my former self.
As a blurry figure walked by, a bound identification tag appeared on my former tiny ankle.
However, the information on it only consisted of the fixed mother's name, birth time, and so on. There was a space for the child's name, but it was left blank.
This reminded me of the name "Yang Yuehan." It seemed to be a name I carried over from my previous life. As for the name in this life... to be honest, I've forgotten the name they gave me. Or rather, during that stage when I hadn't yet adapted to my Innate Spirit Vision, the name they gave me held no meaning.
"Xiao Han, aren't you going to look at the child you were swapped with? It's actually a girl... is it a preference for boys over girls..."
"I won't look. There's no point; it only adds to the trouble. Let us each be well."
"But for that younger sister just now... you didn't act this way." Sister Bai questioned my answer.
"She... she doesn't have her own cognitive concepts yet. Her life has just begun, and she still has a chance to start over. As for me... I've already passed that stage." I let go of Sister Bai's hand, ending the Heart Sense resonance. I simply didn't want this contradictory psychology to cause Sister Bai unnecessary worry.
If asked why I made such starkly different choices, I couldn't give a decent answer. But since I chose to do it, my subconscious must have had deeper considerations.
One encounters many problems in life. Aside from academic ones, digging to the bottom of other issues rarely leads to good results.
Bai Yu stood in place. Having lost the Heart Sense resonance, she was now merely a spectator in this Ley Line hallucination. The registration form formed from Ley Line information in her hand suddenly fell back to its original position.
She had lost the qualification to interact limitedly with this hallucination and had become a complete observer. She looked up at Xiao Han, who had walked to the window, but in the end, she hesitated to speak.
What she wanted to say was... during the resonance, she had learned about the relationship between luck and the Ley Lines. But for another child to leave such a clear image in the past Ley Line information... that in itself was very strange, wasn't it?
Bai Yu crouched down, looking at the tags and records.
Mother's name... birth time... infant's name... Tan Han (crossed out) Tan Han...
"Xiao Han..." Sister Bai took a deep breath and stood up. Looking at my back, she softly called my name.
"Hmm? What is it?"
"Is it possible for history to be modified?"
"History... objective history naturally cannot be modified. But history where the witnesses are dead and history recorded by the Ley Lines... that's not necessarily the case. Sister Bai, you wouldn't want to modify this meaningless past, would you? This is a hallucination. Even if you completely destroy this place, my past won't change at all."
"Is that so?" Sister Bai stepped forward to my side, as if making a difficult decision. "Then, would Xiao Han mind if I destroyed this place?"
"Why?"
"Because since you've chosen not to contact your biological parents, then let's completely sever any traces. From now on... I will be your only family, okay?"
"...Mm, okay."
...
Sister Bai and I left the Municipal Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital. No one would ever know what had happened there, nor would anyone know who had visited.
A segment of blurred history was simply lost here, making the past impossible to verify.
"It's so late... let's go get some late-night snacks~"
"Sure~"
The simple dialogue added a touch of anticipation and satisfaction to a night that should have been sleepless.
And after a sumptuous late-night snack, the nightlife of the latter half of the night truly began.
This was the first time I felt the latter half of the night was so long, allowing me to spend so much time with Sister Bai. It was also the first time I felt the latter half of the night was so short, making this joyful time vanish in a flash.
In the past, I was a "good child"—eating on time, sleeping on time, waking on time, and meditating on time.
Even when I stayed up late, it was mostly for studying or research.
But tonight, Sister Bai taught me many things.
It turned out that nightlife wasn't about staying up to watch TV, nor was it scrolling through a phone under the covers, and certainly not drinking gloomily in the middle of the night.
The true nightlife of a Witch is to don the cloak given by the darkness, remove the mask worn during the day, and release the freedom and wildness within. It is to traverse ordinary streets lightly under the moonlight, dancing with the night wind, conversing with the stars, laughing about the past, and looking forward to the expected future.
The neon lights and wine of nightlife are just vents for desire and emotional discharge. Such an absurd nightlife only reflects the dissatisfaction in a group of people's lives.
Perhaps for ordinary people, this is carpe diem, but for those prospective Witches about to become Witches, they have changed nothing.
Sister Bai shared her insights and experiences of becoming a Transcendent Witch with me.
Witches actually don't like the fast-paced life of modernity. Such a lifestyle constantly squeezes every bit of energy out of life. Those short-lived species carry the side effects of this lifestyle into the world after death, but Witches cannot.
In fact, a significant portion of those converted into Transcendent Witches encounter the threshold of "mental aging" when they reach the lifespan limit of short-lived species.
This fast-paced lifestyle drains too much passion and enthusiasm.
Whether it's the process of modernization or the lifestyle of short-lived species, both tend to pursue efficiency and speed. The advancement of modernization has further intensified this fast-paced state of living.
People long to realize more of their value and dreams within their limited lives, to the point that even after becoming Witches with endless lifespans, they experience a compensatory mental fatigue.
This isn't the open-mindedness of being indifferent to life and death; it's the loss of the passion they once had for life.
Passion for life isn't just a burst of hot-bloodedness; it's a long-lasting life experience that requires patience and persistence.
Perhaps it's the anticipation for a new day upon waking up every morning, or perhaps it's a small failure after an attempt. People tend to like success because a short life cannot accommodate failure, but Witches can.
As the night gradually passed, Sister Bai and I leaned against each other, sitting at the highest point of the city's landmark building, watching the first light of dawn break over the horizon.
Watching the sunrise with Sister Bai—achievement unlocked~
"Look~ the sunrise!"
"It's beautiful. Why didn't I think so before?"
"I don't know~" I chuckled, playing dumb in response.
Perhaps it was because I had laid down the burdens of the past, and my heart had learned to appreciate ordinary beauty.