Chapter 219: “reincarnation”
In a certain instant,
Jiang Shan’s body trembled, and his head felt a burst of intense stabbing pain. This intense pain was rapidly intensifying, as if something was drilling into his consciousness.
At the same time, many memories and emotions that did not belong to him kept emerging in his mind.
These things were neither his nor the fierce ghost’s, but belonged to everything of the ordinary people in ZS City who were invaded by the Newspaper Ghost.
Among these people, there were men, women, old men, and children. The memories contained all sorts of messy things, some good and some bad, but these endless memories were not the most terrifying.
The most terrifying thing was:
He could actually feel these people’s emotions in these memories, experiencing all the “bitter, spicy, sour, and sweet” of a person’s ordinary and brief life.
For a moment,
Jiang Shan felt Tong Qian’s happiness and joy from childhood to adulthood, when she was loved by her parents and praised by her teachers;
He felt Feng Quan’s madness and obsession at the moment he lay into the Ghost Coffin with a determination to die;
He felt the despair and fear of countless people when they were killed by the Newspaper Ghost and had their memories and emotions stolen by it.
Countless people’s faces,
Representing countless people’s pasts.
At this moment,
Jiang Shan’s past was being continuously invaded by the Newspaper Ghost’s supernatural power, and his body began to become weirdly damp.
It was as if a layer of water was seeping out from his body.
“This is… Ghost Rain?”
While his consciousness was still relatively clear, Jiang Shan noticed the abnormality on his body.
His pupils dilated, and his eyes were filled with disbelief.
“Why does my body have the supernatural power of Ghost Rain?! Could it be that the Newspaper Ghost has affected my past memories?”
But Jiang Shan only pondered for a very short time, so short it was only a few instants, before his consciousness began to sink, as if his whole person had fallen into a vast ocean.
The mutually fused supernatural powers were affecting reality with Jiang Shan as the medium.
Dachun City, South Pass District.
In a room in some old residential area.
“It’s raining, Mom. When is Dad coming back? I miss Dad so much.”
A little girl who looked only five or six years old looked at the sudden downpour outside the window, like a torrential rain, and couldn’t help asking her mother who was cooking in the kitchen.
The little her seemed to have little impression of the heavy rain a month ago.
In the little girl’s memory,
She only remembered that her dad disappeared in a heavy rain, and Mom told her that her dad had gone to a very far place to buy gifts for her.
Then, a group of very bad people drove her and her mom out of their home to a place with many people and a lot of crying.
After that, she couldn’t remember.
But this wasn’t important. When she saw the heavy rain identical to the day Dad disappeared, she didn’t want gifts anymore; she only wanted Dad to come back now.
“？！”
Hearing her daughter’s sobbing voice, the woman preparing dinner suddenly looked up at the window.
Her name was Wang Yan.
An utterly ordinary local of Dachun City, ordinary to the extreme.
And this ordinariness had been broken a month ago.
“Splash… splash…”
Looking at the torrential rain outside the window, Wang Yan suddenly felt boundless fear surging from the bottom of her heart.
Every drop of rainwater hitting the ground sounded like steel needles, madly stimulating her nerves, and painful memories instantly flooded her mind.
Because in Dachun City, South City District’s Jingtan was the source of Ghost Rain invading reality.
And her family, who had already settled in South City District, were the first victims of Ghost Rain’s supernatural power.
She had watched with her own eyes as her husband, to prevent the whole family from starving, ignored the text message warnings and went out in the heavy rain, only to vanish alive right in front of her.
Leaving only her and her daughter who was not yet six years old.
And such tragedies did not only occur in South Pass District, nor only in Dachun City.
All areas affected by Ghost Rain were like this, and even worse!
“Mom… Mom, I think I see Dad…”
Just as Wang Yan was hiding in the kitchen secretly shedding tears, her daughter’s words from the living room instantly startled her.
Even though she had already guessed that her husband would absolutely not return, even though going out now might let the woman see her tears, she couldn’t care about that at this moment.
When Wang Yan panicked and anxiously ran to the living room and looked out the window following her daughter’s gaze, she froze.
Outside the window, in the already hazy heavy rain, a man extremely familiar to the woman was standing strangely in mid-air in the rain without any basis.
The man’s figure was very blurry, even his outline not very clear, but his face the woman saw clearly.
This man standing in the rain, gazing at her through the window, was her husband!
“Liu Yuanyang? Is that you? Have you missed me? I…”
Wang Yan stared blankly at her “husband” in the rain outside the window. At this moment, she no longer cared why her husband was outside the sixth-floor window, in this torrential rain.
She only knew she had many things to say, but didn’t know where to start.
And that man in the rain, he just stood quietly in the rain watching everything in the room.
Almost at the same time,
The same scene appeared in different cities, different places, in the same way, strangely.
Countless dead people whose memories and emotions were stolen by the Newspaper Ghost, and whose lives and bodies were stolen by Ghost Rain, their “former selves” all appeared in the present world in another way in this sudden heavy rain.
Gazing from the rain,
“Reborn” in the rain.
The Newspaper Ghost’s supernatural power attack used the characteristics of the Ghost Lotus stolen in Jiang Shan’s body as the medium. It seemed to have produced some unknown and unimaginable terrifying supernatural power with Ghost Rain!
This terrifying fierce ghost, dismembered by Shen Bao into four supernatural lands, four ghosts.
At this moment, it finally revealed its true supernatural power to reality.
The one nailed to thirty days of memory, countless Jiang Shans, gained the Newspaper Ghost’s ability. He stole the past of every person killed by Ghost Rain’s supernatural power.
In other words,
Now appearing in Dachun City, Dachang City, and all areas affected by Ghost Rain, all the “dead and resurrected” people, each one represented every second, every instant of Jiang Shan’s past.
The him who only existed in the past was living in the current world with the identity of others’ pasts.
Unclear bodies,
Representing that people from the past can never live in the present;
Extremely clear faces,
Representing that Jiang Shan and those already dead people, their past memories all truly existed.
Now Jiang Shan didn’t even know what he was doing or what he wanted to do.
He only knew,
Every self appearing in reality was himself, but also not himself.
He was living in this world using these people’s past memories through Ghost Rain’s supernatural power. These people, before dying, perhaps only wanted to see their parents again, or just glance at this world once more.
But no matter what.
If the obsessions in these memories could not disappear, then the past Jiang Shan would forever be unable to reclaim his past self; he would completely fuse with these people’s memories.
Otherwise, his past might be replaced by strangers.
And once that happened, Jiang Shan’s memories would no longer be complete, and his “present” might die because of it.
If he had to name this process, Jiang Shan would call it—
Reincarnation.
