After her dramatic cousin stopped acting up, the aloof doctor got anxious.

One month.

Qi Wenshen suddenly smiled.

His laughter was hoarse.

He also hoped that he could get that little woman back within a month.

He replied: "Thanks, we'll talk about it later."

Then I turned off my phone and sat back down at my computer.

This time, he no longer searched for bloggers.

He opened the academic database and entered keywords.

Consciousness transplantation, neural interfaces, near-death experiences, quantum consciousness hypothesis...

One academic paper after another.

One experiment after another.

He placed bets like a gambler.

As dawn broke outside the window, sunlight streamed through the gaps in the curtains, tracing a golden line across his face.

Qi Wenshen was completely unaware that his eyes were bloodshot, but he was staring intently at a piece of text on the screen.

[...Under stimulation by electromagnetic fields of a specific frequency, experimental mice exhibited transient memory sharing, suggesting that consciousness may exist in some unknown form within bioelectromagnetic fields...]

Specific frequency.

Electromagnetic field.

Memory sharing.

Qi Wenshen's fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly.

He recalled what Shen Ruo had said: "I have the memories she left in my mind."

……

Li Hehua sat on the old sofa in the living room, holding her phone in her hand, her fingertip hovering over an unnamed number in her contacts for a long time.

After a long while, he finally pressed the dial button.

The phone rang twice before being answered, and a deep male voice came from the other end, "Feed."

Li Hehua's fingers tightened around her phone. "She's back."

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone, then the voice came back on, "Come over here."

Li Hehua hung up the phone and hurriedly went out.

As the elevator descended, she stared at her reflection in the mirrored wall.

A fifty-year-old woman, with graying temples, has unknowingly seen decades pass by.

She recalled twenty years ago, when her daughter was just born, holding that pink little dumpling and vowing to give her the best of everything in the world.

But fate played a cruel joke on her.

When my daughter was one year old, she suddenly developed a high fever, and after the fever subsided, she changed.

She thought it was from being frightened, until that dream...

"Your daughter's soul has left her body. I will temporarily borrow another soul to nurture her. Eighteen years later, the great hurdle will pass, and everyone will return to their rightful place."

She remembered the fortune teller's words for over a decade.

……

The large manor on the outskirts of Beijing is hidden halfway up a mountain, with towering iron gates and vines entwining it.

She had been here several times, but each time she dared not look around at the ancient stone carvings and the eaves with copper bells hanging from them.

Li Hehua stared at the person opposite her, her voice trembling, "Master, didn't you say she wouldn't come back after she went back? But she came back last night... What about my daughter...?"

He lifted his eyelids, his gaze unfathomable.

Li Hehua's words were stuck in her throat, as if an invisible hand was choking her.

She wanted to know if her biological daughter was in danger.

But that gaze was too imposing, carrying a kind of inhuman indifference that scrutinized life and death, and she instinctively felt afraid.

The man took a sip of tea, the bottom of the celadon cup tapping against the sandalwood table with a crisp sound.

"Why are you being so stubborn? This girl is actually quite good to you. Your souls often switch places, so you essentially have two daughters, don't you?"

Li Hehua hesitated, "But... I only want my own child."

"She keeps having nightmares; she must be having a hard time over there..."

The middle-aged man looked at her, giving her a slow, deliberate glance. "She's been with you for so long, don't you have any feelings for her at all?"

Li Hehua froze.

emotion?

Of course there are.

More than a decade, thousands of days and nights.

He calls her "Mom" and treats her very well.

But she wasn't her daughter.

"If you're really determined to prevent her from ever coming back, I can help you."

Li Hehua looked up, and her heart skipped a beat.

"But are you really willing to give it up?"

Are you willing to give it up?

Li Hehua did not answer immediately.

She remembered the man who would teach her how to make pasta in the kitchen.

He would hug her and act coquettishly, saying, "Mom, you're so amazing."

She's the daughter who buys her skincare products and teaches her how to use them.

Those memories overlapped with her now straightforward daughter, making the tug-of-war in her heart grow stronger and stronger.

Switch back?

Or not to change it?

Li Hehua recalled her biological daughter's furrowed brows in her sleep, the occasional tears welling in her eyes, and her tearful words as she spoke in her sleep, "Don't come any closer."

That was her own daughter; she couldn't possibly watch her sleep restlessly and pretend nothing had happened.

She must be suffering over there.

Therefore, she had selfish motives.

"Didn't you say that my daughter has overcome her major hurdle, or... it would be better if we all went our separate ways?"

The middle-aged man chuckled softly.

There was no discernible joy or anger in that laughter; it sounded like the sigh of someone who had seen life and death with detachment.

"Alright, since you've made up your mind, I'll help you get her back."

Li Hehua's shoulders relaxed.

"Have you thought this through? This change truly means returning to your own life."

Li Hehua hesitated for a moment.

She remembered the child's smiling face this morning, and the crescent moon shape her eyes formed when she called out "Mom".

You can develop feelings for a dog after raising it for more than ten years, let alone a person.

But she wasn't his biological daughter.

"I've made up my mind."

She nodded, her voice soft yet firm.

I suddenly felt a little sad, a dull ache in my heart.

The man raised his hand in a gesture, and the butler, who had been standing quietly to the side, immediately turned and walked out.

He picked up his teacup again and took a sip. As he lowered his eyelids, a fleeting look of relaxation crossed his eyes.

He had finally waited for the woman to make this decision.

He had only been a soul-collecting messenger in the underworld for a short time then, and was not yet proficient in his duties. On his first mission, he collected the wrong soul.

Originally, it was the old lady in the next ward whose time had come, but he inexplicably took away the soul of the one-year-old girl in the next ward.

By the time they discovered it, the soul was already on the banks of the River of Oblivion.

He quickly put the soul back, but the little girl's soul had been away from her body for too long, and her small body could no longer hold on.

He tried every possible method to keep his job.

Finally, the girl's soul was sent into a virtual, running novel world.

They found a body with a compatible magnetic field.

That is, the female supporting character named Shen Ruo in that book.

The two souls swapped places, each finding its rightful place.

Then he appeared in the woman's dream and told her that after the so-called major hurdle and the subsequent gentle recuperation, everyone would return to their rightful place.

Of course, I didn't tell him it was because of him that things turned out this way.

He only said that he had foreseen it; yes, his current identity in the human world is that of a diviner.

For the sake of this girl, he would come to live in the human world from time to time.

Other soul-reapers can lie down after completing their missions, but he cannot.

He would worry as soon as he received a call from this woman, fearing that the girl might have an accident in the virtual world, and that the authorities might investigate and discover his mistakes from back then.

This woman always hesitates when it could have been done in one go.

I can't bear to part with it today, I want to wait a little longer tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow I say I actually want both.

He was getting so impatient waiting that his liver was aching.

The butler returned quickly, holding a talisman in his hand.