TDU Chapter 526
Chapter 526 Subconscious
Wei Yang finished speaking, then lowered his head to pick up his watering can. He slammed the pitchfork hard into the ground, took a few steps forward, and shoved Qi Xia aside with his filthy palm.
“It’s getting late,” Wei Yang remarked as he turned back, sweeping the three of them with his sly gaze. “Care to stay for dinner? I butchered a young woman yesterday, she’s had a day, but the flesh should still hold up.”
Qi Xia’s expression darkened once more. After a long pause, he ultimately asked, “Wei Yang, was it I who instructed you to do all of this?”
“Hah, of course not. I merely follow my own inclinations” Wei Yang stretched lazily and laughed. “When I was committing fraud abroad, I often recalled an old saying commonly mentioned in huaben* stories, {Back to Country Life (归隐田园)}, and think how wonderful it would be to leave it all behind and live a self-sufficient pastoral life.”
(TLN: A huaben is a short to mid-length vernacular story that grew out of Song Dynasty oral storytelling. The earliest surviving collection is ‘The Tales of the Serene Mountain (清平山堂話本; 1550)’, and the genre truly flourished in the late Ming, when scholars began writing huaben for a commercial readership.)
Chen Junnan glanced at the scattered limbs all over the farm and frowned. “So this is your {pastoral life}?”
“Yes, and no.” Wei Yang shook his head. “An ordinary pastoral life is nothing more than growing vegetables and watering fields. If one indulges a little, perhaps raising some cattle or sheep. That’s not the pastoral life I dreamed of. Only here will do. Here, I can do whatever I want. If I want to kill, I kill. If I want to torture, I torture. I can even tear into the severed limbs of a young girl with my own teeth. Do you understand?”
“No,” Chen Junnan and Qiao Jiajin answered in unison.
“Preserve more memories and you eventually will,” Wei Yang said flatly. “Here, anything forbidden in the real world becomes permissible, for you might not remember it, and others might not remember either.”
“Stop lying to yourself.” Qi Xia cut him off coldly. “Keep those severed limbs for yourself. We’re not the same kind of people.”
“Hahahaha!!” Wei Yang, who had just stepped toward the door, burst out laughing again. “Not the same kind? We’re both {goats}, aren’t we?”
“But I am a {true goat},” Qi Xia said. “What about you?”
“Fancinating…” Wei Yang turned around and spoke in a voice so faint it was almost a whisper. “I am also a {true goat}.”
Qi Xia immediately furrowed his brow, but in the next moment Wei Yang had already turned back and entered the house, slamming the door shut behind him.
Wei Yang was indeed a true goat.
Chen Junnan and Qiao Jiajin were both left somewhat stunned. They had agreed to come talk to Wei Yang, yet the exchange between Qi Xia and Wei Yang had been far too obscure for them to make sense of.
Qi Xia’s brows knit as he took in the scene. He turned and declared to the two men, “Let’s go. We need to get back before dark.”
One look at his expression was enough. They didn’t need to understand—so long as Qi Xia did.
Qi Xia led them along the road back. Partway there, he suddenly turned his head and asked, “Chen Junnan, did I have the habit of touching my chin when I was thinking in the past?”
“In the past…?” Chen Junnan contemplated carefully. “Now that you mention it… come to think of it… I don’t think so. You used to think a lot, sure, but you had all kinds of mannerisms. It wasn’t just touching your chin.”
Chen Junnan searched through his distant memories. Even he could not recall exactly when Qi Xia had begun the habit of stroking his chin.
It seemed as though it had started with this meeting, seven years later.
From Chen Junnan’s words, Qi Xia realized that two questions remained to be answered.
Aside from {touching the chin}, there was also {true goat}.
From this brief encounter, Qi Xia understood that his line of thinking closely resembled Wei Yang’s.
In other words, since Wei Yang had deliberately thrown out the riddle of {touching the chin}, it meant he believed the known conditions were already sufficient to deduce a precise answer.
Now, with the long road stretching ahead, Qi Xia had more than enough time to lay out every condition one by one.
He had never had the habit of stroking his chin before, yet now he did. There was a high likelihood that this habit, too, had been learned from Wei Yang.
Seen from this angle, the conclusion was already unmistakable.
Qi Xia spent only a few seconds linking all the clues together. His expression darkened once more, sorrow filling even his gaze.
As expected, once the search began, every path led to the same answer.
Though Qi Xia no longer remembered Wei Yang, the gesture came naturally.
This demonstrated that what is deeply engraved in the subconscious survives, even through rebirth.
The moment this conclusion formed, countless threads in Qi Xia’s mind connected at once, like circuits receiving power for the first time, all snapping together in a single thunderous instant.
Even Wei Yang had likely never imagined that Qi Xia would arrive at the answer in fewer than ten steps after leaving.
Yet how could Qi Xia bring himself to believe such a horrifying conclusion?
If one could control one’s own subconscious, then it meant that long ago he had already foreseen this issue. That was why, in every cycle of experience, he kept honing himself.
Had he not already laid out all those {paths} for himself in advance, the clearest proof of all?
He would engrave every scrap of knowledge into his mind, again and again, hoping that one day in the future, this knowledge would rise from the subconscious and save his life.
He would attempt and fail time after time, until success was no longer an accident.
As long as he did not die completely, remnants from the subconscious would always remain behind. Whether knowledge or habit, whether memory or…
This was precisely what Wei Yang had been trying to convey.
“Remnants that remain…” In Qi Xia’s mind, the image of that figure in a pure white dress surfaced unbidden.
‘Yu Nian’An, are you merely a lingering remnant of my thoughts… or half of my life itself?’
A deafening hum filled Qi Xia’s head. Everything he had held onto for so long felt as though it were on the verge of collapsing in that very instant.
Yu Nian’An, along with those strange memories… could they have been something his former self had, on some distant day, carved into his own subconscious by some method?
If once was not enough… then what about many times?
Through repeated brainwashing and hypnosis, could one fabricate a memory so vivid it felt real?
“So there was never any need for {Reverberation} or magic at all…” Qi Xia looked up at the sky and let out a bitter laugh. ‘I never needed those things. I alone was enough to drive myself into a desperation…’
“Swindler lad… what’s wrong with you?” Qiao Jiajin felt something was off. Qi Xia had been muttering to himself for quite a while now.
“Ole Qi, ya alright?” Chen Junnan asked as well. “Did that deranged man Wei Yang scare you stupid?”
“Scared stupid…?” The bitter smile seemed etched into Qi Xia’s face, leaving him unable to think of anything else. “Qiao Jiajin, Chen Junnan… tell me, why is it that we want to escape from this place in the first place?”
TL Note: Rant goes here ( •̯́ ₃ •̯̀)
