"She's in the inner room. She should be asleep." Yangjin gestured toward the inner room with her lips.
Just then, I heard Maru's voice. It really was his voice. "Mother, who are you talking to?"
Then, a bleary-eyed teenager emerged from the inner room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. He really had been asleep. From the look of it, he had not fully woken up yet.
"Father!" He suddenly ran toward me in delighted surprise and grabbed my arm. "It really is you, Father! Mother said I could see you here, but I didn't believe her. I never thought it would actually be true."
Maru had not grown up. He still looked fifteen or sixteen.
He was very happy to see me. If the situation had not been so strange, I would have been happy too.
But at that moment, I could not be happy, because I had no way of telling whether this mother and son were real or fake.
Yet she had said this was the Great Living Buddha's arrangement. If the two of them were real, then they had come from another time and space—the one that belonged to the early twentieth century.
Still, I could not show any doubt about their identities. I smiled and stroked his head. "You're still the same. You haven't changed."
But after saying that, my heart skipped a beat. They had not changed, but I had.
I no longer looked like Master Tumba. I looked like myself—Jiang Xiaobai.
Yet Yangjin and Maru did not seem to care at all. They had even recognized me at a glance.
If they were not fake, then there was only one possibility: in their eyes, I still looked like Master Tumba.
"Father, do you remember this?" Maru took out a gun. That's right—it was that