"If I told you that I was God," the woman suddenly asked, "would you believe me?"
The boy's eyes widened as he stared fixedly at the woman smiling sweetly atop the ruins. For a moment, he felt as though his thoughts had come to a standstill...
"You little brat! I told you to worship Guanyin Bodhisattva—what are you doing here?!" The middle-aged woman's scolding yanked the boy out of his daze. His whole body jolted, and a bone-chilling cold crawled from his tailbone up his spine to the back of his neck, followed by the burning pain of a slap across his body.
The boy shuddered. Instead of looking at his mother's furious face, he turned to look at the top of the ruins—at some point, the woman had vanished, as if she had never been there at all.
As if everything had merely been the boy's hallucination.
Vaguely, the boy felt as though something was missing from within him... but for the moment, he could not say what it was.
"Still spacing out! Still spacing out!" Seeing the boy's blank expression, the middle-aged woman grew even more furious. She grabbed him by the collar and rapped him several times on the head. "All you know is how to run out and play! Do you know how hard it is for me to raise you little brats by myself?! I told you to worship Guanyin Bodhisattva, but you wouldn't! What if your dad breathes his last in the emergency room? Tell me, what then?!"
The middle-aged woman cried and shouted as she hit and cursed the boy, but he seemed completely unmoved. He merely stared stupidly at the ruins.
"Get over here!" The middle-aged woman seemed to have run out of breath from scolding him. She dragged the boy over