"This is an ability user's power." Ye Qing's voice rang out in the darkness. "He was my colleague. A former colleague. Back then, we were both in the Expert Database. He died before I left. His ability... wasn't very useful, actually. He could turn memories into images. He was an orphan, too. His closest family had died in an accident caused by a ghost, and he'd been caught up in it. He missed his dead relatives, so he gained that ability. It was only that ability, though. He was seventeen at the time, old enough to understand things. He wasn't like you, a two-year-old child who knew nothing and only wanted to bring your dead parents back. You were lucky, too. You wanted to bring them back, and you pulled them from the past into the present instead of creating false dolls. I've read records of the latter happening. That ability user eventually accepted reality, went mad, killed the dolls he'd created, and committed suicide."
I stared at the figure in the darkness and said nothing.
"I'm sorry I had you watched when you were little. Though I never approached you directly back then, I must have caused your parents a lot of trouble," Ye Qing added.
I opened my mouth, but said nothing. I only asked, "Do you regret it?"
Regret not taking me away by force back then?
If he had acted sooner... perhaps I would have used my ability to solve the problem sooner. Perhaps things wouldn't have gotten this bad.
"Timing, location, and people," Ye Qing replied. "Liu Che didn't have any of those things back then. But starting with him, with his predecessors and ancestors, everything each generation, every person, has done has shaped the present."
Even though I couldn't see Ye Qing in the