Burning with fever, Cui Ciyou sank completely into a deep, chaotic nightmare.
Memories he had forcibly buried in the deepest reaches of his soul.
Fragments of memories from another blue planet, long since blurred by the passage of time.
At that moment, they surged forth like floodwaters bursting through a shattered dam.
They swallowed Cui Ciyou's consciousness whole.
Cui Ciyou seemed to have returned to that city of steel, concrete, and cold neon lights.
The sky was no longer the eerie red of the Demon Continent.
Instead, it was a hazy gray, shrouded in industrial fumes.
The air no longer smelled of sulfur and dust, either.
In their place was the smell of car exhaust;
And that peculiar, earthy odor rising from rain-soaked asphalt.
Within that cold, gray torrent of memories, only one figure remained so clear, so warm.
Cui Ciyou saw a woman with a gentle smile, her eyes filled with weariness and love that never faded.
Her hair had begun to gray, and the burdens of life had etched fine wrinkles around her eyes.
Years of toil had left her hands rough, her knuckles even slightly misshapen.
She always wore plain, old clothes, washed until their colors had faded.
Every morning, she would prepare a steaming breakfast for Cui Ciyou;
Every late night, she would sit beneath a dim desk lamp, mending his worn-out school uniform;
And whenever life's disappointments left him dejected, or even ready to give up.
With those hands, rough yet endlessly warm, she would gently stroke his head, again and again.
Silently offering him the deepest comfort and encouragement...
She was his mother, a gentle, kind woman whose troubled life had been filled with misfortune and toil...
In Cui Ciyou's lonely previous life, she had also been,
His only light, his only warmth, his