Can I Really Change Things? (ON HOLD)

Chapter 40

The journey back to the camp was filled with grief and sorrow. It was like they were all having an out-of-body experience. It was like they weren't even experiencing it at all, but rather watching through the eyes of someone else. But it didn't make it any easier. The entire time, nobody spoke, they all just let their legs guide them back to the camp where they would have to break the news. When they finally arrived, they all choked when they saw the hopeful faces of everyone else. 

As Zixuan, Yanli, and Huaisang came out, they all stopped when they saw the looks on their faces.

Huaisang, who was the camp's main strategist (after TaiFeng had gone they all looked towards his brains for help) knew something was wrong. The entire morning, he had a bad feeling, like something big was going to happen.

"What happened? Did you catch Wen Chao?" Zixuan asked, looking around confusedly. 

Jiang Cheng, Xichen, and Wei Ying couldn't speak at all. In the end, one of the Qinghe Nie disciples had to step forward and deliver the news. 

" Wen Chao escaped... Yuzhao Long." He said, pausing a little, as all eyes were now on him.  "She had ...passed away ...three months ago."

What?

"Shijie... She died." Jiang Cheng sniffed, handing her the bracelet. 

The air was deathly cold and silent, it was like the world had just faded into grey and black. All this time, they had all desperately prayed for her to be safe, when in fact she had already left them.

Guilt was one of the strongest emotions coming from the Yunmeng siblings, she had given up her life to save Lotus Pier. All this time she was gone and none of them even knew.

They should have been there for her, she was always there for them, why didn't they do the same?

Wasn't it enough that she had to live most of her life thinking she was a bad omen? Wasn't it enough to lose the one person who had ever shown her kindness? Wasn't her life already filled with hardships? Why did she need to lose her life?

Zixuan was no better, he wept just like everyone else, doing his best to cover his tear-stained face with his sleeves.

Nobody good seemed to stay around long enough in his life. It was always like this, he had never known the meaning of true friendship until TaiFeng came along and turned everyone's lives upside down.  

She was a breath of fresh air in his asphyxiating life, and once again he was back to gasping for air

Xichen couldn't even bring himself to look at TaiFeng's siblings, who he had failed so drastically. 

If anyone wanted to assign blame, he wanted to take all of it. That fateful day, it was him that let her go. 

Fate, huh? There seemed to be a lot of that in her life. Good fates, bad fates. Seeing into the future and all that. 

When he first found out that TaiFeng actually could see into the future, he was scared. Not for himself, but for her to be able to see into the future seemed like too big of a burden for one person to bear. He didn't know much about how the rules of time worked, but he had read that some events can't be changed no matter how hard you try. Even if you could do it a million times over, nothing would change.

He thought that the aspect of not being able to change things would be too much for her to handle. No matter how strong she came off as, no matter how many times she downplayed how badly she was hurt, she was only human. And humans have their limits. 

When he asked her about it, she just told him that it was okay and that he didn't need to worry so much about her, that she could handle things just fine.

He was reminded of the time when she was injured back at Nightless City, she had been through hell, and it was blatantly obvious, but still, she refused to accept help from him.

He remembered her words as clearly as a melody.

'I still have my pride!'

And that was it, wasn't it? Her pride. The one thing she had so much of, up to the point where she would refuse other people's help like it was poison. It was like she thought people would think of her as useless and weak if she didn't do everything alone. 

She was a lone wolf, and it had killed her.

He should have said how much she meant to him, not as a friend, but as his first, his only, and his final love.

After all, Lans only love once. He had never really put much thought into that saying before he met TaiFeng, but once he got to know her, it was all he thought about.  

At first, he saw her as a good friend, but it quickly turned into something else. In the beginning, he couldn't even describe it, it was like whenever she was around he would feel lighter. like he had lived his entire life with a huge weight on his back without even knowing it.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, he had fallen for her without even realizing it, by the time he did, he was hopelessly in love.

But none of that mattered anymore.

She was gone. Not just gone, she was taken from them. Her beautiful life was stolen from them all. 

It wasn't fate that was cruel, it was the Wens. They had no right to cause such sorrow and malcontent. Who were they to decide who lived and who died?  All this time they had brought nothing but suffering, after all, that was why they were all here, wasn't it? To defeat the Wens, so that they could bring peace back and end Wen Rouhan's insufferable dictatorship. They were all there to put a stop to all the injustice and deaths. 

As the sky turned an eerie and unusually faded red, crows cried out as they flew overhead, as if compelling them to take action with their haunting sounds. 
Their heartache and pain turned into rage, and their tears of loss were now tears that promised vengeance for the one they had all lost.

But little did they know that far away, after three months of painstaking effort, an unstoppable typhoon had broken out.