Sons of Nature

3 The Witch's Dance (8)

Zhan Cheng stared at him, not knowing how to feel. He had expected a lot but he hadn't thought the truth would be so ... complicated. He had thought that this was merely about Gongliang Ye's parents themselves. To now have a third person involved ...

He kept quiet for a moment and the witch didn't explain any further, giving him time to digest what he had just heard.

Finally, Zhan Cheng furrowed his brows. "I assume this possession isn't like when I was haunted, is it?"

"No. If you are haunted, then your sense of reality gets disturbed. You will hear or see or smell things that aren't actually there but any reaction you have to that is your own. Possessions, on the other hand, are different.

"A spirit person — or at least some of them — are able to detach their souls from their bodies for a certain amount of time. The length mostly depends on their own strength and talent, although it is something that can also be practiced. Their soul, then, can move around and take possession of another body. Is there no soul in the body, then it is theirs to do with as they please. The same is true if that soul is weaker than them and unable to defeat the onslaught.

"That was the case with my mother. Her body was taken over and she could do nothing. She likely knew what was happening. She likely still saw through her own eyes and heard her own words and what happened around her but she wasn't the one to do these things. She was merely a silent observer in her own body."

Zhan Cheng still frowned. What Gongliang Ye described sounded horrible but he still didn't quite understand. "Why though? Why would somebody do that?"

"Because not everybody deals with rejection as well as my father did. In his city, there was a man who had long been interested in him but my father had never requited that interest. When my mother appeared and rejected my father, that man saw an opportunity.

"In taking over her body, he felt like he would fulfill both their wishes: He could finally be with the man he liked, even if it could only happen in disguise, while my father would be able to live with my mother even if it was just a fantasy. In any case, my father never would have known and that man was clearly so far gone that he wouldn't have minded assuming somebody else's identity for the rest of his life to get what he wanted.

"Unfortunately, I was born. And as I said, he lost consciousness while in the process. My mother — or rather the woman who gave birth to me — thus suffered through the rest of childbirth, bringing a child into the world that she had never wanted for a man she had already rejected. And the worst of it all was that she was very much aware that she only had a few moments to herself before he would undoubtedly regain consciousness and continue that sick charade."

Zhan Cheng's mouth felt dry but it didn't matter. He did not have any words to say. This situation, it was so bad that no words could help, wasn't it? To actually know that there was this kind of story behind how you were born ...

Gongliang Ye sighed. "Do you want to know what she did?"

"I hope she told your father?" Anyway, Gongliang Ye's father sounded like he would have helped. After all, devastated as he might have been to know that she had never actually loved him and the past ... months or however long it had been since their wedding had been nothing but a lie, he still should have wanted her to be safe, right?

Gongliang Ye shook his head though. "No. She didn't. When he turned around to tell the people from his family who were waiting outside for news, she grabbed a hairpin that had been left beside the bed and slit her own throat. To her, what had happened and what was about to continue was bad enough that she rather ended her life.