25. On the road heading west, I kept thinking, thinking a lot. I thought of the late senior brother Shuai who told me that if things went badly, I should go home. I thought of the junior sister who abandoned me; now she must be entwined with her senior brother. Senior brother Pang is heading into great danger this time, and probably won't come back. Stone, he is with his parents, while my parents died of thirst in the desert long after abandoning me. Senior brother Dian, I still don't understand whether he was truly insane or just pretending. I think that even if a person could pretend to be insane for all those years, he must have his own reasons. Moreover, in my eyes, he is hundreds of times better than those well-dressed masters of Shaolin or Wudang, better than the county magistrates who sit high in court, better than the emperor himself. He is crazy, yet clearer-minded than anyone else.
When I was young, my goals were the treasure in the cave, the junior sister, and the outside world. The junior sister left; the outside world is broken, and even the cave no longer exists. It seems that the purpose of this world is to shatter all your dreams, only to have others tell you that this is helping you grow.
Without a home, without a place to belong, I can only keep walking, walking on a road whose destination I do not know. Anyway, this world has already brought me too much pain. I have begun to feel numb, becoming mechanical, turning into a walking corpse, becoming one of them. Even though I so strongly refused to believe that the world was like this, even though I tried so hard to break free.
I looked down from the top of the mountain.
26. With the whooshing wind by my ears, I felt the ground rushing toward me at a rapid speed. Once again, it felt like I was back in a dream: the deceased senior brother, Stone, the junior sister, my master, they were all smiling at me. Then a huge dark shadow engulfed them, and a cold, chilling voice said to me: You live in a real world.
The end