Chapter 8

Below is a song from the Audio drama and its accompanying picture titled Jianghu is Not Far or The Jianghu aren’t Far.

It took two whole days of walking for me to finally make it out of the valley, and another two days until I stumbled upon a small village with simple folk customs.

Fortunately, all of my belongings stayed with me when I fell off the cliff, so I was able to exchange a few copper coins for some dry food. I also bought a donkey; it was better than nothing to carry me for the rest of the journey.

Over these past few days, I kept thinking of Psycho, especially in the dead of night before I fell asleep. The jade pendant resting on my chest seemed warm as if it was directly burning my heart.

At the end of the day, I comforted myself by thinking that I had been with him for over three months, and developing some type of feelings over that long period of time was perfectly normal.

I stayed overnight in the small village with only a dozen households, planning on getting a night’s rest before heading out on the road the next morning. However, that night I had a dream.

The dream was very clear, as clear as reality. It was as if I was floating in the air, watching in a third person’s perspective of everything that had happened in the cave over those three months.

Scene after scene, every moment was replayed without the slightest difference.

I fell off the cliff, and then Psycho saved me. When I had a fever, he took off my clothes and held me to keep me warm. Even though I was obviously a big man, he seemed to mistake me for some delicate unmarried young girl and decided to take responsibility for seeing my naked body. Thus, he came to regard me as his ‘woman.’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry during the fake pregnancy scene.

When the dream showed me the part where I was preparing to leave the cave and leave Psycho, I thought that the dream would be over, but it wasn’t; it actually kept on going, showing me something that I did not experience.

I saw Psycho. He was happily carrying a fish back to the cave. There weren’t many fish in the valley, and it was even harder to catch them in this season, so it must’ve taken him a lot of time to be able to catch that one.

“NanNan!” He shouted at the entrance as if he was afraid that I wouldn’t know he was back.

Then he walked into the cave. I suddenly had this very bad hunch that whatever would happen in the next few moments would make me feel terrible. I willed myself to wake up, but it was too late. I floated above the entrance and watched Psycho running out of the cave, shouting the name that was supposedly mine.

His complexion looked awful as he stood in front of the cave entrance, panting for air and carefully scanning different directions over and over again, in hopes of catching a glimpse of my figure.

“NanNan!”

“NanNan, come back!”

“You come back! NanNan!”

He searched for a long time, from dawn to dusk. He climbed every tree, stone, and slope that he could climb. He went as high as possible for a chance of finding even a trace of my trail.

He searched for me for two days, not even stopping to eat or sleep. Just when I thought that he, who had boundless amounts of energy, would never give up on looking for me, he returned to the cave where we had lived.

His footsteps were unstable. The grass-woven shoes had been worn and broken due to the many days of running around. Wounds covered his feet, showing a mix of dirty mud and hardened red scabs.

He finally seemed to be exhausted. His knees wobbled and gave out, softly collapsing onto the grass in front of the cave. He faced towards the sky and let out an anguished outcry, scaring away the nearby birds in the valley. When he vented out his grief, one could hear that his roar contained an endless amount of pain and suffering. After the roar, he unexpectedly collapsed forwards, and with a ‘pu‘ coughed up a mouthful of blood.

Shocked, I struggled to move towards his fallen body to check on him, but my eyes opened during that moment.

I was awake, but still in a state of shock and disbelief. Psycho’s collapsed form filled my head.

The dream was so realistic. Was it just my imagination or did it really happen?

I held onto the black jade pendant on my chest, my mind still in disorder.

I stayed in this disarrayed state on the road while riding on the donkey. It took me about an incense’s amount of time until I realized that I was heading in the opposite direction, which was actually the road going back to the valley.

I told myself that since I had already gone in the wrong direction, it was better to just go back and check up on Psycho.

I’ll just go back and take a look. It’ll only take a day or two anyway. If he’s fine then I’ll leave, the delay won’t really make a difference.

In the end, I still couldn’t rest assured about Psycho’s situation. So I grasped onto the donkey and whipped it to make it go faster.

What I did not expect was that when I finally returned to the valley, everything in the cave would be the same as before, with only the exception of Psycho’s disappearance. I found the doe in a bush near the cave. She didn’t make an effort to hide when she saw me, causing me to wonder if she had gotten used to being kept in captivity.

“Seems like he let you go.” I stared blankly for a while. When I saw her walk towards me, I quickly waved at her, trying to drive her away. “Go, go. Run away now and don’t die. You were quite fortunate to survive that calamity, now don’t be stupid enough to get caught again.”

The doe cried at me twice before eventually walking into the woods.

I sighed and waited another day at the mouth of the cave, but there was still no trace of Psycho.

I was afraid that something had happened to him and he had collapsed somewhere, so I left the cave and searched everywhere in the valley, but I still wasn’t able to find him. It felt like I was overlapping with the Psycho from my dream, with both of us searching anxiously for each other.

After waiting another day, I had to accept the fact that Psycho may no longer be here. I went back to the mountains, took the donkey that had been leisurely grazing on the edge of the cliff, and left the valley again.

I have a feeling that this time for sure, I won’t be coming back.