Chapter 3
The brat’s piercing screams caught both women’s attention. Ms. An saw the fallen tin and then my flattened body. She froze.
In disbelief, she sank to her knees on the cold floor and picked up my cockroach corpse with trembling fingers.
A broken howl tore from her throat.
The sight frightened Zhang Yanlan and the child.
Ms. An turned her gaze on the boy. The look in her eyes said she wanted him to pay with his life.
Clutching the brat, Zhang Yanlan blustered, “My darling grandson helped you kill a cockroach! Don’t be so ungrateful. You’re out of your mind—it’s only a stupid bug!”
Ms. An staggered to her feet and fetched a cleaver from the kitchen. Zhang Yanlan grabbed the wailing child and fled, shouting over her shoulder, “You’re insane! A lunatic! Crazy woman!”
When they were finally gone, Ms. An collapsed against the door, tears streaming down her face.
I wanted so badly to hold her, but an irresistible force dragged my soul away.
The second time, I became a parrot covered in emerald-green feathers.
From inside a cage at a bird market, I stretched my neck and surveyed my surroundings.
A man in a suit entered the shop. He wanted a clever parrot that could talk to an elderly family member and keep them company.
The owner enthusiastically recommended the bird beside me. He asked fifty thousand for it, claiming it had impeccable manners and could even sing.
The suited man probably thought that was too expensive. He looked at me instead and asked my price.
“That one can’t even talk,” the owner said. “If you’re serious, you can have it for three hundred.”
The man was still hesitating. I could not let the opportunity slip away, so I burst into song: “United—we become Li Yiliang—”
The man’s face lit up. “Good, good! I’ll take this one!”
The shop owner’s face turned as green as my feathers.
On the way home with the suited man, I was wondering how to escape when the route began to look strangely familiar.
Wasn’t this the road to my house?
When he knocked on my front door, I still had not recovered from my surprise.
Who was this man? Why didn’t I recognize him?
Ms. An opened the door looking haggard. She had never touched up the white hair that first appeared after my death, and fresh gray roots had grown around it.
The suited man addressed her as “Mrs. Mentor.”
As they talked, I slowly recognized him. He was an apprentice my father had trained when he was alive, a man Dad had treated like half a son. I had even been jealous of him once.
Later, he had been assigned to a classified mission, and I had not seen him again.
He had not even been able to attend Dad’s funeral.
I had been wondering how I would ever find Mom, and now fortune had delivered me straight to her door.
The moment he left, I flew up in delight and cried to Ms. An, “Mom! Mom! Mom!”
“It’s Xingxing! I’m Lu Anxing! I’m back again!”
Ms. An smiled bitterly. “Zheng Jie must have spent a lot of time teaching you to say that.”
Oh no. I had become my own stand-in.
I shouted, “Ms. An! How can you fail to recognize your adorable daughter? You knew me when I was a cockroach!”
I landed on her shoulder and affectionately rubbed my head against her cheek, coming away soaked in tears.
“It is Mom’s Xingxing. Am I dreaming?”
She bit herself hard and panicked. “Why doesn’t it hurt? Why doesn’t it hurt?”
She pinched herself viciously twice more. Only when she felt the pain did she stop. Then she gathered me into her arms, laughing and crying at once.
The swing from devastating loss to overwhelming joy nearly made her faint.