“Nia! Nia!”
“Oh, I’m so glad! So, so glad...!”
The name of this body appeared to be Nia.
The man and woman noisily crying by this body’s bedside were most likely Nia’s parents.
All right, all right, I get it. I understand that you’re overjoyed that your child’s life has been extended, but stop shaking me. I can’t focus on controlling her chi.
I had yet to fully see this body for myself, but given how tall her parents looked from this perspective, Nia was likely a child, and a small one at that. She was able to converse, so at the very least, she wasn’t an infant.
“Niaaaaa! Niaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Live! Please, just live!”
Oh, come on already, I am. And stop shaking me. I’m gonna die. Keep this up and I really will die.
Thinking about this situation rationally, this was, in a sense, me taking over the life of this body. And these people would raise me, convinced they were raising their own child. They had no idea who I was nor where I had come from, and yet, they would be caring for me.
Mm, well, not much I could do about that.
All of the blame rested on that hooded man. I was simply a victim of the whole affair, and the one who allowed the body of Nia, fated to death, to actually survive. At the very least, I had no intention of letting myself succumb to disease like this. I would not let something like illness take down one such as myself.
According to that man, the original Nia had in fact already left this world... If that were true, I could only hope that she was able to rest in peace, no longer living in fear of the specter of death.
Though—as my current predicament made apparent—it appeared that even if one were to be allowed to rest peacefully as I should have been, there were cases in which you would be rudely woken up by some inconsiderate person.
“Niaaaaaaaa! NIAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
“Oh, Nia! You are our greatest treasure!”
Could you both be any louder? Honestly.
I opened my eyes slightly and looked over at the two beside me with rebuke. They were holding hands, sobbing tears of joy while they wailed like a seal and a crow.
“Pray leave her be, Master, Mistress. The Young Mistress appears tired. Let us allow her to rest.”
Though he hadn’t quite entered the room, there was someone by the entrance. He sounded like an elderly man. Given how he addressed them, I could only surmise he was a servant of the household. Nia’s parents were dressed rather well; were they perhaps from the upper class?
No, they had to be. There was no perhaps about it.
That was how the hooded man managed to swindle a large amount of cash from them to temporarily keep Nia’s body alive with his fraudulent soul-swap, which hadn’t truly solved the issue of her mortality. Most likely, at least. I hadn’t seen it all go down myself, so I couldn’t say for sure just how much they had given him.
My seal and a crow of a father and mother reluctantly left my bedside.
Should I view them as people who loved too deeply or simply parents who doted excessively on their daughter? Or should I view them as both?
Well, whichever it may be, while I never wished for this to happen, now that I’m back, I have no intentions of dying right away.
Now that I had received this body, I had no other choice than to live as Nia. In which case, it was up to me to take on the duties and responsibilities that she should have borne.
If respecting Nia’s parents allowed her soul to rest in peace, then how about I show a little filial piety, hm?
If I wanted to do that, though, first... First, I had to beat into submission this devil of illness eating away at her body.
Hee hee, oh, you poor little disease. Do you really think you can win against me?
I could hardly call my prone position ideal for circulating chi, but I had no choice but to work with it. I laid both hands over my heart from my place on the bed and guided the chi through my whole body.
Though I must say, not only is this body frail, the circulation of its chi is incredibly stunted.
The size of the body more than likely played a challenging role as well. It was because it was a child’s body that there was noticeably little chi to shape, and the body’s weakened state decreased the chi further. With the devil blocking the chi’s meridians, the chi was not simply struggling to circulate, it was outright being blocked.
Chi is a life force unconsciously circulated around the bodies of all living beings. Should its flow be unnaturally interrupted in any manner, it can lead to disease.
Is the focus of the disease the lungs?
There were other areas negatively affected as well, but there was no mistake that the organs were the areas most impacted by the devil.
All right, that should do it.
I shaped the chi within Nia’s small and frail body, circulating it through all the pathways. Slowly but surely, the disease built up around her lungs was whittled down by the chi until the pathway was clear enough for it to continue its advance.
I couldn’t tell just how much time it would take, but with this, her disease would heal.
By using precise control of the body’s chi to stimulate the body’s self-cleansing mechanisms and energies, one could easily remove a devil of illness.
Disease dared not steal me from the world of the living, whether in my last life or this one.
But...
Just who exactly was I?
I had unconsciously turned to chi to heal my ailing body, but what even was “chi” to begin with?
I had absolutely no idea who I had been...
Ah, it matters not.
Henceforth, I would be living as the girl named Nia. And with that being the case, perhaps it was for the best that I could only vaguely recall my past. That which was precious or important to my previous life should have been engraved on my soul. No doubt my impulse to use chi came from those etched memories.
So long as I ensured I experienced much over the following months and years—having my flesh pierced, being bathed in blood, allowing myself to get carried away by war and battle—I was sure I would remember at least what was necessary.
Until then, it mattered not whether I knew who I had been.
There was no need to rush.
Now that I had attained this body, I was not about to let it die so quickly.
All of that said, I had little idea of the specifics of this body’s life either. It did not retain Nia’s memories. As much as I searched, I could find no hint of them.
Though I wasn’t aware of the details, I did know that a human thinks with their brain, and the memories are retained in said brain. I had initially thought that the lack of my own memory was because I did not have the organ that retained those memories in the first place. After all, I was nothing more than a soul; it wasn’t as if my brain came along with me.
Well, no point dwelling on it, I suppose.
Nia was still a child. It shouldn’t take too much time for such a young life to regain its memories. Being bedridden, it was unlikely she had experienced enough of life to have more than a handful of unforgettable times, anyway. And even if she had, there was no changing the reality that I couldn’t remember them. That which is not there cannot suddenly appear, and that which cannot be remembered cannot suddenly be so.
There was simply nothing more to it.
Regardless, in that moment her body was of more importance than her memories. I had to prioritize dealing with the disease that was taking control of Nia’s body before anything else. Dealing with any other issues would come after her body survived this ordeal.
After all, it was still very much teetering on the edge.
The tickling of the throat would appear without warning and always gave way to a cough that would ruthlessly pull my almost-dozing consciousness back to reality. Every time I would begin coughing, someone—from what I could see, it seemed like a servant girl—would come to check up on me.
Though that scene was repeated many a time, dawn broke without any further incident.
On the surface, that was the night that a hooded man saved a girl near death. But behind it all, it was the night that a foreign consciousness began living within the soulless body of a girl who’d left it behind.
I turned my head to the side and looked through the lace curtains that covered a large window.
The light outside the window was bright.
I was the one now living through Nia’s lost tomorrow.