The silence crystallized within the room, scratching against the wooden structure with every breath they took. Zhang San's apprehensive eyes searched the corners available to him as if Reier's words would materialize across the walls. She uttered, finally, and her words brimmed with distraught. He chanced a look over his shoulder, then paused when she made contact. Her warm fingertips rested upon his back. He lowered his cheek to his shoulder and allowed his heavy lids to shut. The touch felt nice. Familiar and safe. He breathed in the reprise, praying for the moment to stretch till eternity.
She flinched. His eyes snapped open and he rose his head. His eyes searched the corners once more. Her fright oozed, pouring around him and suffocating the hall. He swallowed, uncertain what to expect if he looked back.
Reier spoke her fears into reality, and his confusion spiraled. He redressed, hiding the source of her terror behind cotton and spun to face her. Her eyes were screwed shut. Her pale skin lost color as light shimmered off the newborn dew on her forehead.
"Reier--"
He could not contend with her questions. She dreaded the wrathful deity on his back as if he breathed fury upon her hand and willed her surrendering. He parted his lips to speak false truths uttered by every human to rationalize the afterlife, but his lips fell limp and he dropped his eyes, yielding to his vast ignorance.
A defeated sigh escaped his nose. His body slacked. His heavy head dropped, then carefully rose again. Zhang San's shoulders straightened in a straight, yet loose posture, and his sunken eyes opened. Incandescent hue replaced the dull irises. An halcyonic smile blossomed upon his face.
"You are her," Tang Sanzang spoke with boundless knowledge. "You perceive the plane which is not meant for you," his tone seemed threatening, as if he knew how to steal her powers. Yet, he had no such abilities. His tenderness felt unnerving, and it continued. "He fulfilled his purpose, and transcribed Zhang San's fate. With it, he reached Nirvana. His body gone as is everything else. You will not find him anywhere; he is... free." Tang eyes squinted, attempting to determine if she understood, then softened, and smiled knowingly that she did not--how could she with her forbidden eyes?
She dared to peek between the slits of her eyelids when she heard him speak her name, then abandoned her fear with a start -- the man in front of her appeared as cellophane as she felt, and with a blanching pang to her waned heart she understood that she trespassed upon something too sore to put into words. Leaning forward and opening up her body language, she attempted to meet his gaze, to return to the present with him, but a sudden shift in his behavior stilled her breath. For an infinitesimally endless second, she watched with hawkish, unblinking eyes as the strings of his body slackened then reanimated to the tension of a foreign presence filling ill-fitted flesh. Concern gripped her--her mother taught her that not all bodies could channel, that the host's brain could tear from the weight of memories too big for it-- but the fitting ended without any apparent damage, and she dared draw breath again, steadying herself and assuming an attentive position to receive the words of the ghost who partook of Zhang San's body.
She listened unflinchingly to the ghost's words, letting its truth pass over her--accepting but not believing. Although the entity was possessed of a living body's intelligence, she raised her hands to sign to it in its primitive, ancestral language in addition to addressing it through Zhang San's ears. "You are proof that something 'remains'," she replied flatly, gesticulating as she spoke. "Your body, too, is gone. Yet you 'remain'. Do you desire the same freedom he found? Do you want Nirvana?" She paused, frowning at it as she considered the circumstances of the possession. "Perhaps you don't. That is why you 'remain'."
For each spoken instance of the word 'remain', she gestured to different aspects of herself, attempting to pinpoint which part the ghost considered the most significant--the 'heart', the 'mind', and the 'body'.
Then, without words, Reier signed to the old soul directly: "I am - here - for you."













