Anada looked up at the blue-black sky shrouded in thick fog.
For some reason, she had felt all along as if someone in the sky was watching her. However, after a long look, she couldn’t find any clues.
Could she have been mistaken about the feeling?
At this moment, a chubby little boy whose features were squeezed together by his chubby cheeks popped his head out of a window from the top floor of a four-story building by the road.
The chubby boy, probably thirteen or fourteen, spotted Anada, and his eyes lit up before he quickly concocted some mischief. He took a deep breath in through his cheeks and spat a thick wad of phlegm in a parabolic arc toward where Anada was standing.
But the mischievous child’s aim was poor, and the phlegm landed five or six meters away from Anada.
Anada glared venomously at the chubby boy for a moment, wanting to scold him, but her body was no longer strong enough to shout. She could only mutter in a low voice, “Damn brat, if it were a few days ago, I would have gone up there to tear your limbs off!”
That said, how could the weakened Anada compare to the chubby boy now?
All she could do was spit in contempt and, hunching over, trudge away. Behind her, she could still hear the boy’s laughter.
After the prank by the mischievous child, Anada did not pursue the previous sensation of being watched any longer. Perhaps that feeling was merely from nearby residents sneering at her after seeing her fall.
Carrying a gloomy mood, Anada left the uphill road. Here distance from her rented home was still a few hundred meters away. In the past, it would probably have taken her only a few minutes to get home, but now, those few hundred meters seemed as long as the past ten miles, incredibly lengthy.
Anada slowly shuffled forward, feeling a stiffness in her muscles and joints that was very uncomfortable. Plus, with her foot sprained earlier, walking became even more difficult.
Having made it more than two hundred meters, Anada could not go any further and had to sit down on the flowerbed by the roadside to rest.
While Anada rested, suddenly a melodious singing of hymns reached her ears.
Curious, she turned her head and saw that the singing came from the theater behind her.
She was familiar with this theater; during the day, it was a children’s choir and at night an adult choir. Before she aged, she had attended a performance. However, as a low-ranking Diya, she really couldn’t enjoy such sappy music. She’d much rather go to the Enchanted Theater for a pleasant adult stage drama than listen to these cheesy, melodramatic love hymns.
Now, the voices from the theater were exactly the kind of lovey-dovey tunes she used to dislike.
But maybe because she had to listen, or because she had just had discomforting experiences, Anada oddly found herself not as repulsed by the singing.
Even, she got lost in the music.
The choir’s love hymns told the story of a dashing nobleman and his true love, a tale filled with adversity. Tragically, just as the lovers finally came together, the nobleman passed away from a disease caused by his youthful indiscretions, leaving behind the girl who had been faithful all her life.
The story was clichéd, but the hymn was beautiful.
“How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
“And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
“Yet the years have etched their lines upon your face.”
“Even though aged, even though wrinkled, even though everyone has left you, I am still waiting behind the mountains, beyond the starlit sky, in the folds of your memory, as eager as the day we first met, waiting for your perusal.”
Perhaps Anada had never experienced this kind of love, but the stark contrast wrought by the passage of time had deeply imprinted herself in her mind. Not long ago, she was a young girl with stunning beauty, but now… her face was full of wrinkles, and she seemed as old as if about to enter a coffin.
“Would anyone care about me now?” Anada mumbled to herself, unable to help but conjure the image of a young boy in her mind: her childhood sweetheart, Hebdon.
“The song is right,” she thought. “Love eventually fades, youth also withers.” Anada took a deep breath, “As long as I can start on this path, everything is worth it.”
With that thought, Anada stood up again. Home was only two hundred meters away.
As long as she got home, she could take the potion she had exchanged with Zithraide. Even if she had lost her youth, even if she had agreed to Zithraide’s demonic terms, as long as she succeeded, she was willing to pay everything!