Stolen Part Two

As I woke up, I immediately assess my surroundings.

Sound of rushing water, I'm close to the river.

The feeling of lying on my side, rocks, this is the river bank. My hands are tied. My mouth is gagged.

And there's a cloth around my head, I can't see.

Someone just picked me up. I felt the world spin as I crashed into water.

I'm in a river of ghosts, tied up, gagged and blind.

It was a violent struggle. I felt numerous hands grab me and push me under. All in order to drown me. The sheer malice was choking me. It was inevitably coming closer.

Then I woke up. The first thing I felt was that I felt nothing. For the first time, in my life that I woke up, I felt nothing.

Normally you would feel the pillow supporting your head, or the sweat on your forehead, or the mattress underneath. But today I felt nothing.

I stood up and I realized. I was standing in the river. My head was under the whole time. How am I still alive?

The answer: I'm not.

In the distance, I saw someone coming out of the river. It was a body I was all to familiar with but had never seen from this perspective before.

"That's my body! That belongs to me! It does not belong to you! Give it back!"

Everything clicked at once for me. Tì shēn, the process by which a Shui gui steals the body of the living and their victim becomes new Shui gui. Amelia, said she needed to tell me something. She asked- No, she was begging me to stay with her, not to go home. She was crying.

"Go die for all I care, you idiot!"

It was right in front of me this whole time. She was trying to protect me. From this scenario. She knew. Why didn't she tell me? No, she was trying to tell me.

They tossed me in the river to die. For what? For asking to fence up the river, for protecting the town from Shui gui. The only reason you wouldn't want that would be... If you wanted the Shui gui to possess the people. Or, an even more sinister reason, if you were a Shui gui yourself.

I... I need to get out of here! I waded through the water but I never made it past the river bank. I was tied here to the water. Bound to where I lost my body. No I can't stay here... I have to talk to her. She'll have a solution! She can bring my body back here to repossess it!

"Let me out! I have to speak to her! Amelia!"

When escaping from the water wasn't possible, I decided to follow the river instead. I used the current to reach the next town, the town where I met her. It's a strange feeling being a ghost. You still interact with the world around you, but there's no sensation, no feeling to it. It didn't feel at all like the water was carrying me. It was like some unexplainable force was acting on me instead.

Having the water carry you, but still not being able to feel it, does a lot to ruin your stability. I flopped into the water and turned upside down many times. It felt as if the world wasn't in sync. Or like the controller wasn't plugged in.

I passed by numerous Shui gui on my way but they all ignored me. They were all just looking out to land. Waiting. Waiting for someone to come by.

Struggling through all that, I finally made it to the next town's bridge again. Once there I yelled for her and I kept yelling. A day, two days, three days, four, five, six, eight, eleven, twenty.

Thirty days had passed. Not having to eat, sleep and being unable to feel anything was taking its toll on my mind. But I was unmoving, fighting the water current, I stayed. Hoping and hoping, she would pass by this river again.

Until the thirty first day, I saw it. The two seater rental car, belonging to her.

"Amelia! Help! I'm over here! AMELIA!"

The car stopped. She heard me! She had stopped! Yes! I'm over here!

She came out of the car and walked to the bridge's edge.

"Fish... I'm so sorry..."

Yeah, I forgive you. No hard feelings. I don't know why you didn't tell me but since it's you, you must have had a good reason!

"Please, Amelia! You have to find my body. It was taken! The last time I saw my body, it was headed towards my town. You have to find it!"

"Fish, I can't..."

"WHY NOT?! It's my body, it belongs to me! I grew up in it, I trained it! It is mine!"

"Fish, I have to go. I can't help a Shui gui, a demon, it's one of the rules."

"I'm not a demon! I'm a person, a human!"

"Can you really say that now, Fish? Maniacal behavior, irrational, angry and an uncontrollable obsession over one's old body. It's all things a Shui gui experiences. You are a demon."

"Then why didn't you tell me?! That you knew! You knew that they were helping the Shui gui!"

"We had an agreement with your town, Fish. Everyone in your town is either a water ghost or an offspring of one. A long time ago, the temple promised not to interfere with them as long as they stayed away from other towns. It was necessary for peace. The temple would keep it a secret and they wouldn't hurt other towns. Sounds great in theory, doesn't it?"

That didn't matter to me. What's important is my body! Not anything else!

Amelia walks away.

"Forgive me, Fish."

"No, no, no nono nono! Amelia come back! Don't leave me here like this! AAAAAAHHHH!"

...Weren't you supposed to be my savior?

Day a hundred and some irrelevant number. I'm still waiting by the bridge. I see people pass by but no one has been able to see me except Amelia that one time. I'm losing it. My sanity and slowly... my humanity. I refuse to accept that I'm a demon.

Now I spend my days doing what I used to do in highschool to pass the time. I'm amusing myself. Making puns and word play by myself.

Wanna hear one?

In my situation, I guess you could say... a ghost ghosted me! Badum tss. HAHAHAHA! Get it? Cause I got turned into a ghost! I got turned into a ghost... I am a ghost. I'm talking to myself... I'm going insane aren't I?

No- Wait. I used to talk to myself when I was human too. Was? Was? Was?! I am human! What am I talking about! Hahaha.

I'm crazy. I'm talking crazy!

Where's Amelia? I'm bored. It's boring without having someone else to share puns with. Amelia... she left me here. She abandoned me. In the end, she left me out to dry... No, no. You can't hate her, she gave me ample clues. Even my sixth sense was telling me something bad was going on. But did I listen? Noooope.

So here I am... Fish in the river. All alone. No one to talk to. The other Shui gui completely ignore me. It's as if their one goal in 'life'... Pfft! See what I did there? It's as if their one goal is to drown some innocent poor sucker like me and obtain their body. Like they're not even picky about it. Whether it's an old man, a child, an ugly person or their opposite gender, they'll just possess them, they really don't give a flying fish.

...

I'm. I'm lonely. For the first time, in a long time. I feel really lonely.

Ever since graduating high school, I have never felt this lonely. Was this how, Jun Ling felt too? All alone, in this river. And I can't even do any cool stuff like her! She could stand on the water and enter my dreamscape, like wow. Meanwhile I'm just trying to hang on from being dragged further down the river by the currents.

This... this is pathetic. I should have never gone out of my way to help people then this never would have happened. But... I had to. What kind of person would I be if I abandoned innocent people to this fate? Jun Ling could never approve of a man who does that. I wanted to live up to her expectations... I wanted to live...