Chapter 59: Remember

“Well… that… I, cough, cough…!” Nagu was out of breath from chasing after Hamoyin, who had walked too fast.

Originally, she wanted to rush up and hug Hamoyin first, but now she looked completely unfamiliar. Suddenly appearing and claiming to be ‘Nagu’ would make anyone suspicious. So, she stopped a few steps away from Hamoyin, bent over, and gasped for air.

“Hah… hah… you… you walked too fast.” She almost got lost in the forest, but fortunately, Hamoyin heard her shouting and stopped.

Hamoyin just stood there, looking at her without saying a word.

After a few minutes, Nagu finally caught her breath. She looked up at the blurry figure in front of her: “Hamoyin?”

The man didn’t answer her. He just stared at her with those beast-like vertical pupils, his gaze not as sharp as usual but somewhat puzzled.

This made Nagu feel a bit troubled. She was tired, sleepy, and covered in mud, feeling extremely uncomfortable. She wanted to explain, but her brain was a mess due to exhaustion. Moreover, she hadn’t fully understood what had happened herself: “Give me some time to explain, don’t stab me.” She was very worried because Hamoyin hadn’t put down his knife.

Hamoyin put the knife back at his waist: “Okay.”

“Thank you…” Nagu instinctively touched her face, which was still dirty with mud. “Well, anyway, I…”

“Damn, how do I explain this? Actually, I was a parasite living inside the real Nagu’s body. Recently, I was expelled by the original owner. Then, somehow, I was suddenly placed into another body. Will Hamoyin believe it? Probably not…”

Thinking about this, Nagu decided not to explain it from the beginning. Instead, she started with the most unclear part of the event: “I crawled out from under that big tree two days ago…”

At that time, after being pushed out of the body by the real Nagu, she was in a dazed state, soaking in a place filled with mist. Initially, she thought she might die like that, but after a while, she suddenly felt a violent pressure around her, followed by a headache-inducing weight.

At this moment, she could clearly feel herself being stuffed into another body buried in the soil. This body was wrapped entirely in fine tree roots, making moving very difficult. But strangely, she felt she could breathe smoothly.

After panicking alone for a few minutes, Nagu barely calmed down. This body felt terrible to her. Besides being extremely hungry and thirsty, her toes, fingers, and neck joints were completely stiff, and moving them caused a sour and itchy pain.

Nagu waited a long time until her fingers could slowly move. After moving her fingers, she tried to pull the tightly wrapped tree roots off her body. But when her fingertips touched the roots, they all left her body like a receding tide. It was as if the things wrapped around her were not tree roots but insect tentacles. After all, Nagu couldn’t open her eyes at that time. She just identified those rough and hard things as tree roots based on her memory and touch. So when they moved away like living creatures, Nagu was so scared that she wanted to scream, but she ended up with a mouthful of muddy water.

Then, she could feel those ‘tree roots’ drilling through the soil above her body as if helping her loosen it. Realizing this, Nagu didn’t care about the disgust anymore and desperately reached up to throw away the soil. With the help of external forces, digging through the soil wasn’t particularly difficult except for the exhaustion.

Nagu didn’t know how long it took her to crawl out of the mud. She only knew that the moment she emerged from the soil, the sunlight almost blinded her, and the fresh air overwhelmed her, making her feel disoriented.

After adjusting to the light, her first reaction wasn’t to check her surroundings but to immediately turn back to look at the pit she had dug herself out of. She wanted to know if those things were bugs or tree roots…!

The pit was about two meters deep. The soil at the bottom was a strange dark blue, gradually turning to the usual brown and red as it went up. In front of the pit was a large cow skull covered in moss and plants.

Nagu squatted at the pit’s edge for a long time but didn’t see the tendrils that had helped her loosen the soil. Had they hidden after finishing their work? Were they really bugs?

She was grateful for their help, but her back still instinctively broke out in goosebumps. Nagu sighed and collapsed onto the dense grass. Only then did she have the mood to look around. It was a very strange place, with huge trees, ruined walls buried in the grass, and sunlight mixed with the green of the leaves and golden sand.

And it was so quiet that there wasn’t even a bird’s call.

Where was this place? Whose body was this? After resting enough, Nagu sat up from the grass and focused on the cow skull in front of the pit. Besides this, there were many other animal skulls placed around.

At first, she just looked around with her eyes, but after noticing some carvings under the moss, she reached out to clear the moss covering the carvings. After cleaning, Nagu found that the carvings were a few lines of text right in the middle of the cow skull’s forehead.

Fortunately, she had learned some writing before. The text on the skull included the leader it belonged to, the time of death, achievements, and a rough cause of death, which was due to severe illness.

What caught her attention was that from the achievements, this body seemed to belong to a former witch. The leader it belonged to was an unfamiliar name, not any of the current leaders, possibly a predecessor?

Nagu touched her face and hair, then stood up and walked towards the other animal skulls placed on the grass. From her observation, each skull corresponded to a deceased witch, and after checking them one by one, she confirmed this.

So, this was a witch’s graveyard.

Nagu vaguely remembered someone saying that after a witch died, they would return to the Mother Goddess. So, did that mean this place was also considered the Mother Goddess’s side? Had the old witch’s body been brought here?

Thinking this, Nagu began to search among the animal skulls for information about the old witch, but she didn’t see any witch belonging to the leader Duogaluo. This meant the old witch’s body had yet to be brought here, so Duogaluo and the others would definitely come here soon to bury the old witch.

“So, I just hid there, waiting for someone to come because I couldn’t find my way back. If I ran out recklessly and got lost, it would be even more troublesome…” Saying this, Nagu licked her lips. Hunger was bearable, but she was so thirsty that she felt like she was going to burst into flames. “By the way, did you bring any water?”

Hamoyin shook his head but pointed to the side: “There’s a pond over there.”

After saying this, he started walking in that direction, and Nagu hurriedly followed behind him: “I’m not lying to you. I… I really am Nagu, but I’m afraid you won’t believe me even after I explain.”

Hamoyin just walked ahead, leading the way, without answering Nagu.

Seeing his silent demeanor, Nagu didn’t know what he was thinking. She knew she looked extremely suspicious right now, but… well, there was no ‘but’, she was just very suspicious.

The two walked silently to the relatively open pond. Without the dense branches blocking it, the moonlight became brighter, allowing Nagu to see Hamoyin’s face a bit more clearly. He seemed to be deep in thought, and Nagu could only let him ponder on his own.

She needed to drink some water first. As she leaned down to drink from the pond, she also washed her face. Since it was nighttime, her reflection in the water wasn’t very clear. Nagu roughly felt that this body was older than the original ‘Nagu,’ probably by one or two years, making her around nineteen. It was quite a pity to die so young from illness. But why did her consciousness keep transferring into other people’s bodies? This time, she was sure this body wouldn’t come back to life because it was originally a corpse.

“Are you really Nagu?”

“Cough, cough…!!”

Hamoyin’s sudden voice startled Nagu, causing her to choke on the water. She quickly patted her chest and answered while catching her breath, “Yes, I am Nagu. I know it sounds ridiculous… but, but actually… uh… how should I put it.”

“If it’s true, then it means there were two people inside ‘Nagu’s’ body before,” Hamoyin said.

“…”

Nagu looked at Hamoyin with her mouth half-open: “Why do you think that? No, no, it’s true. Oh my god, how did you know?”

“Duogaluo told me everything you said before you regained your memory,” Hamoyin said, taking out the string of scales from the small pouch at his waist. “Those words were very contradictory. At first, I thought they were just nonsense, but if what you’re saying now is true, then they weren’t nonsense.”

It was his intuition. He felt that the unfamiliar girl in front of him wasn’t lying, and her way of speaking was really like Nagu.

“I’m telling the truth!” Nagu hurriedly climbed up from the pond and stood in front of Hamoyin. For the first time, she was so grateful for Hamoyin’s beastly intuition. “Actually, I didn’t tell you the truth before because I thought you wouldn’t believe me… I should have told you. Anyway, there were two people in that body, but I was the fake one. Now, the real Nagu has returned. She didn’t appear or regain her memory before because of a head injury. The one who lived with you was always me. Now that she has regained her memories from being captured by the monster, she pushed me out. The current her is the real Nagu.”

Nagu hurriedly explained everything to Hamoyin in one breath and didn’t stop: “And the body I’m in now isn’t mine either. It’s the body of a witch who died young. I actually don’t have any previous memories. I don’t know my name or how to return to my previous place. These are the things I haven’t told you. Really, I’m not lying. Please believe me.”

“…” Hamoyin looked down at his wrist, where Nagu had instinctively grabbed in her anxiety. This little habit was just like the Nagu he knew before, always reaching out to touch or hug him. “You don’t know your name.”

“Right, I don’t remember my name, but I must have died somewhere to end up here…” Nagu looked up at Hamoyin, her eyes and tone starting to show a hint of pleading. “Hamoyin, you have to believe me… Otherwise, if you leave me here, I really don’t know where to go. Going back to find Duogaluo would be strange. How would I explain it to him? After all, this body seems to be that of a witch who died in the tribe. Someone will remember.”

“You don’t need to go back to find Duogaluo.”

“Eh?”

Before Nagu could react to whether Hamoyin believed her or not, the next moment she was pulled into his arms. The hug was so strong that she felt her head was being pressed against his hard chest.