60 A Small Lit Candle

Xiao Ying stood at the side of the room, walking through with Lan Chang and Ming Cheng, not even particularly fazed when she closed the door that passed through his body as he followed behind them unseen.

"Ming Cheng, it's time that you get to bed. I'm going to stay awake for a little longer to write out what I need. Don't stay awake for me. You're a growing boy," Lan Chang instructed, sitting herself down in the corner of the room where there was a tiny desk tucked away.

She set it up first, brushing the dust off from its surface with her bare hands, before she made her way over to the curtains and the window to clear away the grey fuzz of it outside, where the night breeze blew taking it all away.

Quickly closing the room off again from the cold, plunging the room into darkness without the pale, silver light of the moon above, she moved over to the bedside table where she took the unlit candle that had been set up and moved it over to her desk.

She lit it quickly and with practiced skill, before leaving the room, calling out behind her," I'm going to go and get some water."

Ming Cheng, who had simply stood there, in front of Xiao Ying the entire time and out of the way, watched her leave, before making his way to the lit candle to cup his hands around it to try and siphon some of the heat from the tiny, flickering flame.

Xiao Ying had seen how he had shivered when he entered the room, surmising that it was cold from the small boy's reaction.

He dimly came to the awareness of the fact that he could not feel temperature anymore, sensations of hot and cold no longer registering in his body and burdening his senses.

Everything instead was some sort of lukewarm sensation, from the air in front of him to the wall behind him, their textures only available to him, as long as he didn't focus on the sensation of dissipating and becoming able to pass through.

Tiny of body and naïve of mind, Ming Cheng looked so tiny and pitiful as he tried to warm himself up around the tiny light, unwilling to go and shed his clothes to change into something else quite yet.

And to think that now the boy was experiencing auditory hallucinations too.

Xiao Ying didn't remember writing in any such thing in his original work, seeing that the topic was a little bit too large and complex to handle, with Ming Cheng trying to balance hearing the ghost of his dead mother and having somebody notice it a little too hard for Xiao Ying to particularly write well to a point that it would, in some way, be beneficial for Ming Cheng.

He had an idea of maybe the boy having spiritual powers in the beginning, but he had scrapped the notion to not make his protagonist too OP.