81 The Bubbles of Pride

Ming Cheng found himself slightly overwhelmed as he dealt with his new schedule and way of going through his days. All of the others walked cautiously around him, making sure to announce all their movements before they made them, and then warning him when they were about move out of his line of sight.

Honestly, he didn't mind what they had come to, not at all minding the extra information that he received on their movements throughout the kitchen, considering keeping an eye on them was made far, far easier.

The irritation of being pitied and patronised was easily suppressed and almost non existent, the mere thought of it only being a minor and peripheral one, dismissed quickly and without the fanfare and consideration given to the more important ideas that popped up in Ming Cheng's mind.

Emotional pain had been weathered by his body and heart almost every single day before, back when he was still living on the streets, and this was less than nothing.

If these same thoughts had been occurring to him back then, then maybe, in the quietest recesses of his mind, on the darkest and most silent of nights within the dead of winter, when Ming Cheng found himself to be the only person alive as all the others slumbered and inevitably died around him in their sleep and cold, he would have chuckled.

He would have entertained the notion, creating a dreamscape palace, land and story about it, propping up characters and objects to act out a story of his own design where this was all real, where this was all more than a fantasy, where this was all allowed to play out without the threat of pain, physical beatings, rabid dogs, and abandonment.

The story would was been cliché and silly, having been told, and retold, over and over again, in lands both near and far, existing within the lexicon of minds and memories that made up those nations with different names, time periods, and peoples.

It would be a simple story that, now, Ming Cheng could never conjure up and let run amock.

Those dreams and delusions that he had once laughed at, morbidly mocked and had belittled within himself were now all true, after all.

That story built up within the black of the moon could never exist anymore, no longer existing as the original, and one and only story teller, was now dead, another boy in his place, displaced and from a different place entirely.

Somebody else had taken over where he had previously sat, no wearing his face with no more marks, and now eating the food that he could only hallucinate then pull away from.

The original story teller, the original creator of that story, was now dead, and Ming Cheng had taken his place.

There was now only the story of luck, fortune, and love, nothing much remaining from the original boy who had come into this place and nothing much for the newer boy to go back to now, not that there had been much to begin with.

Ming Cheng let himself smile at the antics of his friends, knowing that they were not needed.

He would be fine.

Outside, a bird tweeted and flew away.