Twenty-Five

"Altria, you can do it."

She bravely stepped on the rooftop, and brought herself to walk a few steps. 

The god in purple robes, with white hair smiled back at her.

They stopped outside her dormitory. "I'll escort you up to here, Altria," the ethereal voice said.

Wait, who are you and what's your name? She had wanted to ask.

He was gone...

DRIIIIINGG........

The alarm rang continuously, forcing Altria to wake up from her dream. She was back in her world, and back to her pain. I don't feel like going to work, she thought. If i go to work, I'll see him and her, and it hurts. Then, she rubbed her eyes and looked at the time on the black screen of the clock. Since the incident yesterday, she had never ever felt so unwilling to wake up for work. The images of Cassandra Chen hugging Lyrid repeated themselves in her mind. 

Even with the disappointment of her first love, she had never felt anything as painful as seeing Lyrid with another girl in his arms. She couldn't sleep all night, and resorted to binge-watching television dramas and feasting on all the snacks she could get her hands on, to distract herself from thinking about Lyrid and Cassandra. 

She reminded herself that she needed to take a long route on the subway and stop at an interchange to take a different subway service (indicated by the different colours on the map below) before she could arrive at work. Since she was on her probation, she could not afford to miss work. Without a valid reason, her absence would be cut from her salary.

As she was figuring out a valid reason to excuse herself from work, her smartphone beeped, showing a notification on the screen of her smartphone. Her co-worker seldom texted her unless it was necessary. Quickly, she opened the message to reply to her co-worker.

Realising the criticality of the situation, she quickly washed up and dressed, before hailing a taxi to go to her workplace. For sure, she would be the one blamed as she was last to leave the laboratory yesterday. Twenty minutes later, she arrived. Thanks to her-co-worker, Ceries had been called to help, and to her relief, Ceries informed her that a few months ago, they had installed a few surveillance cameras in the laboratory. While these cameras had been installed for security reasons, they had not expected that the cameras would eventually come to use one day. Many people were not aware of the presence of these cameras as they were cleverly installed in unexpected locations not obvious to the workers.

Ceries logged into the surveillance camera application in his smartphone and together they viewed the footage of the CCTV recordings taken the previous night. The truth came to light that it had been Lyrid's fiance, Cassandra, and her assistant, who were the culprits behind the broken cylinders in the laboratory. What Altria didn't know was the fact that Cassandra had been aware of Altria's ambiguous relationship. Since she was the future heiress of the Dong Group of Companies, she feared that Altria would take over her role, and wanted to eliminate her, by making trouble for her to get her fired.

The incident was reported and the team asked for additional security facilities to be installed in the gallery and laboratory area, but no response was received from the management. At the same time, since the conference encounter, Altria did her best to stay away from the Dongs.

........................................

Backup Plan

"The culprits may come back anytime. We need a backup plan to deal with them," Altria said to her co-workers confidently. Mischievously Altria informed them how she intended to carry out a backup plan to get back at the culprits. Together as a team, they carefully planned and discussed how they would trap the culprits in the event they decided to cause more damage to the laboratory. After work, they would keep all important memorabilia and documents away, and also set up traps before leaving.

The said traps involved scattering some pieces of dry ice around the laboratory, and placing a volumetric flask filled with water, along with a yellowish paper with some laboratory tools on a table to make it appear as an unfinished job of restoring a document. Under the table, a huge block of dry ice was placed. The idea behind mixing dry ice with water would be that sublimation would occur, causing it to change in state from solid to gas without existing in a liquid phase in between. If sublimation occurs within an enclosed container, the carbon dioxide produced will build up and this pressure will eventually cause a small explosion.

Finally, after repeating the steps of their plan for several nights on row, Cassandra and her assistant finally made their appearance to wreck more things in the laboratory as another phase of their insidious plan. Without thinking, Cassandra brashly smashed the volumetric flask on the table. Unfortunately, the contents of the flask flowed down to the floor and met with the dry ice, instantaneously triggering a chemical reaction emitting smoke that enveloped the whole laboratory. In fear that an explosion was about to occur, the two women hurriedly charged out of the laboratory and lay flat on the floor outside. Word had it that suddenly, Cassandra had suffered an accident and resulted in some serious burns and allergies (likely from inhaling the smoke) and would be going overseas for treatment, so she would not be around for some time in the company. Her assistant, who was with her during the accident, suffered minor allergies.

The next day, Altria and her teammates were glad that to see some technical personnel equipping the gallery with advanced security facilities, and to celebrate, they went partying for a few nights out. On one night of drinking and partying, Altria was heavily drunk so teammates bundled her into a taxi and asked the driver to send her home. In her half-drunken condition, Altria dialed Lyrid's number from her frequent call list and asked him to meet her at a secluded area close to her apartment, just overlooking a park. 

When he arrived, Lyrid found her sitting at a bench alone and extremely intoxicated. He noticed how her face was very flushed and he smelled the alcohol on her breath. Upon seeing him approach, she threw herself at him and held him tight. 

"Ly...I...I like you," she declared in her half-drunken stupor. 

"Al, you're drunk," he said solemnly. 

"Ly, I need to say it tonight," she continued to convey in her drunkenness, "Please don't push me away. I've liked you from the start, even before I knew your social status.  I don't care about your social status, the person I like is you.."

"Al," he patted her on the back. "You're really drunk. Please allow me to send you home." He helped her into the passenger seat of his car, and reclined the seat for her to rest.

As he was helping her fasten her seat beat, she brought her face close to his, and peering into his eyes passionately. She laughed and said, "I really love you, Ly." She kissed him madly, and in Dijun's eyes, she looked no different from Fengjiu. He felt her body pushing against him wildly, and responded to her kisses with tender kisses of his own. It then occurred to him that the mortal Altria wanted more than that. She wanted him.

He looked into the sensual look of her eyes and understood what was on her mind. Recalling his moment with Fengjiu while he had been Donghua, he reminded himself that as much as Altria resembled Fengjiu, she was just a container for Fengjiu's primordial spirit, and not Fengjiu herself. He recited an incantation to put Altria to sleep, watching as it backfired slightly, followed by Altria closing her eyes and falling asleep. He fastened her seat belt and closed the door of his car, before driving her home. While he was driving, in his mind, he really wished that she was his Jiu'er and not her mortal incarnation.

For a few days following her drunken encounter with Lyrid, Altria applied for personal leave from work with the alibi she had some family matters to handle. In fact, when she woke up the next morning, the truth had occurred to her that she had embarrassed herself in front of the heir of the company with such a shameless act. She felt unlucky, having been rumoured to have an affair with her previous supervisor, and now in her current job, she had created a disastrous situation for herself and was unable to face him at work. She found it awkward to face him in future, and furthermore, he had rejected her advances.

As she was having a migraine on the third day of her leave, she came down from her apartment to purchase some paracetamol from the nearest 7-11 convenience store, as it was already midnight and the shops were closed. The said store was located about ten minutes away and she had to cross a street junction, and pass some traffic lights to get to the store. She had been standing on the pavement before the zebra crossing, awaiting the traffic lights to turn to red, when suddenly she saw a huge beam of flashing lights, and a delivery truck rushing towards her. She screamed, and felt her knees going soft, falling to the ground. In her fear, she closed her eyes but when she opened her eyes again, she was astonished at the sight before her very eyes.

The tracking spell that Wenchang had placed in Fengjiu's soul had alerted her of the impending danger that she was in. In his panic he had cast a magic spell remotely from where he was, to stop the truck from colliding into her. The process had created a link between where he was to the street Altria had been on, and at the same time, it had exposed to her, who he was. She immediately recognised him as the purple-robed immortal from her dreams. When he had saved her, he had changed her destined calamity, as her life had been set to end with the truck accident at 24 years of age. Lyrid teleported himself to the scene, and quickly scooped her into his arms and carried her on his back in her half-conscious state.

While Lyrid was carrying Altria, a memory of the Emperor Song carrying Consort Chen in the rain flashed in her mind, which continued with one of Wenchang carrying Fengjiu, and then everything went pitch black as she lost consciousness.

Meanwhile, in the Sky Kingdom, Cheng Yu was conversing with Siming on Fengjiu's destiny as Altria. As Siming read her fate scroll, he informed her that Fengjiu was about to return. Upon looking at the scroll again, he was surprised to see that her original fate of dying from the truck accident had erased itself, and was slowly rewriting itself. In other words, her original fate had changed because another immortal had intertwined with her fate. Quickly, he got up and went to inform Dijun of the phenomenon.

Hours later, as Dijun was away speaking to Siming, Altria woke up and found herself alone in a strange room. She realised she was in a huge mansion, with nobody other than herself presented. As she roamed around the mansion in her curiosity, she happened to chance upon a room was not like the others, and entered it. Coincidentally it had been the room that held Fengjiu's body, and as she looked at the woman on the bed, she couldn't help but wonder why the woman had looked so similar to her.