Deep winter beneath a warm sun, a cold wind drifting through. A heavy snow had only just visited the earth, and the ground still lay under a thick white layer; as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but pure white blanketing hill and field. And a single huddled figure in grey clothing stood out starkly against that dazzling white world.
This was a small hillock, and the little boy sitting at its foot opened his eyes, then slowly rose to his feet. The weather was bitterly cold, yet his clothes were thin — nothing but a single flimsy layer of grey outerwear, filthy and covered in tears and holes of every kind. Strangely, though, there was not the slightest sign on the boy’s face of anyone feeling the cold; his expression was instead uncannily placid, and his eyes, set against the snowfield, were like two ice crystals glinting with cold light, giving off a lucid yet utterly indifferent glow.
He took two steps forward, his feet sinking deep into the snow. Then he suddenly stopped, bent down, and gently scooped up a handful of snow from the ground… Looking at the snowflakes in his hands, that face — so cold it scarcely showed any human expression — actually broke into the faintest of smiles. His smile was lovely. An indifferent boy, a world of white snow, a faint smile blooming without warning… It was a scene that could set the heart trembling, and yet there was no one here to see it.
He crouched down, set the snow on the ground, then scooped up more and heaped it in the same place… The snow before him grew higher and higher, until it stood as tall as he did. With both hands he shaped the pile little by little, his expression still and utterly absorbed, as though he had poured every thought he possessed into it, and nothing from outside could reach him any longer. Before long, that white heap had taken the shape of a person. The boy laughed softly again. He gazed in silence at the little snowman he’d made for a long while, then carefully drew a small piece of biscuit from inside his clothes, pressed lightly with his palm to break it into two even halves, and set one half upon the little snowman.
He was only ten years old this year — an age at which a child ought to be growing up carefree under the doting love of his parents. But at this age, who could have imagined that he had already drifted alone for many years, and that this biscuit was the only food he had today?
He was cold; he shut out everyone. Yet deep down, how he longed for a friend or companion who might make him less alone… But he could find no one who could become his friend, because he could no longer believe in anyone — fearing, hating, holding enmity toward everything in this world. The only one who could be his companion was the snowman he had built. It would keep him company, and it would never harm him. And friends should share their food.
Were the snow to melt away here, what lay beneath would be a desolate, deserted stretch of hill country where scarcely anyone ever came. Every day he walked without purpose; wherever the fewest people were, that was where he went. He had no goal, and could find none — could not even see tomorrow, could find no reason to go on living. He simply lived, on instinct.
He truly was a most singular boy. The empty, indifferent air about him was such that one could scarcely detect any human warmth in him at all; even the little snowman he had just built seemed more real, more present, than he did.
The boy bit away at the long-since-hardened biscuit bit by bit, his movements so careful it was as if he feared finishing it too quickly. And apart from that faint sound of chewing and the occasional drift of wind, there was no other sound in this world. Just as the breeze itself seemed about to give up in disappointment and cease its dance, a faint sound of footsteps suddenly cut through all that hollow desolation, adding a stroke of living color to this cold, still, and moving snowscape.
The boy stopped eating, and a pair of eyes — harboring far too much coldness and wariness for his years — turned toward the source of the sound. Those footsteps were very light, and very hurried indeed, as though whoever made them could not wait to reach some place. And the position those footsteps were approaching was, unmistakably, the very spot where the boy stood.
From far off, the boy caught sight of a figure that gave him a feeling he could only call entrancement. Inexplicably — he who had gone so long without laying up any feeling at all — his heart, cold for so very long, suddenly began to pound. His eyes and his expression froze, and he stared dumbly at that approaching figure.
The figure drew nearer, and at last he saw her form and her face… In an instant the world lost all its color. The pure white blanketing hill and field, the hazy blue overhead, the still-dazzling light of the warm sun — all of it turned pale and colorless in the moment the girl lifted her head, leaving only her, a single stroke of vivid, matchless beauty.
It was a girl, a girl of about the same age as the boy. One look was enough to tell she was only around ten years old. So very small, she should never have appeared alone in a place like this, as he had — a boy with no home and no goal. And yet, young as she plainly was, she was so very beautiful: a peerless beauty that should not have been possible on a girl of that age, a beauty impossible to put into words… a contradictory beauty.
Her exquisite features looked as though carved from ice, shining in the light of the setting sun with a crystalline, holy purity. The faint smile at the corner of her mouth held an intoxicating contentment, serene and graceful as a lotus glimmering under the moon, wrapping her in a delicate, ethereal air like an immortal glimpsed through mist. Yet when her feathery lashes trembled and her eyes slowly opened, a pair of clear, rippling eyes that glinted with cold light appeared — and at once the holy, ethereal mist was shattered, transmuted into something that made the heart shudder: a cold allure. She truly was cold, untouchable as something sculpted from ice and jade, and her eyes above all — like rare black pearls, clear and translucent yet so deep you could not see their end, so that if you gazed too long you felt an eerie sensation of your very blood and bones freezing over. And yet she truly was alluring too: an allure that was holy and not to be profaned, an allure mysterious and impossible to grasp. A lift of her eyes, a curve of her lips, and boundless enticement bloomed, like a poppy in the intoxicating dark of night — the kind that draws men in like moths to a flame, scrambling forward even knowing it may mean death.
Holy… coldly aloof… bewitching… Could a ten-year-old girl truly possess all of that? Could such a thing truly appear in a girl of ten?
Anyone who had never seen her would say without hesitation, impossible. But anyone who had seen her would believe they were looking at a girl who could only exist in a dream.
(End of Chapter 68)