Sweet Romance18 min read
Birthday Wish, A System, and Lives I Lived
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I turned twenty-eight on a rainless Monday and made a small wish into the dark ceiling of my one-room apartment.
"I wish for one different life," I whispered, "one strange trip. Just once."
A light like a camera flash hit my eyelids and a soft voice answered, "Granted."
"I—" My last thought was the shape of a glowing bubble, the size of a marble, humming at my breath. Then black.
When I opened my eyes again, the bubble floated in front of me and said, "I am the Wish System. The Chief Deity marked your wish. Today you are our anniversary lucky guest. You will travel. You will help believe-ers — believers who need their deepest wish fulfilled. In return, you get a space: a Spirit Spring room. The spring heals, trains, and stores only your things."
"Do I have to give anything?" I asked, suspicious.
"You will act. You will help. Use your head. Use your hands. I will not ask your life for a single thing," the bubble said, almost affectionately.
"Do I get a power?" I asked, and a laugh like gentle wind answered.
"You get the Spirit Spring and the space. Begin your first task. Read the file."
The file slid into my mind like a paper boat.
She was a trainee named Sunhee in 2013 Korea — bright, mixed heritage, a voice like a bell. Her life should have been a ladder up. Instead someone had peeled her luck like varnish. The file said, simply: Restore Sunhee's chance to debut as a top idol.
"There's a reborn," the system added. "A red-wrapped luck-snatcher. Name: Giselle Wu. She looks like an elder-sister, but she isn't. She has an abnormal system. Protect the believer."
I pressed my hands to my temples. "I can do systems. I read novels. I can smell patterns in gossip. Send me."
"Transfer in three… two… one."
The world flipped like a theater curtain.
The light in my eyes sharpened. I could hear the chorus of a rehearsal studio. My body was small. My throat thicker with youth. I was someone else and also myself. My tongue shaped new vowels — Korean and a childhood dialect threaded through.
"Sunhee? Are you awake?" A voice — warm, a captain of the room — opened the door.
"Morning," I said, and my voice was high and musical. I had her name, her background, her dreams. I had only one life to change for someone else's future.
"Drink this porridge," Hermione Ford said, handing over a paper bowl. She looked like a big sister from a drama: strong jaw, soft hands, and eyes that examined you like a director. "Rest if you must."
"Thank you," I said. Hermione's presence felt like a blanket. She had been kind to originary-Sunhee for a short time; I stored that memory like saving bread.
I slept like a phone reboot. When I woke, other girls were in the room: Sofia Vasquez — timid and bright — and Janessa Malik, who moved with theater-schooled posture. We lived in a company dorm shared by trainees. It was cramped and merciless and honest: hard floors, harder teachers, hunger for applause.
We rehearsed until our muscles sang. "Push!" cried an instructor. "Again from the top!"
"Sunhee, give it your all!" Hermione said, clapping beside me.
"Yes!" I told her. My heels beat the tile; the choreography nested under my skin like muscle memory. I drank from the Spirit Spring that night in the space the system gave me — one cup when I could steal a breath. The water smelled like rain on concrete and eased my knees. It made my voice bloom warmer. "This will help," I told myself. "Not magic for nothing, but practice and a place to rest."
Three months became one year in the blink of a company contract. We were trainees, then debut finalists, then a ten-member group set to debut under a large entertainment company. We called our group Bunny in informal moments; the world still called us a small new girl group. The first show was chaos. Cameras found my freckles, my half-asian softness, and someone photographed a smile that made the internet say, "Her eyes hold stars."
"Florence," the staff whispered. They had decided on a stage name for the original — "Florence Scott" — a name that sounded like polished glass. In truth, under that polish, she was a child who had learned to make her happiness visible.
"You're selling that brightness for tonight," Hermione said before the show. "Bring me that light."
"I will," I said. The stage lights were unblinking. We danced like the last petitioners in front of a temple. When the chorus dropped, the crowd fell into beat with our feet. That night a famous gif was taken: my grin and the dimple catching the light. Fans found me. A small station account posted and the world first hummed.
"Someone's new bias," Janessa laughed.
"New life," Sofia said softly, and I wanted to tell them: I wasn't living my life. I was borrowing a story to repay a debt.
Months passed without detailing. We fought for choreography slots, cried in bathrooms with makeup streaked, and learned what the press calls "marketable" and what the work calls "soul".
"Do you remember the reborn?" the system asked in my head.
"Yes," I said. "Giselle Wu. She seemed to be everywhere in Sunhee's life because she wanted to be. She smiled like a sister. But the file said she had an abnormal 'Affection System' that siphoned luck."
"Affection is a power that thrives on closeness," the bubble answered. "It takes favor and reroutes it. It needs time and proximity."
"Then stay away," I told the file aloud. "But also, she will be at debut. Expect her." I set traps for rumor as a trap for a fox. I smiled an extra smile in public stages and replied to fans with a practiced openness. No one must look lonely-looking during contract weeks.
Giselle was a satin-voiced older woman in trainee days who turned on three years into ours. She knew words that felt like warm tea. "You can do better," she would say, and slip a hand over a shoulder. "Let me help."
We were suspicious, but we were also hungry for kindness. I listened and recorded in my head, then I went home and cross-checked the scenes. She arrived on the heels of Sunhee's big opportunity and left on the heels of a misstep. A pattern emerged.
"She is not alone," my system said. "She has followers. She is a weak system; she needs connection. But she is still dangerous."
"Then we expose her play," I said.
At the contract party I set a stage trap — a place with cameras, a script, and a big screen. "We will show our gratitude to the fans at this fan-sign," I told Hermione. "I need your help."
"Of course," Hermione said. "Why are you so tense?"
"Old ghosts," I lied.
On the day of exposure, the venue hummed with expectation. Fans filled rows, light sticks swirled like constellations. Giselle, ever radiant as if cut from soap, moved through the crowd and hugged familiar trainees.
"She's our elder," a staff member said to me. "Leave her be."
"Not this time," I whispered.
"Ready?" Hermione asked. She squeezed my hand. Her warmth steadied me.
I told the sound crew to play the "reveal track" — the projection of a chat log, a timeline of interventions, its timestamped evidence of coordination, and clear messages: "Steal her spotlight" — "She is a stepping stone" — "We need to keep you small." They were plain, brutal. Some messages were threats masked as advice.
The screen flared. A hush swallowed the room like fog.
"What is this?" someone yelled.
"It is an open archive," I stepped forward. "For everyone to judge."
The chat logs were not mine to fabricate. They were real screenshots I had compiled over months: leaked messages, her anonymous DMs, recorded meetings where lines about 'placement' were dryly discussed. They all pointed to one person at the center. The room stung with the smell of betrayal.
"Florence, answer," came a voice from the audience. "Did you know?"
"I did not," I replied. "I know only what the screen shows now. But I will not stand here and pretend that art alone caused the mistake. Some hands arranged this."
Giselle, who had been smiling like a sun, watched the screen. Her smile crumpled. She had practiced a face for pity but not for panic.
"What is this?" she said, but her voice had no anchor. "Who did this?"
"It is not who," I said. "It is what. Hospitality for an audience. Lies for a career."
Giselle's eyes darted like trapped birds. "They are—" she began, then tried another tactic: denial like a practiced prayer. "No, you are reading it wrong. Those are jokes. She misunderstood."
"Play them again," I told the crew. The leader held the microphone and replayed messages: "Don't let her get the solo; keep her on visuals; she's just cute, not golden."
Giselle's face changed: pride, then confusion, then anger. The room started to ripple: phones out, whisper networks forming.
"You think you can brand me a thief?" she spat, making a last stand. "You— you will ruin me."
"Is that what you wanted?" Hermione asked, voice steady and cold. "You wanted to rob someone of their debut?"
Giselle's mouth grew thin. She looked at the trainees, at the cameras, at the fans. At first there was fury — like a panicked animal — then a slow, white bloom of fear.
"This is slander," she croaked. "They are lies. I was helping. I gave her vocal tips. I took her lessons." Her words shook.
Around us, the crowd divided: pieces of the room gathered like weather into storms of opinion. Some recorded. Some cried. Some applauded me for speaking. A woman near the front stood and shouted, "Did you think we wouldn't see the private messages? Did you think we were blind?"
Giselle tried to step to the front, to press forward. A group of fans surrounded her; their faces were not gentle. Cameras offered magnification. People recorded with phones, fingers shaking.
"Please," Giselle said, voice thin as the paper she must feel herself made of. "Please, I didn't—"
The next minutes felt like a slow camera pan. Her demeanor collapsed. Denial cracked into trembling.
"Turn it off!" she hissed at the projectionist. "Take it down!"
"No," I said. "You were public. We will be public."
A murmur rose: "Do it again. Show everything." A man in the back laughed with the cold, pleased sound people make when a script completes itself.
Giselle's steps faltered. She moved to leave but the staff blocked exit routes. The fans turned their phones into strobe lights and whistles. They wanted to watch. She was not only exposed; she was expelled with attention.
She knelt in the center of the floor sudden and obvious, a movement as old as begging. Her knees pressed into cold tile. The satin of her dress folded like newspaper.
"Please," she said to the crowd, voice small. "I didn't mean— I'm sorry. Please—"
No one touched her. "Why did you do it?" Hermione asked, calm and terrible.
"Because— I was lonely. Because I thought they'd like me if I had someone under my umbrella. Because I thought if I made them believe, they'd make me worth something." The confession was unspooled like ribbon.
"Did you love what you did?" Janessa asked, voice sharp.
Giselle swallowed. "I thought I did. But being loved for what you do to others is not love. I didn't know —"
The crowd's reaction was not uniform. Some pouted with righteous anger. Some recorded her apology with the casual cruelty of someone who knows a falling person will entertain. "Beg," one man said. "Beg more."
Giselle's hands shook. She put palms together as if in prayer. "Please forgive me," she said. "Please forgive me, Florence. I can return what I took. I can apologize. I will— I'll do anything. Don't end me like this."
Her voice shifted: first hope, then despair. She scanned the crowd for a rescuer and saw none. The applause was not for her. Phones reflected like stars. Some clapped. Some made terrible faces. The sound of a camera shutter became a percussion beat.
I stepped forward and watched her change under everyone’s gaze. The arrogance she had wrapped in sisterliness peeled away. Not just shock or denial: there was the stagger of being discovered. "You meant to crush her," I said, not loud: my mouth was small, but my voice carried. "You planned to take her luck and store it like coin. You wanted to be the only person with a map."
Giselle's knees gave. "Please," she said. Then: "No, you don't understand. I did not want her to die!"
"Not yet," Hermione said. "But you wanted to make her small. You wanted to be on top. That is cruelty by design."
She curled inward, the center of her body folding like a book. The room's noise pressed in. The halo of lights made me feel raw. A hundred phones pointed like tiny judgments.
Giselle's change — her face from arrogance to terror, denial to pleading — was a small tragedy everyone saw. She begged with a voice that crawled: "I can explain. I can pay."
"Stand," said Janessa finally. "If you are sorry, do it here. We will watch while you undo it."
"Undo it?" Giselle laughed in a hiccup. "How do I undo someone else's life?"
"Then kneel and confess," Hermione said.
Giselle did as she was told. She told the truth to the room: who she had drawn in, who had been paid for silence, who had signed forged notes, who had doctored evaluations. She named names. Every name was a stone. For each name the crowd responded: some cheered, some shouted "shame". People around us took pictures that would land in every timeline by sunrise.
She had a path: her life dismantled in front of a thousand witnesses, hands wringing with cameras. The exposure was the punishment, and it was public in the fullest sense: the whole network would become witness.
Afterwards later, months later, the trial of reputation played out online. Giselle's phone calls were recorded, her apologies archived. She attempted at first to deny, and then to compose scripted contrition; the public wanted more rawness. She crawled through interviews and was shouted down. She went to the company and demanded mercy; she received cold silence. She tried to step onto later smaller stages and was met with whistles and the occasional, pitying applause. The comments recorded every tremor.
I had not wanted a person ruined. I had only wanted a life returned.
The system's bubble whispered, "A is assigned."
"Good," I replied quietly.
The rest of Sunhee's life — Florence Scott's life — unfolded like a careful performance of faith. We practiced; we took the small essentials of being seen seriously. The spring healed my knees; the score taught me to write music. Ryder Larsen, a quiet actor who had come by for a guest rehearsal, held a cup of coffee and then, one night on a film set, told me he liked me.
"This is a confession," he told me softly as we sat listening to the director count a take. "I don't believe in love at first sight. Then you came, and I did."
"I can't," I said. "I don't have the freedom to love. Not yet."
"Then let me wait," Ryder said simply. "I can wait."
His voice was the kind of small miracle one cannot plan. We kept things discreet; when we finally spoke publicly, we did it carefully. Fans were told we had affection and respect. They were not furious. They were oddly approving. I gave them not betrayal but a kept promise: I would be open. Ryder's patience became a kind of plot safety.
We worked. I sang marathons, I filmed dramas, I learned not to fall asleep in interviews. Years piled up without small hallucinations. The Spirit Spring taught me remedies for my skin, for my voice. The bubble congratulated me at the end of the mission. "A," the system said. "The believer gives you an A."
"I—" I smiled because I had loved that girl who once was someone else. I had given her back her debut, her stage, her life. I had taken nothing.
When the transfer came, I closed my eyes. The bubble promised me rest.
"Next mission?" I asked.
"Ready," the bubble chimed. "A palace world. A lady born to a family of officials. Her wish: find true love. Beware schemers."
"I like true love," I said aloud.
"Then go," said the bubble.
I woke again and smelled incense, cool silk, and the river. A twelve-year-old named Janessa Malik — delicate, polite, raised in an atmosphere of love and caution — rested in the cradle of a wealthy official's house. Her mother doted on her, her brothers protected her, and everything seemed lined in vellum.
"Mother, I would like to learn to dance," I told my mother. "I think it will make me stronger."
"Swing your skirts in the sun, and your bones will be loud when you shelter a husband," my mother said with a laugh. But she allowed it anyway. She trusted the polite goodness of our little household.
It was at a spring day's festival that I saw him: a quiet prince, Ross Fedorov by the name the system thrust into my mouth, though in that time his name was a string of title and weight that made my chest subtract and add feelings in the same beat. He was meant to be courteous; instead he watched me as if I were a feature carved into a world he had only just noticed.
"Who is she?" Ross asked a woman nearby.
"That's Janessa Malik," the woman said. "She looks like a painting."
He smiled at me like a boy making a promise to himself. He began to appear in places I could not logically expect him to be: at fairs, in the peach orchard, at the temple where we offered incense. He visited like a weather front. He joked with me about my hair and spoke to my brothers with a brave, clumsy patience I had never seen in men of such rank.
It would take pages to list the little narrations of our courtship: the private notes he left like pressed flowers, the time we managed to sneak away to a riverbank, the laugh he made when I tried to ride a mare and ended up with a sore thigh. It all seemed small and perfect and carefully plucked.
"The original story told me he dies young," I said to the system one night. "If this is the canonical problem, someone plots his death."
"Yes," the bubble replied. "There is an arranged attempt, with poison and shadowed cohorts. The prime station's interest is to place another on the throne — a man named Corbin David — who wanted the advantage."
"Then we prepare," I said.
And I did. I learned herbs. I made dosages and counter-doses. I trained in simple bone-setting and surgical practice. I argued with palace physicians and bribed vendors with my spare coin to secure extra linens.
When the attack came — a poisoned blade in the direction of Ross — the world narrowed to the color of panic. He fell as if a season had passed. I and the servants pulled him into the bedchamber as blood smeared on his sleeve. My hands moved with a surgeon's terror. "Give me heat. Who went near the meat? Who watered his wine?"
The conspiracy was ugly: a prince named Corbin David fed a rumor and arranged a night of tribute where Ross's escort was ambushed. Soldiers had been bribed. The knives were fine and clever.
"Do something," Ross whispered. His voice was a rope.
I injected the counter-extracts I'd prepared in secret. I used the Spirit Spring water to wash away burn and to stem poison. I covered him with heated blankets. I read him a ludicrous story while my fingers felt like wire. He never stopped being a kind of soft thunder.
Ross's recovery was not immediate. The palace doctors muttered and their names were recorded in ledger and memory. When the court finally heard that the favorite son had not died, anger like frost fell across the conspirators. People who had thought the throne ready to be thinly changed were suddenly queued for investigation.
The man who had plotted — Corbin David — was a noble with a smile that cut straight lines. The court preferred to perform justice. In the palace's central hall, under crystal chandeliers and with a hundred eye-glasses focused like a chorus, Corbin was asked to kneel.
"Tell the court why you tried to remove the rightful heir," the emperor ordered.
"Because I saw a chance," Corbin said blandly, the words plucked like ripe fruit.
"Killers stroke knives for profit," one minister said. "Corbin, you misread the world."
The exposure had been studied; informers, reticent guards, and the friends of the wounded prince had all whispered their pieces. The court was not a modern judge; it was a theater of spectacle. Corbin's face went through states: arrogance, surprise, resort, denial, then the liquidation into fear.
He stood and started to deny: "I am loyal, your majesty. I did not—"
"Then explain the letters," one minister said. A page unfolded letter after letter that linked him to payments to brigands. He found his voice failing. He tried to blame a subordinate, then his defense became small and fizzled.
"Enough," the emperor said, and the court decided a punishment that would be public and a caution: Corbin would be stripped of titles, his armor sold, his house opened to petitioners who would forever remind him of his crime, and he would be publicly shamed. He would kneel and be read the deeds he had done, his gilded name unstitched from banners.
The spectacle did what spectacle does: it burned his face into the memory of the capital. Those who had considered hedging their bets now thought twice.
"Would you have him executed?" Ross asked me later, a gray shade in his eyes.
"No," I said. "If we punish everyone to death, we will have nothing left. Public ruin is worse in many ways. He will live with the knowledge, and the punishments will discourage similar actions."
Ross hugged me. He lived. We married when he recovered. We grew old enough to plant a tree in the palace garden and watch it learn to shade. The court continued to hum. The system marked the mission complete and gave me a solid A.
"Another file," the bubble said. "This one is raw."
"I am ready," I said because that is what I was by then. I had learned to answer.
The spirit-spring space grew warmer as my body dissolved into the next life. The transfer left an aftertaste of spring water and paper. I opened my eyes and found a younger pair of hands, still not fully formed, and the scent of earth: a wilderness, tree trunks like columns, a sky so big you thought your voice small.
This time I was named Emerson's echo as Emerson Bauer and I was eighteen, or younger. My new body — in yet another file — was a modern girl on a camping trip. A thunderstorm. A cliff.
I remembered the system's offer when it had said it could copy a small convenience: "I will copy a supermarket for you," it had promised, "a small local market with three floors. You can carry it with you into the world. It will be your store, limited to your possessions only. Use it wisely."
When the ground tilted and the world shrank to rushing air, I thought of that promise like a talisman.
The fall hit like a wrong ending. Trees slid past like wooden teeth. I hit not stone but something that smelled like moss and resin. Everything darkened.
I woke to find myself in the middle of a clearing and above me a shadow, a woman who moved like a long-limbed creature. Her name was not modern. The system labelled her: she was a resident of the beast-world, a woman named — in her file — "Yule", but the reality was she would become Giselle Wu in a different life. No — the monster who had been pitiless in my ancient missions wasn't here. This was victory clean and new.
A small, bleeding man lay at the edge of a creek. His ribs glittered like one of those sculptures carved from grief. I could not, in good conscience, leave him to the forest's indifference.
"Hey," I said to the trees as if they were neighbors. "Hold on."
I dragged him back to a hollowed trunk I had chosen as shelter. He did not notice at first. When he did, he apologized in a voice that was like river-bony: "Thank you."
I fed him from the supplies the copied supermarket had provided to my Spirit Spring. The food was modern and dry but steady. He was enormous — the kind of man whose shadow could be a home. His face was ruled: Driscoll Schreiber, the system's name, but the beast-code called him "the wolf-lord". He had been in a fight with a pack and ambushed by hunters. He smelled of iron and wild things.
"Who are you?" he asked at last.
"I was sleeping," I said, unhooking the bandages. "I woke up and found you."
He laughed the laugh of someone surprised by mercy. "Then consider me your debt."
"You're heavier than my student loans," I murmured.
"Then I'll lighten them," he said.
Men in beast worlds are not simple. They are crowns of muscle and stubbornness. Driscoll was both cold and patient. He healed slow. He watched me fix him like a blacksmith watching a new blade set. I learned the language of forest trade, the way to barter meat for rope, and how to salt hides. I learned to use my small copied supermarket as a trading post. The locals eyed my canned beans like a miracle; it became a way to claim a place without blood.
We grew close not by romance at the first glance but by the economy of shared breath: I scoured the forest for herbs to stretch his supplies, and he brought me hunted fish and taught me how to snare rabbits without killing them needlessly.
"Why did you save me?" he asked one night by the fire.
"Because someone once left me at the edge of a cliff," I said simply.
He fell silent. "Then we are even," he said. "You saved me with your hands. I will save you with mine."
We built a small hut, more a shelter than house, with the market's supplies stacked like modern prayers on a shelf. The copy of a three-floor grocery in my spirit-space meant I could make tinctures and preserve what we had. I taught them the small things: how to catch rain, how to boil wild greens, how to make soap from ash. They called my place "the bright box" — the little shop inside a world that otherwise had no small comforts.
We were still learning each other when a pack attacked the settlement. Ranks of beasts, driven not by hunger but by the politics among claims, swarmed us.
"We can hold them," Driscoll said, eyes like flint.
"We can try," I said.
We tried. We fought. I found that I knew how to be brave in ways I had not practiced. The Spirit Spring's medicine saved many. But an enemy stood out: a man with painted teeth and a crown like a broken star. He had been watching, and he had human cunning.
The fight ended with a standoff, and our village's elders demanded justice. The man who had plotted the ambush would be brought to the central clearing and judged. The clearing, the list of songs, the market copy — everything we had constructed would be examined.
"Do we punish him?" Driscoll asked.
"Yes," I said, thinking of those who had used others as scaffolding before. "But justice must be public."
And so it was. The hunter who had led the ambush was dragged into the ring. He tried to laugh. "You city-blood," he spat. "You with your canned foods and your salted tongues."
"Watch," I told our people.
We fettered him, not to kill but to show. They brought him to the center of the village where the elders could speak. Women who had been stooped from harvest stood with arms folded. Driscoll read the charges: attempted ambush, conspiring to take land, cruel treatment of prisoners. We presented his ledger of bought favors and paid men; the signatures were bloody and unmistakable. He went through the stages: a quick grin, then curiosity, then denial.
"Not true," he said. "I did not order them."
"Then who signed your name?" a woman asked and held up the ledger.
His face shifted. "You think I'm afraid?" he snapped.
The crowd decided on humiliation and labor: he would unbuild the traps, retrieve the stolen goods, and perform six months of service in the kitchens for those he'd tried to starve. He would be made to kneel and scrape the hearth until his hands were raw. He would wear the mark of shame — a cord of beaten copper — for the entire six months. Every morning, the people of the village would watch him carry water and cook the bread he had once blocked from others.
He sobbed for mercy. "I have children," he wailed. "Please—"
"No one takes a life without reason," said an elder. "But those who willfully make others into tools must learn their hands and be made useful."
The punishment was public. The hunter's stage of reaction — smugness to shock to denial to breakdown to pleading — played before the woods and the mountains. People filmed the beginning when they could and later told stories that would change the nature of that man's name. He became an example. People signaled to one another in markets: "Do not trade with him."
I watched him as he scrabbled in the kitchen and thought of Giselle and Corbin and the other men and women who had stitched harm into lives. Public shame had a mean blade; it would not erase the wrongs. But it would put them on record.
By the time we had closed this thread, I had three completed missions behind me. I had kissed the ring of fame, the powder of court gravity, and the roughness of a forest's survival. Each world taught me a lesson about how a single life can be salvaged by attention and the right audience.
When I returned to the Spirit Spring room, the bubble told me, "You have earned enough merit to upgrade the spring. It now has a mild cosmetic and healing boon."
"Good," I said, because every mission had left me with a kind of ache that only softened into memory when I held it like a pressed flower.
I paused then. The bubble chimed like a small bell. "One day you will ask, 'Why me?'"
"I know," I said. "One day I asked for a different life. I should have guessed I'd end up carrying many."
"One more night," the system said, "and then you can rest."
I wrapped myself in the memory of warm porridge, a stage light, Ross Fedorov's hand, Driscoll's quiet breathing beside the fire, and a girl's first public smile. I rested and slept like a person who had learned to love other people's stories more than her own because stories are how we return what we borrow. My ending was not 'always together' or 'and that was just the beginning'. My ending is smaller, sharper:
I closed the Spirit Spring door, wound the tiny silver watch in my pocket that the system sometimes left me for luck, and said to myself, "When the bubble pops and the next file opens — whether it is a stage or a palace or the forest — I will remember the taste of spring water and the names of those I helped. I will always answer."
The End
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