Past Life

Past Life is not merely a chronological earlier existence but a life imposed by narrative control. In Shen Tang’s dream, the former Shen Tang is conscious throughout her suffering yet unable to command her own body. She is forced to enact the novel’s vicious cannon-fodder role, commit the acts expected of such a character, and proceed toward a horrible death. The past therefore becomes the decisive evidence that identity, guilt, and fate have been manipulated by an external story rather than freely chosen.

A Life Governed by the Story

Shen Tang experiences the Past Life as a bystander, standing apart while the whole existence of the former Shen Tang flashes before her. The separation between consciousness and action is central: the former Shen Tang understands what is happening, but her body follows the plot. Each day she is compelled to perform the cruelties assigned to a malicious supporting character, making her apparent wickedness the product of coercion as much as personal choice. The Gu Huaian of that life is likewise unlike the man Shen Tang knows in the present. He is cold and frightening, capable of freezing her with a single glance, which intensifies the sense that the former story has fixed everyone into hostile roles.

The Past Life ends in a horrible death, but death does not release the former Shen Tang into oblivion. Her soul floats away and reaches another world, where she discovers the underlying truth: she is only a character in a novel, created to be humiliated, and her life has been controlled by the author. This discovery causes her psyche to collapse because it removes the last comforting distinction between misfortune and choice. Her suffering was not simply the result of bad decisions within an ordinary world; the world itself had been arranged to produce it.

From Former Character to Present Shen Tang

After the dream turns dark, the former Shen Tang becomes the Shen Tang of another world, an orphan who mysteriously appears at the door of an orphanage. This transition makes the Past Life the hidden prehistory of the current protagonist. Shen Tang had already remembered that Dean Mum said the infant had arrived with a bag embroidered with the Shen character, which explained why she was given the name Shen. No parents had ever come searching, and no missing-person notice had appeared, leaving her origin as an unanswered absence until the dream supplies an ontological explanation: she did not originate in this world at all.

The revelation also transforms the meaning of Shen Tang’s orphanhood. What once seemed like an ordinary abandonment or disappearance becomes evidence of her movement between worlds and identities. She realizes that she is not simply a different person who happens to share a name with the novel’s cannon fodder. She is Shen Tang, and the former Shen Tang is also her. The image recalls the uncertainty of whether a person is the dreamer or the dreamed creature, making identity a continuous thread across bodies, worlds, and narrative versions rather than a stable social label.

Memory, Guilt, and Gu Huaian

The Past Life remains morally present even after Shen Tang enters the new world. Thinking about what she did to Gu Huaian in that earlier existence, she feels embarrassed, while also taking comfort in the belief that he does not know. That hope immediately becomes unstable. She notices that Gu Huaian’s attitude toward her has differed from the beginning of the present life compared with his behavior in the Past Life, and the difference suggests that he may possess memories or experiences unavailable to her ordinary recollection.

Shen Tang eventually asks Gu Huaian directly whether he is reborn, and he confirms that he is. He explains that he had previously considered telling her but feared that the revelation, combined with his mind-reading ability, would make her leave him. His confession confirms that the Past Life is not an isolated nightmare belonging only to Shen Tang. Gu Huaian also remembers being forced to do things he did not want to do while being unable to control his body; he even went to a hospital because he suspected that he might have a mental illness. His testimony gives the past-life experience a second witness and turns a private suspicion into a shared history.

Escape from Narrative Fate

The importance of the Past Life lies in the contrast between enforced repetition and present agency. In the earlier existence, Shen Tang’s consciousness could witness events but could not interrupt them. In the present, she can question the structure governing her life, identify the connection between her two selves, and discuss the experience with Gu Huaian. Their recognition that both have endured bodily compulsion changes the value of the past from an unanswerable tragedy into a condition they can resist together.

Shen Tang responds to Gu Huaian’s admission by embracing him and assuring him that no one will control them in the future. The statement does not erase the Past Life, its humiliations, or its death; it marks those experiences as the boundary against which the present is defined. The former life explains the protagonists’ fear of losing control, but its disclosure also permits them to reject the roles once imposed upon them. Past Life thus functions as both origin and negative image: it shows the version of Shen Tang that the novel sought to destroy and clarifies why the present Shen Tang and Gu Huaian’s mutual recognition is an act of freedom.