[Tokyo Ghoul] Tea Coffee Companion

When Kaneki Ken began to pay attention to this matter, five people had already been killed.

Because that layer of skin was directly torn off—just like human beings tearing off the soft and tender chicken skin from a chicken leg, or peeling off a whole layer of crystal skin jelly from boiled braised meat— So no ghoul's saliva was left behind.But it can be proved by other clues that these people were killed by ghouls.

So based on the clues they have found so far, they investigated several suspected related objects.

But Kaneki Ken never expected that the person in charge of his investigation would be—'that' Xiangba Chacha.

It might be weird to say this, but apart from this explanation, Kaneki Ken couldn't find any other description.

From a certain day in the second year of high school, he began to have a dream.

Dreams are fragmentary, not complete enough to be like real life.But those fragments have established time and rules, like dismantling another person's life into more important fragments, and then playing them in his dream like a movie.

Sometimes he will have such a dream for several days in a row, and sometimes he will not dream once in a few weeks or even a month or two.If these things made Kaneki Ken confused and curious, then another thing made this curiosity turn into bewilderment.

The protagonist of the dream is himself.

Except for some different events encountered, everything else is as familiar as the real self.And the biggest difference is a girl named Aiba Chacha.

To be precise, it was the person who had been his girlfriend since his first dream in the second year of high school.

They commute to school together, eat lunch together, and go to the library together, as every couple does.Occasionally go on a date on weekends, hold hands and walk slowly in a small park or a certain bookstore.

During the holidays, they go to the amusement park and sometimes watch the latest movie.Sweet kisses on top of a ferris wheel or in the shadows of a movie theater, sharing the whispers that only such a relationship would pour out.

After graduating from high school, they were admitted to the same university and lived together.

They had reached the last step of that vacation, and when he woke up from his dream in the morning, Kaneki Ken's entire face was flushed red.

The time in the dream and the time in reality seem to be completely synchronized.Because of the synchronization, it is more real, so that even if he wants to hypnotize himself as a pure dream, he will be shaken by the too precise time and events.

But if it's not a dream, what is it?

Kaneki has researched many related books that can be thought of, about parallel worlds, about dimensions and time and space, and about the symbolic meaning of dreams.

But in those books, there was no answer he wanted.

In fact, in his cognition, Xiangba Chacha does exist.

That was his classmate in the first year of high school, and he was transferred to another school at the end of the first grade.When those strange dreams appeared, they had already lost contact—to be precise, she and Yongjin Yingliang still maintained a friendship relationship, and the latter occasionally mentioned a word about Aiba Chacha's boyfriend in gossip.

But after all, it was the other party's privacy. Yongjin Yingliang only knew that the other party was not a student of their school, and seemed to have already worked.But young, just graduated.

Two years later, Kaneki saw the name "Aiba Chacha" in the newspaper again. She had already become an "entertainer" in the eyes of her peers because of her excellent performance as the second female lead in an idol drama.

He was a senior in high school that year.

Kaneki Ken knew that Aiba Chacha was also at Shangjing University when he entered the freshman year.He even saw her in the library, the girl had exactly the same appearance as in his dream, the only difference was that they were just strangers.

"Thank you, this classmate."

That day he helped her take a book off the shelf, and she thanked him softly.The dumb hair on the top of the head flickered, then bowed and left.

He looked at her back, and finally admitted that this was not the girl of his dreams.

Yet the dreams continued, and at times he almost confused them with reality.The love in the dream was so beautiful, it remained the same for many years, as soft and warm as a girl's smile.

Until that night in September, the purple-haired girl showed the ghoul's blood-red eyes in front of him.For a moment, he felt that this scene was very familiar, but it was quickly covered up by severe pain and fear.

Then, the dream disappeared.

To be precise, after he woke up and realized that he had become a ghoul, the dream suddenly lost its previous stability and clarity.

Occasionally, he would capture fleeting afterimages in his sleep: the small tea and coffee shop run by the girl, before going to bed, they were together in the quilt to continue the story, and she got up in a daze in the middle of the night and tripped herself. In winter, the two huddled in the kitchen to make snacks, and the fog covered the glass with a blurry white...

They are all trivial and vague shadows, which become more and more scattered as the days go by.Kaneki Ken is experiencing earth-shaking physical and mental changes in reality, the more he loses, the more he can't let go of any tender warmth.

Even if it's a dream.

In the end, he fell into the hands of the gecko, tortured inhumanely day and night, and when his physical load reached its limit, his spirit finally collapsed.Jin Muyan swallowed his past self in blood, and his hair turned gray overnight.

He thought, I am a ghoul.

However, at the moment when the transformation ended, he seemed to hear a familiar yet unfamiliar voice.Floating into the ears from a distant place, it is like a hallucination for a short time.

"Is this... the real, 'now'?"

He subconsciously turned to the place where the sound appeared, and saw a girl with long black hair standing there at the end of the blooming manjusawa, tears streaming down her face.That was the half-length lover he had known in his dreams for many years, but he was separated from the Kaneki Ken in this world, the current Kaneki Ken, as far as the sky.

"... Ah Yan."

The last call was as soft as a whisper when reunited after a long absence.Kaneki Ken opened his eyes, the familiar black and white squares were stained with his own blood, and beside his ears was the gecko's maddened roar of hunger and thirst.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

Sure enough, it was just a dream.

Until now, two months later, the dream had completely disappeared after Bronze's experience, but he saw her again.

At the moment of being stared at by those eyes, it seems that the long-lost warmth and nostalgia surround the body and mind.

Different from the strange feeling in the previous few meetings, Xiangba Chacha seems to have something more on her body.Some kind of premonition that came from nowhere told him that this person was the girl in his dream.But looking at those dark, strange and familiar eyes, he has already lost the qualification to ask and confirm.

——He is already a ghoul, they are just strangers.

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