Chapter 86 Chapter Twenty

In 1983, Teresa Teng became popular on the street. From the window on the second floor of No. 19 Anxi Road, there would occasionally be a message "Green grass, white mist, there is a beautiful woman on the side of the water". This was a birthday present from my uncle to Lu Mingyue, a tape recorder imported from Japan. The uncle of the district government can always get these good things.Teresa Teng bought the cassettes from a street shop, and she hopes to fall asleep listening to these songs every night. Lu Mingyue has just turned thirteen years old, she is no longer a little girl, and sometimes she will peek at a certain boy from a distance, such as the kid in the basement across the road.She never talked to him, and no kid on the street would play with him. It was said that his mother was poisoned to death by his father, and then his father was shot.But on many nights, through the window on the second floor, she could see that the transom in the basement was lit, and the boy was lying on his stomach reading a book under the lamp. The faint yellow light made his cheeks smudge golden.

She found out the boy's name from the grandfather on the opposite side, and his name was Shen Ming. Grandpa is over eighty years old. He is a man with many stories. He is often visited by big leaders in Beijing, and some foreign journalists come to interview him.On the other side of Anxi Road, there lived a mother-in-law in her sixties. People called her Miss Cao.The old man and she often took a walk under the ginkgo tree, and occasionally said a few words in foreign languages ​​that no one could understand, and then they looked at each other and said goodbye with a smile. A year ago, Lu Mingyue's adoptive mother drowned in Suzhou Creek because her adoptive father had other women outside.

Since then, she has never had a happy day, especially at night when her adoptive father got drunk. She wants to kill him. This summer, a young man moved into her house, Lu Zhongyue, the uncle's son.His parents were sent out for two months, so they sent him to his uncle's house because there were many vacant rooms here. Lu Zhongyue had a blue birthmark on his forehead. This kid doesn't like reading, he bought a lot of cigarette brands, and would scratch cards with others on the side of the road when he had nothing to do.He likes to inquire everywhere, and soon learned of Lu Mingyue's secret—she is just an adopted daughter, and has no blood relationship with the Lu family.

One night, thirteen-year-old Lu Zhongyue quietly told her: "I like you." As a result, he was slapped by Lu Mingyue. After the long summer vacation, Lu Zhongyue moved back to his own house, but he still came to see his "cousin" at his uncle's house from time to time.He didn't like to go through the gate, and always jumped in over the wall to scare her. Every time she saw Lu Zhongyue breaking in, she would feel scared. In 1983, late autumn. It was a drizzling night, when Lu Mingyue was caught by her drunk adoptive father, the girl resisted desperately, picked up a piece of broken glass, and cut his neck.

Adoptive father died. When she looked at the corpse on the ground in panic, she found a face outside the window. Lu Zhongyue. This time it was still the same as usual, he sneaked in over the wall to play with her, but accidentally witnessed the murder. Her face was covered in blood, and she grabbed the broken glass fiercely and rushed to the window. Lu Zhongyue was so frightened that his face was pale. The heavy rain drenched him into a drenched chicken. He shook his head and said, "I didn't see anything! I swear, I will never Will speak up!" After all, Lu Zhongyue jumped over the wall and escaped.

She cleaned up the murder scene, took the murder pieces The glass was shattered, and the traces of Lu Zhongyue's entry over the wall just provided the police with the illusion that outsiders broke in to revenge and kill. Lu Mingyue walked out of the murderous house, sat on the steps beside Anxi Road, bowed her head and wept.She didn't know that in the basement across the road, there was a teenager watching her quietly through the rain. The police interrogated her many times, but she did not answer who broke in. She only said that she heard a noise downstairs in the middle of the night, and when she came down, she saw her father lying in a pool of blood.She tried to lift him up, but was covered in blood.

No one doubted her words, but there were various disputes about how the murderer broke in until the murder was settled with revenge. In winter, Lu Mingyue was adopted by a childless couple, renamed He Qingying, and moved to the old house where Si Wang was born in the future. On the eve of moving out of the haunted house on Anxi Road, she stuffed Teresa Teng's cassette and the cigarette brand left by Lu Zhongyue into a tin biscuit box and hid it in a hole in the corner of her room. But she kept a tin biscuit box and a cassette of Teresa Teng, and quietly took it to her new home. The adoptive mother is the administrator of the archives. Under her begging, she tampered with her files, making Lu Mingyue and He Qingying two people who have nothing to do with each other.

She wants to break with her past self. Although the family conditions are average, the new adoptive parents are very kind to her, supporting her from studying to graduating from technical secondary school, and assigning her to the post office.She has never experienced any hardships, and she keeps secrets about her experiences back then, and no old acquaintances have come to her. Fortunately, her adoptive parents have no relatives, and no one knows about her past. When he was twenty-four, his adoptive parents died in a car accident.In the same year, she met Si Mingyuan. He Qingying doesn't know if she really loves him, but he really loves herself.

In April 1995, she married this man. Less than two weeks after getting married, she went to her husband's Nanming Iron and Steel Plant to attend a party for employees and their families, but was unexpectedly recognized by someone. "Mingyue?" The young man with the bruise on his forehead stared at her and kept asking questions until he was stopped by Siming Yuan. Although she did not admit that she was Lu Mingyue, she dreamed of the haunted house on Anxi Road that night. Lu Zhongyue broke into her life, such as at the gate of the post office where she worked, and on her way home alone.One day, he found her with an envelope addressed to an address in Beijing.He asked He Qingying for help to adjust the postmark time to half a year ago and put it on the stamp on the front of the envelope.She immediately refused. It is illegal to forge a postmark, and once found out, she will be expelled.

"Sister, I can clearly see what you did on Anxi Road twelve years ago." Faced with the naked threat, He Qingying had no choice but to give in. She was forced to change the postmark time to put it on the so-called New Year's greeting envelope. Unexpectedly, Lu Zhongyue asked her to go to Nanming Iron and Steel Factory again, and entered the underground warehouse of the abandoned factory building, saying that this was the place he used to play in high school, the most evil witch area in the legend. "Mingyue, in my mind, you are a witch." He caressed He Qingying's hair, staring at her shy eyes, "You have killed people, I admire you very much, I will keep the secret from you, as long as you willing……"

Suddenly, He Qingying stepped on his crotch and escaped from the underground of the witch area. She knew that this secret could not last too long, Lu Zhongyue coveted her beauty, and would continue to blackmail her.But this matter must not be told to her husband, if Siming Yuan knows that his wife was a murderer... He Qingying had to solve the problem by himself. She wrote a letter to Lu Zhongyue, asking him to meet at ten o'clock in the evening on June 19th alone in the Witch's District. She said that she didn't like her husband Si Mingyuan, and maybe she should have new plans for the future. In fact, she prepared a sharp knife. On June 19, 1995, He Qingying went out early in the morning.She hid a sharp knife and entered the witch's area, from day to night, hid in the dark underground, waiting for the man to appear. At ten o'clock in the evening, there was a faint sound of thunder outside, followed by the sound of heavy rain like a pot, and then the sound of a man's hurried and panicked footsteps. The moment the cabin door was pushed open, she saw the figure of a young man. As the man turned around, He Qingying stabbed a sharp knife into his back. The point of the knife pierced the heart with precision. She looked at the man's body and the blood flowing all over the ground, and then took a photo with the flashlight, only to realize that it was not Lu Zhongyue! He didn't come, no matter whether he received the letter or not, the only thing that was certain was that she had killed another man. He Qingying knelt down in front of the dead strange man, begging his wronged soul to forgive herself, but she had to hide this secret, just like she did on Anxi Road twelve years ago.She pulled out the knife stuck in the dead man's back and scrutinized every corner of the murder scene, taking away any clues that might be left. She then hurried away from the ground, leaving the dead in a dark cycle of reincarnation. It was midnight when I got home, and Simingyuan was still playing mahjong outside, which she had arranged for her husband in advance.She washed all the clothes repeatedly, but the blood-stained coat was secretly burned. I thought it was impossible to fall asleep all night, but I had a dream unknowingly, an extremely clear and real dream. She dreamed of a young boy, dressed plainly and with melancholy eyes, standing beside her bed with a candle and weeping softly... He Qingying still remembers this face, in 1983 on Anxi Road, in the basement of the old house across the street, his name is Shen Ming. In the early hours of the morning, Siming Yuan returned home. This careless man did not notice anything unusual. It was also on this day that she found out that she was pregnant, and her husband accompanied her to the hospital for an examination. It turned out that it had been more than two months. The next day, the letter she wrote to Lu Zhongyue was just returned to the post office - something went wrong in the mail room of the steel factory, so that Lu Zhongyue never received the letter at all. However, Lu Zhongyue never appeared in front of her again. As her belly grew bigger day by day, she felt this life slowly wriggling, and an inexplicable fear rose from her body. Because, she accidentally heard her husband say that the man who died in the Witch's Quarter on June 19 was the Chinese teacher who had just been expelled from the nearby Nanming High School. His name was Shen Ming. It's not that she didn't think about abortion - when she walked to the hospital door, her calf felt weak, and she seemed to hear the cry of the child, forcing herself to go home with tears in her eyes. The expected date of delivery was January 1996. Unexpectedly, the baby would be born ahead of schedule. He Qingying was sent to the hospital overnight. On December 19, she gave birth to her and Siming Yuan's son. When the nurse came to her with the baby in her arms and looked at the wrinkled face, she cried. She named her son Si Wang. A few days after Si Wang was born, his mother discovered a small birthmark on his back. At first glance, he thought it was a scar. It happened to be on the left side of the back of the spine, almost facing the back of the heart, as if in the mother's womb. She was stabbed in the middle of the room with a knife—the thunderstorm night half a year ago flashed through her mind. In the abandoned underground warehouse of the Nanming Road Iron and Steel Plant, she killed a man from behind, and the tip of the knife was also inserted from this part. So, she finished confinement in countless nightmares. He Qingying never told his son this secret, nor did the child's father—anyway, no one can see his back clearly. In the last few years of the 20th century, this child learned to walk and talk prematurely, and He Qingying felt more and more wrong.He was a taciturn kid whose house was full of toy cars and toy guns that his father bought. He just pretended to play and didn't run around and get into trouble like other kids. When he was still bottle-feeding, once while his mother was asleep, he climbed onto the bookshelf and flipped through "Selected Poems of the Song Dynasty". He Qingying found out, and he tore up half of the book immediately.She taught her son a severe lesson. From then on, whenever he was in a daze in front of the window, muttering to himself, the mother would observe carefully.His eyes are different, not like ordinary children at all, he can always focus on the key points, and he seems to be able to understand all the words. Her son often talked in his sleep at night, and He Qingying put his ear to the child's mouth, but what he heard were all the words of adults, including Nanming Road, Witch's District, Anxi Road... and a name called Xiaozhi. When Si Wang was five years old, the steel factory went bankrupt, and Si Mingyuan was laid off and returned home, and his temper became more and more irritable.A retired employee got drunk and told others that in the spring five years ago, he saw engineer Lu Zhongyue and Simingyuan's wife enter the underground warehouse.Although it was true, He Qingying firmly denied it, and had a cold war with her husband for two years until he disappeared after owing a lot of gambling debts. There are only orphans and widows left in the family. Once, she saw a song "Meng Po Soup" by You Hongming on TV—— "If there is really a kind of water/that can make you drink without getting drunk/then maybe there is a kind of tears/that can make you make me shed without sadness/always see love too perfect/that kind of gamble Feeling / In this life, I have lost the promise of my previous life / only to find that the water has quietly turned into tears / Although I can’t see or hear / But I can’t escape and forget / Even the ends of your hair beside the pillow / have become torment / Although you know I know / but the tears are floating in my heart / after this second, this smile / drink this bowl of antidote / forget all the good and all the loneliness..." Suddenly, when she heard some kind of soft sobbing, she realized that the seven-year-old boy was already in tears. "Wang'er, why are you crying?" He broke free from his mother's arms, hid in the bedroom and locked the door behind him.He Qingying took out the key to open the door, only to see her son lying in front of the vanity mirror, covering his face and crying bitterly. Mengpo soup? Three years later, when she, as Si Wang's mother, came to Gu Qiusha's house as a guest, she unexpectedly saw Lu Zhongyue, and the two looked at each other awkwardly, but did not say a word. Although she was firmly opposed to her son going to the Gu family, in the end she was forced by life, in order for Si Wang to avoid the harassment of loan sharks, so that he could grow up safely, and reluctantly sent him to the most terrifying person. Lu Zhongyue came to look for her in private, this man was so depressed, he was no longer what he used to be.He said that more than 20 years had passed since the incident on Anxi Road, and he would not threaten her with it, not to mention that he no longer had any desire for women, and hoped that they would not offend each other. But he didn't know that she was the one who killed Shen Ming in 1995. Not long after, Si Wang returned to his mother, but Lu Zhongyue became a wanted murderer. If it is said that the only man she has ever loved in this life is undoubtedly Si Wang - this smart kid who thinks he is hiding something, and has kept his mother in the dark for more than ten years. Wang'er, your mother knows all your secrets. And mother's secret, you don't know anything. You really are not a genius. Just a silly kid. You know, there are no parents who don't understand their children in the world, only children who don't understand their parents.