I Was Once a Legend

A middle-aged man was sitting on the hospital bed, looking out the door, with doubts and imperceptible excitement on his dark face.

On his hands, which obviously belonged to intellectuals, small buds sprouted from the fingertips, each bearing a white jasmine. The left eyeball behind the lens has disappeared, replaced by a cluster of delicate flowers.Soft branches sprouted from his gray hair, climbing the walls and bedposts.

There are two pots of Luna and White Jasmine with light pink leaves on the bedside table. They may be the only normal plants in the whole hospital.

Seeing three strangers coming in, the man was stunned for a moment and asked, "Excuse me, are you..."

"Come to visit you." Dong Zheng stopped in front of the bed. The middle-aged man's eyes and mouth were abnormally crooked, his hands and fingers were curled up, and his lower limbs were stretched out straight under the quilt. He was a typical severe hemiplegia after a stroke.

Dong Zheng was sure that he was the one he was looking for, "Don't Uncle Wen remember us?"

The blue curtain used to separate the ward was drawn, and the other half could not be seen. The door of the bathroom at the door was closed tightly. Everything was clean and tidy. Except for Wen Baoshan himself, there was no abnormality.

Cui Zuojing quietly left the ward.

"Ah?" A bit of doubt flashed in Wen Baoshan's cloudy right eye, and he said awkwardly, "I'm sorry, I don't remember much, the doctor said that I was too seriously ill and had neurological problems, so maybe I forgot something. Come on, don't just stand, I can hardly move now, you can do what you want."

Of course it is impossible for him to remember that Dong Zheng said this to take advantage of his illness, just to get close and make the next action more convenient.

"That's it." Dong Zheng pulled the chair slightly without changing his face, and sat down easily. Wang Ailun looked around and could only sit on the side of the accompanying wire bed.

"My father and you are old friends for many years. He heard that you were sick, and he couldn't leave for the time being, so he asked me and my friends to come and visit you. How are you doing now?"

Cui Zuojing came in again, holding a handful of sky-blue hyacinths in his hand, which were in full bloom, and gently pushed the door shut with his elbow.

The boy smiled and said: "I came in a hurry, I didn't buy any gifts, I only brought some flowers, but it seems that Uncle Wen is indeed a person who loves flowers, and this gift is not bad."

"Okay, okay." Wen Baoshan's eyes lit up when he saw the hyacinth in Cui Zuojing's arms, and Jasmine at the fingertips felt his excitement, and danced lightly wantonly, and the branches and leaves growing from his hair stretched even more. .

It really deserves to be a hardcore vegetative person.Allen couldn't help complaining in his heart.

"Let me make it for you." Cui Zuojing walked to the bedside table, pointed to the half-filled glass and asked, "Can I use this glass?"

"Okay, just take it and use it."

Cui Zuojing put the flowers on the bedside table, took the cup and went to the bathroom to scrub.

Looking at the dreamy blue flowers, Dong Zheng couldn't help wondering: Where did he get these flowers?

This question is easy to answer. Cui Zuojing just returned to the stairwell again, and directly violently broke through the vines blocking the road to go up to the eighth floor, and found that there were all kinds of flowers growing there. The stairs are missing.

He picked some of the most beautiful hyacinths and came back in less than 2 minutes.

The handle of the bathroom couldn't be turned at all, Cui Zuojing expressionlessly took out a small section of soft tendril that was folded on the road from his pocket, put it into the door lock and fiddled with it a few times.

The power of the Slayer turned it into a hard "steel wire", and bounced the mechanism away.The bathroom was pitch black, and an indescribable rotten smell wafted out. Cui Zuojing opened the door and went in, directly meeting the half rotting corpse that was hanging upside down on the roof by vines.

Without changing his expression, the young man stepped over hundreds of severed hands and dead branches and leaves on the ground, and stepped on someone's back, making the corpse's spine make a crackling sound, and the dodder parasitic in the abdomen was forced to squeeze. Exporting.

Cui Zuojing threw the two rotten heads from the sink into the toilet full of hair, and turned on the rusty faucet.After the stabbing sound of lack of water, thick and bright red blood flowed out, with a stench that could not be ignored.

Cui Zuojing waited patiently for a while, the liquid flowing out of the faucet gradually cleared up, and then he rinsed the cup, filled it with half a glass of water, and then patted the carrion corpse with a big mouth that was drooling and turned towards the back of his head at some point. to the other side.

Cui Zuojing wiped the corpse water on the handle on the wall, washed his hands again, stepped on the broken limbs and plant stems and leaves again, walked out of the bathroom, and carefully closed the door.

The boy went to the head of the bed with a water cup in his hand, and inserted the blooming hyacinth into the mouth of the cup, turning it into a potted plant.

Dong Zheng keenly sensed the stench of corpses wafting from his body, frowned unobtrusively, and continued to talk with Wen Baoshan as if nothing had happened.

In fact, Dong Zheng didn't say a few words throughout the whole process, and Wen Baoshan kept talking. Although he was not very fluent because of the stroke, Dong Zheng could clearly feel from his conversation that Wen Baoshan was a high-level intellectual.

"I can't remember how long I haven't seen anyone other than doctors and nurses." Wen Baoshan sighed, looking at the bright hyacinths, and sighed softly.

Contacting the conversation between Lu Luo and the doctor that he had just heard in the stairwell, Dong Zheng had a vague guess in his heart, he was silent for a moment, and tentatively asked: "Who is taking care of Uncle Wen these days."

Wen Baoshan turned his head and smiled wryly: "It's just me."

Ai Lun also entered the play at this time, Dong Zheng and Cui Zuojing pretended to be more like the other, he was mixed between the two, and he was not so nervous: "Ah, isn't that inconvenient for many things?"

"There is no way. If there is something very inconvenient, you can ask the doctors and nurses. They are all very nice. If it is really not possible, I will see if I can hire a nurse in two days."

"What about your child? Won't he come?"

"He is in Shanghai. He is busy with work and has to work overtime every day until night. Sometimes the boss has to call him. He can't even take his child to the hospital when he has a fever in the middle of the night. How can he have time to come and see me?" Wen Baoshan sighed. Tone, "He is also under a lot of pressure. He has to pay off the mortgage to raise a child. As a father, I can only try my best to minimize trouble for him."

Cui Zuojing raised his eyes and looked at Dong Zheng, but he didn't ask Wen Baoshan's wife any questions. In all the conversations just now, he didn't mention his wife. He wanted to divorce or the other party was gone.

Dong Zheng lifted the heavy topic, and according to the current progress, as long as they can relieve Wen Baoshan's obsession, the trip to the secret realm can be over: "It just so happens that we have time today, if Uncle Wen has anything to talk to us about. "

"Then you must not find me annoying." Wen Baoshan smiled crookedly, "I am old, and no one wants to chat with me. I can only talk to the flowers I raise. I thought, how nice it would be if they could talk too."

Cui Zuojing: "Who said they can't talk? When we went upstairs, we met a talking pothos."

Wen Baoshan was taken aback for a moment, and then became uncontrollably excited, with wild joy gushing out of his eyes: "You, you can hear them too?"

really.

"We all heard it." Dong Zheng said.

Wen Baoshan said incoherently: "You guys, don't you think it's strange, how can plants talk? When I first heard it, I thought I was crazy. I told the doctor, and he also thought that I might have a mental problem. , Let me do a psychological test."

"People in this world always subconsciously regard all things they cannot understand as abnormalities. When abnormalities appear around them, doubts, rejections, and vetoes will follow, but they don't know that they are all extraordinary powers." Cui Zuojing He lightly touched the blade of the goddess of moonlight and asked, "Since when did you notice it?"

"On the eighth day of my hospitalization, I was so bored by myself. I talked to these flowers as usual, but I heard a very weak voice. I thought I heard it wrong. After a long time, I realized that she was responding to me. .”

"I really wanted to talk to someone, so I chatted with her all afternoon. She has a good temper, and she always listens to me patiently, talks about things she finds interesting, and tells me that she still has a friend. The second The goddess of moonlight joined us in the sky."

Wen Baoshan sat motionless on the bed, the jasmine in his eyes trembled slightly, the frequency seemed to be saying something to him.

Wen Baoshan listened quietly for a while, nodded, and said again: "Before this, I was a firm materialist. I thought there might be something wrong with my head, so I told the doctor about it, but nothing was found. .

"Later, I wanted to bask in the sun so much that I didn't even close the curtains when I took a nap. I liked to take a bath and drink water, and I ate less and less. The doctor said it was because my body was getting weaker, but I knew it wasn't like that.

"Until one day, I discovered that I had sprouted."

In the beginning, sprouts grew from the fingertips.

Wen Baoshan was terrified, but no one could see those tender green and soft leaves except him. In the eyes of doctors and nurses, he was still just an ordinary hemiplegic patient, other than that, his body was the same.

The leaves grew bigger and bigger, and finally even bulged out small buds. Wen Baoshan was terrified, and Jasmine and Moonlight kept comforting him, telling him: It’s okay, you are just more like us.

Panic and fear enveloped him layer upon layer, and his longing for sunlight and water intensified. When these emotions and longings were strong enough to overwhelm his reason, madness emerged—and suddenly one day, he figured it out.

Instead of living in the strange eyes and loneliness of doctors and nurses every day, it is better to accept what you see and hear, and take it as normal. If they can't feel it, it doesn't mean that it really doesn't exist.

I'd rather be an indulgent lunatic than continue to crumble in solitude.

Before he was completely paralyzed, Wen Baoshan often walked around the hospital and found that every plant had its own soul, some of them were irritable, some were docile, and some kept babbling about who’s child When I was leaving, I secretly poured the water in the cup into the flowerpot again.

"At that time, I thought, maybe God really took pity on me and gave me so many friends when I was the loneliest and most in need of talking. Although it would make others think I was a lunatic, I was really happy .”

Having said this, Wen Baoshan stopped.His wife is divorced, and his only child is far away in a foreign country. No one.

Colleagues and friends come to see him, but all of them have their own affairs and lives and can't spend more than an hour here.After they left, Wen Baoshan was so bored that he didn't even want to watch TV, and the mobile phone that young people liked didn't appeal to him. He just stared at the ceiling in a daze and talked to himself more often.

At the age of 53, Wen Baoshan was forced to stop working due to a sudden illness, and finally told him what it means to be forgotten by the world.

Could there be anything worse than this?

"Later, my hemiplegia became more and more serious, and I could barely move on my own. Flowers grew on more and more places on my body. One day, Jasmine asked me if I would like to become like them and become their forever friend."

Cui Zuojing: "You agreed?"

"Yes, I agree." Wen Baoshan tried hard to raise his arm, but couldn't do it at all, so he had to say to Dong Zheng, "Can you please help me lift the quilt?"

Dong Zheng got up and lifted the quilt covering his chest.

From the abdomen down, the human body disappeared, and the brown-green stems of plants grew from every inch of the skin, covering the waist, hips and legs, the vigorous green leaves stretched out, clusters of white flowers, and the light yellow stamens exuded Fascinating aroma.

Wen Baoshan was like a huge jasmine growing on the hospital bed.

Morbid, beautiful.

"Then I...became what I am now."