The strange story of Huai'an Inn

Chong Liu's consciousness crawled along the intricately connected sticky threads to another node, followed by another one.A piece of fragmented memory forms a dark and deep net, and a sad life that does not know what happiness is in the net.

Before the age of ten, Zhuang Cheng was like a grass growing under a dangerous wall, no one paid attention to him.He always plays, thinks, and observes the pedestrians coming and going on the street where his father and aunt can't see, because the place where he can't see is safe.

He saw his younger brother being held in the hands of the nanny and the aunt and loving him, seeing the father who had never shown a good face to him lovingly holding his younger brother on his shoulders and playing around, he was also curious about the feeling of being loved and paid attention to how is it.He looked at his own reflection in the water tank, but he didn't know the difference between himself and his younger brother.

He also had the luxury of hoping that one day his father would show him that loving smile.

His mother, Lu Hua, is the only one who cares about him.She is like his anchor, fixing his small boat lost at sea in an unsafe harbor, giving him a sense of security.

Zhuang Cheng knew from a very young age that he could not cry, because crying would bring disaster.Either his mother was punished, or he was punished.Even if he was injured, even if his hand was scalded by boiling water, even if his lower back was beaten with a feather duster by the aunt, he held back and never cried.

Gradually, he lost the ability to cry.

But what he didn't know was that most of the time, not crying would be regarded as some kind of resistance and some kind of provocation by default.

When he was ten years old, his brother died of smallpox.The whole family was devastated, but he was the only one who didn't cry.

That was the first time he was beaten black and blue and dying because he didn't cry.

How much adult violence can a ten-year-old bear?When his father's feet stepped on his ribs again and again, when the big hand that he was eager to rub his hair slapped his cheek fiercely, he suddenly understood the meaning of death.

The world before his eyes turned black, and all perceptions began to become distant, as if he was being stripped away from his own body bit by bit.

That was the beginning of the nightmare.

Without his brother, all the attention, all the attention he had longed for, finally fell on him, but it was completely different from what he had imagined.

Reading, reading, reading... Reading has become the only activity he can do in his life, and he can't stop even when he is eating.He wants to make up for the "wasted" time of the previous five years, and he wants to surpass the smartest student in the academy in the shortest possible time.

It's not because his father cares about his future, but because his father wants to rely on him, an unrecognized son, to get ahead and glorify his ancestors.

And he couldn't defy, couldn't refute, he could only act like a slave, deterred by the horsewhip, and tremblingly carved the words in the book into his mind one by one.

No place is safe, no moment is safe.His father would test him on a whim at any time. If he memorized a word wrongly, he would be scolded for a few words. If his father was in a bad mood, it was not uncommon for him to be beaten until he could not get out of bed for three days.

It would be fine if it was pure hatred, but often after the heinous beatings and abuses, his father would suddenly become loving and gentle towards him.He personally fed him medicine, bought him snacks from Shuifangzhai, and even taught him how to play chess.

At such times, the longing for fatherly love often made him so grateful that he forgot that the ferocious demon just a moment ago was the same person as the loving father in front of him.

The interlacing of sticks and honey destroyed Zhuang Cheng's perception of himself and the whole world, and made him completely become Zhuang Yan's slave.

Father and son, the master-slave relationship that has been decided since birth and cannot be escaped in life, the authority that cannot be challenged and the violence that cannot be restrained...

Zhuang Cheng didn't even know that he was being controlled all the time, he willingly did everything his father asked him to do, even after failing the first state test, his furious father poured a whole pot of boiling tea on him, making him The entire left arm was blistered and festered, and he only blamed himself for being useless with endless humiliation and regret, and never doubted Zhuang Yan's use of him.

In this kind of life, Zhuang Cheng can't make any friends and has no life of his own.The only safe haven for him to rest is the silent but gentle company of his mother, Lu Hua.

Until the last sincere warmth in this world was taken away.

Chong Liu felt a sharp pain in his heart, but the pain was not his own, but Zhuang Cheng's.

The pain was deep in Zhuang Cheng's spirit and never stopped.

It was a sobering pain, a pain that completely collapsed the world in the eyes.

Lu Hua did not die by accident.

Zhuang Cheng, the evidence left by the banker's scandal, the "trash" who failed the state examination twice in a row, how much dignity can he retain when he sees the proud and powerful family members of the banker's family in Huiyingzhou?

And in a drinking session where everyone was drunk, several cousins ​​and brothers of similar age cornered him, beat and humiliated him with drunken madness, and told him one thing.

In order to reconcile with his grandfather, his father, who had lost all his wealth and could not live a miserable life, forcibly stuffed a huge swollen glutinous rice ball down Lu Hua's throat, choked her to death, and pretended to be an accidental death.

A life, a bedside person who served him for half his life and gave birth to his son, was brutally killed for such a ridiculous reason.

His father never saw him and his mother as real people.

His pain, his resentment, his doubts, attracted a strong foul smell.Chong Liu was not sure where he got it from, it seemed that there was a very obscure source, which was deliberately blurred by Zhuang Cheng's consciousness.

Maybe it's... the Book of Poorness mentioned by Zhuang Cheng before?Such a strong filth... definitely didn't happen by chance.

The more and more foul smell began to cause distortions invisible to the naked eye to occur inside Zhuang Cheng's body, and his concept of time and memory began to distort and change.

He starts to be able to go back in time, to see the past.He saw the whole process of his father killing his mother.

The aunt helped him press the mother's feet, and he forced a whole bowl of glutinous rice balls down the mother's throat.The mother coughed and struggled, and finally the glutinous rice balls got stuck in her esophagus, compressing the trachea, making her unable to breathe, and suffocated painfully to death.

He not only saw this, he also saw the process of his father and his aunt discussing the murder of his mother, saw all the natural thoughts in his heart when his father and aunt abused him and his mother in the past years, and saw in the eyes of his relatives, What is it.

He hated them, hated everything in this world.Because no one has given him warmth except Luhua.In his eyes, the world is pain, torture, and eternal hesitation.People frame each other with malice and will do anything to get their way.

He wanted to end it all, end all causes of pain.

Man is the source of suffering.

That's why he can resonate so strongly with the God in Yellow.Why did he accept the invasion of his soul by the god in yellow.

This is why the entire family of the dealer disappeared overnight.From the house to the grass and trees, there is nothing left.Where the dealer's old house was originally located, a huge pit appeared.

The nearby villagers said that in the middle of the night, they heard the screams of ghosts coming from the direction of the dealer.But they couldn't imagine what a tragic end the Zhuang family, especially Zhuang Cheng's father, aunt and grandfather, would have under the gaze of Zhuang Cheng's distorted eyes.

After that, Zhuang Cheng returned to Tianliang City.It's just that he was no longer Zhuang Cheng at that time.

He renounced being human because no one needed him.People bring him nothing but pain.

He embraced the god in yellow who accepted him, thought he was not "waste", and was willing to make him his "priest".

At least it is the god in yellow that Zhuang recognizes as Chinese.

After all, Yingzhou is far away, and the banker's family is not such an important family, so that the news has not spread to Tianliang City, so that it has been difficult for Chongliu and the shopkeeper to find out.

Finally, Chong Liu saw the last bit of humanity that was about to die out in the coercion of those yellow filth.

All these strange things, as if they penetrated into the other party's spiritual perception, were not carefully considered by Chong Liu, but more like... some kind of instinct.

Some instinct he didn't have, or didn't pay attention to before the filth.

He instinctively knew that he needed to break those sticky yellow Tai Sui's control over Zhuang Cheng, and he naturally stretched out his "hand".

It's just that what he stretched out was not a hand, but something else that was longer and more numerous...

Those wrists that shouldn't exist explored along the dense net of those yellow substances, and deftly penetrated into Zhuang Cheng's distorted spirit.

His countless "hands" sucked out the only warmth in each memory, as accurately and quickly as picking fruits, and finally stuffed them all into Zhuang Cheng's spirit.

All about the memories of the reeds.

Like the twinkling stars in the dark, like a little bonfire burning in the winter of despair.

Foulness likes resentment, greed, fear...but it's not very compatible with warmth.

Although it can't save this lost soul, at least it can cause a lot of disturbance to his spirit.

Chong Liu guessed right.

The strong shock was transmitted along those yellow sticky threads, and Juli shook Chong Liu out of the trance state between instinct and sobriety.He gasped, as if he hadn't breathed for a long time, but felt that his mouth and nose were covered with foul-smelling mucus.He hurriedly wiped off the mucus that hindered his breathing, lying on the ground retching and coughing for a long time before finally regaining complete clarity of consciousness.

He fell out of the yellow Tai Sui package?

Chong Liu raised his head, only to see that Zhuang Cheng was heavily wrapped by several huge vines, unable to move, still howling and struggling in pain.And the shopkeeper...

"Liu'er! How are you!"

Grabbing his shoulders with both hands, the shopkeeper's anxious face appeared in the field of vision. He grabbed his cheeks with both hands and checked carefully, "Is there any injury?"

Chong Liu just looked at him blankly, "I'm fine...what happened just now?"

"You were caught by Zhuang Cheng. He wanted to use you to threaten me to stop. But for some reason, his control over the filth suddenly became disordered, so I took the opportunity to trap him." The shopkeeper replied concisely, omitting countless details, and at the same time Gently helped Chong Liu wipe off the mucus on his forehead with his sleeve, but carefully paid attention to Chong Liu's eyes.

Chong Liu looked at the shopkeeper stupidly, and after a while, he remembered something and looked up to the sky.

blue sky...

The giant yellow tower is gone...

They really came out?

And Song Mingzi is nearby, casting some kind of spell on those already frightened people to stabilize their spirits...

Or clear their memories?This kind of experience will drive the mentally weak to go crazy...

The theater building was almost destroyed, but fortunately there seemed to be no casualties.

ended?

Why is there no sense of reality at all?

How did the shopkeeper pull them out of the giant tower?

"Liu'er... When you were caught by him, did you... do anything?" The shopkeeper suddenly asked softly.

The tone was very careful, without any hint of interrogation.

Chong Liu wondered why the shopkeeper asked, "What are you doing? I was wrapped in those yellow things, and then I fell out... I don't remember clearly. The boss... But you, Are you OK?"

The shopkeeper's clothes were disheveled, the Haoran scarf on his hair was also loose, and his black hair was scattered behind him.Chong Liu suddenly remembered that before he was caught by Zhuang Cheng's filth, he saw the red fluffy smoke spreading around the shopkeeper, and in that smoke... the shopkeeper's body seemed to change shape...

But before he could see clearly, he couldn't see anything...

Could it be... the shopkeeper actually has distortions on his body, but they are just hidden?