"Name?"
"Huai Shi."
"Age?"
"Seventeen..."
As Huai Shi sat in the police station, recording the conversation, he felt like he had been repeating himself for ages.
Afraid of any unexpected situations, he repeatedly asked the police officer after the recording was done, "Do you guys take in prostitutes?"
The police officer's expression twitched for a moment, but he didn't bother with him and just poured him a cup of tea, saying he could leave once the inspection was done.
Huai Shi sat in the chair, still shaken, and sighed.
A small alley, a dead body, a small goldfish, an iron box.
With so many strange elements thrown together, even someone as experienced as Huai Shi was having trouble processing it all.
But the only thing he was sure of was that this kind of thing was not normal!
Thinking back to the explosion at the port, it was probably a drug dealer's internal conflict!
What if there was two taels of pure white powder in the box? It would be amusing if the police caught that.
Although he was so poor he could barely afford to eat, he didn't need to go to jail for a free meal, did he?
In this situation, as a citizen of the Eastern Xia Republic, no, as someone with some common sense, reporting to the police was the most sensible thing to do.
"You did well. In situations like this, seeking help from the police is the most reasonable method," the police officer who returned his belongings to him in the evidence room nodded in agreement. "If it's not just white powder but a bomb, the situation would be even worse..."
"But what's in that box?" Huai Shi asked curiously.
"I don't know. We've checked it with X-rays and explosive detection, and it shouldn't be anything dangerous, but it looks like an antique. We'll have to wait for the experts to come tomorrow and open it to see. But you're free to go now."
He placed the basket in front of Huai Shi.
Because the case involved a death, all of Huai Shi's belongings had been checked. After receiving them, he immediately checked his thick notebook that he had carried with him for years.
It hadn't been tampered with.
The police officer in the evidence room noticed his nervousness and couldn't help but laugh. "What? Are you afraid we'll read your diary? Young people still write diaries these days, haha. Don't worry, we didn't read it, didn't read it..."
Huai Shi awkwardly smiled and put the notebook in his pocket. When he picked up his phone, he accidentally saw his bank balance text message again, and his heart ached.
After confirming with the police station that there was no reward for reporting a case like this, he walked out of the door with a heavy heart, feeling the world was bleak.
As he walked down the street with his head down, the streetlights cast a long shadow behind him.In the swaying shadows, it seemed like a crow was taking off.
Boom!
A thunderclap flashed across the night sky.
Just as if waiting for Huai Shi to leave, after a brief pause in the evening, heavy rain poured down amidst lightning and thunder.
By the time Huai Shi returned home, he was already soaking wet.
Standing in front of the large iron gate, he sighed, took out the key, unlocked the iron chain tied to the gate, and pushed it open with all his might amidst the piercing sound of the pouring rain.
"I'm back..."
No one responded in the darkness.
Under the flashlight of his phone, the ancient courtyard covered in fallen leaves revealed a dilapidated and decrepit appearance.
Under layers of ivy and vines were walls that had long peeled off, and the courtyard behind the iron gate was a mess of fallen leaves. The neglected fountain pool had long dried up, and the stone carvings on both sides were incomplete, looking strange and eerie.
Suddenly, a sharp lightning bolt lit up the sky covered in dark clouds, illuminating the grim silhouette of the old house in the courtyard.
...
At the foot of Qingxiu Mountain in the suburbs of Xinhai City was Huai Shi's home.
In the past, it was called "Yuyuan Shishui Hall". At that time, this garden, which took five years to build and cost a huge amount of money, was extremely luxurious. Flowers bloomed all year round in the garden, and the green pine and cypress trees in front of the door remained evergreen. The luxury inside the building goes without saying, and the owner was also the top rich merchant in East China, with a constant stream of visitors every day...
Search tinyurl.com/2p9emv8w for the original.
But that was ninety years ago.
The world changes too fast. In just ninety years, it has moved from the steam era to the electronic era, and from the electronic era to a new electronic era. The world has gone from peace to chaos, and then from chaos back to peace... So many things have happened, and there are too many things to remember, so many things have become relatively unimportant.
Now, Yuyuan, after a brief period of glory, has experienced a long period of silence and decline, and has been forgotten by most people.
Amongst the overgrown weeds, the former luxury is gone, and the climbing ivy covers the cracks on the mottled walls. Most of the sculptures in the courtyard are now broken and unrecognizable. After being squandered and ravaged by the prodigal descendants, the once-magnificent mansion is now empty and destitute, on the verge of becoming... no, it has already become a not-so-famous haunted house.
But for Huai Shi, this dilapidated house, a cello that is also aging and on the verge of collapse, and his bleak life, are all he has.
As the old house deteriorates day by day and the cello gradually cracks, Huai Shi feels like he is saying goodbye to his own life.
"The savings account with the last four digits of 8193 has a current balance of 144,444 yuan..."Amidst the howling wind and rain outside the window, Huai Shi finally checked his bank account balance.
"Motherf*cker... how am I supposed to survive like this!"
Even if he ignored the string of symbolic zeros behind it, he had a strong urge to die.
What could he do?
All of this was the legacy of his biological parents.
When Huai Shi was born, his family still had some assets. If they had worked a little harder, they could have rebuilt their family business. However, after his grandfather passed away when he was three years old, Huai Shi's parents began to rapidly decline, using an astonishing speed to squander their wealth in just a few years.
They drank, gambled, and took drugs, and even smoked. In the end, they fled with the company's money before it went bankrupt, leaving Huai Shi alone to deal with the crazy shareholders who came to collect their debts...
Almost everything valuable in the house was taken away.
If it weren't for Huai Shi's grandfather's will, which entrusted a lawyer to leave this old mansion to Huai Shi, who could officially inherit it when he became an adult, Huai Shi would have been wandering the streets like a stray dog.
Sometimes, people's ability to endure really is infinite, just like Huai Shi. Since he was ten years old, he felt like he was going crazy, but he didn't expect that his nerves were so tough that he still had no signs of schizophrenia.
At most, he occasionally hallucinated, hearing footsteps in the old house, the sound of dripping water upstairs at night, or someone sighing while he was sleeping...
Life must go on.
Even if he couldn't make it, he still had to go on.
Upon careful reflection, it was a miracle that he was still alive.
Originally, everything was slowly getting better. He would grow up, get a full scholarship to a prestigious university based on his achievements, and find a job that paid more. Finally, life seemed to be moving towards a better direction.
But he was just too poor and hungry.
"Life is always so painful, or is it just childhood that is so painful?"
Unfortunately, there was no middle-aged uncle who liked to grow flowers to answer him.
He was neither a child nor Mathilda.
So, in the long and melancholic night, Huai Shi squatted on the balcony smoking and gazing at the distant rain, sighing helplessly.
Thunder roared.
The cold rain poured down from the sky, as if it wanted to swallow the whole world.
The anger that Huai Shi had been accumulating for days finally erupted, rising from his heart and making him roar at the sky, "Damn you, God! What's the use of all this? If you have the guts, just come and kill me!"
"I will defy fate!!!"
With his roar, the pent-up frustration in his heart was finally released, and Huai Shi finally felt a little better.But then, he heard a loud rumble, and the dark clouds, pouring with endless rain and lightning, suddenly shook and burst with a sharp sound of tearing steel.
Above the Stone Essence Pavilion, a huge hole was torn open in the clouds, followed by a blazing lightning bolt that struck down like a divine punishment, straight into the railing in front of Huai Shi, shattering the old railing to pieces.
In the stinging smell of electrified air and flying debris, Huai Shi collapsed on the ground.
"Oh my god... is it really that powerful?"
He scrambled back into the room, mustering up the courage to shout before closing the window: "Just kidding, just kidding, bro! I'm not going against you!"
The window slammed shut.
Huai Shi sat on the chair, feeling helpless and wanting to howl at the sky.
Life was unbearable!
His bank account had dropped to three digits, he almost applied to a prostitution agency for a job, encountered strange deaths when he went home, and now he was warned by lightning when he tried to rebel against fate...
For now, he could only hope that some silly netizens could bring some joy to his painful life.
With a glimmer of hope, Huai Shi opened his phone and saw a picture of himself standing in front of the prostitution agency posted in the class WeChat group. A group of people were mentioning him, and someone named Qinsou and Nuxin were shouting: "Congratulations to Huai Shi for his debut in the prostitution industry! Should the girls in the class send him a flower wreath?"
"Screw you, I don't like girls. I like bald guys with soft skin like you two!"
After replying, Huai Shi turned off his phone and covered his face.
Now, the fact that he almost became a prostitute was known to the world...
The most frustrating thing in the world was not losing one's reputation after ten years of hard work, but losing it before even doing anything wrong.
What a shame!
Why did this happen?
He had such a big house and a golden finger, he should have been overwhelmed with joy and happiness, and the double happiness should have brought even more happiness. He should have been living a dreamlike life of happiness, but why...
Boom!
Before he could finish his thoughts, another thunderbolt struck outside the window, startling Huai Shi. Unable to think anymore, he could only take out his thick notebook from his bag.
"Why can't you be more impressive? Look at other golden fingers, they can add points, give tasks, and even turn into girls. Why do you just write a diary?"
Yes, this was his golden finger.Ever since he picked up this thing after a high fever at the age of nine, Huai Shi knew that it was not an ordinary object. He kept it safe and sound, and as he grew older, he dreamed every day of hearing the mysterious voice saying "Super XX system loading complete" in his ear, so he could become successful, make a name for himself, and turn his life into a thrilling novel where he could burn hundreds of cash machines and become a popular figure even after death, even turning into a cute girl in the gacha game...
But until now, he still hasn't figured out what this damn thing is for.
It looked like a useless notebook, indestructible, tear-proof, fire-resistant, and water-repellent. The only impressive function was that it automatically wrote a diary every day, updating in real-time what he did every moment...it was like saying, "I'm going to record all of your silly moments from your middle school years and show them to you later."
Huai Shi opened the thick cover, and the silhouette of a crow on the title page was still prominent.
He flipped to the end and looked back at his fantastic life today. When he read the description of himself leaving the police station and saw the line "A crow took off from the swaying shadow," he was stunned.
"Did a crow really fly off from the swaying shadow?"
Huai Shi sighed and couldn't help but exclaim, "I didn't expect this damn thing to have atmosphere descriptions...I should copy a few lines and write a fantasy novel to make some money."
Of course, this embarrassing sentence was mercilessly recorded.
"..."
Huai Shi sighed and continued to flip through the pages. He didn't expect that there would be a thick divider at the end, and behind it were some strange files...
It was like a resume from somewhere, with two-inch ID photos attached.
Most of them were burly men who could beat up Huai Shi, and there were several snake-faced girls he had never seen before, as well as a middle-aged man with a bald head and premature aging that he seemed to have seen in the local news...
Chen Bo, Wang Quan, Mu Jing, Lu Bai...
The strange files were increasing rapidly, and when they finally stopped, there were over seventy of them.
"What the hell..."
Huai Shi looked at the notebook in his hand in astonishment and pondered, "Was it activated by a lightning strike?"
He opened the window and put the notebook on the balcony, shouting to the sky, "Come on, strike me a few more times!"
But the heavens didn't answer him, and didn't even bother to throw him a dog.
In the awkward silence, the only thing that updated in the notebook were the foolish mistakes he had just made...
"Cough, let's just pretend nothing happened."
Huai Shi sighed, took the notebook back, and threw it on the table.I don't understand what happened, but I still have to continue job searching tomorrow. I'll just go to sleep now and dream about everything...
He threw himself onto the bed and closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw a hunched figure standing under the dim light of a street lamp. The figure was crouched like a monkey and when it lifted its head towards him, it revealed a terrifying mask.
The next moment, he was dead.
