C1

When I was twelve years old, my father was tempted and made a bet. From then on, the more he made a bet, the more he lost, the more he made a bet.

My mother wept all day, and they argued more and more, until one night my father returned with two men covered in dirt.

One of them I recognized as a bachelor from the eastern end of the village who had never married because of his ugliness and his cripple, and the other I'd seen once at my father's game table.

That night, my mother was sitting on the kang mending my clothes when my father came in. Without saying a word, he immediately lifted me off the kang and went outside to the window.

And then I heard my mother yelling at them what they were going to do, and then her painful wails.

I was worried about my mom and desperately wanted to break free from my dad's shackles, but my dad held me tightly and even used his hand to cover my mouth, preventing me from making a sound.

I heard the heavy breathing of two men in the room, and my mother cried out, "Wang Da Chuan, you're not a man, you're a beast."

Wang Da Chuan is my father's name, my mother's crying makes my heart ache, tears fall from my eyes. I stared at my father, not knowing what he did to my mother.

After a long time, the two men came out of the house, pulling up their pants as they did so, their faces filled with unsatisfied pleasure.

I still remember that lame man's ugly face. He stood in front of me and my father and wiped away his saliva. "Wang Da Chuan, you're so damn strong. In the future, you'll have to repay me with your wife."

After Cripple said this, he left my house with another person, laughing out loud.

My father finally let go of me, and with ten fingers in my hair, I quickly ran into the house, only to see my mother naked, kicking off the bench under her feet and hanging herself like a rag on the house beam.

I was so scared that I cried and hugged my mother's leg. I shouted for my father to come and save my mother.

My father rushed in at my shout, but when he saw what my mother looked like, he stopped dead in the doorway.

I begged him to come down and save my mother, but my father suddenly pulled me to his side and wouldn't let me get close to my mother. I watched helplessly as my mother struggled to the point where she didn't move.

This was a nightmare for me for the rest of my life. Even now, I would often dream of my mother's death and wake up covered in cold sweat.

My father hastily buried my mother, because before she died, she was tainted and said that her body was not clean. My father did not even let her into the ancestral grave, and there was not a single grave.

After this incident, my father became addicted to alcohol and drank a lot of wine. My father, who had been good to me, started to fight me after drinking, and from my initial poverty, my life was filled with a darkness that would never fade.

The next year we were going to sow the fields, but my father had also exchanged the money for the seeds for wine. He watched as the other families busied themselves while my family's land was still in a wasteland.

Finally, on a dusky evening, my father came to my house with a man I had never seen before. That man was in his early thirties, had a refined appearance, looked pretty good, wore a Chinese tunic, and looked very decent. My father pointed at the man in front of me and told me that this man would be my man from now on.

My dad sold me and traded me for the seeds from that year, and for the money for his wine. I didn't hesitate to follow this man. I just wanted to get rid of my father, but I didn't know that another nightmare was playing out in front of my eyes.

The man my father found for me was called Herculean. He was from the next village, and his family was pretty good. He had a wife, but she said he died of an illness last year.

He was exactly twenty years older than me, and after he brought me home, I heard his father whisper to him that I was still young and that he would have to wait two years before he could touch me, so that night I was given a room of my own.

I slept until the latter half of the night, I felt a cold air coming from my body, a big, cold hand, through my clothes, stroking my body.

I was awakened by the chill, and before my eyes I could see the face of Herculean, no longer gentle, but twisted with a tinge of desire.

When he saw that I had woken up, not only did he not stop, he became even more unrestrained. Those light caresses had turned into a greedy prey.

His large, ice-cold hands touched every inch of my skin, and all my struggles and shouts turned into his impatient desires. He roughly tore off all my clothes, and his entire body was pressed down on mine. He roughly broke open my legs, and rushed straight towards my body, but there was nothing there at all. In that instant, his entire face contorted like a bloodthirsty beast from hell as he stared at me.

He neatly pulled out the belt on his pants, and on his hand, that belt mercilessly slapped down on my thin body like a ferocious beast. The pain that was akin to being roasted by flames tore apart my skin, and long streaks of blood covered my entire body like long blood-colored bugs. I hugged my legs, curling up until I passed out.

It wasn't until I grew up that I understood that there was a problem with He Liming. He had lost his ability to be a normal man in an accident, and it was for this reason that he turned the originally refined man into a tyrannical and twisted psychopath.

In the days that followed, he tried several more times, but each time he failed, and each time I got a beating, and my body, apart from my face and all the bruises on my body, kept coming back with old scabs, and several times I couldn't even get up from my bed.

I still remember that it was a rainy night. He Li-Ming drank a lot of wine and I shakily brought him a basin of water to wash his feet.

However, his eyes flashed like a hungry wolf once again, causing my heart to clench. Because every time he looks like that, I face a beating, and I'm so scared that I can only tremble.

The water in the basin rippled in my trembling hands, and when he saw me, he flipped the basin in my hands angrily, splashing all over my body. The wet clothes clung to me, and the two puffs on my chest aroused his anger once more, and once again he pressed me to the ground.

As before, there was nothing to it. The drunk Helian Ming abruptly stood up from my body and kicked me with all his might, scolding me for being a useless money loser. He even asked me if I was crying because he didn't play with me well.

At that moment, his face was imprinted on my heart like a demon. He turned around and grabbed a poker from the side, threatening me with it.

I knew that I didn't want to die, nor did I want to die like that. I staggered to my feet, resisting the pain of having all the strength in my body drained out of me, and rushed out of the house in a panic, running all the way without looking back.

The rain had turned the gritty mud into mud, and I was soaked through, my rag shoes falling into the mud as I ran. However, I didn't dare to turn back or stay behind. I was afraid that they would easily catch up to me. I was afraid that I would be beaten to death.

I continuously shuttled into the forest, the weeds, and the bracts. As long as I could hide in a place, I would be like a headless fly as I ran in. Perhaps it was because he drank too much, or perhaps it was because the rain was too heavy for him, but in the end, the sound of his footsteps became softer and softer behind me until it was dead silent.

I finally ran down a country road away from the village, shivering in the rain from the wet clothes on my body, the rain running down my disheveled hair, blurring my vision, the pitch dark night sinking me into endless fear and confusion, and at that moment I thought of death, or perhaps only death, as the end of all my misery and desolation, and I stopped running.

A blinding light came from the distance. At that moment, my eyes were blinded by the light. The light came closer and closer. In that instant, I seemed to see my mother reaching out her hand to me.