Chapter 2: The Weight of the World

  After I bowed my head several times, the villagers helped me lift the wooden puppet off the table. The puppet wasn't very heavy, but the villagers were enthusiastic and insisted on helping me carry it to the car. I stood beside them, thanking them sincerely, and took out the fruits and oats I had brought to share with everyone. We chatted for a while, mostly about their younger generations. Many of the elderly people are lonely, not because of others, but because they miss their children who live far away.

  。

  When I returned to the store, it was already 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Here, before 2 o'clock is considered noon. I moved the wooden puppet to my carving basement and prepared to help him clean up the dirt on his body. This puppet has been around for some years, and it's a bit difficult to get him completely clean. If you use too much force, you might damage the more distinctive parts of the puppet. If there was someone to help me, it would be faster, but my dad is not a diligent person. Since I came back, he has left the entire store to me to take care of. He either goes gambling, sleeps at home, or goes to those unscrupulous places outside with massage parlor signs to find women. He can't help me with anything.

  Fortunately, the wooden puppet was pure white all over, and the ash and his skin were easier to distinguish, which also saved me a lot of effort. Moreover, in the process of cleaning the wooden puppet, as long as I got close to it, I could smell a faint and pleasant woody fragrance. The scent made my mood more comfortable.

  When I had finished cleaning the entire puppet, a puppet that looked exactly like a real person appeared before me. The puppet was very tall, over 1.8 meters in height, which is rare for men in our country, and even if there were any, they wouldn't look good. But this puppet, although tall, looked refined and elegant, with every detail carefully carved, from its overall appearance to the lines on its skin. However, the puppet's eyes were strange - one was pitch black and shining brightly, matching the slightly opened lips that were a pale red color, making the entire face look gentle and lifelike, almost indistinguishable from a real person. But in the other eye socket, there was nothing, just a white empty space, like those plaster statues of people, which was quite frightening at first glance.

  Logically, there are only two possibilities for this situation. One is that the woodcarver forgot to paint the other eye of the wooden puppet, and the other is that the woodcarver intentionally made the puppet blind in one eye. However, the probability of the former is higher, as the entire wooden puppet is exquisitely crafted to perfection, suggesting that the carver should be a master craftsman who would not make such a low-level mistake. It's possible that this blank eye may hold some special meaning.

  I have a bit of OCD, and when I was carefully examining the wooden puppet, I noticed that the lines around its unpainted eyes were a bit blurry. It felt like there were a hundred bugs crawling under my skin, and I couldn't help myself - I put the puppet down on the ground, picked up the carving knife, and began to carve. Just as I was about to make the first cut, the phone on the table suddenly rang, giving me a fright. The knife slipped and poked into my thumb, causing a big drop of blood to fall onto the puppet's originally unpainted eyes, forming a red dot that looked like an eyeball. The bright red blood mixed with the puppet's pure white skin, creating an eerie effect.

  I don't know if it was because I hurt my hand or for some other reason, but my heart suddenly started racing, and in a panic, I quickly used a clean towel to wipe the wooden puppet's eyes, but it didn't work, the blood had already seeped into the wood. The phone rang again, and with one hand free, I answered it - on the other end was Su Huai Feng, my boyfriend of nearly ten years, whom I was about to marry.

  。

  Su Huai Feng is a second-generation official, has studied abroad, and has a strong foreign flavor. His father's official position is very high, but I won't say to what extent, as it involves other people's privacy. However, Su Huai Feng doesn't love me, and we only got together because of family reasons. Today he asked me out, probably to discuss our marriage plans, which are set for the end of this month, just over a dozen days from now. Since I returned, he hasn't contacted me at all, and it's been a long time since we last met. For this reason, I spent several hours getting ready, trying my best to leave a good impression on him. I always thought that I wasn't worthy of him, which is why I've been working so hard to start my own business, in order to use money to improve my social status and avoid giving others something to gossip about.

  Just as I was getting dressed, a message suddenly came, from Su Huai Feng, with white background and black words:

  "I have something on tonight, let's catch up another time."

  ——

  Let's meet again sometime.

  This sentence instantly extinguished all my passion, I'm a gentle person and I love Su Huai Feng very much, but at this moment, I was so angry that I had the urge to call myself an old mother and scold their whole family. We're about to get married soon, how could he still be like this?! I sat there fuming for half a day, didn't want to do anything, waited till night fell, took a bath and went to bed.

  (I'd like to explain that since my home is in the suburbs on the outskirts of the city, it's very far from my store. My parents don't get along well and I'm not too fond of going back, so I partitioned off a small bed screen in the basement of the store and usually sleep there.)

  I'm the kind of person who sleeps lightly, and last night after midnight, I was half asleep and felt extremely tired, as if something had crawled into my bed and was pressing down on me. Along with this weight on my body, a faintly familiar scent wafted into my nostrils, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't recall where I'd smelled it before. At the time, I didn't think much of it, just wanting to roll over and go back to sleep, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't move - my entire body from the neck down felt like it was dead, and I started to panic. Later, I thought that maybe part of my brain's neural center had woken up, but the neural center controlling my muscles hadn't fully awakened yet, which is why I was experiencing this loss of bodily control. After all, before this happened, I was a person who believed in science. But just as I opened my eyes to calm down, using the weak light from the streetlights outside the window, I saw with terror that there was a huge black thing pressing down on me!