Chapter 4 Xu Village

  I trembled and slowly got up, following Lan Xi's back, walking to the door of that room.

  The first thing I saw was that red rope, the one hanging from the ceiling, swaying precariously.

  "How could it be..." I didn't dare to speak out loud, afraid of attracting Lan Xi's attention, but my forehead had already started sweating, feeling an unbearable heat in my body, and my fingers were unconsciously tapping on my thigh.

  None of this is an illusion, it really isn't an illusion.

  I don't know what Lanxi wants to do, but Lanxi seems to want to find something in the room. She looked around with her eyes for a few moments and didn't see what she wanted, so she slowly put her index finger into her mouth.

  "Ka……" I could hear a crisp sound, but what I saw was Lanchuan's mouth suddenly filled with blood, several strands of flesh stuck to the corner of his mouth, red and white intertwined. In fact, this should be Paoge's body, and the severed finger also belonged to Paoge.

  What does she want to do? What is she writing...

  My gaze was fixed on Lan Xi's handwriting on the ground with blood, one stroke at a time. At this moment, there was no time to see how well the words were written.

  "Xu Village……54317628" I stared at the words written on the ground by Lan Xi, not knowing what she would write next. But then Lan Xi's writing hand stopped, and she stood up, ignoring the infant corpse on the ground. With a sudden burst of energy, her hands grasped the red rope hanging in mid-air.

  "She was looking at me..." My gaze met Lang Xue's in mid-air, and I could see that she had been staring at me all along.

  She was asking me, I suddenly realized.

  Lan Xi then leaned her neck closer to the red rope, and suddenly her mouth twitched, her hands relaxed, her neck hung on the red rope, and her body swayed heavily and powerlessly.

  I wanted to save her, I don't know why I thought of saving her, but it's all useless now, because I couldn't even speak, time seemed to have stopped, and I just stared blankly as Lan Xi went from calmness to struggle to finally falling silent.

  I stared at the corpse of "Cannon Brother" suspended in mid-air, feeling the ceiling gradually blur, and then I lost consciousness.

  ……

  This is already half a month after I witnessed the hanging suicide in Lanxi, and now I am sitting on the train to X Province.

  At this point I had already decided to start writing and put these down in words.

  After I lost consciousness, something else actually happened.

  When I woke up, I found myself in a hospital with my adoptive father by my side.

  My foster father is actually a benefactor to me, but I don't have much good feeling towards this old man.

  "How did you end up here." This was my first sentence, I moved my body a few times while speaking, and found that there was nothing unusual, but the scene before I fainted flashed by quickly, and my mood was not light.

  My adoptive father heard my voice, turned his head around, and a hint of surprise flashed in his eyes, but then returned to calmness. In his tone, which was still stern, he said: "Didn't I warn you not to get close to these dirty things?"

  He's still the same, when I was a kid, I raised a black cat, he told me that the black cat was a demon in its past life, and I threw it away. Later, when I went to high school, I met my first girlfriend, he told me that her family had been robbed of their grave, if I married her, I would die, so I left her.

  By the time I was in third year of high school, I discovered that his occupation was going around digging up other people's graves.

  From that year on, I started to dislike this person. For four years in college, I never went back home. Writing these taboo things is also because of my hatred for him. Later, I didn't have any contact with him either. He was originally rarely at home, so I almost forgot about this foster father. I didn't expect that he would appear before me now.

  I didn't want to respond to him, but the words that Lanxiu wrote on the ground before hanging himself appeared in my mind. I was afraid that I would forget them, but they were still very clear, and even the scene was replaying slowly like a videotape.

  "Xu Village, 54317628 In my heart, I silently recite, just like the hospital room only has me in it, this old man is not here either."

  "This matter, I warn you, you are not allowed to intervene again, otherwise your life will be in danger." My foster father seemed very impatient, just like the first time I brought the black cat back home, just like the first time he saw that girl by my side, he was always so certain.

  "You go ahead, I don't need you to take care of my things." My tone was very ordinary, letting him leave, just like speaking to a stranger.

  This time he didn't fly into a rage, I felt relieved in my heart, he could only leave here with a bare face, and it seemed that he wouldn't come back again.

  I don't know how I spent the next few hours, and when I asked the nurse, I had been lying in bed for two days. I also forgot to make a phone call to ask about something, and just sat there numbly, with scenes flashing through my mind before I fainted.

  Hearing the sound of slightly hurried footsteps outside the door, it was opened by Zhou Ping, and... Cannon Brother.

  My gaze remained fixed on Cannon Brother, the two of them came in and almost cried with joy, cheering and saying they would go out for drinks tonight, but I was still staring at Cannon Brother, that Cannon Brother who had clearly already hanged himself.

  "You... I pointed at Cannon Brother, wanting to ask something, but didn't know what to ask. Could it be that you're not dead?"

  At this time, that cannon brother looked a bit embarrassed and apologetic, saying: "Little Golden Lock, I'm sorry to Xiao Baobao, I don't know how it happened, I was in a hurry to finish using the restroom and fell asleep on my own in the restroom. You fainted outside, and the doctor said you were anemic and fainted. If Zhou Ping hadn't rushed over, we would have been overwhelmed with guilt."

  "Anemia......" I muttered to myself, I'm a medical student, wouldn't I know if I had anemia or not...

  "Lin Suo, don't blame Voice Cannon (Cannon Brother's name), I didn't know you had anemia again. If I knew you'd faint like this, I wouldn't have let you go...” Zhou Ping was trying to mediate on the side, afraid that I would blame Cannon Brother, but he didn't know that I wasn't thinking along with them at all.

  "How's your finger?" I thought for a moment and asked Paoge.

  The cannon brother looked at me in surprise, but still stretched out his right palm, and it could be seen that the index finger of his right hand was broken off halfway.

  My head buzzed with a loud noise, wasn't this what he had bitten off himself?

  Cao Ge saw the look of surprise on my face, chuckled and explained: "Don't be scared, Little Jin Suo, this is just a cut from an electric fan when I was a kid, it's nothing."

  "The electric fan cut...". I don't know how to describe my mood at this moment.

  I didn't think about it anymore, and from the bottom of my heart, I didn't want to touch those things.

  It wasn't until later that I realized what had happened. It seemed like nothing had occurred that night, and no one in the apartment complex had heard me banging on the door or shouting. It was as if the events of the evening had been a dream - Cannon had fallen asleep on the toilet, and I had passed out from anemia. But there were still some remnants left behind: a word that looked like a place name, and a string of unknown code.

  At first, I didn't think about it for a few days, but gradually I found that sometimes when sitting, the look in Lanxi's eyes before she died would appear in my mind, and at that time, my reaction was that she was asking me.

  But I don't know her and she has no reason to ask me.

  I tried hard not to think about it, but this gaze was like a nightmare, starting to appear in my dreams, and the ending of each dream was always written in blood on the ground.

  Finally, I couldn't bear it anymore, and I started losing control of myself.

  I searched online for Xucun and found that there are at least hundreds of places called Xucun all over the country, which makes this name completely useless. So I started to focus on that string of code, thinking it might be a license plate number, or a doorplate number, or some other contact information, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get any useful information out of it.

  However, after I went to understand the Lán Xī thing, I found that the professor who had dealings with Lán Xī had been suffering from schizophrenia for a week after Lán Xī's death. Even using Zhōu Píng's identity, when xx University inquired about Lán Xī's family information, the school was unable to provide Lán Xī's parents' household registration information, and there wasn't even any information about Xú Cūn.

  I mentioned this matter in a book, just two days ago, and suddenly a reader named Wang Si Feng left a message.

  "In our province and city, I think there was a banner during the year of my high school entrance exam. Those banners were all about getting into famous universities, and I seem to have seen Xu Lanxi's name on one of them..."

  Then he also mentioned the year he took the college entrance examination, and after checking, I found that the calculation was indeed consistent with Lanxi's high school graduation year. Moreover, Lanxi is indeed surnamed Xu.

  Then I searched for X Province X City and finally confirmed that there is indeed a place called Xu Village.

  I hastily dealt with the clinic and book matters, and then I hastily set out on this journey, and at that time the destination was a place called Xucun.