Chapter 37: A Life of Murder

  All that was seen inside the house were four empty walls, with only a person hanging from the high beams above, their head tilted and tongue sticking out, swaying back and forth with the noise of the door being pushed open.

  I immediately shouted loudly: "Come on, come on, someone has hanged themselves!"

  Wang Jue rushed into the room, saw this scene, and was so frightened that he couldn't speak. After a while, he pushed me and said, "First save people, find a stool."

  It's strange to say, but the large room didn't have a single piece of furniture, empty and desolate like a granary. How the person who hanged themselves managed to get their head into the noose hanging from the beam over three meters high is indeed a puzzling question.

  I moved a stool from the outer room, Wang Ju sat on the stool and hugged his legs, pulling his head out of the noose. I supported his body under the stool and slowly lowered him to the ground.

  At first it was just the two of us in the house, but after my loud shouts a moment ago, several neighbors rushed over. Everyone worked together to carry the person who had hanged themselves into the courtyard for some fresh air.

  It wasn't until then that I saw clearly, the one who had hanged himself was the scar-faced man from earlier. Wang Jue touched his nostrils and shook his head, indicating he had stopped breathing. Based on a doctor's professional ethics, he performed CPR on Scarface for several minutes. In the end, there was no turning back.

  Now the village is in an uproar. It's said that someone has been killed, and the villagers have all come out of their homes to surround the Knife Scar Face family's courtyard, making it impossible to get through. Some people are shouting to inform the village head, some are shouting to call the police in the city, and some are saying to quickly go find Knife Scar Face's wife.

  What's even more terrifying is that someone said I and Wang Jue - two outsiders - killed Scarface, and they wanted to tie us up together and send us to the Public Security Bureau. Just as they were about to tie us up with a rope, we heard someone shouting: "The village head has arrived".

  Then everyone quieted down, and the crowd voluntarily made way for a path. A short, dark-faced old man with a cane hobbled over from the crowd.

  The village head walked up to me and Wang Jue, looked us up and down, then glanced at the scar-faced man on the ground, and asked with a look of disdain: "Where are you two from?"

  "Wang Cheng, Wu Zhuang," said Wang Jue. Before I could even open my mouth, Wang Jue had already taken the lead and tugged at the hem of my clothes from behind. I nodded in understanding. Probably what he meant was that telling them our true origins would only bring more suspicion and wouldn't be helpful to our current situation.

  The village head pointed with his cane at the scar-faced man lying on the ground and asked: "How did he die?"

  I recounted the whole process from entering the door, but before I finished speaking, someone in the crowd shouted: "Liar! Where can two people stand in the main room for two hours without going into the house to find the owner?" "Exactly, people are fine at home, how could they hang themselves?" "Take them both away and send them to the police station!"

  Slowly, the cries of "kill" and "beat" in the crowd grew louder, rising and falling in waves, unrelenting. The emotions of the people also became more agitated, as if they had determined that we two were the culprits. Someone even came forward to grab my and Wang Jue's arms, wanting to make us do a jet plane pose like prisoners on display.

  Wang Jue and I, of course, were not willing to show weakness, using pushing and shoving to resist the eagle claws that came at us. As a result, the crowd became even more angry. We pushed them, they pushed us, pushing and shoving, pulling and tugging, the decibel level getting higher and higher, the amplitude of the movements getting bigger and bigger. It seemed like it was about to escalate into a mass incident.