Breathe.
Although it was late summer, thanks to the dim yellow street light, the air exhaled from one’s nostrils was clearly visible.
“Did you feel anything?” Li Ang asked softly.
The black umbrella shook gently behind him, and a sound was heard.
The Yin Qi. The faint, yet clear Yin Qi filled this narrow and messy alley just like a misty veil and obscured the view.
The black umbrella swayed comfortably and sucked the gloominess and coldness in the air. Li Ang adjusted his breathing and allowed the Ripple Breathing Technique to slowly circulate through his body.
The warm current made the chilliness dissipate. Li Ang shook his body, walked through the alley along the path of the Yin Qi, turned left and right, and arrived at a two-story house.
The whole house was grayish-brown and was covered with verdant creeps on the outer wall. Through the space between the branches and leaves, the mottled concrete wall tiles could be seen.
The house was probably 12 years older than Li Ang. The cracked corners and the foot of the wall made people wonder whether the building would collapse at any moment.
The room on the second floor of the building was lit. He could hear a young reading voice from upstairs while standing at the bottom of the building. Li Ang froze for a moment. After he made sure that there was nobody, he climbed up the wall of the building quickly like a black cat. He silently crouched on top of the second floor and listened to the movement coming from the floor below.
“There is a stone cliff at the foot of the mountain, and there is a crack on that cliff. The complex-toothed flying squirrel uses this crack as its nest.”
Several young children’s voices were reading the text aloud. They were reading the textbook The Complex-Toothed Flying Squirrel of the second grade of the People’s Education Edition. The general idea was that winter was coming, but the complex-toothed flying squirrel got by without doing anything and refused to build a nest. In the end, it froze to death late at night in the winter.
The voices of five boys and three girls were speaking, and they were all very young. They were seated in rows of four, two people in each row. At the front of the room, an adult man wearing cloth shoes and weighing around 70 kilos occasionally stood up to walk.
Based solely on sound, without looking, Li Ang could roughly imagine the scene inside the house. Was this a cram school in the shantytown?
The children finished reading the text. The man sitting on the podium in front of the room coughed violently and asked the children to use their math book.
Li Ang patiently lay on the rooftop, waiting for something to change. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door. A middle-aged woman, who sounded like she was doing heavy physical work, thanked the teacher in a tired voice and took her child away.
As 10:00 approached, the children in the cram school were taken away by their parents. When the door was closed, the man in the classroom coughed violently and slowly brewed a pot of tea for himself.
The jasmine tea he brewed was clear, sweet, and delicious and had detoxifying properties. The pale white flowers floating and spinning in the tea could make people calm just by watching them.
The middle-aged man named Zou Zhengze held the lid of the enamel cup, rubbed the brim lightly, took a sip of tea, and said indifferently, “Aren’t you coming down to have a look?”
After a moment of silence, Li Ang gently jumped into the place through the window, his red-faced Lord Guan mask glaring at Zou Zhengze.
“Which organization are you from?” Zou Zhengze blew on the surface of his tea and asked casually, “Special Affairs Bureau? Abnormality Institute? Or Whale Vocalization Organization?”
Li Ang did not answer and only looked at Zou Zhengze with interest.
He was about 45 years old and medium-sized. He was not fat or thin, he had short hair, and he was wearing cloth shoes, a red short-sleeved T-shirt, and black trousers. The T-shirt did not cover his entire arms and revealed large old burn marks.
The burn scars on his face were more obvious, as the dark red scars covered the entire left side of his face, extending down under his right ear. Whenever he smiled, his slightly swollen lips would move to the side, making one worry about whether the corner of his lips would tear along the scar.
“You killed Zeng Weiming and Wang Fangni?”
“Yes, I did.” Zou Zhengze nodded his head.
“Why did you do that?” asked Li Ang. “Out of hatred?”
“Hatred?” Zou Zhengze said as he shook his head. “It was not out of hatred but out of love.”
Li Ang grinned and said, “A sane person wouldn’t consider murder a form of love.”
Zou Zhengze shook his head and coughed a few times before he got up from the chair and knocked on the table. “What do you think of this place?”
“It’s okay as far as cram schools go.”
“Actually, it’s not really a cram school,” Zou Zhengze said with a smile. “The people living here are not rich. Many couples get up early to do physical labor and have no time or qualities to raise children.
“When I was young, I repaired bicycles, carried bags, burned boilers, opened a kiosk, worked as a barefoot doctor, and taught for a while. Fortunately, I showed my capability to help the residents here with their children and tutor them.”
“What a touching story,” Li Ang calmly said. “You could even participate in the selection for the top ten people who made others feel touched in Yin City.”
Zou Zhengze ignored the sarcasm in Li Ang’s words and said with a sigh, “When I was young, Wang Fangni and I were best friends. We grew up in the village and went to school together. Unfortunately, my family wasn’t doing well financially, so they had no money to school me. I could only enter society early and experience it.
“Later, when I heard that there was an accident at Fangni’s home and they had no money to school her, I worked two jobs in the city and mailed her money so she could continue her high school education.
“When she was in college, we lived together. I drove a taxi to supplement my income while she took classes during the day and went home to cook for me at night. Those were our happiest moments. She told me that she would marry me after she graduated from college.”
The fond, warm memories of his past were revealed on Zou Zhengze’s dark red face. “Unfortunately, those good times did not last long. When I had to extinguish a fire, I rushed into the fire and my escape respirator was taken away by the person I rescued. By the time I was dragged out of the fire by the firefighters, my face had become unsightly.
“Fangni didn’t leave me. She took good care of me and constantly described to me the beautiful future we had once imagined.
“However, she was a female college student with a bright future, and I was a disfigured, crippled person. The opinions of the people around Fangni made her go increasingly more silent.”
“You had such an experience? That’s fear of being abandoned and fear of disgusting others. You were disgusted with yourself and you hated yourself. You could no longer trust the person you loved.”
Zou Zhengze said in a daze, “At the time, I treated her very badly. I hit her, but she still remained silent. I told her to get lost, but she did not. I ripped the bandages, escaped from the hospital at night, and got out of that city.
“Back then, I didn’t know if I hated her or myself.”