56 Memory

Zhou Weixiao climbed into the back seat and spotted the leather jacket his brother had left there a couple of days ago. He immediately gave the seatback a hard slap and eagerly asked, "Bro, can I wear this jacket? I'm feeling a bit cold."

Having no desire to experience any more breathless escapes for the moment, Zhou Suirong felt a slight pang in his chest just looking at that leather jacket. "Wear it. It's yours."

Zhou Weixiao slipped into the coat and cried out repeatedly, "So cool!"

His build was at least three sizes smaller than Zhou Suirong's, and wearing the jacket only made him look even thinner, appearing somewhat mismatched and awkward.

Zhou Weixiao rolled up the overly long cuffs, constantly shifting his posture in the confined space as he sought the right angle in the rearview mirror to admire his own looks.

He ran his fingers through his hair a few times, and with a somewhat dissatisfied mutter, asked, "Should I go dye my hair? How about red this time?"

Fang Qingzhou thought to herself: Could it be that little Zhou's vanity is genetically inherited?

Pressing down on the top of his head, Zhou Weixiao pondered, "Let me think. Should I dye it myself, or save up some money first?"

Zhou Suirong's fashion sense could not accept a younger brother sporting a dragon fruit head, so he advised, "Don't dye it."

The angle from which he offered this advice struck Fang Qingzhou as remarkably clever: "Red hair doesn't go well with clothes."

This remark proved effective indeed.

After kicking up a fuss for a while, Zhou Weixiao's energy was depleted once again. The joints of his body felt like aged, rusty machine parts, stiffly pieced together; with the slightest movement, they emitted sharp, cracking sounds.

He hammered his shoulder with some force and wailed, "My bones are about to fall apart. I'm so exhausted."

With that, he stretched lazily to loosen up his muscles and tendons, only for specks of white starlight to burst before his eyes, making him so dizzy that he tipped backward.

Zhou Weixiao groaned in regret, "If I'd known, I would've finished that half of a steamed bun earlier. I'm a bit hungry now."

Fang Qingzhou fished several bags of snacks out of the storage compartment and tossed them over.

Zhou Weixiao erupted into another burst of joyous and effusive gratitude.

Even when life was an absolute mess, his positive attitude remained astonishingly high.

Looking like an utterly helpless parent dealing with a possessed, rebellious child, Zhou Suirong fretted, "You do physical labor, yet you can't even eat properly?"

"Whatever goes into the stomach is gone after a trip to the restroom; it's nowhere near as useful as clothes and shoes," Zhou Weixiao mumbled around a mouthful of food, making his flawed logic sound entirely reasonable. "Besides, the place where I work includes dinner and a midnight snack. I've analyzed it, and a person only needs two meals a day. Anything more is just a waste of food."

"Stop analyzing," Fang Qingzhou said with a throbbing headache. "Listening to you think makes me feel like my cortisol levels are skyrocketing."

Zhou Weixiao asked, "What does that mean?"

From the side, Zhou Suirong translated, "Cortisol is also known as the stress hormone."

Zhou Weixiao asked with an air of innocence, "Why would talking to me cause you stress? All my friends think chatting with me is very relaxing."

Fang Qingzhou answered with a straight face, "It feels like talking to a humanoid."

With a face full of innocence, lacking any malice, Zhou Weixiao raised a question: "Don't you chat with a humanoid every day when you look in the mirror?"

Fang Qingzhou replied, "I don't need a mirror to talk to myself."

Once again, Zhou Weixiao experienced a moment of sudden enlightenment: "Oh, right!"

Zhou Suirong felt a ball of turbid air clogging his lungs.

Did anyone care about his feelings? His cortisol levels were the ones truly about to skyrocket right now.

"Zhou Weixiao," Zhou Suirong said with a stern face, "although I might not have much standing to say this, please really stop wasting money. Your lifestyle is extremely unhealthy."

With a cheeky grin, Zhou Weixiao said, "Stop trying to manage me."

Likely to signal his non-cooperation, he fished out his phone and lay flat on his back.

The interior of the car suddenly fell silent. After a few minutes of quiet, Zhou Suirong glanced at the rearview mirror.

Fang Qingzhou whispered, "He's fallen asleep."

·

Zhou's mother lived in the neighboring county, about an hour's drive away. The residential complex's property management wasn't strict; Zhou Suirong lowered the car window and gave a hand gesture, and the security guard directly opened the gate to let them through.

The three of them successfully entered the complex. Zhou Weixiao was woken up, and he rubbed his eyes, stumbling in a daze as he followed behind the two of them.

In the gap while waiting for the elevator, Zhou Weixiao was still trying to dissuade them: "Why don't we just not go? The things they yelled at you back then were so vicious, what's there to talk about? You're not a tadpole, you don't have to go looking for your mother."

Thanks to him, Zhou Suirong couldn't brew up any sort of emotional state at the moment.

Entering the elevator, Zhou Weixiao stood leaning against the wall with his hands shoved casually into his pockets. Glancing at the advertisements on the wall, he read out a few words with disjointed pauses before his thoughts reeled back and he suddenly said, "Or maybe they'll treat you nicely, considering your mom wants you to arrange a job for him."

Zhou Suirong asked, "For who? My mom?"

"Your brother?" Zhou Weixiao wasn't entirely clear either. "He's younger than you, so he must be born after your mom remarried, right? Though he looks older than you."

He patted Zhou Suirong's shoulder and cracked a dull joke, "Strictly speaking, we're one big happy family, eh?"

The muscles in Zhou Suirong's face twitched uncontrollably as a baseless sensation of pain flared across his body. The air he breathed passed through his nasal cavity, carrying a faint scent of blood.

He pushed away Zhou Weixiao's hand, instinctively rubbed his arm, then dropped it, shifting his posture to transfer his weight from his left foot to his right, and let out a heavy breath. He raised his eyes uneasily to scan the numbers jumping on the panel, feeling a physical resistance toward approaching that household.

Zhou Suirong didn't know how his mother's first marriage had ended, but her second marriage was hardly idyllic either.

Ever since divorcing Zhou Shiwen, she had harbored a deep-seated sense of inferiority and anxiety, coupled with the immense pressure of survival, which drove her to desperately seek shelter in the protection of others.

When Zhou Suirong was a little over two years old, she was introduced to and married an ordinary small-time merchant.

Zhou Suirong could find no redeeming qualities in that man.

Before his mother gave birth to her second son, she walked on eggshells at home, dragging Zhou Suirong down into the same precarious state. He had to cower like a parasite in a cramped corner, enduring abuse and beatings in exchange for the right to be integrated into the family.

Later, after his younger brother was born, his mother finally found some breathing room and began living what she considered a normal life. Meanwhile, all the conflicts of the new household converged entirely upon Zhou Suirong, the "outsider."

Perhaps because Zhou Suirong possessed nothing that could make his mother fond of him, she harbored an indescribable aversion toward this son of hers. Now, as Zhou Suirong sifted through the entirety of those memories, the only things that continuously resurfaced were his trampled dignity and the unbearable violence of his past.

Just as Zhou Suirong was breaking out in a cold sweat of disorientation, an electronic "beep" detonated a string of chimes in his ear. He covered his left ear, but the piercing tinnitus could not be shut out.

Zhou Weixiao was closest to the door. Seeing the elevator doors slide open, he strolled out with a languid posture.

He took two steps before being forced to backpedal as a tall young man materialized right in front of the elevator.

The young man's gaze swept past Zhou Weixiao's face and drifted onto Zhou Suirong.

At this sudden encounter, everyone both inside and outside froze.

The elevator doors automatically closed.

Recovering his wits, Zhou Weixiao pressed the open-button and pointed outside, saying, "Hey, this must be your brother!"

"Xiao Zhou," Fang Qingzhou's voice vibrated through the air, sounding somewhat distant; Zhou Suirong wasn't sure if it was an auditory hallucination.

He turned his head, staring straight into Fang Qingzhou's calm and sincere eyes, and heard her say, "Adults have the right to choose their family. I believe that is the greatest benefit of growing up."

With scattered thoughts, Zhou Suirong thought blankly: Did he have a family?

He felt for his ring; the metallic texture pressed against his skin, and he could feel the faint engraving on the side bearing both their names.

Awakening as if from a dream, Zhou Suirong pulled himself away from his trance-like reverie.

He supposed he did; he had Fang Qingzhou.

Unable to decipher the encrypted conversation between the two of them, and seeing that they were ignoring him, Zhou Weixiao reminded them again: "I mean, outside! Your brother!"

The elevator doors opened once more.

This time, standing outside was not just the young man from before, but also a middle-aged woman holding a child. Right behind them, a man in blue pajamas emerged while holding a smartphone, on which a short video app was playing a rural mini-drama at high volume.

Neither of Zhou Suirong's two younger brothers resembled him. Though Zhou Weixiao wasn't particularly striking, he was at least pleasing to the eye. The one before him, however, had acne scars pitted across the greater part of his face, his flesh piled up, and his facial features carried an innate cruelty.

He opened his mouth aggressively, pointing straight at Zhou Weixiao's forehead: "You guys even came together? Have you no shame? Looking for trouble, are you?"

With such an unfriendly greeting, it was clear that any previous negotiations had completely fallen through.

"What are you pointing at? Where's your manners?" Zhou Weixiao slapped his hand away, lifted his chin, and shouted loudly, "My dad is missing."

"What the fuck do I care if your dad is missing?" the young man warned in a rough voice. "I'm telling you, if you guys dare to come to my place talking nonsense again, I'll make all of you leave horizontal!"

Zhou Suirong looked past the crowd toward the middle-aged woman at the back, and before he even realized it, the word slipped past his lips: "Mom."

Zhou Mother's youth had been practically ground away by the passing years; the delicate clarity of her face was concealed beneath matted, unkempt hair and haggard wrinkles. She slightly averted her gaze, clutched the child tightly in her arms, and retreated a step toward the corridor behind her. Only then did the husband beside her turn off the short video on his phone, point toward the apartment door, and motion for his wife to go inside.

The young man sneered, "Still calling her mom? Didn't you crawl away long ago? We ordinary folks can't climb up to the likes of heartless things like you."

Zhou Weixiao's temper was ignited. He rolled up his sleeves and angrily swore back at him, "Ordering your own mother around, what a dutiful son you are! Failing to take advantage, you turn around and call others heartless—do you know how a dog barks? It sounds just like you!"

The rhythm of their exchange was so tight that Fang Qingzhou tried to speak several times but found no opening to chime in.

With one foot pressed against the closing doors of the elevator, Zhou Weixiao hadn't even finished speaking when the elevator emitted a sharp warning tone.

The young man provocatively hooked a finger at him, and Zhou Weixiao boldly stepped out.

Zhou Suirong quickly grabbed his arm and yanked him back behind him.

Several people crowded the narrow corridor outside the elevator.

The young man aggressively shoved Zhou Suirong, roaring at him, "Get lost! Did you hear me? Get lost!"

Fang Qingzhou tried her best to maintain her composure; arguing was useless and might only trigger unnecessary provocation. Stepping forward slightly out of alignment, she said, "We only came to talk and ask a few questions. The police must have looked into you."

The young man kept shoving Zhou Suirong, treating her words as turning a deaf ear, showing not an ounce of respect for the older brother who shared half his blood—likely because he had been pampered by his parents into bullying him so lawlessly since childhood.

After a moment of silence, and past the point of endurance, Fang Qingzhou called out, "Brother Zhou."

Zhou Suirong grabbed the young man's wrist in a tight grip and violently twisted it backward. The young man let out a miserable shriek on the spot. Seeing this, the stepfather in the background cursed a foul word and stepped forward to help, but Zhou Weixiao lunged ahead, and the stepfather met him with a flying kick straight to the chest.

The two sides erupted into a brawl. At this, Zhou Mother's expression finally shifted, losing her detached indifference. Unable to intervene while holding the child, she spun around in circles on the outer perimeter, pleading in a trembling voice for them all to stop.

·

Zhou Weixiao lay on the ground, screaming at the top of his lungs.

When Fang Qingzhou went to help him up, he ducked away. Lying flat on his back, he yelled up toward the upper floors, "Someone's getting beaten up! Call the police! 110! 120! 119! Hurry up!"

Neighbors quickly gathered around. A kind-hearted bystander wanted to step in to break up the fight, but Zhou Weixiao grabbed the man's trouser leg, freezing him in place so he could only stand on the sidelines and offer words of persuasion.

The battlefield situation was nothing short of clear-cut.

Zhou Suirong focused exclusively on beating the young man, while the stepfather tried to intervene from the side, yet couldn't match his strength.

Seeing his son taking a one-sided beating, his clothes violently ripped as he scuttled away in a pathetic scramble to protect his head, and noticing the growing crowd of onlookers, the man stamped his foot in fury and roared, "Stop! Stop! Cut the fighting! What on earth are you people trying to do, blocking my doorway?!"

Father and son ceased fighting one after another, and Zhou Suirong stopped as well.

Seeing them separate, Zhou Weixiao finally climbed back to his feet. Ruffling his blond hair like a wild lion, he pointed at the young man and shouted, "He threw the first punch! Do you want me to air out all your family's dirty laundry? Let's keep arguing then!"

The stepfather and son supported each other, looking fierce as they threatened, "This is our home, and you came here to beat people up. I'm calling the cops, and once the police arrive, none of you are leaving!"

While comforting the wailing grandson in her arms, Zhou Mother reached out with a heart-poured expression to touch her son's wounds, pulling his loosened collar back into place. She didn't spare a single glance for Zhou Suirong.

Fang Qingzhou rarely faced such raw, violent scenes head-on, and she found everyone here deeply unsettling—all because Zhou Suirong's mood was plunging into a terrible state.

Zhou Suirong stood ramrod straight, shaking out his hand. His knuckles were beaten red, and several claw marks lined his neck. His gaze remained fixed and unmoving as he coldly stared down the opposite party. Far from sorrow, what filled him was a sort of indescribable, seething energy.

More than a decade of pent-up gloom evaporated with every swing of his fists, vanishing along with the burning heat throughout his body. The terror that had once been carved into his bones was nowhere to be found.

He discovered that the vicious, wolf-den-like family of his past had each seen their monstrous faces reduced to toothless weaklings.

Zhou Weixiao stepped up, grabbed the hem of his jacket, and said, "Let's go, bro! This place is reeking of bad luck, stop associating with them!"

Pressing the elevator button, Zhou Weixiao eagerly tried to drag him inside. Zhou Suirong's footsteps locked in place for two seconds before he turned and stepped inside.

"Help me out." Zhou Weixiao dropped his pretense of strength, hanging his weight entirely on his older brother as he cursed, "I told you not to come, I told you so. Just walked right into a beating for nothing. Did you only find out today what kind of people they are?"

Neither had Fang Qingzhou anticipated that the scene would turn into such chaos. "I remember you saying that when you came last time, your stepfather proactively greeted you."

Switching back and forth between full of vitality and on the verge of collapse, Zhou Weixiao immediately shot back, "That just shows his amiability was all for your money! The moment you stop paying, aren't his true colors showing?"

Fang Qingzhou had initially thought Zhou Weixiao's injuries were an act, but all the way back to the car, he kept clutching his abdomen and hissing in pain.

Not daring to touch him casually, she asked, "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, fine, I'm young, what could possibly happen to me," Zhou Weixiao urged, "Just hurry up and take me home, I don't want to stay in this lousy place anymore."

Fang Qingzhou turned to check Zhou Suirong's injuries instead.

Chasing after them, Zhou Mother called out a distant "Hey."

At the sound, Fang Qingzhou and Zhou Suirong looked back. Taking small, hesitant steps, Zhou Mother approached them. Stopping at a distance—perhaps misinterpreting something—she said to Zhou Suirong, "The police asked me a few days ago, but I didn't say anything. You don't need to worry, just don't come back."

Just as Fang Qingzhou was about to ask what she meant, Zhou Weixiao poked his head out of the back car window, slapped the car door, and spoke up righteously: "What kind of mother are you? Don't you even know your son's name? What do you mean by just 'hey'?"

Her remaining words were cut short by his shout. With a dark expression, Zhou Mother turned and walked away without looking back. The wind whipped her loose clothing, leaving it uncertain whether the fabric was fluttering or if her footsteps were simply faltering.

Taking charge with a strong sense of ownership, Zhou Weixiao declared, "Forget about them! Let's go home!"

Exhausted as well, Zhou Suirong had no desire to go back and question her further. "Let's go," he said.

·

Back in Qing'an Town, Zhou Weixiao's condition showed no sign of improvement.

Rejecting help from the two of them, he stepped out of the car himself, shuffled step by step toward his bedroom, and said weakly, "I'm going to lie down for a bit. My stomach really hurts, he hit me right in the lower back."

With a stern tone, Fang Qingzhou said, "You need to go to the hospital for this."

Zhou Weixiao protested, "What hospital? Get an X-ray and a blood test and a few hundred bucks are gone just like that. My vital energy and blood are strong, I just need to lie down."

Trailing closely behind him, ready to catch him at any moment should he trip on the stairs, Zhou Suirong retorted unceremoniously, "You're sallow and gaunt, where on earth is your vital energy and blood coming from?"

Finally reaching his bed, Zhou Weixiao shut his eyes tight and lay down straight as a board. "You guys don't understand, as adults we have to learn self-comfort and self-healing. Don't argue. It interferes with my mental focus. You guys can go back now."

Daring not to leave him alone at home, Fang Qingzhou went outside to call an ambulance.

Perhaps the pain had grown truly unbearable, as Zhou Weixiao tossed and turned on the bed before struggling back up to a sitting position. "Maybe I should go see a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine? TCM should work too, I suppose."

Zhou Suirong was exasperated into a laugh by him. Fortunately, the ambulance arrived at that moment, and he forcefully hoisted the stubbornly struggling idiot onto his back to carry him aboard.

By the time the necessary hospital examinations were completed, the sky outside had already grown pitch black.

A drizzle had fallen in the early evening, and a biting, murderous chill permeated the city's streets alongside the drifting raindrops. A heavy, somber haze pressed low from the upper sky.

Saying he needed to grab his phone charger and jacket from the car, Zhou Suirong walked toward the parking lot alone.

Shutting the car door, the wandering wind, the misty rain, and all the clamor of the city were locked away outside.

After a day of chaotic upheaval, the profound silence brought an overwhelming sense of exhaustion upon Zhou Suirong.

He slumped over the steering wheel, intending to rest for a moment.

His mind was packed with too many things; at first, he could sort them, thinking of buying dinner and clothes for Fang Qingzhou, but soon his thoughts scattered, drifting back to today's residential complex and reconstructing every detail.

Yet the images turned chaotic, every person's expression flickering, alternately crying and laughing like masks interchanging on their faces.

Wishing to escape this bizarre world, Zhou Suirong backed away continuously, only to sink deeper and deeper into a sensation of weightlessness.

After another blink, he saw Yan Jianyuan.

The background melted into a blurry twilight yellow, with only Yan Jianyuan sitting clearly beside the bar counter. The bright glow from the light strip cast a gentle render across his face, yet the look he cast over was exceptionally chilling.

Yan Jianyuan said, "Some troubles seem simple, but they actually can't be resolved. Because even the most malicious people are similarly protected by the law."

Zhou Suirong heard himself ask, "What kind of trouble has Mr. Yan encountered?"

Yan Jianyuan's hand rested on a glass cup, his slender fingers casting a faint shadow on the tabletop: "Fang Qingzhou is always just an onlooker. I sometimes wonder, if you were the one who died, would she wish that I were dead too?"

Zhou Suirong's voice grew slightly taut: "President Yan, what are you talking about?"

"If I happened to appear before her at the exact moment she hated me the most..." Yan Jianyuan raised a hand to his own neck, "If no one stopped her, would she kill me?"

Zhou Suirong stood up.

Yan Jianyuan's gaze lifted accordingly, his profile hidden outside the light, his bottomless eyes possessing a ghost-like eeriness that made one's blood run cold.

"Either stop me. Or die with me."

Swaying on his feet, Zhou Suirong pressed his head as his vision spun wildly, plunging into darkness and losing consciousness.

The moment he fell, a tremor racked his entire body, urging him to jolt upward, yet he could not wake up.

He saw himself enter his stepfather's house.

With cordial friendliness, the man invited him to sit on the sofa, flattering him with the words, "You've become so successful now. If your dad hadn't told us, we wouldn't have known."

Ever since he stepped through the door, Zhou Mother had pulled up a small children's stool and seated herself in the gap between the sofa and the wall, maintaining a silent, evasive detachment.

Zhou Suirong hardly recognized her anymore.

In his memories, his mother had been strikingly pretty, just like her name—standing tall and upright like a spring orchid, even if she rarely showed him a warm expression. Now, her back was hunched, her eyesight had failed, and she wore a defeated posture unable to lift her head, utterly devoid of any luster.

Paying no mind to what his stepfather was chattering about, Zhou Suirong watched as Zhou Mother sat with her legs tucked on her small stool, intently knitting a sweater as if the matters being discussed had nothing to do with her. A raging fire began to burn from the depths of his heart.

He recalled a late night in his childhood when he finished washing the laundry; his mother had sat beneath a dim desk lamp, sewing clothes in the exact same manner.

Zhou Suirong had gone over to persuade her to sleep early. The moment he sat down beside her, cautiously smoothing out a hem with his fingertips, the needle in her hand had jabbed straight into him.

Drawing back his hand, Zhou Suirong had dropped in terror to the floor, while Zhou Mother had sat there just as detachedly as she was now, without even raising her head.

Those memories, which time had lulled him into forgetting, burst forth from an unlocked high-pressure valve, darting back and forth through his body like hooked arrows.

Indeed, he was fragile. His heart and mind had been pierced to shreds, his flesh flying, yet he was denied even release, the pain throwing him into a daze.

Zhou Mother was affectionate toward her younger son, humble toward her husband, and toward himself, cold to the point of cruelty.

She always chose not to see—not seeing him get beaten, not seeing him suffer, not seeing him endure.

Even when pleading with him, she refused to lower her head.

A voice bellowed deafeningly in his ear:

Then why should it be?

Why?!

With a voice frozen to ice, Zhou Suirong said, "Impossible."

Translating his resentment into a sharp blade, he hunted for the most wounding vocabulary, turning to humiliate his stepfather: "What Zhou Shiwen does is none of my business. Whether he wants to threaten you or harass you, you can call the police. I won't give him a single penny. As for your son, the fact that he can't find a decent job just makes him useless. If he had an ounce of capability, he wouldn't have ruined his studies while you pampered and coaxed him. Counting on me to help him? Shouldn't he come over and kneel down to apologize to me first?"

On the surface, he looked calm, but inside, things had been completely upended. Reason was being devoured, and crazy thoughts coiled tightly around him like shadows in the night, twisting and dancing without restraint.

The woman who had sat motionless finally reacted, turning her face toward him at last.

Zhou Suirong smiled with a sense of release. Even the unbearable headache eased considerably because of it.

They had a massive argument, parting on bad terms as Zhou Suirong was driven out.

Like a walking corpse, he arrived at Zhou Shiwen's home.

His headache flared and receded in intensity. When the attacks hit, his body shook uncontrollably, trembling in spasms as he sat curled up on a stool, gulping down hot water cup after cup to replenish the fluids lost to sweat.

Zhou Shiwen paced back and forth in the clutter-filled room, Zhou Suirong's gaze tracking his feet.

The man walked with a slight limp, the muscles in his right calf withered away, hidden beneath his trouser leg.

Zhou Shiwen's voice sounded like a muted background track, with only a few sentences occasionally leaking into his ears.

"I gave birth to you." "I'm not asking for much." "You can try and see if you can run." "At worst, I'll go to your company to find you."

Zhou Suirong found it laughable, yet amid his profound hopelessness, he couldn't utter a single word.

Nothing mattered to him anymore. Money, affection, dignity, or anything else—he lacked the strength to care.

Outraged beyond measure by his indifference, Zhou Shiwen grabbed him by the collar. Zhou Weixiao leaped forward in a panic to pull them apart.

A knock sounded at the door. Zhou Weixiao hurried to open it, and an uninvited guest walked in.

Supporting himself by the edge of the table, Zhou Suirong stood up, watching unblinkingly as Zhou Mother walked right up to him. Word by word, carrying the weight of a command, she said, "You need to fix this. This is the trouble you brought. Don't let him come looking for me anymore."

Zhou Suirong's face was pale and bloodless, his state of mind reduced to burnt ashes, fluttering tattered and torn, scattered to the winds by his own breathing.

He offered a bleak smile and asked, "Why do you hate me so much?"

From the side, Zhou Shiwen hurled a sarcastic curse: "Slut."

That single word instantly demolished Zhou Mother's restraint. Her cold face flooded with resentment, and the murderous hostility of wanting to kill locked onto him with a piercing glare.

Trembling, she pointed at Zhou Shiwen and spat, "You cripple! If you hadn't lied to me, would I have married you? You cripple!"

She wasn't skilled at cursing, and having lost her mind with rage, she could only repeat the word "cripple" over and over.

Flying into a blind fury, Zhou Shiwen moved to attack her, but Zhou Weixiao timely intercepted him, dragging him backward.

A torrent of vicious profanity poured from the man's mouth until Zhou Weixiao shoved him into the innermost room and bolted the door from the outside, redirecting the continuous stream of curses to a new target.

Turning his gaze back to Zhou Suirong, the accumulated grief of his mother, having erupted after years of suppression, struck out indiscriminately at anyone in sight with a tragic determination for mutual destruction.

"Why do I hate you? Because you weren't someone I wanted to give birth to! Your very existence was meant to ruin my life!"

"Back then, he borrowed money from my father and had someone else impersonate him on our blind date. But I didn't find out until the wedding day that the man I was marrying was him! All of them teamed up to lie to me!"

"They locked me in a room, and while I screamed inside, no one came to help. They treated me like livestock, thinking that once they threw me onto the bed, I would accept my fate. Outside, they drank and celebrated—and my own parents were right there among them. I don't understand, I don't get it. Did any of them treat me like a human being? Was I just a broodmare?"

Zhou Suirong stepped closer to her.

Dodging him as if he were a poisonous snake, Zhou Mother waved her hands hysterically: "Don't come near me! Don't touch me!"

Zhou Suirong froze in place.

The look she gave Zhou Suirong held no mercy, only revulsion. Her face wet with tears, she cried with venomous hatred: "You people surnamed Zhou all disgust me! Just looking at you makes me sick!"

Zhou Suirong asked softly, "Then why did you take me with you when you got a divorce?"

"You think I wanted to? We had an agreement—I'd bear him a son, and then he'd divorce me. But once the boy was born, he went back on his word! Everyone started making up new excuses, telling me to just live a proper life. What does living a proper life even mean? All of you, get the hell out of here!"

Zhou Mother shrieked curses at the top of her lungs.

"I didn't want to take you either, but nobody wanted custody of you, and I couldn't get a divorce otherwise! I wish you were dead! Looking at you, there have been countless times I wanted to strangle you with my own hands! You ruined my life, and you still expect me to love you?"

Clenching her teeth tight, the fierce cruelty on her face looked as though she wanted to tear the flesh from Zhou Suirong's bones: "I wish all of you would just drop dead! Stop haunting me like ghosts!"

Her second husband may have had countless flaws, but he was her own choice. Yet because of Zhou Suirong's existence, she could never truly begin a new life.

Zhou Suirong's innocence and admiration had subjected her to a cycle of torture between pity and revulsion.

She could not accept being a mother; she had been just as innocent once, and every softening of her heart only revived the humiliation of having her soul laid bare.

The years Zhou Suirong had spent away were the most stable of her life.

She didn't care whether Zhou Suirong became a successful man—it would have been even better had he lived in poverty and squalor. Yet he had returned, dragging Zhou Shiwen's ugly visage right along with him.

Setting aside the bond of mother and son, they clearly had no connection left. They ought to have hated each other and passed by like strangers; how had Zhou Shiwen ever thought of using him as leverage? It was merely to destroy her all over again.

Listening to her curses, Zhou Suirong felt his heart break into pieces, his breathing turning dull and painful.

Before leaving, Zhou Mother issued a repeated warning: "Don't ever come looking for me again!"

Slowly squatting down to the ground, Zhou Suirong wept without stopping until he lost all feeling, numbness blanketing the depths of his heart.

Dazed and lost, his headache grew too intense to keep his balance, and by the end, his memory blurred entirely.

The scene shattered into pieces, chaotic shards of light and shadow intersecting. When he finally came to, he found himself lying side by side with Zhou Shiwen.

With one hand clutching Zhou Shiwen's clothes and the other gripping a knife, dark red blood was already spreading halfway dry across the floor.

Staring blankly at his own hands, Zhou Suirong slowly touched the side of his face; it, too, was smeared with a sticky wetness.

Gathering all his strength to stand, he stumbled toward the outside.

Because Zhou Mother had arrived too late to catch the last bus back to the county, she was staying overnight at a friend's place nearby.

Zhou Suirong called her, and when he tracked her down, Zhou Mother came out to wait for him from afar, wishing to keep their meeting hidden from others.

Stepping out from beneath the streetlight, he looked into the deep, dark expanse stretching in all directions, losing the courage to take another step forward.

Catching sight of the bloodstains on his clothes, terror surfaced on Zhou Mother's face. Zhou Suirong met her gaze in silence. After an unknown length of time, amid the water-like chill of the night, he let out a wretched, pitiful laugh and said, "I did nothing wrong."

The moment those words left his lips, exhaustion and a sense of release flooded over him simultaneously, accompanied by a sort of frantic, burning heat that briefly made him feel as though he were enduring the purgatory of ice and fire.

What wrong had he actually done? He couldn't sort it out.

Looking at the blood on his face, Zhou Mother suddenly understood what he meant. Shock and remorse briefly washed over her, causing an expression even heavier with grief than before to cross her features.

Seeing that Zhou Suirong was about to leave, she instinctively called out to him, choking out, "I know you weren't the one in the wrong, but I'm not that great a person. They kept bringing up your origins, leaving me no way out... Actually..."

"I know," Zhou Suirong interrupted. "Public opinion is terrifying. Don't say any more."

Zhou Mother said, "If you hadn't been born to me, many people would have loved you."

Stopping once more, Zhou Suirong asked her calmly, "Then if I had been someone else's child, would you have loved me?"

Zhou Mother's lips quivered. After a long moment, she trembled out a single word: "Yes."

He had once gone to great lengths to win her favor without success. Now, obtaining the very answer he had wanted his whole life, he found that single word to be cruelly unbearable.

Instead of an ending that could draw a line under his two decades of suffering and obsession, it acted as an invisible shackle bound forever to his flesh. Those unfulfilled expectations transformed into countless blades of a slow, lingering execution.

They sliced both his past self and his present self into bloody shreds.

He realized thoroughly that the disease causing his torment had no cure whatsoever.

The moment he hastily turned his back, his face was already streaming with tears.

He didn't remember the loud wail he had let out when he was born into this world. But this final weeping, so close to death, was so quiet.

Climbing into the car, Zhou Suirong drove forward aimlessly.

Until the road ahead ended, Zhou Suirong pushed open the door, got out, and slowly walked up the mountain alone.

Not knowing where he was headed, he stopped halfway, sat down on the ground, and dialed Fang Qingzhou's number.

A series of busy tones echoed through the phone—no one answered.

He switched to leaving voice messages and sending texts:

"Will you call me back? I want to hear your voice."

"I'm sorry. You can let me know if you're busy with work. Call me back."

"I want to see you. Please just reply with one word. I'm sorry."

The night wind on the mountain carried a humid warmth that failed to dispel the late-summer stuffiness, yet it still chilled him to the bone.

Shutting off his phone, Zhou Suirong couldn't help wondering what Fang Qingzhou would do if she knew all this, or what she would say to him.

His mind conjured up nothing but worst-case scenarios.

Such as: "We've already broken up, you don't need to tell me these things."

Or: "Xiao Zhou, your mother actually made a valid point."

"You need to learn to take responsibility for yourself instead of pushing it onto others."

"Your impulsiveness disappoints me. How could you kill someone?"

Every assumption lacked any shred of human warmth. Zhou Suirong stopped engaging in this form of self-harm.

He climbed higher. Slowly, day broke, and the sun cast a gray, hazy light across the horizon.

Feeling deeply exhausted, he longed for rest. The voice in his mind repeated those words to him over and over.

The instant the blade sliced open his skin, the clamor in Zhou Suirong's ears vanished completely.

His blood flowed out carrying his body heat, and as he fell, he saw Fang Qingzhou appear just as he had imagined, pressing down on his wound and calling his name.

Why are you crying, though? Fang Qingzhou.

Why are you crying?

Zhou Suirong wanted to touch her face, but his hand refused to rise.

Stop crying.

A piercing, bone-chilling cold gripped Zhou Suirong's spine, as if that murderous wind was sweeping over him once more. He opened his eyes, his sleeves drenched through with tears.

Turning his head, through the blur of water in his eyes, everything in his view flickered.

The car door was open, and Fang Qingzhou was standing right in front of him.