Chapter 31: Wife
Li Jiahong held the business card and returned to the busy street, only realizing he had safely walked out of that eerie forest shop when he accidentally bumped into the shop sign of a small restaurant. He apologized to the restaurant boss while walking under the blazing sun with lingering fear.
He always felt it was somewhat unreal, but the business card in his hand constantly reminded him that the previous experiences were all real.
“Where is my child now?” Li Jiahong hugged his luggage and boarded the bus back to his hometown. He looked at the bright blue sky outside the window, yet always felt the world was gloomy and dim.
The things heard in the shop were too bizarre and strange. Knowing that his wife, who was still persevering with rehabilitation in the hospital, might encounter danger, he crossed four cities overnight, traveling all the way covered in dust, and finally made it back to his wife’s side just before midnight.
Li Jiahong didn’t even have time to put his luggage back home and came straight to the hospital to visit his wife.
Coming to the bedside with the nameplate “Jiang Gu” hanging next to the bed number, seeing his wife still sitting at the head of the bed laboriously flipping through the photo album, Li Jiahong breathed a sigh of relief.
Seeing her husband suddenly return with a face full of fatigue and urgency, Jiang Gu was somewhat surprised, “Why are you here at this time? When did you get back?”
Now, every time she saw that withered yellow old face weathered by wind and sun, Jiang Gu couldn’t help but feel heartbroken. Her husband had once been a promising and handsome man, but now because of her, he had become like this. Although Li Jiahong always said he didn’t mind, she couldn’t help but care and often felt ashamed for it.
She raised her powerless hand, wanting to properly touch her husband’s cheek. Li Jiahong lovingly held her hand, letting her touch his face.
“I just got back. I was a bit worried about you, so I hurried over to check.” Li Jiahong’s voice was gentle as he lightly smoothed Jiang Gu’s furrowed brows.
Just as he finished speaking, he keenly felt his wife’s hand stiffen slightly and pause for a moment.
Seeing Jiang Gu’s expression was off, he immediately followed up, “Nothing happened while I was away these few days, right?”
He cupped Jiang Gu’s fragrant cheeks, making her meet his eyes, and said seriously, “No matter what happens this time, we have to face it together, okay? I said before that I would protect you and the child well. I’ve lost one chance already. Give me another chance, okay?”
Jiang Gu gazed into Li Jiahong’s eyes, full of the same deep affection and determination as always. It was precisely because her husband always kept his promises that she had fallen for him back then.
“Don’t worry, I’ve already learned a lot about that thing. You don’t need to deceive me.” Seeing Jiang Gu hesitating, Li Jiahong continued softly, “So, you don’t need to worry about me getting involved in this troubled waters and what consequences it might have, because I’m already in it.”
“Why are you so silly.” Upon hearing this, Jiang Gu’s eyes immediately blurred with tears, unable to stop crying. The couple embraced, but both were very restrained, and Jiang Gu didn’t cry out loud, “Why are we so silly.”
“Otherwise, why did we become a couple?” Li Jiahong smiled, gently rubbing his wife’s emaciated back.
Jiang Gu didn’t respond to this, just sobbed lightly a few times, then slowly told her husband about the things that had happened since she awoke and while he was away.
During the fifteen years of coma, Jiang Gu endured the torment of nightmares day and night, repeatedly looping through the full process of the memory when her child was taken away and she fell from a tall building that year.
In that memory, she always saw a black robe figure eight feet tall. Under the brim of his gray-black flat-top hat were a pair of fiery red eyes like hell flames, staring fixedly at her. He stood together with a group of deformed, twisted-faced people, surrounded by them. Vaguely under the shadow of the hat brim, she could see his cracked lips moving, narrating a language she had never heard, interspersed with rhythmic syllables impossible for humans to produce.
In that language, only the frequently appearing “hogu” pronunciation left a deep impression on her, and it was these two syllables that immediately reminded her of that unbearable university memory, making her realize that this group of monsters shuttling from the deformed spacetime tunnel were a group of creditors come to collect debts.
They violently took away her child and tried to kill her with some unseen rod-shaped sharp weapon. It was during evading the assassination that she accidentally fell from the tall building, nearly losing her life.
Perhaps because he was the leader of those deformed people, the bowler hat guy thought she would surely die falling from such a height. He merely glanced down at her despairing fall from the rooftop edge, then instantly disappeared without a trace with her child and that group of deformed personnel.
But no one expected that not only did she survive falling from a height of more than ten floors, but she also awoke fifteen years later.
Even more unexpectedly, at the very last moment of the fall, she actually saw that face hidden under the hat, and in the looping dreams one after another, her impression of that face became even more profound and clear. Every facial detail was like the most primitive tattoo, etched deeply into the depths of her mind one by one.
What kind of detestable face was that? Without the enhancement of hatred and grief and indignation, any human who saw it would shudder, wail to heaven, resent God and blame the creator for why such an ugly face was created.
At first glance, it was a rat person face with cold eyes, but upon closer inspection, one would discover that what covered the entire face was not hair, but living biological pipes, like exposed capillary vessels, forming the illusion under visual deception that it was a mass of hair. The fluid inside flowed through every intricately complicated “hair tube.” Its mouth had no incisors, but a retractable secondary mouth, with the tip of the tongue deep in the bloody mouth being a sharp black thorn, making one guess that they might feed like venomous blood mosquitoes, with a tongue that could shoot out like a chameleon’s…
That was not human, nor could it possibly be a species from Earth.
Trapped in the looping nightmare, Jiang Gu regretted immensely—regretted her ignorant recklessness back then, regretted having no sense of awe toward this world, and most regretted participating in that ritual with no way out due to a momentary bewitchment.
After being freed from the vegetative state, Jiang Gu hadn’t slept a few peaceful nights. At first it was because of inner guilt emotions, but later, during the time after her husband left, she began to notice what seemed like a few lines of sight from nowhere peeping at her, and she could feel they must be those hellfire-red eyes from back then.
It had returned, realizing the mistake of failing back then, now coming to root out its mistake, and this time it wouldn’t fail again.
From the first day she felt the line of sight, she became extremely sensitive to red things. She would even go mad and scream because of the red flowers brought by the neighboring bed patient’s family for the patient, and become horrified to a ferocious expression upon seeing blood drops remaining in the syringe.
Every night she didn’t dare to turn off the light to sleep. If forced by the hospital, she would cover her head with the bed quilt, even if suffocating, she wouldn’t stick her head out to gasp for breath before dawn, because the medical instrument monitoring her vital signs next to the hospital bed would also flash red warning lights in the darkness.
Therefore, every time before sleep, she could only flip through the photo album, hoping to find courage and the power to survive from the happy times with her family, longing for her husband to return soon.
Fortunately, her husband suddenly returned tonight. His appearance calmed her tense emotions of the past many days, and in that sweat-scented embrace, she felt long-lost warmth and tranquility.
“Take this. This is the amulet I got for you. Keep it safe.” After hearing his wife’s encounter, Li Jiahong fell into a moment of silence. He felt both heartbroken and afraid, glad he had returned in time. He reached into his luggage, took out a black-edged white feather about thirty centimeters long from a crevice. The hair was soft, the feathers tough, not knowing from which species of bird.
“What bird’s feather is this?” Jiang Gu took the feather in surprise; it was the first time she had heard of such a simple amulet.
The moment she took the feather, Jiang Gu felt it had some magic power; she wanted to keep holding it tightly, somewhat reluctant to let go.
Li Jiahong gave a dry laugh a few times, only saying he didn’t know either, inwardly hoping this feather would truly have the protective wonder Boss Lin mentioned.
Today is the Double Ninth Festival. Has anyone gone hiking? Seeking collections, votes, etc.~~~~
