Chapter 28#

The Truth#

The fish scale necklace was returned to its rightful owner.

Ye Sheng fumbled with the light green scale, his head lowered, unable to describe his feelings. He didn’t know why his grandmother had used this fish scale as the key to the box. In his eyes, it was just a cheap necklace he had bought from the market. So cheap that he could give it away to a stranger on the train. If he hadn’t met Ning Weichen at the banquet, would he have never been able to open that box in his life?

The thread that passed through the fish scale was rough. Ye Sheng gently touched it with his fingertip and put it in his pocket. The doorbell rang, and the hotel staff brought him his phone and a change of clothes.

Ning Weichen stood up from the sofa.

“It’s getting late, rest early.” He left these words and walked to the master bedroom on the left, leaving Ye Sheng sitting alone.

The suite at the Rose Empire Hotel was even better than the one at the Yuecheng Hotel. Ye Sheng had been stained with the smell of perfume and alcohol at the banquet hall, and he felt uncomfortable himself. He picked up his pajamas, walked into the bathroom, quickly washed up, changed his clothes, and walked into a guest room.

He lay on the bed, with the table lamp on, and carefully examined the necklace. There were many scratches on the light green scale, all left in Yinshan.

The place he once wanted to escape from the most now seemed to have a strange power. Just hearing the name calmed Ye Sheng’s constantly floating heart.

He was indeed very suitable for Yinshan.

This was the city center, the most prosperous and expensive area in Huaicheng. Ye Sheng was in a ridiculously expensive hotel room, but he was recalling the countless times he had been tormented by poverty in the past.

Ning Weichen said that he didn’t know himself well enough.

In fact, he had never thought about understanding himself.

Why do people live? Ye Sheng had been thinking about this question since he was born. He didn’t know what it was like for other children to be sick, but for Ye Sheng, it was very painful, extremely painful. When he had a fever, his consciousness was dull and blurred, his internal organs trembled upside down, and every part of his bones, blood, and soul was tormented in a raging fire.

The first feeling he experienced in this world was pain.

After he recovered, Ye Sheng was like a person who had lost his soul. The villagers said he had been burned stupid.

In fact, he was more like he had been burned crazy. From birth, he had a sharp hatred for this world. Hysterical, roaring destruction, crazy destruction, a hatred that could not be eliminated. It was just that he was too weak as a child to do anything out of control, so he could only choose to close his eyes and sleep, close his mouth and stare blankly, which gave people the impression of being dull and slow.

But his grandmother seemed to be able to see through his heart.

She took the young him to the top of the mountain behind the house.

That was the first time Ye Sheng saw the full view of Yinshan. The hundred thousand mountains were continuous, the smoke was vast, and the green forest was like a wave.

Grandma smiled and rubbed his hair, and said softly, “The hardships our Sheng Sheng is suffering now, God will compensate for them in the future. A person’s luck in this life is constant. You just need to grow up slowly, and everything will be fine after you grow up.”

However, it didn’t get better after he grew up. In the ignorant and backward mountain village, the discrimination he received was like a crude and hard knife. Later, in high school, a group of classmates who considered themselves civilized gave him a new soft knife.

Prejudice is more terrible than ignorance. Because of prejudice, that group of classmates analyzed his every action with their own self-righteousness. They analyzed his original family, analyzed his underlying logic, and then came to the conclusion that he was psychologically dark.

A group of morons.

Ye Sheng had never figured out what he wanted to live for.

The so-called stable university life, the so-called return to Yinshan, the so-called taking the civil service exam. It was all just a copy of a young woman he knew from the poverty alleviation office.

When that woman smiled, her eyes were like the towering mountains.

With a pair of eyes extremely similar to his grandmother’s, she stared at him and said to him.

“Dedicating your life to something you think is meaningful is the best answer to living.”

Was his life plan really from the heart? No, he was just imitating someone else’s life.

He referred to the meaning of other people’s lives to give himself an answer to life.

Ye Sheng did not sleep well this night.

The cold fish scale necklace was in his hand, but it felt like a ball of hot fire. Ye Sheng seemed to have returned to the years of his childhood when he had a constant low fever, with a dry mouth and weak limbs.

In the middle of the night, he suddenly opened his eyes and struggled into the toilet.

Splash, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face with cold water. Ye Sheng stood in front of the mirror, raised his head, his hair dripping with water, and his almond eyes looked at himself in the mirror with deep coldness. The corners of his eyes were as red as a cloud. Crimson, burning brightly.

Ye Sheng took a deep breath. The silk pajamas were very loose. He reached out and touched his back, familiarly touching the uneven spot.

The red birthmark he had since birth, which was wrinkled into a ball when he was a child. When he grew up, it opened up, shaped like a red butterfly with its wings spread.

Now this red butterfly was so hot that it seemed to be able to burn his fingertips.

Ye Sheng went back to his room and checked the time. It was 5:30 in the morning. He didn’t plan to sleep now. He waited until six o’clock, and without saying goodbye to Ning Weichen, he left the hotel directly.

He called a car and went back to Huaian University.

When he got in the car, the driver also looked like he hadn’t woken up from his early shift, listening to the radio.

Ye Sheng closed his eyes to catch up on sleep.

The host of the radio station was talking in an exaggerated tone about a cold storage murder case that had happened in Huaicheng not long ago. The deceased was frozen to death in the cold storage. When found, two medical needles were inserted into his left and right eyes, and the long needles almost penetrated the entire eyeball.

The bloodstains solidified on his face, and his appearance was strange and terrifying, and the murderer has not been caught yet.

In fact, the photos of the cold storage were not released, the matter of the needles in the eyes was doubtful, and the police also gave an answer, saying that this person was drunk and fell into the cold storage, and it was not a homicide, so there was no murderer.

But for the storyteller, the truth of the story is not important, the more bizarre the better.

He constantly exaggerated and analyzed it, using various assumptions to embellish it into an urban grotesque.

However, this city is too big, and countless people die for countless reasons every day. Such a piece of information that happened in the suburbs did not cause a big wave in people’s hearts, and the host of the radio station just used it to make up the numbers.

At the end of the program, the host said with a smile.

“Okay, that’s all for today’s Little Mouth Tells Stories. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.”

After the radio station was a piece of gentle and lyrical music. At the time when the sky was about to brighten but not yet bright, it made people more and more sleepy.

The end of the music was accompanied by a young boy’s tender voice.

“When I was very young, I asked my father, why do we tell stories? My father said that there are three kinds of people in this world: storytellers, story listeners, and people in the story.”

“Stories help us record the years and seal up our joys and sorrows. And those who grow up listening to stories will one day become the people in the stories.”

Those who grow up listening to stories will one day become the people in the stories.

Beep.

The driver stopped the car outside the gate of Huaian University, yawned, and said lazily, “We’re here.”

Ye Sheng suddenly opened his eyes.

It was not rush hour yet, and it only took an hour to get from the Rose Empire Hotel to Huaian University. After Ye Sheng paid, he took his fish scale necklace and walked quickly to the dormitory.

It was still the familiar camphor trees and the familiar smell of laundry detergent.

The faint golden sunlight of the morning sprinkled on the ground, but the peaceful, leisurely, and beautiful university life gave him a completely different feeling this time.

Their dormitory building was hidden in the green shade, and the sun had not yet shone on it.

Ye Sheng walked upstairs quickly and went to dormitory 404. As soon as he entered the dormitory, he directly took out the box from the cabinet.

Then he took out the fish scale necklace, found a thin, invisible seam at the bottom of the shell, and fitted the scale into it.

In the process of pushing the scale in, Ye Sheng quietly held his breath.

After pushing it to the bottom, the shell lock still did not move. However, Ye Sheng’s fingertip felt a faint coolness. A faint blue light spread from below, with a faint glow. It seemed that the fish scale was slowly melting inside.

The process of the fish scale melting was very slow.

While waiting for the lock to open, Ye Sheng received a call from Huang Yiyue.

He hung up directly, and Huang Yiyue sent a voice message directly.

He didn’t know what Huang Yiyue had experienced at the Qin family yesterday, but her voice was hoarse and trembling now. After being frightened and crying all night, she was obviously a little mentally abnormal.

She cried and said, “Ye Sheng, you can’t do this to me. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been born at all.”

Using the grace of birth as a threat was no longer useful to Ye Sheng.

Ye Sheng was about to block her, but his hand stopped on the screen, stunned, and suddenly stopped moving.

The words Huang Yiyue said were very strange.

Her tone was very strange, fearful, resentful, and broken.

“If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been born at all” was like a deep curse.

He didn’t look like Huang Yiyue, nor did he look like his biological father. Even Huang Yiyue’s selfish, cowardly, vain, and stupid personality made Ye Sheng wonder more than once if there was any blood relationship between them.

But his umbilical cord was connected to Huang Yiyue’s body and cut by the nurse. The hospital had all the information about his birth, and there were also records of his photos from childhood to adulthood!

When Huang Yiyue called again.

Ye Sheng answered.

Huang Yiyue didn’t seem to expect the call to go through. She was stunned for a moment, then became crazy and incoherent, crying, “Sheng Sheng, save Mom. I’m locked up by them. Xie Yan hit me so hard. Sheng Sheng, only you can save Mom now. Sheng Sheng, Mom knows she was wrong, Mom knows she was wrong.”

Ye Sheng: “Huang Yiyue, explain what you just said.”

Huang Yiyue: “What?”

Ye Sheng said indifferently, “—If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have been born at all.”

Huang Yiyue seemed to be really on the verge of collapse now. Everything last night was like a nightmare, torturing her to the point of insanity.

She spoke with difficulty.

“Sheng Sheng, I am indeed your mother, but the process of me getting pregnant with you was a bit complicated.”