Chapter 1.1 - The First Sentence Part 1

Translator: tarararawr

The First Sentence Part 1

It was close to one o’clock when Pu Tao returned home.

She said it was home, but she didn’t really regard it as her home. It was an apartment she rented in Rong City 1 . She was not the only person in the apartment. She lived with another girl who was her roommate.

In order to catch up with work and drawing, Pu Tao worked overtime three days in a row.

She put on slippers. All the bones and limbs in her body were tied up to be as heavy as a weighing hammer 2 . Only her abdomen was like a lonely city suffering from famine.

Pu Tao picked up her canvas sneakers. She was about to put them on the shoe rack when her hand stopped midair.

Her roommate’s shoes were laid out in a mess and occupied the entire shoe rack. She paused for a moment and put them aside to make room for her shoes.

She unlocked her bedroom door and hung her bag up. She took out a sauce pan and went straight to the kitchen. She was ready to cook up a bowl of noodles to satisfy her hunger.

She stepped over the sliding door and stopped dead in her tracks.

In her field of vision, there was a pool of filthy pots and pans stacked at random.

Pu Tao was heaving for a long time.

Bang! She put the sauce pan on the counter. She walked over, and stood silently by the sink for a moment.

When she turned on the faucet, water gushed out. Red and yellow oil stains rose to the surface.

Pu Tao was physically and mentally exhausted. This scene suddenly stung her eyes.

The feeling of filth and grease overcame her, and she seemed to be drowning in the sink.

After a moment of extreme nausea, Pu Tao forcefully suppressed this feeling. She turned off the faucet and turned around. She immediately went to the other bedroom.

She began to firmly bang on the closed wooden door.

She didn’t care about how she became a late-night ruthless and disturbing robber.

Pu Tao did not know how many times she knocked on the door until her hands were tingling.

The door was like a tomb, where “dead people” who couldn’t speak had settled in.

And tomorrow, it would come back to life from the dead and exist like a zombie. It would continue to torture her through its mold virus with every chance it could.

This was the third time.

It’s like the saying “three strikes and you’re out”. A suspicion rose from the bottom of Pu Tao’s heart.

She didn’t knock on a door, but a coffin. She wanted to scream, but how could she when it would only summon her own echo?

The first time was when her roommate didn’t flush the toilet. She asked her about it on Wechat and her roommate ignored her. Later, Pu Tao called her and she still did not answer. Finally, they happened to meet at the entryway, and Pu Tao had a chance to mention it to her. In the end, the girl played it down with, “Oh, I didn’t notice.”

A similar thing happened several times after that, but the roommate came and went without a trace. She pretended to be blind and dumb like a wild dog when ti came to her excretions. She was like a goose honking as it flew 3 , and the stench it left behind wrapped around the roof.

The second time was when Pu Tao wanted to wash her duvet cover in the washing machine. She lifted the cover and saw that her roommate had forgotten to dry her clothes for a long time. All of her clothes were wrinkled into stiff abstract paintings.

Pu Tao went to find her, and she still performed her technical deafness to the highest point of perfection. She hid in her room and pretended to be dead. It was only when Pu Tao returned to her room did she go to the bathroom and turn on the washing machine to clean the lumps of moldy “baguettes.”

Pu Tao was in a state of collapsing.

Roommates were really a matter of luck. There was no guarantee that a person would not come across any exotic flowers 4 .

The worst thing that could happen was a double kill. Even if she had problems with her roommate, she met a landlord who wanted to be arm-flinging shopkeeper 5 and she didn’t get any response when she filed a report with the police.

Pu Tao thought that when the three months left were over, she must get out of this hellhole as far away as possible.

Pu Tao completely lost her appetite. She took the sauce pan back to her room and fell onto her bed — her Pure Land 6 . She went off to her dreamland that was filled with embroidered little daisies.

After closing her eyes for a while, the negative feelings were gone. Pu Tao turned over and took her cell phone out of the back pocket of her jeans to send her best friend a Wechat message.

She knew her best friend would still be awake, so she randomly chose a meme to start the conversation.

Best friend replied: “Just came back home?”

Pu Tao typed: “What do you think?”

Her best friend’s name was Xin Tian 7 . Her parents chose the name “bitter before sweet”, but she always shamelessly claimed that it came from “sweetheart”.

Footnotes

蓉城 (róngchéng) – nickname for Chengdu Like the object used in scales to weight against in ancient times. 雁去留声 (yànqùliúshēng) – idiom meaning leaving behind a reputation 奇葩 (qípā) – it can mean someone that is peculiar, but is a prodigy; or it can mean someone who is very weird and can behave as arrogant, naive, or self-centered. 甩手掌柜 (shuǎishǒuzhǎngguì) – it means someone who asks others to do work like housekeeping but does nothing himself 净土 (jìngtǔ) – in Buddhism, it’s paradise where one can reach final enlightenment. It can also just refer to a clean and unpolluted place 甜 (tián) – means sweet