V3C11

Parsed with an automated reader. The content accuracy is not guranteed.

For Song Hanzhang, no matter when in his childhood and the majority of his youth he recalled, the memories would never be pleasant. Even after getting rid of that life for so many years, he would still often dream about those times.

It was almost the perpetual motif that ran through all his dreams: he was a puppet, repeating rigid actions that wouldn’t be judged as wrong under the monitoring of countless eyes, and once he crossed that line, he would step into the abyss and then woke up in shock.

Returning to this basement after all those years, his book of memories was reopened as expected. Except this time, he wasn’t alone.

Song Hanzhang pondered for a long time, then slowly said, “My adoptive father, Song Lü, was a very famous police officer, specializing in the field of criminal investigation, especially in solving serial crimes. He gained a high reputation among the police at a very young age, and he was particularly interested in my biological father’s case, spending a total of three to four years going through the evidence before finally locking onto his suspect. In this process, he met my mother. She was a well-educated woman, and apparently her personality was very gentle and kind. Contradictorily though, she was a crazed fan of my birth father. Even though they had never met before, she had already become attracted by his cruelty, cunning, and genius.”

Lin Jue was confused. Never would he have expected for Song Hanzhang’s past to be so bizarre. Even though he had heard that serial killers often had avid admirers, Lin Jue couldn’t understand why.

“She approached Song Lü very passionately and received a lot of information from him, and even contacted my biological father before him. That was the one part I couldn’t understand; from what I understood of Song Lü, he was very sharp and good at detecting lies, but he hadn’t see anything off with her actions; no matter how much he liked her, his judgement shouldn’t have lowered to such a state,” Song Hanzhang said, frowning.

“Wait… did you say your adoptive father liked your mother?” Lin Jue was confused once again.

““Mm. He was successful in his career, had the normal sexual tendencies, and was not celibate, yet he never married. Apart from that reason, I couldn’t think of any more logical conclusions, and I could more or less hear it in the way he spoke. He always felt that my father had a criminal gene that was inherently evil; his parents, as in my grandparents, had both been killed by capital punishment, and his living sibling are all in prison without exception. As for my mother… he believed that she was the most gentle and kind woman on this world and the only wrong she did was being deceived by my biological father, getting pregnant before marriage, and giving birth to me, before finally committing suicide from postnatal depression.” Song Hanzhang’s tone was calm, as if discussing something unrelated to him. “He believed that the evilest blood ran in my veins, but that they also contained the most beautiful. He wanted to cut off this ‘evil nature’ from my genes through his nurture.

“He gave me a set of rule and demanded that I follow them at all moments of my life. For as long as I can remember, I had to report to him daily on my activities throughout the day, including my thoughts as I did them. He was so good at judging people’s lies that as a child, I had a hard time fooling him and had to be careful about everything I did; even just stepping on a cockroach forced me to consider if it was a sign of violent tendencies or cruel nature. In this regard, he almost mental. But what frightened me the most was something that had happened after I entered primary school.”

Lin Jue listened with perked ears. Even though he had never experienced such a suffocating life, just imagining it almost drove him mad.

“One day as I went home from school, I saw a wild cat wounded by a car. Some children took the cat to the side of the road. At that time, the cat was still alive, but it died soon after. The children were talking about hanging the cat; according to folklore, the cat has nine lives and if it is hung after death, will not come back to haunt one. I watched them out of curiosity and only left when they had hung the dead cat on a tree. When I reported my activities to him that day, I didn’t mention this matter, because I thought that there was nothing I could say about it. The cat hadn’t been run over by me, nor did I hang it, I simply passed by and watched for a while; there truly wasn’t anything to say. But Song Lü didn’t feel the same way.”

Song Hanzhang paused, his tone changing slightly. “He asked me why I simply watched as it died, why I didn’t save it. If my mother had seen it, she would have sent that wild cat to the veterinarian without hesitation. She was that kind of person.”

Lin Jue opened his mouth a few times, unable to speak. Song Lü’s logic was too bizarre: he was expecting the same actions as his mother from Song Hanzhang, but it was completely baseless.

“In reality, there was nothing special with this matter. He thought that I did the wrong thing and would at most send me down to the basement for self-reflection. After going to school, he added an extra punishment, which was writing a self-criticism. He rarely punished me by force: at most, he would hit my palms with a ruler. As usual, I came to this basement for ‘self-reflection’. Even though I didn’t think I did anything wrong, I had to use Song Lü’s thinking to ‘sincerely’ look for my mistakes and report them to him. But this time, I was afraid.”

Song Hanzhang looked at that familiar wall lamp, the familiar desk and chair and asked himself. “Where on earth did he know my every move from?”

A chill ran down Lin Jue’s spine. He recalled something Song Hanzhang had just said- “there was an interval of time where I liked being here a lot, until I realized there were hidden cameras monitoring my every move.”

“Maybe he had seen me by chance on the way back home. It could well have been a coincidence, but I didn’t believe in coincidences, I needed to test it. So I took a risk and did a small experiment. I ripped a piece of paper out when I wrote my self-criticism and wrote a diary entry on it. Aside from recording what I had done on that day, I also complained about Song Lü’s harshness in the tone of a child. I then folded up the piece of paper and hid it in my pocket. As I folded the paper, I also folded in a small paper crumb that fell as I ripped it. The crumb was about the size of a rice grain and would fall out the moment the paper was opened. Unless they knew about it beforehand, it was difficult to be seen. Even though it was risky, it was the most secretive way I could think of at that age.

“After detention, I washed up as per usual, and hid the folded diary under the newspaper lining of the writing desk. Three days later, I pretended to have remembered my diary and wrote a second entry, hiding it in the same spot and taking the first entry out to have a look… I was so very careful when I opened it, but no matter how cautious I was, the speck of paper I had folded in it was gone.

“From that day on, I knew that I was constantly monitored by Song Lü.”

A chill haunted Lin Jue. He sincerely felt afraid, and sorrowful for Song Hanzhang.

He could imagine: this fear and powerlessness from the control was like a marrow-sucking maggot, latched onto Song Hanzhang as far as his memories went. Even though Song Lü was dead, the shadows he caused would follow Song Hanzhang for life.

From a certain perspective, Song Lü had succeeded, he had completely and utterly changed Song Hanzhang’s life. If not for him, Song Hanzhang may have become a criminal, or a normal human, or even someone who was kind and devoted like Shentu Ming. But he wouldn’t have become what he was now; he wouldn’t need to hide his true self, maintain a suspicious attitude for everything, have a deeply rooted unease and coldness.

“This life continued until I was sixteen. By that time, I was mature enough to at least be able to perfectly disguise myself as what Song Lü wanted me to be, and he believed that I had been ‘corrected’. He was quite satisfied, and quite proud, even delighted. He had finally ‘fixed’ the dirty genes my father left in me. I was more and more like my mother, gentle, elegant, hardworking, treating others with kindness… So not what I’m like now. I also thought that I disguised myself very well. The only one to see through me was Lu Ren.”

——You look so laughable, almost exactly like me. Ah, no, you’re much better at pretending than me. Lu Ren, who hadn’t seen him for several years, smiled and circled around Song Hanzhang a few times, dropping those words mockingly.

“Lu Ren’s mother was Song Lü’s younger sister, but they disliked each other. Song Lü believed that Lu Ren also required a correction program, but Lu Ren’s mother spoiled her son so after Lu Ren went home and told on him, she never believed him again. Lu Ren was very free when he was young; because his family ran a martial arts school, he grew up there, and in the holidays he went to his grandparents’ house in the northern mountains. He roamed there and bullied the animals within; sometimes there was no sign of him for days. He was basically a wild beast.”

Lin Jue couldn’t help but cut in, “Did anything happen to him as a child?”

Otherwise how could he have become such a weird person? Lin Jue muttered in his heart.

“No. His family is well-connected and both his parents are of good character and healthy; they’re not of extreme wealth but they are still quite well-off. For his personality, I can only say it’s by birth, at the most, I can say this game has offered him the chance to indulge himself. The fact that you saw him in university meant that he had never gotten into prison for misconduct.”

Lin Jue reluctantly agreed.

“That year, Song Lü died. The cause of death was an ordinary car crash which resulted in severe intracranial injuries and a severe cerebral edema. The doctors took off a piece of his skull to prevent the edema from pressing down on the nerves, but he still died. Life is odd; at that time, my feelings were probably akin to a prisoner who had almost served his sentence suddenly being told that he was acquitted of all charges. From that day on, I was completely free: no more debriefing, no more self-criticism, no more detention; I could do anything I wanted to do, no longer analyze everything before doing it. But habit is a frightening power, even now I am still walking along the path he drew out for me. I don’t know how long this habit will continue for, but one day, I will be free of it.”

“You’ll definitely be free!” Lin Jue said decisively, more certain than ever. “We’ll leave this game alive, you’ll get what you want, and then I’ll get what I want too.”

Song Hanzhang’s eyes slowly recovered their firmness, even gaining a hint of a smile from the confusion of reminiscence. “Even I’m not that confident.”

Lin Jue touched the two burn marks on the back of his hand and said, a little abashed, “I’m not that confident in myself, but I trust you, so I believe that you can do it.”

It shouldn’t have been a pleasure to carry the expectations of others. Song Hanzhang had despised carrying Song Lü’s expectations, but for Lin Jue’s, he felt the opposite way..

He suddenly felt that this was alright. This expectation meant that he was being trusted, almost unconditionally. To someone like him, it meant he was being given highest sentiment one could offer another.

“Aren’t you scared of me? Sometimes even I think I’m not normal,” Song Hanzhang asked, staring at Lin Jue with eyes so focused that they bordered on greed.

“Why would I be scared of you? It’s not as if you wanted to kill me,” Lin Jue retorted in confusion. “Even if your dad was a serial killer, it had nothing to do with you! To impose his stuff onto you is just weird.”

Song Hanzhang smiled, a rare smile without any mockery.

In reality, Lin Jue was wrong. He had very seriously considered killing him after losing the antibody in round one. If Lin Jue had chosen to leave him behind, he would have used his corpse as a tool to attract the zombies and gotten the antibody for himself.

But Lin Jue’s choice changed Song Hanzhang, and changed his own fate.

Even now he felt that Lin Jue was an unbelivable person. In order to save a stranger he had only met for a few hours, he had been willing to gamble his life, but he wasn’t even a world-saving saint like Shentu Ming. He was just a slightly kind, slightly courageous, and slightly cute, normal human.

“Xuezheng, look over there!” Lin Jue suddenly pulled on Song Hanzhang’s elbow. The split open metal door was slowly breaking down.

The breakdown was like the mirror world in the second round, self-destructing after they found the right answer. The matter that made up the world quickly melted, turning into fluttering black shards.

Song Hanzhang stood up and offered Lin Jue a hand. “It seems like the rules are still restricting us from avoiding battles for long periods. In order to prevent us from refusing to leave an illusion after defeating a monster, once the stagnation time exceeds a certain threshold, it will force us to leave. How are you feeling? Can you walk now?”

Lin Jue nodded. “Don’t worry, I’m still quite strong.”

Song Hanzhang glanced at him with distrust and Lin Jue quavered. “Really, my physique is pretty good.”

“Then prepare yourself, we will definitely meet another few monsters before midnight.”

All corners of the basement had been ‘evaporated’ by the unknown power. In the large masses of black shards, a light flashed before both of their eyes and they returned to where they were before entering the ‘black hole’.

The lamp light lit up the terrifying darkness around them; the campus seemed even older than it was half an hour ago.

The time now was 21:35. There were two hours and twenty-five minutes until midnight.

***

Vera’s Notes:

I actually quite like this chapter. Though it breaks absolutely every rule of show-not-tell, it makes for quite a powerful scene and has some nice character development in it. Song Hanzhang’s perspective is always interesting to read about.

|TOC|

Like this:Like Loading...