Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
Zhou Hang's sneakers crushed a patch of withered ginkgo leaves, the soles sticky with the juice of rain-soaked fragments. He stood at the school gate, looking up at the four gilded characters of "Chongde Middle School" gleaming coldly in the autumn sun. On the windowsill of the guardhouse, a drooping pothos plant surprisingly still thrived.
The camphor tree by the basketball court had thickened, its bark twisted and covered with new moss that had long since obscured the words " Zhou Hang lovei Lin Xue " carved into it. He bent down to pick up a half brick, remembering how Lin Xue's textbooks had once been torn into snowflakes on this concrete ground.
Suddenly, a pungent smell of smoke wafted through the air. Three men in work uniforms squatted in the shadows of the shed, exhaling clouds of smoke. Among them, a bald man flicked ash into a water bottle; a crescent-shaped scar on his right earlobe was a remnant of Lin Xue's grip.
"Hey, isn't this our model student?" The bald man squinted, the cigarette flickering between his fingers. "Heard you’ve become an internet celebrity?"
His uniform bore the logo of "Hongyun Logistics," and oil stains marked his cuffs. Beside him, a chubby man with a gold chain was scrolling through short videos on his phone, the canned laughter blaring from the speaker making Zhou Hang's temples throb.
The bulletin board under the teaching building displayed yellowing photos of outstanding graduates. Zhou Hang's finger traced the glass, stopping in the middle of the third row—Wang Lili smiled while holding her lesson plan, her photo marred by a burn mark from a cigarette.
Last year, a report from the education bureau stated that she had been suspended for physically punishing students; now it was said she was running a tutoring class in an urban village.
As night fell, Zhou Hang curled up in a booth at an internet café, typing away at his keyboard. The blue light from the screen reflected off his reddened eyes, and seventeen unnamed drafts lay dormant in his document. When he typed "The first time I saw Lin Xue was in the physics lab," his knuckles suddenly spasmed—she had been on tiptoe reaching for a reagent bottle on the top shelf, her white lab coat revealing cotton socks adorned with little daisies.
That night when his article exploded on trending searches, Zhou Hang received a multimedia message from an unknown number. The photo showed Lin Xue's composition book from her third year of middle school; on its yellowed pages, the teacher had written in red ink: "Psychological Distortion." The comments section erupted with thousands of messages—some shared photos of their own scars stitched thirty times over, others questioned "What kind of saint are you pretending to be?" One ID claiming to be Wang Lili's cousin sent death threats.
The second wave of trending searches hit unexpectedly. On Douyin, within the Bully Apology topic, the bald man held up his ID and cried out: "My daughter is also being isolated now..." Behind him, on the wall of his rental apartment hung a certificate for being a "Safety Model" from his logistics company.
The chubby man went live, panning across a bedside table piled high with antidepressants as comments flew by arguing about "staging" and "karma." The day police arrived was marked by heavy rain.
When Zhou Hang handed over the computer case to the police officer, he noticed the side of the chassis had Lin Xue's student ID number written in pencil. While making his statement, he mentioned how Lin Xue always loved to wrap correction tape around her wrist like a bracelet. The young female officer taking notes suddenly paused, tears dropping onto the report and smudging the ink.
On the night before moving, Zhou Hang rummaged through a storage box and found a tin box at the bottom. Inside the faded Qian Paper Crane was half a piece of eraser, with stars drawn in ink that had long since smudged. This was what he had slipped through the gap of the door when Lin Xue was thrown into the boys' restroom all those years ago.
Suddenly, the moonlight on the windowsill dimmed, and the neon sign on the opposite rooftop lit up with the words " Debt Cleared," casting a red glow that made the entire room feel like a crime scene. The curtains in the new apartment were not properly installed, allowing morning light to seep in and slice through the darkness.
His phone vibrated on the pillow beside him; a message from an unknown number lay quietly there: "Have you ever heard an echo? Every response in the valley is a new question."
Zhou Hang stepped barefoot onto the cold floor, while an elderly man downstairs swung his arms as he jogged, and shadows of trees danced on his back like a shattered kaleidoscope.
Comment 0 Comment Count