Chapter 24

Chapter 24: The Sinister Joy (24)

"Ha, our old factory manager was just a good man!" Director Xu said. That year, the glass factory had collaborated with several universities in the city, and after finishing business discussions, they would gossip. When Li Yun heard about Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue, he felt deeply sorry for them.

Li Yun was someone who valued talent. He felt that although they had made mistakes, their lives had suddenly changed, and upon reflection, they were truly pitiable. So, he asked his contacts at Huiyong University to inquire, and after some effort, he finally found Liang and Zhao, who were struggling in life.

Li Yun asked if they were willing to come work in Zhou Ping Town. The glass factory happened to need a clerk and a tester. He also needed a capable assistant with strong writing skills, and it would be a bonus if they spoke foreign languages. Although the living conditions in Zhou Ping Town were not as good as those in the city, the interpersonal relationships were simpler, and they wouldn’t need to run around everywhere.

Both positions didn’t require a high level of education, and most of the workers at the glass factory had only junior high or high school diplomas. Liang Lanjun initially didn’t want to leave Huiyong City, but it was Zhao Yue who made the decision. "Great! Let’s go!"

After coming to Zhou Ping Town, Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue had a period of being well-respected. Li Yun had said that they were university graduates and that he had personally invited them. They did indeed have an intellectual demeanor, different from the country folk in the town.

Liang Lanjun was taciturn but reliable, while Zhao Yue always wore a smile and was approachable. Both of them had even tutored the local children.

But good times didn’t last long. Some gossiping workers somehow found out that they didn’t have university degrees. As for why they dropped out, there were various rumors, but none of them were good. Feeling the cold stares around them, Liang Lanjun became even more unwilling to socialize, and Zhao Yue gradually distanced herself from the workers.

The townspeople’s feelings towards them were somewhat complicated. On one hand, they envied that they had attended university and hoped their own children could be as successful as them. On the other hand, they were eager to uncover the secret of why they dropped out, seeing them as outliers. They reduced their interactions with the townspeople, but their work was always flawless. Over time, a delicate balance was struck between the two sides—

They lived like outsiders in Zhou Ping Town, not needing to socialize with anyone, with a private space all to themselves.

Over the course of ten years, the townspeople almost stopped discussing their past. Some had even forgotten that they hadn’t graduated. They only occasionally lamented how they didn’t fit in and pitied them for being unable to have children. The gossipy discussions would often turn to whose fault it was, followed by lewd smiles.

"What I know is all of this. The old factory manager definitely knew more, but he’s long gone," Director Xu said as he stood up to refill his tea.

The glass factory had already stopped production, but the workers were still busy, just like Director Xu, who had been writing Spring Festival couplets. Many other workers were decorating the activity hall and transporting New Year supplies. Hai Shu saw Liang Lanjun outside the hall, hanging up colored lights with a few other workers.

Hai Shu observed from a distance for a while but didn’t approach to interrupt. Her conversation with Director Xu hadn’t cleared the doubts in her mind; in fact, it had made the suspicions around Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue even stronger.

The actions of the deceased former factory manager Li Yun also warranted closer scrutiny.

Being expelled from university was never a small matter, especially for a prestigious institution like Huiyong University. According to Guo Yongguo, Li Yun was very superstitious, and when he found human bones in the furnace, he believed they were the souls of the wronged, so he abandoned the old workshop halfway through construction and decided to build a new factory on the east side of Zhou Ping Town.

This was a factory manager with somewhat conservative views, yet he was so lenient toward two university students who had been expelled due to scandal. Was he truly just pitying them? How did he view their actions at the university?

However, the strange core of this matter didn’t lie with Li Yun, but rather with Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue. Both had been expelled, yet Li Yun had taken a liking to them. Was this just a coincidence? And then considering their appearance at the crime scene, Hai Shu’s brow furrowed tighter.

Here were two expelled university students, and in the city, three missing university students, including the still-missing Xu Qiao.

Currently, there was no evidence connecting them, but their shared identity made it hard for a keen detective not to consider them together.

Could there be a thread linking them to the mysteriously dead Wan Zeyu and Yuan Zhong?

The wind in Zhou Ping Town was cold, and Hai Shu subconsciously pulled up her hood. She thought she should personally visit Huiyong University to hear how the school explained the expulsion of Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue.

As she approached the police station, Hai Shu saw a familiar police car driving out. It was from the Criminal Investigation Team. Was that Wen Xu driving? Where was he headed?

Just as she was thinking about it, her phone rang. She looked at it—it was Sui Xing. According to the plan, Sui Xing should have been returning to Zhou Ping Town today. Was something happening?

"Xing Xing," Hai Shu answered.

Hearing the nickname through the phone, Sui Xing seemed stunned for a moment. "Hai, Hai Hai—"

Hai Shu: "..."

Hai Shu could almost imagine Sui Xing’s eyes widening in surprise and laughed. "What’s up? Are you back?"

Sui Xing’s tone carried some apologetic undertones. "I was about to report this to you. I won’t be able to return for a while."

Hai Shu: "Is there something at home?"

"No, it’s not at home, it’s at the team," Sui Xing sighed. "It’s the missing university students' case I mentioned to you before. When we came to Zhou Ping Town to investigate, we had temporarily put the missing persons case aside. But since there are so many university students involved, and each one has a significant background, especially Ping Sheng, his father, the deputy director of the city bureau, has been pushing for the case. He even wants to apply for cross-district investigation. So, the higher-ups have put pressure on Captain Qiao, which... "

Hai Shu understood. Captain Qiao had immediately sent the elite members of the Criminal Investigation Team because, on one hand, they thought the case in Zhou Ping Town was suspicious and had bad implications. On the other hand, they believed the investigation wouldn’t take long and that once the case was solved, the team could return to focus on the missing persons case. But as the investigation in Zhou Ping Town deepened, the case was getting more complicated, and it was looking unlikely to be solved before the Spring Festival. So, they couldn’t entirely abandon the missing persons case. Sui Xing was now being kept on that case.

"Alright, we have enough personnel here for now. You focus on the missing persons case in the city," Hai Shu said.

Sui Xing wasn’t entirely reassured. "Have you found any breakthroughs?"

Hai Shu didn’t hide anything. "Honestly, I’m just wandering around in a maze right now. Every path looks like the right one, but when I eagerly rush down it, it’s always a dead end."

Sui Xing said, "A bottleneck, I understand."

Hai Shu spoke lightly, "So, staying in the city isn't such a bad thing for you right now. Change the case, change the approach. A group of people stubbornly working on this might not get anywhere."

Sui Xing nodded, seeming to want to say something, but then held it back. Hai Shu only heard a sigh.

"What's wrong?" Hai Shu said, "If it's us, don't hold back."

Sui Xing clicked his tongue. "You still remember what I said to you last time?"

Hai Shu: "I hold grudges. Speak up, what happened just now?"

Sui Xing thought for a moment and cautiously said, "I suddenly think you’re a bit like our old captain."

Hai Shu stopped in her tracks, her fingers tightening slightly.

Sui Xing, unaware of her reaction, continued, "Captain Xun Susu. When I first came to the city bureau, she had already left our city, but she came back a few times. It seemed like no problem was too big for her. When you told me to stay at the city bureau, I suddenly thought of her."

Hai Shu said, "I know her." After a moment, she corrected herself, "All the female detectives probably know her."

"Right," Sui Xing said, "She really was amazing."

Hai Shu didn't continue on that topic. "Okay, since you're not coming back, I have a task for you."

"Alright, tell me."

Hai Shu briefly explained meeting Liang Lanjun and Zhao Yue at the crime scene and the information she'd gathered about them. "The information we've gotten is all secondhand, passed through who knows how many hands. Go to Huiyong University and find out exactly what happened before and after they were expelled."

The holiday atmosphere in Zhou Ping Town grew stronger. The sounds of firecrackers seemed to dispel the shadow of death, but the unseen black clouds still loomed over the town.

Early in the morning, Hai Shu arrived at the police station but didn’t see Wen Xu. He had been coming and going mysteriously these days, and she wasn’t sure what he was up to. Hai Shu was just about to meet with Cheng Wei when she heard footsteps in the corridor.

It was Wen Xu, but he didn’t seem to have come from the guesthouse.

"I saw you leave in a car yesterday," Hai Shu asked. "Where did you go?"

Wen Xu sat down to eat breakfast, grinning mischievously. "Guess."

Hai Shu wasn't completely clueless. Zhou Ping Town wasn't big, and there weren't many places that required driving. Given the Criminal Investigation Team’s current focus, Wen Xu had probably gone to... the town hospital.

Hai Shu said, "Did you meet with Liu Qiong?"

Wen Xu put down his chopsticks, tapping his fingertips together, silently applauding. "So smart, Team Leader Hai."

Hai Shu: "..."

"What did you talk about with her?" Hai Shu asked. "Is she still not willing to say anything?"

Wen Xu said, "She might be close to breaking."

Hai Shu shot him a glance.

Wen Xu quickly defended himself, "Just to clarify, I didn’t use any torture methods, okay? You said that with someone like Liu Qiong, we could only take it slow, so I was just following your advice."

At first, Wen Xu didn’t directly engage with Liu Qiong. Instead, he used his male identity to blend in with Liu Qiong’s family members, especially her brothers. After they had visited Liu Qiong, they were planning to return to Kongyun Town, but Wen Xu, saying that Liu Qiong was in poor condition and needed family to stay with her, as well as that the police might need their cooperation, managed to convince a few of them to stay. He also arranged accommodation near the hospital for them.

Their daily presence around Liu Qiong gave her considerable mental stress—being surrounded by people from her hometown, reminders of the past. She seemed to have become more nervous.

Wen Xu went to the hospital whenever he could, played cards with them, casually chatted about the past of Kongyun Town with Zhang Gang, and talked about the future development plans of Kongyun Town in front of Liu Qiong. Wen Xu even intentionally mentioned handcuffs, causing Liu Qiong to shudder.

However, he always stopped short of pushing her too far, smiling and inviting Zhang Gang and the others to go outside the hospital to eat and drink.

"She's almost at her breaking point," Wen Xu said. "I can tell she’s longing for release."

Hai Shu said, "You just came back from the hospital?"

Wen Xu finished his last bite of noodles. "I’m going back later. Want to come along?"

Hai Shu prepared the necessary equipment for an inquiry. "Sure."

The sunlight streamed through the hospital corridor. Some family members, with their children dressed in festive clothes, came to change the elderly who couldn't go home for the New Year into holiday attire. Faint cries could be heard from Liu Qiong's ward. Zhang Gang walked out with a worried expression. When he saw Wen Xu and Hai Shu arriving, he hurriedly said, "Brother Wen, you came just in time. My sister's losing it, shouting at us to get lost! I’m just trying to be nice, I’m not after her money!"

Wen Xu reassured him and opened the door to the ward. As soon as Liu Qiong saw him, her gaze froze.

Wen Xu walked over, grabbed a chair, and sat down. The ward was so quiet that only their breathing and heartbeats could be heard, as if the air itself had become stagnant.

"Why keep yourself locked in a cage?" Wen Xu slowly spoke, "Actually, you know better than I do. There are things you can say that will set you free. You’re just afraid to take that first step."

Liu Qiong trembled, and the bed shook with her.

Wen Xu looked at her tearful eyes, "The people who tormented you are no longer here. Don't torment yourself anymore. Didn’t you want to cut ties with them? If you say it, maybe you won’t be controlled by them anymore."

Hai Shu opened the recording device and gently placed it on the small table beside the hospital bed.

The silence lasted for a long time, like someone struggling to crawl in the dark, unable to see any light. Hai Shu and Wen Xu did not interrupt her.

Suddenly, a hoarse scream echoed in the ward. The woman, who looked much older than her actual age, covered her face with the blanket.

"My son, he’s a devil."

"My husband and my younger brother-in-law, they are all madmen!"

"I’ve become a madwoman too. I can’t live a normal life!"

Liu Qiong and Wan Zeyu’s father, Wan Jiayong, were once a couple that everyone envied. They grew up together in Kongyun Town. Although their family was poor, life in the town was the same for everyone, and they never felt inferior to others.

The young Wan Jiayong had ambition and determination. Together with his younger brother, Wan Changgui, he went out to work, vowing to make life better for their family. In Kongyun Town, Wan Jiayong was a well-respected young man, and people often praised Liu Qiong for having good taste in finding such a man.

In Liu Qiong’s heart, the upright and ambitious Wan Jiayong was almost perfect. The only flaw was that he occasionally mentioned his younger sister from the countryside.

Kongyun Town was already considered a poor rural area in the eyes of city folk, but beneath it, there was a more backward place called Zhiya Village. According to Wan Jiayong, the Wan family had once had a little sister, but they couldn’t afford to raise her, so they gave her to relatives in the village. Liu Qiong had never seen her, and no one in the Wan family ever mentioned it. Only Wan Jiayong planned to help his sister once he made some money, intending to find her a good family.

Liu Qiong never expressed any jealousy about this, as she didn’t want Wan Jiayong to know she resented his younger sister.

Later, policies helped Kongyun Town, and large road construction projects began. Wan Jiayong took his younger brother, Wan Changgui, to work on them. Before he left, he told Liu Qiong that if they did well, they could earn a lot of money. With that capital, they could start their own business.

But Liu Qiong was thinking about getting married, and Wan Jiayong, in his simple way, hugged her and said, "Alright, we’ll get married after the New Year."

Once the road was finished, various factories were built in the town, and as promised, Wan Jiayong married Liu Qiong. They lived happily for a while. But six months later, Wan Jiayong thought of his sister from the countryside. Thinking his life had stabilized, he believed it wouldn’t be a problem to help her and went to ask about her, only to find out that his sister had disappeared.

The rural relatives said that when the road was being built, his sister had gone to work there, thinking she could do some logistical work. She had gone, but never came back.

Wan Jiayong and his brother were deeply regretful, wishing they had brought her home sooner. They began using their work opportunities to search for her and spent several years investigating. They learned that his sister might have gotten involved with the Luo family from Zhou Ping Town, who had also come to Kongyun Town to work on the road.

At that time, transportation wasn’t as convenient as it is now, and information spread slowly. Wan Jiayong eventually came to Zhou Ping Town but didn’t find his sister, because his sister—whose real name was unknown—had drowned in the river in Zhou Ping Town, and she had a fetus in her womb.

Liu Qiong stayed in Kongyun Town for a long time, not knowing what her husband and brother-in-law had been doing. She only noticed that when they came back, they didn’t seem as happy as before, and sometimes they would talk in private, like they were planning something.

She never imagined that they planned to dig up his sister’s corpse and re-bury it in Zhiya Village, then kill the people who had kidnapped and murdered her!

Hai Shu’s mind was shaken. When she found the handcuffs in the Luo family’s coffin, she had already vaguely deduced part of the truth. But hearing Liu Qiong’s account as an eyewitness still made her feel a chill run down her spine.

"Wait a minute, how did Wan Jiayong know the Luo family killed Caimei? Why did he say Caimei was kidnapped?" Hai Shu asked.

Liu Qiong shook her head repeatedly. "Because the one who drowned wasn’t Caimei and the fetus. It was Caimei and the child she gave birth to! It was a girl! They saw it in the coffin!"

Immediately, Hai Shu grasped the most crucial point. The patriarchal Zhou Ping Town, and the corpse that disappeared in the coffin.

Even now, people in Zhou Ping Town still believed the Luo family and others had said Caimei drowned while pregnant. But in the coffin Wan Jiayong pried open, there was a fully formed baby, separated from its mother’s body.

Furious, Wan Jiayong immediately guessed the truth: Caimei had given birth to a baby girl. This angered the Luo family, who perhaps wanted to discard the baby girl or force Caimei to get pregnant again. But Caimei surely didn’t want to give up her child. Maybe she fought to protect her daughter, or perhaps she had already become an enemy of the Luo family. In the end, both of them were thrown into the river.

There was no police report, no autopsy. The Luo family tricked the villagers, lying that the baby hadn’t been born yet and it was a case of one body, two deaths.

But everything in the coffin told the truth.

Wan Jiayong and Wan Changgui brought back the sister’s body and buried it in an old grave in Zhiya Village. From then on, Liu Qiong’s nightmare officially began.

Wan Jiayong insisted on moving to Zhou Ping Town, and Liu Qiong, blindly following her husband, went with him. Wan Jiayong and Wan Changgui carried out the killings of the Luo family and two other accomplice families, doing it cleanly. The police station could never figure out who the murderer was. Soon after, the superstitious townspeople invited a "spiritualist," claiming that Caimei’s vengeful ghost was haunting them. After a peace ceremony in the forest, no more murders occurred. For a long time, everyone believed the vengeful ghost story, and the killers were gradually forgotten.

But Liu Qiong, who knew the truth, could never find peace again. The husband she had always relied on and trusted was a murderer, and so was her brother-in-law. Living with them, she felt suffocated.

But what could she do? She had no job, only learned how to manage household chores, and had a young child. Could she report her husband? Impossible! She could only carefully guard this bloody secret, cutting off contact with her family, never returning to Kongyun Town, and pretending to start a brand new life.

The glass factory moved to Zhou Ping Town, radically transforming the town. People gradually forgot about the annihilated Luo family and the mysterious Caimei. Wan Jiayong and Wan Changgui went on with their transportation business, getting along well with the factory executives. No one at home ever mentioned murder, as if it was just something Liu Qiong had imagined.

But she knew it wasn’t. Her life could never go back to how it was before everything happened.

She lived in a daze, and as the family’s conditions improved, Wan Jiayong never committed any more crimes—at least, not that she knew of. Just when she thought she had adjusted to the self-hypnosis, she noticed her son often looked at her with strange eyes, looking at Wan Jiayong too.

Wan Jiayong never disciplined Wan Zeyu. One, because he didn’t have the time, and two, because he didn’t think being strong was a bad thing. If someone was bullied by Wan Zeyu and didn’t like it, they could always fight back. Just like he did when avenging his blood relatives.

The bloodline of the Wan family seemed to carry that madness.

The more she looked at her son like this, the deeper her fear grew. Would Wan Zeyu turn out like Wan Jiayong in the future? No, absolutely not!

She didn't dare to speak out about Wan Jiayong, but Wan Zeyu was still young. As a mother, she had to correct her son's behavior!

Whenever Wan Zeyu caused trouble at school, he would be beaten when he came home. Holding a bamboo stick as a whip, she would beat him while scolding, hoping the old saying, "Spare the rod, spoil the child," would work on Wan Zeyu.

But in his first year of high school, she suddenly realized that all her efforts were in vain. Both father and son were monsters!

That day, she once again raised the whip, but Wan Zeyu coldly smirked and pushed her away. He was already much taller than her, with the physique of an adult man. His eyes were cold-blooded and filled with hatred. "I know what you’ve all done."

She felt the blood in her body turn cold.

Wan Zeyu approached and grabbed her by the neck. "You're my mother, don’t push me."

Just like how two dominant forces cannot coexist in one mountain, as Wan Zeyu grew, the conflict between him and Wan Jiayong became deeper. Wan Zeyu acted recklessly at school, and the school was ultimately too small of a world for him. Wan Zeyu constantly provoked Wan Jiayong's authority at home. Wan Jiayong said something with deep meaning to him: "I don’t care how you rule the world outside, but as long as I’m here in the Wan family, you don’t get to speak!"

Hai Shu reacted quickly. "So that car accident..."

Liu Qiong closed her eyes, her eyelids trembling violently. "That was Wan Zeyu. He personally caused the death of his father and his uncle!"