Corpse Retriever

In the past, it was not as though Ah Li had never been taken outside. The old lady would hold her hand and lead her out, and Ah Li would be like a statue, walking when guided, sitting when guided.

Later, Ah Li would ride on Runsheng’s tricycle to pick Little Yuan up from school and take him there. Little Yuan would also hold Ah Li’s hand and bring her to Cuicui’s house to play, or take her walking by the fields and the river.

The countryside was broad and sparsely populated. On the footpaths and field ridges, they rarely ran into anyone.

Recently, Aunt Liu and Uncle Qin had also noticed that Little Yuan would take Ah Li to the track field for a walk in the mornings.

But no matter what, those times had all been with someone close enough to her taking her outside.

Right now, this was the first time Ah Li had wanted to go out on her own.

And she had really gone out.

Uncle Qin set down the hoe in his hand, preparing to follow her.

The courtyard was one thing. They were outsiders here, and no one would come visiting. But if she went farther out... this was a school, after all, with a very dense population.

Ah Li was afraid of strangers, let alone a crowd of strangers.Uncle Qin had just reached the courtyard gate when he stopped.

He turned and looked up at the second floor behind him.

The old lady was standing there, a warning in her gaze.

Uncle Qin was quite surprised. Did the old lady mean he was not allowed to follow?

“Don’t follow her. She walked out by herself. She knows what’s out there.”

After saying that, Liu Yumei turned around, closed her eyes, and tears slid down from the corners of them.

There were not many people on the path through the residential compound.

Ah Li walked along the roadside, keeping as much distance as possible from every passerby.

Many of the compound doors nearby were open, with people sitting inside. When they saw such a beautifully dressed little girl passing by, quite a few warmly called out greetings.

There were also boys and girls her age who came out on their own, looking at her curiously, even trailing behind her.

Ah Li gave no response and did not look at them. She simply kept her head lowered and walked on.

Her left hand was loosely curled, swinging slightly. In the past, whenever she went out, Little Yuan would hold that hand.

As for her right hand, ever since she had stepped outside, it had unconsciously been clenched tight. Then she noticed that the bill had become even more wrinkled in her grip.

She immediately loosened her right hand and used both hands to smooth the bill flat again and again.

Once she left the residential compound and reached the area outside the track field, the children following her either stopped and went back or were called back by their families.

It became much quieter around the girl.

But ahead of her... there were even more people.

She stopped and raised her head, looking at the crowd before her.

Most of them were vibrant college students, but in the girl’s eyes, they were terrifying vengeful ghosts.

She knew they were not.

But there was nothing she could do. All the noise in her ears sounded like ghostly wailing, and every smiling face looked especially hideous to her.

She had stayed in that dream too long, lived through too much there. The environment of that dream had long since seeped into her reality.

She took a step back.

She wanted to go home.

But when she lowered her head and looked at the two-yuan bill in her hand, she lifted her head again and continued forward.

She stepped into the flow of people and felt herself being swallowed up.

The college students passing by nearby, or simply sitting by the edge of the field chatting and flirting, were all drawn to the girl.

It was not fully dark yet, and the lights inside and outside the field were bright, so everyone could clearly see the girl’s clothes and face.

That kind of refinement, that kind of bearing, was no exaggeration to say, enough to make people forget their next breath the moment their eyes fell on her.

What was fashionable these days was all kinds of foreign styles. Clothing in an old classical style was extremely rare. In most people’s minds, that sort of style was just the long sleeves and flowing skirts worn for ethnic dances at school performances.

But what the girl displayed was true grace and nobility.

Only at this moment did many students realize that those descriptions and depictions from the poems and classical texts they had studied in high school really did exist in real life.

This girl seemed as though she had stepped right out of a painting. So the ancients really had not been lying.

The male and female students along both sides of the road watched her move, praising her as their eyes followed along.

Students walking on the road would already be standing there with mouths open when they saw her. After she passed, they all turned around and remained rooted in place, staring after her in a daze.

This was a university, after all, and the students were fairly well-mannered. Everyone merely admired and praised her. No one made any other move.

But each gaze falling on the girl from all directions felt like a burning brand.

Her vision even began to blur slightly because of it, yet she still forced herself onward.

At last, she reached the shop entrance.

She climbed the steps and walked inside.

The enclosed space, the denser crowd, the closer stares all brought even more terrible pressure and torment.

Her hearing was already filled with vicious laughter and curses, and in her sight were horrifying evil creatures everywhere.

They crawled out from the shelves.

They seeped up through the cracks in the floor tiles.

Some even hung all across the ceiling.

She was standing still, and yet this world was frantically twisting and spinning.

Her eyelids began to tremble.

The girl wanted to go mad, wanted to scream, wanted to let herself completely lose control. Because only then could she forget her own existence. And when she forgot who she was, she would also forget the terror and the agony.

But she still struggled to endure. Just as she was beginning to feel suffocated, she saw that orange-and-white can of drink on the shelf.

She reached out, took it down, and hugged it to her chest.

Found it.

Next,

she had to bring it back.

“Wow, what a beautiful little girl,” a female student working part-time beside Lu Yi exclaimed.

Lu Yi, who was sitting behind the register doing the accounts, looked up. When he saw the little girl walking toward him, he rubbed his eyes, because she gave him a deeply unreal feeling.

Lu Yi had already been somewhat unsettled all day. The offering table was still set up in his dorm room, and now, looking at this girl, he felt as though he had wandered into Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.

As the girl walked toward him, she kept using her hand to smooth the bill she was holding, as though hoping to make it flatter, even though those wrinkles would not affect its use or circulation in the slightest.

When she reached the counter, Ah Li lifted her head and looked at Lu Yi.

In her eyes, Lu Yi looked like a long red snake flicking its tongue, stretched out in sections.

A hideous voice came from the counter. The long snake slithered onto it and coiled together like a pile of stacked red sausages.

Lu Yi leaned forward and poked his upper body out past the counter, asking, “Is this what you want?”

Ah Li placed the two-yuan bill on the counter. The snake used its tail to stick the bill away and said with its tongue flicking:

“Exact amount.”

The girl turned and walked out of the shop.

Leaving that enclosed environment let her relax a little.

But next, she still had to walk all the way home from here.

…

Li Zhuiyuan dragged his exhausted body into the school grounds. When he passed by the shop entrance, he walked inside.

“Prodigy Bro, Yin Meng called back. I told her where they went to take pictures.”

“Mm.”

Li Zhuiyuan answered and walked over to the shelf, picked up a can of drink, opened it, and took a sip.

He had overdrawn himself too much today, and he had also eaten too much sugar. The moment it entered his mouth, all he tasted was bitterness, mixed with the fizz rising up, making Li Zhuiyuan feel like throwing up.

He walked to the counter and dropped the can of drink he truly could not keep down into the trash bin.

Lu Yi did not notice anything unusual about Li Zhuiyuan and went on talking. “Earlier at dusk, a little girl came to buy something. She was wearing ancient-style clothes. Good grief, she was really beautiful, so beautiful it was unreal.”

Li Zhuiyuan’s first thought was Ah Li.

But then he immediately felt that was impossible. How could Ah Li possibly come all the way here to buy something?

If she needed anything, she could just write it down for Aunt Liu. She normally would not even go outside.

Li Zhuiyuan waved a hand at Lu Yi, then walked out.

He left the living area, passed outside the track field, and finally entered the residential compound.

That stretch of road was neither especially long nor especially short. Since Granny Liu had moved here, he had walked it many times, so often that he knew it by heart.

He pushed the door open and entered the courtyard.

Li Zhuiyuan saw Uncle Qin watering the vegetable patch.

“Hello, Uncle Qin.”

“Mm.” Uncle Qin nodded at the boy. He wanted to say something, but seeing the exhaustion on the boy’s face, he guessed what the boy had just gone to do, so he kept silent for now.

Li Zhuiyuan pulled open the sliding glass door and walked inside.

Ah Li was sitting on the bed. She had apparently just taken a bath and still carried a trace of warmth on her body. Her hair was wet, and Aunt Liu stood behind her, drying it with a towel.

What puzzled Li Zhuiyuan was that Ah Li’s face seemed somewhat pale, as if she had just gone through a bout of total exhaustion.

But the thing was, even if the girl drew talismans for him, at most she would only feel a little tired. A short rest would be enough for her to recover.

In his memory, he had never seen Ah Li look like this.

“Little Yuan’s here.”

Aunt Liu smiled as she took away the towel and walked out of the bedroom. When she closed the door, she deliberately did not use much force.

The door was shut, but not tightly.

Aunt Liu stood at the doorway, smiling softly as she waited in silence.

This sense of anticipation far surpassed tasting the pickled cucumbers she had made herself.

“Ah Li, what’s wrong?”

Lu Yi’s earlier words echoed in Li Zhuiyuan’s mind, and he thought of one possibility, though even now he still did not believe it, because it was too exaggerated, too absurd.

Ah Li moved the pillow aside.

Underneath it was a can of Jianlibao.

The girl held the Jianlibao in both hands and shuffled on her knees from the bed to its edge, stopping in front of the boy.

So it really had been her who went to the shop.

Li Zhuiyuan pressed his lips together. Just as he reached out to take it, the girl seemed to remember something. She lowered her head first and hooked a finger under the tab, pulling it open.

In the past, whenever they drank this, the boy would always open it first before handing it to her.

She had grown up drinking tea with her grandmother and did not actually like sweet drinks.

But she liked drinking it with him.

Pop!

It had been sitting still for quite a while, so the drink did not spill over.

The girl smiled, revealing two adorable dimples, and handed the can to the boy.

Li Zhuiyuan reached out, took it, tilted back his head, and drank a big mouthful.

“Mm, so sweet.”

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