Chapter 111: Being too old to die is a thief
Chapter 111: Being too old to die is a thief
The golden sunlight shone from the eaves, and the sky became bright. Feng Yuxu put his cell phone back into his pocket and stood up from the stone gandan under the tree at the entrance of the village.
Ji Taixuan's shadow disappeared shortly after entering Yanglao Village. Perhaps he happened to walk under the shade of a tree, or perhaps he hid in a house. The dark clouds were so thick that it was impossible to find any trace of him.
To be on the safe side, she decided to tell Ning Zhe about her previous experience first, and wait under a tree at the entrance of the village until dawn before going deeper into Yanglao Village to continue searching.
Sunny daytime is her home turf.
Feng Yusu gently placed her hand on her chest. The three life-saving coins that Ning Zhe gave her were tied around her neck with a red rope and buried in the ditch. This was the guarantee of her safety on this trip.
As you enter the village, the first thing that catches your eye is a crossroads. The layout of the houses in Yanglao Village is very interesting. If you use a drone to take aerial photos, you will see the Chinese character "羊" hidden in the greenery. The entrance where Feng Yusu entered the village is at the bottom vertical line of this "羊" character. Going up, you will reach the crossroads.
Yanglao Village is not large, so one can try the roads one by one. Feng Yusu first walked to the left fork at the intersection and saw an old lady who had gotten up early standing hunched over on the steps at the door of her house. She held the lever of the water pressure well with both hands and shook it up and down, struggling to pump water from the ground to wash vegetables.
Such pressurized water wells are very common in towns and rural areas in southern states such as Qinzhou. Yunzhou belongs to the Central Plains region, where easily exploitable groundwater is relatively scarce.
Feng Yusu noticed that even though the water pressure well was equipped with a labor-saving lever structure, the old woman still had a lot of effort to shake the water, and it seemed that her body was already very old.
Judging from her thin figure and hunched back, she should be at least over 70 years old.
An old man of this age still has to get up early to wash vegetables?
In a place like this, every tiny detail is worth noting. Feng Yushu walked over carefully, her sandals clicking on the hard concrete road. The old man was shaking the water pump on the side of the road with great effort, and the aging lever made a tired groaning sound of metal friction, which gave her an indescribable strange feeling.
Squeak--squeak--the old woman shook the water silently, submerging the vegetables in the basin. She let Feng Yusu walk past the center of the road in front of her without even looking up.
This is even more strange. Even if he didn't see me coming at first, now that he hears the footsteps and knows someone is approaching, a normal person's reaction should be to look up. Even if he is too lazy to look, he will still have some subtle reaction.
But the old woman in front of him did not react at all to Feng Yusu's arrival, as if she did not exist at all. She did not see the figure walking in front of her, nor did she hear the splashing sound just a few meters away. She just shook the water by herself, with her head lowered and not even raising it.
Feng Yusu hesitated for a moment and did not move forward. She stopped where she was and watched the old man's laborious movements without saying a word.
The water level in the basin gradually rose, submerging the two bunches of vegetables, but the old man did not stop shaking the water. Clear groundwater was still being pumped up from the well, filling the entire basin and finally overflowing from the edge.
The water overflowing from the basin wet the cloth shoes on the old woman's feet. She finally realized that the water was full. She quickly and clumsily loosened the handle of the water press with her skinny hands, squatted down stiffly, and put her hands into the basin, as if she was going to start washing vegetables.
As the old man stopped lowering his head and rowing the water, Feng Yusu finally saw the old man's face, and the next moment, her expression froze.
What a face it was… There was no trace of fat or collagen on the old man’s face. His dry and withered skin looked like a piece of plastic wrap covering a human skull specimen. The thin and dry skin clearly outlined the shape of the skull. In the deep eye sockets were a pair of dry, necrotic and dehydrated eyeballs. It was obvious that he had no vision at all. This old man was blind.
She might also be deaf, because she did not respond to the sound of Feng Yusu's footsteps when she was close to her.
"mom--?"
"Mom? Where are you running to again..."
Suddenly, a rough male voice came from the room behind the old man. Feng Yuxu saw a man with a crew cut and wearing short-sleeved shirt and long pants sticking his upper body out of the second-floor window. He frowned and looked at the blind old man who was washing vegetables downstairs: "Why are you looking for something to do again? It's not work for you. What's the point of doing it secretly... Fuck..."
The man with the crew cut muttered, and when he looked up, his eyes suddenly lit up, and he saw a beautiful lady in bright clothes and a voluptuous figure standing in the middle of the road, looking up at him curiously. The man's face flushed, and he ran downstairs excitedly, grabbed the old mother's hand and dragged her into the house.
While pulling him, he whispered, "I told you to stay home, why did you insist on going out? What if outsiders see you..."
The man with a crew cut hurriedly pushed the blind old mother, who looked like a dried corpse, into the house, closed the door, and walked a few steps closer to Feng Yushu with a shy smile: "Big sister, you are not from our village, right? Why are you standing at my door so early in the morning?"
"..." Feng Yushu frowned and said, "I'm here to look for someone. There is a family in this village that married their only daughter to Yundu. Do you know where that family is?"
"I know, Uncle Mu is the only one in the village who doesn't have a son." The man with a crew cut grinned and said cheerfully, "Uncle Mu's house is at the east end of the village, in a bamboo forest, there's a two-story building. You must not know the way here, sister. I'll take you there right now. Let's go?"
"Thank you, I can walk by myself." Feng Yuxu politely declined the crew-haired man's offer to lead the way for her. Without any hesitation, she turned around and returned to the intersection she had just come from.
Feng Yusu didn't want to stay there any longer, because just now, when she asked the man with a crew cut for directions, she caught a glimpse of a black lacquered coffin covered in a snakeskin bag held down by bricks behind the water pressure well and under the eaves.
The black coffin, which was more than two meters long, was placed by the door, covered with several snakeskin bags filled with urea. Through the crack of the door behind the man at the village head, Feng Yusu saw a pair of deep eye sockets, with two dry and shrunken eyeballs staring blankly through the crack of the door.
Feng Yusu trotted back to the crossroads. The houses along the way were all ordinary houses. Every now and then, he could see some black coffins covered with snakeskin bags, waterproof cloth, straw sheds and the like. The coffins were parked near the houses without any hesitation.
There are coffins everywhere in Yanglao Village, placed in the open air.
(End of this chapter)