Chapter 12: A Weighty Topic

The teal-green bus jolted and swayed as it weaved through the city streets.

Inside the bus.

Fuyuan gripped the overhead handrail with one hand, holding her suitcase with the other, pressing it between her legs to keep it from sliding around. She still felt something was off, though she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what, so she pushed the feeling to the back of her mind for the time being.

Yuxin was headed to the neighboring temporary city where her parents lived. Since their routes didn’t match, Fuyuan politely declined Yuxin’s offer to accompany her to the Wuyou Mental Hospital and instead sent her to the nearest high-speed rail station.

When she got off the bus, dusk had already settled, and a few streetlights flickered faintly along the roadside.

Fuyuan pulled her suitcase along the street. For some reason, she thought of the little girl’s dream—the night then had been even darker and denser than now. She paused outside a Lanzhou noodle shop and went in to have a bowl of clear broth noodles, feeling a comforting warmth fill her stomach.

By the time she reached the rented apartment, it was nearly nine in the evening. From upstairs, she could faintly hear parents scolding their children.

Holding her key, she used the dim light to unlock the door. Inside, the room was shrouded in darkness.

She fumbled with the wall switch a few times, but nothing happened.

Suddenly, she remembered that when she left yesterday morning, for safety and to save on electricity, she had turned off the circuit breaker, even though she would only be gone for two days.

Turning on her phone’s flashlight, she found the circuit breaker panel in the kitchen and flipped it up. The living room lights flickered on.

Her appetite had been quite large recently. After settling her luggage, Fuyuan sent a message in the family group chat to let her parents know she was safe.

After washing up and lying down, she felt a slight hunger again. Lifting the air-conditioned quilt, she got out of bed, walked to the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator.

She didn’t usually cook and hadn’t put in any fresh ingredients, so there was no unpleasant smell.

The small fridge was packed with snacks, mostly large chunks of chocolate and long cans of potato chips. The chocolate, left unrefrigerated due to the power outage, felt soft to the touch.

She picked two cans of chips and sat on the living room sofa to finish them, still not feeling quite full.

Digging through the pile of snacks in the fridge, she found a pack of knife-cut noodles at the bottom, still unopened. She tore open the packaging and took one of the noodle cakes.

It was her first time cooking, and lacking experience, she recalled the motions of the noodle stall owner. She poured oil into the pan, added the noodles, and stirred. When it started sticking, she added a little water and sliced a red chili to season it.

When it was done, Fuyuan scooped the noodles into a bowl. Then, thinking it over, she took an egg, fried it golden on both sides, and placed it on top.

After eating and rinsing her mouth again, she lay back on the bed and suddenly realized something was wrong.

If Teacher Shen was so saddened by her students’ troubles, why was she dreaming about rushing an oral presentation?

But Shen’s emotions didn’t seem feigned. Fuyuan had seen many dreams before and could usually tell the difference between genuine and fabricated feelings. Besides, Shen had no reason to pretend in front of her students.

Moreover, the sachet’s scent was problematic—too overpowering.

The potency of a fragrance doesn’t necessarily enhance its sleep-inducing effect. Take cardamom, for example; its strong, spicy aroma stimulates the nervous system rather than calming it, especially if placed by the bedside.

Now that she thought about it, Shen had worn light makeup and didn’t look haggard, but the bandage on her index finger and the stains on her clothes suggested her mental state was likely fragile recently.

Rubbing her brow, Fuyuan opened WeChat. Her thumb hovered over Shen Lin’s chat window but hesitated, ultimately not opening it.

Perhaps she was being paranoid.

Suddenly, a video call notification appeared on the top of the screen—it was from her mother.

She opened the group chat and saw two missed calls from earlier, around the time she was cooking the noodles.

She answered the call and quietly turned off her own camera.

“Yuan Yuan, why did you come back without saying a word?” Her mother’s face filled the screen, and faint sounds of someone washing in the bathroom could be heard in the background.

Her father called from the other side: “I told you, Yuan Yuan told me you were busy and couldn’t reach anyone.”

“Only you can say that—why don’t you say it yourself?” her mother snapped at him. Her father fell silent.

Fuyuan coughed lightly, not wanting to get caught in an argument. “Are you both home now?”

Her mother replied, “We’ve been back for half an hour. Your dad’s driving, I just finished showering, and I’ll go to bed soon.”

Fuyuan acknowledged with a short “Hmm.”

Sensing her mother’s exhaustion, she said, “You should rest early; you’ve had a long day.”

Her mother suddenly asked, “Do you know the old woman next door to your grandmother’s place?”

Fuyuan shook her head. She barely went there once a year, so how could she be familiar?

Her mother sighed. “How could someone be so hopeless?”

“What happened?” Fuyuan asked.

Her mother sighed again. “Wasn’t today your grandmother’s eightieth birthday? Since they’d been neighbors for years, I even got scolded by her as a child... My mother, your grandmother, said it was lively with so many people around. She also said that woman usually kept to herself and didn’t like socializing. It’s a lonely life.”

Fuyuan felt a bad premonition. “And then?”

Her mother said, “Your grandmother asked me to invite her over. I knocked for a long time, but no one answered. Your grandmother said she was usually home at this time and that a few relatives were coming to celebrate, so you can imagine what happened.”

Her face clouded with gloom. “She actually hanged herself from a beam, with a white cloth around her neck. Like in the movies—standing on a stool, head slumped in, then kicking the stool away. Isn’t that just awful timing? Not before or after, but on the day we’re celebrating a happy occasion. Purely troublesome.”

Fuyuan’s heart suddenly pounded fiercely, her voice trembling: “Is the woman you’re talking about thin, with long hair tied back with a black hairband, and a large black mole on the web between her thumb and index finger?”

Her mother looked surprised. “Probably. You know her? That mole on her right hand is definitely there. I didn’t see the black hairband, though. When I saw her, her hair was loose, her face was bluish-purple, and her tongue was sticking out—it was terrifying. I didn’t dare look any longer.”

Fuyuan fell silent, a vague conclusion forming in her mind, yet she didn’t want to accept it. “Why do you say she hanged herself today and not yesterday?”

Her mother gave her a strange look. “You went to bed early last night. Your grandmother and I even talked to her, told her about the banquet today, and invited her to join us. She agreed so nicely—I thought she was finally coming around.”

Fuyuan’s gaze darkened as she looked at her hands, laden with guilt.

She had known all along that those turbulent dreams had pulled her in.

She could have, to some extent, altered the course of the dream...

That woman once knelt before her as if she were a deity, lamenting her fate and her children’s unfilial behavior.

If only she had been able to say a kind word then—would things have turned out differently?

After all, today wasn’t just her grandmother’s eightieth birthday; it was her own sixty-seventh as well.

Alas, the world offers no “ifs.”