PSP Chapter 17: Despair

Everyone covered their noses as they looked on.
The body that had fallen to the ground face first was wearing a black robe, with bagua and yinyang fish embroidered on the back and cuffs respectively.

 

Everyone recognized this person.
It was one of the masters that Liu Wangyu had invited that day, specifically the young man who was the leader.

 

Among them, Liu Wangyu had the biggest reaction.
He remembered very clearly that he had personally sent the master away that day.
If he had already died, who had left with him?

 

He also remembered that he had asked about the jade Buddha, and had said that since the female ghost had been taken care of, it would be useless to continue wearing it.
It would be better to sell it to him at a high price, since he wouldn’t be using it again.

 

At that time, he had only half-believed that the master had gotten rid of Qi Mei, so he hadn’t agreed.
If he had agreed at that time… he might not have remained alive without the jade Buddha's protection.

 

Thinking of this, Liu Wangyu was terrified and looked at Shen Meiren, who had also messed with his Jade Buddha but who he had to rely on now, with resentful and complicated eyes.

 

Shen Qingcheng raised his eyebrows, “Liu-fuban, don't look at me like that.
You aren’t my type¹, I won't take a fancy to you.”

 

Lu Qi, including the other players, were almost used to Shen Meiren's snarky words, and reacted quite calmly.

 

Lu Qi took Xue Tong's place and pushed open the door, which had closed by itself.
The handle on the other side of the door and everything around it was covered with blood.
The bottom layer was dry and solidified, but some of it was still running down the door panel and pooled on the ground.
There was a big puddle; if the threshold hadn’t been blocking it, it would have flowed out under the door.

 

The location of the bloodstain was very strange.
The handle was the place with the most bloodstains? Meng Tianhai suddenly realized something, and turned the corpse on the ground over with his foot.

 

Zhou An'an: “Ah!”

 

Zhou An’an closed her eyes unconsciously, then forced herself to open them again in the next second.

 

The man had been dead for several days, and his corpse showed signs of decay from the recent hot weather.
HIs exposed skin was covered in bruises.
His eyes were open and bulging, and his tongueless mouth was gaping open, the inside bloody.

 

After careful observation, Meng Tianhai nodded to Lu Qi, “It should be that someone grabbed his head from behind, shoved the door handle into his mouth, and suffocated him to death.”

 

That would explain why there was the most blood on the doorknob, and why Xue Tong had some difficulty opening the door at first.
When the man had died, his mouth was still hanging on the doorknob, and his blood kept dripping and dripping.

 

Shen Qingcheng: “Liu-fuban, you invited this person, what are you going to do with him now that he is dead?”

 

Liu Wangyu avoided looking at the corpse on the ground, “Finding a place to bury him should be fine.”

 

Shen Qingcheng: “You won’t notify his disciples to collect his corpse?”

 

How was he supposed to explain this man's death to his disciples? Liu Wangyu immediately shut up when he realized he had almost been tricked into revealing his true thoughts.

 

Shen Qingcheng nodded and said with a smile, “The bodies of Qi Mei and Qi Anle must’ve been handled the same way, right? Actually, I've always wanted to know… Qi Anle was just a child who didn't understand anything, why did you bother to kill him?”

 

Liu Wangyu kept silent, and Shen Qingcheng ignored him.
After speaking, he entered the room with the other players.

 

Qi Mei's house had a simple layout, with only one bedroom, a kitchen, and one bathroom.
When the door was fully opened, the whole house could be seen from the doorway.

 

They did a cursory sweep of the house first, but didn’t find another body, which meant that only the young man had died that day.

 

There were many photos hanging in the living room, most of them of Qi Anle, from a chubby little swaddled dumpling to a babbling toddler.
The background of the photos mostly showed the kindergarten.
He was lying on a mushroom structure, riding a seesaw, smiling brightly in front of the camera.

 

It was obvious that Qi Anle was a lively and cheerful child, and loved his mother very much.
Whenever he was in a photo with Qi Mei, he was hugging Qi Mei's neck tightly and smiling shyly.

 

When Qi Anle started to attend kindergarten at the age of four, his photos gradually decreased, and it was obvious that the child in the pictures had become timid and anxious.
He looked nervously at the person who was taking his picture, and never laughed in front of the camera again.

 

Liu Zimei herself was a mother, and she felt deeply.
No matter who was right or wrong in that story, the child was always innocent.
He was still so young.

 

The players split up, some looking in the living room and some in the bedroom.
The bedroom was the most private place, and the most clues could be found there.
Shen Qingcheng didn't want to compete with the other players, so he explored the living room.

 

Shen Qingcheng looked left and right; the apartment hadn't been cleaned for a long time, and there was dust everywhere.
He wanted to sit but there was nowhere to sit, so he just took out the paper blocks that were serving as padding for the table legs and played with them.

 

This vacation experience was extremely bad, he was detained in kindergarten all day long, he was going to give a bad review!

 

The block of paper was made of a piece of white paper that was folded several times, and it was quite thick.
He unfolded it in a bored manner, and unexpectedly a few photos fell out.

 

Shen Qingcheng looked down and saw that the photos were neatly arranged side by side, as if they were people who were passing by.
The people in the photos were all expressionless, looking straight in his direction no matter what angle he looked at them from.

 

He gave a light tsk, furrowed his brows, and looked again.
This time, the photos were better behaved, and every one of them smiled brightly.

 

How dare you show this little trick in front of your grandfather²?

 

“Lu Qi,” he shouted first, then bent down to pick up the photo.
When Lu Qi came over, Shen Qingcheng, who had just picked up the photo, raised it at him.
“I seem to have found the father of the child.”

 

Lu Qi and Chen Ge came closer together, and Lu Qi took the photo.

 

In fact, only one of the photos featured Qi Mei and a strange boy, the boy’s face so blackened that they couldn't make out his appearance.

 

The reason why he was distinguishable from the principal, the dean, and the security guard, was because the boy was in good shape and he looked at most ten years old, unlike any of the other men.

 

In the other two photos, the protagonists were a young couple with lined faces and weary eyes.
At first glance, it was obvious that they were from a poor family.
The man's face was somewhat similar to Qi Mei's, and on an initial guess they were probably Qi Mei's parents.

 

Lu Qi: “Where did you find this?”

 

Shen Qingcheng pointed to the paper on the ground, “It was wrapped in paper and put under the table leg.”

 

Chen Ge mouthed an exclamation.
“It seems that Qi Mei has a problem with her parents.” As for the other guy, after last night's incident, he had already guessed that the other party had probably flirted with a xiaomeimei after marriage, so the scumbag was not worthy of sympathy.

 

At this point, the players who had entered the bedroom to search came out again, and Zhou An’an glanced at Lu Qi's photo.
“What did you find?”

 

This was a really rude question.

 

Meng Tianhai was better than Zhou An'an.
He knew that it was all thanks to Lu Qi’s group that made it into Room 607, so he took the initiative to say, “We found Qi Mei’s diary of Qi Mei.”

 

“It's an account.” Liu Zimei corrected him.
Her daughter did a similar thing, and she had been corrected several times.
By now, she remembered it perfectly.

 

“What's written in it?” Shen Qingcheng asked curiously.

 

Accounts were different from diaries.
They did not need to be updated every day.
The owner of the account could record only the things that were meaningful or important to them.

 

Qi Mei's account started in college.
In her freshman year, she met someone who was very important to her, her Prince Charming, so she started to keep the account, wanting to record everything about them.

 

The first half was mostly about her relationship with that man.
She occasionally mentioned her parents and complained a little, because they often urged her to find a partner.
Later, she revealed that she already had a boyfriend, and her parents began to ask how the man's condition was and whether or not he had money.

 

Objectively speaking, the man's condition was very good.
He ran a company and earned a good income, and he was a graduate of a famous university–if only he weren’t married.

 

The man concealed the fact that he was married and fell in love with Qi Mei, who was a freshman at the time.

 

It was a pity that paper couldn't contain fire³, and the husband's marriage was finally revealed in a very tragic way.
Qi Mei was directly approached by his wife in a public class.
In front of her teacher and many classmates, she insulted her for being petty, for being shameless, for seducing a married man.

 

The entries in the following period were very chaotic.
There were many meaningless scratches on the paper.
She had written so hard that several sheets had ripped, imprints left in the pages underneath.

 

It was easy to imagine how complicated and shattered Qi Mei's mood had been at that time.

 

Qi Mei seemed to have finally calmed down afterward, writing:

 

I know she's not wrong, she's just defending her marriage and happiness.
Maybe she went a little too far, but she's not wrong.
I can't blame her, it’s not her fault.

 

I know I wasn’t wrong, I just fell in love without knowing it.
I wasn’t trying to destroy other people's families, I'm not petty, I didn’t do anything wrong.

 

He was wrong.

 

He was wrong, he shouldn't have come to proposition me if he had a wife, watching me sink deeper and deeper but never mentioning it, and he didn't even say sorry to me after the incident.
Disgusting.

 

He disappeared, I can't find him, and I don't want to find him.
I will treat this as a nightmare.
When I wake up, I will be as I was before, and I will finish college well.

 

I hate him, he made me hate myself.

 

Reading this, everyone knew that things couldn’t have been that simple.
If Qi Mei had already steeled herself and recovered from this event, she never would’ve gotten to the point that she had dropped out of school, given birth to a child, and cut off contact with her family.

 

They looked down, and sure enough.

 

After the incident happened, it quickly spread among the school.
Qi Mei was a motivated learner and good-looking.
The teachers originally admired her, but then everything changed.

 

The teachers were hesitant to talk to her, shaking their heads and sighing from time to time, and the classmates talked about her in both in private and to her face.
Qi Mei could ignore all that.
Even if it was difficult, she could endure it until she graduated.

 

Until she got a call from her parents.
She told her parents that she had done a small⁴ thing and wanted to seek comfort, but all that was waiting for her was a scolding.
She was scolded for not loving herself, scolded for being poxie⁵.

 

Now she was finally calm and no longer needed comfort.
On her father's words, she went back home to visit her sick mother, but unfortunately it was just a trap from beginning to end.

 

Her parents scolded her for losing money, and regretted that they had spent any money on her studies.
They said that she was just humiliating herself if she continued to study like this.
It would be better to get married earlier, so they sold her to a widower in the next village for a large sum of money.

 

After she learned the news, she escaped from the house while her parents were not paying attention.
When she was sitting in a car going back to her school, she received a call from a teacher who had been taking good care of her.

 

The teacher told Qi Mei that she was expelled from school because her deeds affected the school's reputation.

 

Qi Mei explained her situation and begged, and the teacher had to reveal the real reason to her.
That woman was much more powerful than Qi Mei had ever imagined, and she did not want Qi Mei to live too well.

 

Qi Mei couldn't remember how desperate she was at the time, only the strange expressions of other passengers when they saw that she was crying too much.

 

In that night, Qi Mei thought about dying countless times, how good it would be to die, to be free, to be done once and for all.
She dropped out of school and rented a small, dilapidated house.
Every day, she was undisturbed and lived like a maggot that dared not see the light.

 

Before she did something wrong, Qi Mei found out that she was pregnant.

 

If her parents and dropping out of school was the last straw that broke the camel's back, Qi Anle's arrival was driftwood for the drowning.

 

She had nothing left, the child was her everything, she could give up anything for the sake of the child, including this filthy body.

 

 

 

TLN:

¹ Lit.
“your appearance doesn’t fit my aesthetic” (你长得不符合我的审美).

² Calling yourself someone’s father or grandfather means you’re asserting that you’re better/more senior than them.

³ (纸包不住火) The truth will come out/cannot be hidden forever.

⁴ xiao (小) can mean “small”, but can also mean “petty/small-minded”.

⁵ Lit.
“broken shoes” (破鞋), means “whore” or someone who interferes with the relationship of a couple (like a homewrecker).

 

I want to throw something.