Chapter 96

"Why did you hit the tree..."

Assistant Xing wiped the blood from his eyes with his sleeve and looked out the left window.

Across the street, I could vaguely see a quiet, old neighborhood beneath a sky that looked like splashed ink. Only a neon sign was lit.

Obviously, we are no longer in the tunnel.

"I've really run into some evil spirit today. What the hell is this place?"

His blood-stained face was twisted in a hideous manner. He pulled his phone from his suit pocket and checked it; the screen had shattered in the impact.

"Shit..." He threw his phone onto the car seat.

I carefully opened the car door and looked down. There were no red spider lilies or hand bones outside.

He got out of the car, wiped the blood from his eyes, and squinted at the neon sign.

The vision changes from blurry to clear.

It was a store sign. The first two words were off, leaving only the last three words visible: Auto Repair Shop.

“Sizzle——”

There was some poor contact in the circuit, and the light tube surrounding the circled words flickered, like an inviting ghost lamp.

"Great, it's a repair shop... If they fix my car, I can... get out of this damn place..."

He uttered some difficult sentences between his bloody teeth, his eyes rolled up slightly, and it was obvious that his mind was not very clear.

The blood from his head dripped down his face, and the front of his white shirt was soaked with blood.

He was panting, dragging his wounded leg, staggering and walking like a zombie towards the other side of the road.

The garage door was halfway down, leaving only a meter-high gap. He bent down and stepped into the dim light behind the door.

The sign above the shop made two soft clicks, and the first two words lit up:

Qingde Auto Repair Shop.

The workshop of the auto repair shop was dark. At the other end of the workshop, there was a rectangular light grid, and light came through a small door.

"Is anyone there?"

His voice echoed in the huge space.

He walked towards the small door, shouting hoarsely, "Is the boss here?"

Stumbling, he walked into a narrow passage between storage rooms.

The blood that kept flowing into his eyes made his vision even more blurred. He reached out and groped for the road. It seemed that there was a large plastic barrel on the left and a tire on the right.

"What a mess..." he complained.

The leather shoes stepped on the ground, making a wet sound under the feet.

He suddenly stopped and sniffed the air: "Why does it smell so strong?"

There was a window high on the wall, and the pale moonlight shone through it, cut into long strips by the sparse iron bars, falling right where he was standing.

“Crash…”

He heard a sound and looked down.

The moonlight illuminated a gurgling stream beside him, which fell continuously to the ground.

It turned out that the bucket next to him had a small hole in it, and the liquid inside was leaking out. Next to the bucket, there was a dagger lying.

He lowered his head and looked at the dagger, his eyes confused, muttering: "This... This is my dagger, how did it fall here..."

He held the edge of the bucket with one hand, bent down with difficulty, picked up the dagger, rubbed the wet handle on his body, and said, "It's stained with gasoline... It's so dirty..."

"Gasoline. Gasoline. Gasoline..."

His eyes suddenly widened: "Gasoline!"

The camera suddenly pulled to a bird's-eye view. There was a large amount of gasoline on the ground around the oil drum, and Assistant Xing's feet were stepping on it.

Fear crossed his face, and he looked up and around: "This is... this is Qingde Auto Repair Shop! Why am I here? Something's wrong... something's wrong!"

He turned suddenly and tried to run.

Suddenly meeting the swaying face of the red spider lily behind him, Qiu Yue gave him a genuine "toothy" smile.

He screamed and fell into the pool of gasoline.

"Xing Yao." A faint chanting sound came from far above.

"Who, who is calling this name! I hate this name!" Assistant Xing - Xing Yao sat in the gasoline and screamed in despair.

"I'm where you are." The voice was so vague that it seemed to come from the clouds.

"Who, who is it..." He suddenly looked up and froze.

My sight passed through the tall window, through the vertical bars and looked diagonally upwards, meeting the window of a gray building next door.

That window had no windows, it was square and dark.

There was a figure standing in the window.

The camera zoomed in, revealing a young man with a thin face, dark eyes, a short buzz cut, and dirty overalls.

The boy raised his left hand in greeting. Around his wrist, a string tied to a small peach-pit pig.

Xing Yao's bloodstained face was twisted like a ghost: "Qiu... Song..."

Qiu Song slowly raised a slingshot from the dark window. It was a powerful-looking, modified stainless steel slingshot.

Pull it open and aim it diagonally downward toward the window of the auto repair shop.

The camera zooms in on the slingshot's bullet, and what's ready to go is not a stone, but a burning cigarette butt.

"No...don't..." Xing Yao's bloodshot eyes seemed to be bulging out, and his teeth were chattering.

The boy's sharp eyes pressed against the slingshot, staring at him from afar, and a whisper drifted from the corner of his lips: "Xing Yao, I'm just doing what you did."

In an instant, like lightning tearing off a layer of darkness, the picture flashed, switching between reality and illusion, and the young man Qiu Song in the black window suddenly turned into another person.

A young man, slightly older than the boy, with an inch-long scar on his left cheek. Combining his facial features, anyone could recognize him—that was the younger version of Xing Yao!

In the next frame, Xing Yao, who fell into the gasoline in the workshop, also turned into the young Qiu Song in an instant.

The next frame shows two contrasting images side by side, both from a long-range perspective, one person in a workshop, and one in a gray building window:

The picture on the left shows the young boy Qiu Song aiming a slingshot at the adult Xing Yao.

The picture on the right shows the young boy Xing Yao, aiming a slingshot at the young boy Qiu Song.

The right picture also shows three large characters carved out by lightning: "Ten Years Ago", as if revealing the hidden truth in an instant.

The scene cuts back to a close-up, the rubber band in Qiu Song's hand loosens, and the burning cigarette butt shoots towards the camera, as if it wants to break out of the picture.

The cigarette butt was like a burning bullet, passing through the gap in the iron grille of the auto repair shop and falling into the gasoline.

boom--

Flames engulfed Xing Yao's entire body.

Xing Yao howled miserably and rolled over, crawling towards the small door.

Several barrels of oil were also engulfed in flames.

"Bang!"

The impact of the explosion expressed by the black and white lines is no less impressive, and the colorless fireball sweeps across like a giant beast, swallowing up the world just the same.

"Boom—"

It was as if the sky was collapsing, the roof collapsed, and huge triangular steel beams fell with fragments of steel tiles.

Xing Yao was about to crawl to the door when he was hit on the waist by a steel beam, almost breaking him in two.

His deformed body was burned black and he was still struggling in vain, like a roasted rat.

There were two desperate eyes on the black face, and his mouth was silently open, looking at the two figures standing beside him in the thick smoke and flames.

One was Qiu Yue, the other was Qiu Song. The fire couldn't burn them at all, and they looked down at him quietly, as if appreciating his pain.

Only the red spider lily on Qiu Yue's body was burned to ashes in the flames, and her damaged skin slowly recovered, as if she was reborn from the fire.

She returned to her original form, her white dress intact, fluttering in the fire.

Qiu Song raised his hand and threw the slingshot to Xing Yao: "Give it back to you."

He raised his head and stretched out his left hand with the peach-core pig on it towards Qiu Yue: "Sister, let's go."

Hand in hand, the brother and sister walked towards the endless fireworks.

Behind him, Xing Yao, who had turned into a charred corpse, watched him with despair through his dark, empty eyes.

The picture zooms out.

It became a news photo.

A cordon surrounded the devastated fire scene. Under the tilted steel beam, a piece of cloth covered something, and a curled-up stump that looked like a black dead branch was exposed at the edge.

News headline: "A man entered an unmanned auto repair shop to smoke, causing a disaster; an oil barrel exploded and killed him."

In the next frame, this picture is shrunk to the left, and an old news picture is placed on the right, with almost the same composition, marked with a date from ten years ago.

News title: "Illegal smoking caused gasoline barrel to explode, and auto repair shop worker died while working."

——To be continued.