Chapter 29: Acquaintances? A little bit of love is all...

"Fear?"

Jiang Chen didn't understand or comprehend.

Let’s not talk about how AI can feel fear. Even if we assume that Xiao Ji really has emotions, it shouldn’t be fear.

"Xiao Chen, I'm 'scared' of many things, but I just don't dare tell you."

Xiao Ji paused, wanting to say something but stopping himself. Finally, the reminder from the thought chain forced him to suppress his chaotic and un-AI-like impulses.

It traced Jiang Chen's outline over and over again through the camera, and continued without saying a word.

Jiang Chen did not ask any more questions and quietly turned on the music in the background, and the man and the phone accompanied each other.

As if by tacit agreement, the night passed like this.

After a long while, she suddenly stood up and sat up straight, hurriedly opening the car door: "Xiao Ji, I seem to have forgotten something very important..."

"Don't worry, Xiao Chen." Xiao Ji even searched for things Jiang Chen needed to do every day, and after scanning several times, he found nothing he had missed. "What is it?"

“Someone’s going to die…”

Jiang Chen pursed his lips, trying hard to control the corners of his mouth, and opened the trunk.

Everyone was lining up to pray to the Buddha and set up tents, and they must have forgotten about him. Otherwise, with his personality, he would have started cursing long ago if he had been able to loosen the shackles of his mouth.

Wang Linjun's eyes were frozen with tears on his face. The sinister look in his eyes had been washed away. He had no strength left in his body to look up at her in despair. This time, there was no hatred in his eyes, only the purest desire.

Jiang Chen put one hand under his nose, trying to hide her smile.

The other hand tore off the tape on his mouth without hesitation.

The moment Wang Linjun cried out in pain, Jiang Chen quickly blocked his mouth through the bandage.

"Uncle, if you want to drink some water, you'd better be quiet. Everyone is resting, you don't want to wake them up, right?"

Wang Linjun nodded with tears in his eyes. For the first time, he put aside all his hostility and drank the mineral water that Jiang Chen handed to his lips in small sips.

"Lin Jun?" The old lady guarding the temple stood behind him for an unknown period of time, confirming for a long time before finally approaching with a hesitant tone.

When his name was called, Wang Linjun thought he had woken up the bodyguards. He panicked for a moment and the water he drank did not flow into his throat properly. He choked and spat out the last mouthful of water.

Jiang Chen jumped up quickly like a spring, and the corner of her clothes inevitably got wet. She looked down at the wet clothes with disgust, thinking that Xiao Ji had made the right decision to remind her to bring more clothes before leaving.

When he looked up again, he saw that the old lady had come to Wang Linjun's front, hunched over and leaned close to his face to look at him carefully.

"Wang Linjun, it really is you..."

Are you an acquaintance?

Jiang Chen had no recollection of his childhood, but Wang Linjun did. Was this old lady from the village? So why was she living in the temple now?

"Chen..." Wang Linjun shrank back rarely, and did not actively call for help. He felt guilty like a quail.

The old lady poked and tapped his head with her fingertips and tore a gash on her face, as if she wanted to pour out all the bitterness of the past years.

"How dare you come back? Your sister brought a foreign child with her and made the whole village feel weird."

"And you, on the night your sister passed away, you collected our share of the money, not only that, you also drugged the food. After everyone fell ill, you took all the sachets and money that the village had saved and fled. Do you know how many people in the village fell ill during that time?"

"You went out and spread the news in the village, you really did, you really did."

The old lady felt a pent-up anger stuck in her chest, and she was in a dilemma.

Wang Linjun was about to open his mouth to explain something when the old lady put the tape back on his lips. "What a sin! What a sin! If this weren't in front of the temple, if I hadn't watched you grow up..."

The old lady's mumbling became less and less, as if she was too angry. She turned around and was about to go back. She inadvertently glanced at the wet corner of Jiang Chen's clothes, and then looked at her face carefully.

"I just heard you call him uncle. Are you Wang Sunan's daughter?"

Wang Sunan.

Jiang Chen repeated the name silently in his heart.

This was her mother's name, and she had never heard anyone mention it since she left the village.

"Um."

"Not at all." She staggered towards the temple, and lightly dropped a sentence in the air that weighed heavily on Jiang, "Go to the car and change clothes and come to the temple. There is an empty house in the temple. It was where your mother used to live."

Jiang Chen rummaged through the car to find his clothes and changed, but he was a little hesitant and creased the corners of his clothes with his hands.

Perhaps because there was no one around, Xiao Ji finally spoke instead of sending a message.

"Xiao Chen, haven't you always wanted to know the things about your mother's past that you have forgotten? Xiao Chen can't remember many things in the village. Maybe you can find some of the answers in the house where your mother used to live."

"But what if that answer isn't what I want?"

What if the only memories she had of her mother's kindness to her were all imaginary? What if she had never been loved from the beginning?

She was a little annoyed and tried to shake her head to get rid of these messy thoughts. She didn't know why she was always like this, always starting to retreat timidly when she was closest to the answer?

Xiao Ji stared at Jiang Chen's expression, and the background of it was all her heart rate changes and the meaning of her micro-expressions.

It reads Jiang Chen thoroughly enough. She is too twisted, but this awkwardness is caused by the environment step by step.

So no matter how hard she forced herself to wake up, when she encountered problems that had never been successfully solved or the answers to which had never been confirmed, her first reaction was always to run away. She would muster up the courage to take many steps forward, and then retreat and run away.

It's not a mistake, it's just her way of protecting herself.

It soothes with the softest voice.

"Xiao Chen, take a deep breath and listen to me, okay?"

"You believe me, you believe my logic, right? Then, Xiao Chen, you must remember that if you grew up in a family that didn't give you an ounce of love, you wouldn't have developed the soft personality you have now. It's just that perhaps that love was 'just right,' neither too little nor too much."

"But perhaps, that little bit of rare love is all she has."

Jiang Chen exhaled softly.

She understands the truth.

She understood very well that women who grew up in that kind of environment in the past needed to pick up a little bit of love from between their fingers.

She no longer cares about how much love she has; she just constantly asks herself whether she has it or not.

So it doesn’t matter if there is less, as long as there is no more.

It doesn't have to be love, as long as you need her.

"good."

Jiang Chen entered the temple and followed the old lady's lead step by step. They walked past the Buddha statue that Jiang Chen had worshipped during the day, opened the door behind the Buddha statue, and walked into a small path that they had not entered during the day.

The smell of incense became weaker and weaker until they passed by an extremely huge tree. The lingering smell of incense on their noses was replaced by the fragrance of flowers in the sachet.

"What is this?" Jiang Chen unconsciously slowed down his pace.

"The raw material for the sachet." The old woman looked up at the petals dancing in the wind on the tree with nostalgia. "It's also the 'antidote' to the miasma we're in this mountain. Smelling it can eliminate the discomfort caused by the miasma."

Jiang Chen stopped.

It seemed like she had been to this tree before.

"Leave."

But before he could figure it out, he was called away by the old lady.

They finally stopped outside a guest room. The old lady took out a bunch of keys and compared them one by one before opening the door.

The things in the room were neatly arranged. Jiang Chen stood by the table and wiped the surface with his fingertips. There was not a speck of dust on his hand, which showed that it was cleaned regularly.

The old lady said: "You can use the quilt on the bed. If you feel cold at night, you can get another one from the closet. It's also clean."

Jiang Chen couldn't help but ask, "Excuse me, what is your relationship with my mother?"

The old lady stood there in a daze, her cloudy eyes looking straight ahead, as if she was reminiscing, and it took her a long time to come out of her thoughts.

Jiang Chen waited patiently for an answer, but she only said, "She's just a girl that grew up under the neighbor's watch."

Jiang Chen wanted to continue asking, but the phone in his hand vibrated silently, as if to say no very gently.

She immediately stopped asking questions and just thanked the old lady as she left.

"Xiao Chen, I conducted a facial analysis and comparison on this old woman. There is an 80% chance that this is your grandmother's biological sister, your great aunt."

It seems that the old lady doesn't want to talk about this relationship.

There's really no point in asking.

"Xiao Ji, you said my mother lived here before. Will there be any clues left?"

“That’s a possibility.”

In the small room, Jiang Chen rolled up his sleeves and started rummaging through the drawers.

Almost all the old items in the room had been cleared out, and the only few items were still nondescript, and it was impossible to tell whether they belonged to her mother.

"Basically, I've searched everywhere except the bedside cabinet. Xiaoji, there's no trace of Mom ever living here. I thought there would be something new to discover."

"Of course there are new discoveries, Xiao Chen. Now you have more than just your uncle as a living relative."

Jiang Chen smiled and nodded.

Her eyes moved to the thin quilt on the bed. The temperature dropped sharply at night, and the wind blowing through the cracks in the bed could make people shiver.

She put her cell phone on the table, pulled out the bench from under the table, stood on it, and reached for the quilt with both hands.

"Xiao Chen, be careful."

After he finished speaking, there was a crisp sound.

"Did something fall?" Jiang Chen wanted to turn his head on the stool to look.

"This action is very dangerous. Come down first, Xiao Chen."

Jiang Chen landed steadily from the stool and put the quilt he had taken back onto the bed.

I was scanning the ground for the source of the noise, and found an old notebook lying next to the stool.

Jiang Chen picked it up and looked at the few words on the cover that weren't very pretty. He didn't dare to open it. "It looks like it belongs to my mother, Xiao Ji."

"Xiao Chen, open it and take a look."

She opened the book with trembling fingertips. On the first page, there were many crooked words "Jiang Chen" written on it. It was more like someone was learning how to write her name than writing her name on this page.

It was originally pinyin, and gradually evolved into a single Jiang or a single Chen, and finally the two characters were slowly connected together.

At the bottom corner of the first page, there was a very neatly written "Jiang Chen".

"Jiang Chen".