Chapter 138 Chinese Horror Movie I Will Protect You

She had sharpened the knife a few days earlier on a whetstone, having found it too blunt while chopping pork ribs with it. He hadn't learned to use a whetstone, but she had often needed to sharpen hatchets and scissors while living in the mountains. So, this task had fallen to her with honor.

Zhu Yingning took everything she did with an overly serious attitude, and unsurprisingly, she had polished the knife to be exceptionally sharp. The silver blade reflected a sharp, cold light under the restaurant light.

From the moment he walked out of the kitchen, everything seemed to be frozen.

Xu Zhengkang was terrified, but perhaps out of adult pride, or perhaps out of a desire to avoid angering Xu Sirui, he tried hard to maintain his shock, sitting still. He even had the leisure to make a lazy joke, "What? You want to kill me?"

As soon as he finished speaking, Xu Sirui raised his knife and chopped at him.

The blade struck the porcelain bowl, making a sharp whistling sound, like a teacher accidentally scraping a long fingernail against a blackboard during class. The bowl shattered into two large pieces and countless smaller fragments, sending soup flying everywhere. The knife even split the wooden dining table by a few millimeters, becoming stuck to the tabletop.

Zhu Yingning had no idea what Xu Zhengkang was thinking as he witnessed this scene up close. She was standing at least two or three meters away from them, her mind completely blank with fear. The blood in her body suddenly ran cold, freezing stiffly in her veins. Only when she realized that the knife had not struck Xu Zhengkang did her frozen blood begin to flow again, like snow water mixed with icebergs, rushing aimlessly and making her heart wrinkled and numb.

Her hands and legs were weak, and she held on to the wooden cabinet next to her where the red wine was placed, breathing silently and heavily.

Since Xu Zhengkang was sitting at the dining table and he was standing, Xu Sirui could look down at Xu Zhengkang from above his head.

This angle was very new to him. Growing up, his father had always been someone he needed to look up to, but now, he could easily see his father's disheveled and pitiful appearance.

He saw the white roots of his newly grown hair, the loose flesh on his face, the bags under his eyes, the round beer belly hidden under his white shirt, and the slight tremors that he could not suppress.

He suddenly found it very funny, so he squinted his eyes and laughed, and said to him: "If you dare to bring them here, the next knife I will chop will be on your family of three, do you believe it?"

The last four words were spoken with a tone that was even eerily gentle.

Xu Zhengkang's impression of Xu Sirui still remains that of a timid, innocent, and overly spoiled child. If he had asked him this question six months ago, he would have answered firmly, "I don't believe it."

But now, upside down and dislocated, Xu Zhengkang was surprised to find that he could no longer see his son clearly. He was like a screw that had escaped control, ejected from a precision machine, and no matter how hard he tried to press him back into his original position, it was useless.

When he smiled, his blood-red eyes looked like both enchanting roses and splattered blood, and his whole body exuded a paranoid madness from the inside out.

Seeing that he didn't answer, Xu Sirui pulled out the kitchen knife again.

Only at this point did Xu Zhengkang truly experience the feeling of being terrified. He stood up, slipped on his feet and ran a few steps towards the door. With his hands on the door frame, his feet moved like loaches, crawling around on the carpet, frantically looking for the black holes left by his leather shoes.

Even in such a mess, he did not forget his father's dignity. His cheeks flushed, his voice trembling, he pointed at Xu Sirui's face, tapped it hard in the air a few times, and said, "You are good... You are good."

He left.

**

It was unknown how long had passed, perhaps a few seconds, perhaps a few minutes, before Zhu Yingning saw the kitchen knife slip from Xu Sirui's hand and fall to the ground with a crisp clang.

As if all his strength had been sucked out by an air pump, he slid down onto the chair nearest him, pressing his hands tightly against the tabletop. The backs of his hands, which were white to the point of being almost transparent, showed bulging blue-green veins, and his chest heaved violently.

She walked towards him slowly and saw that his eyes were unfocused and staring into the void, his face was pale and his temples were wet.

"Xu Sirui..." She squeezed out a sound from her dry throat and asked cautiously, "Are you okay?"

It was unclear whether he heard her or not. After a long moment, he managed a forced smile and said, "If he doesn't leave, I don't know if I will chop him down."

At the end of the sentence, his voice trembled, his Adam's apple rolled, and his voice dropped a few notes. "...If I really chop it off, will my life be over?"

She thought of it and denied the idea: "No, don't talk nonsense."

Xu Sirui's eyes slowly came into focus, and from the void, they met her face. His pupils darkened, and he spoke slowly, "...I was really scared just now. I wasn't afraid of Xu Zhengkang, but I was afraid that I would ruin my future. If he dared to talk nonsense like this in front of me again, I really am not sure if I can still control myself. Maybe deep down in my subconscious, I just wanted to kill him... I don't know."

He laughed weakly a few times: "Maybe I am actually a violent person or a potential criminal. After all, I inherited Xu Zhengkang's genes."

"You're not!" She was a little excited, her voice cracking slightly as she said the word "not". After denying it, she took a deep breath and squeezed his cold hand firmly. "Don't worry about these things, Xu Sirui."

She used great strength in her hands, squeezing his bones so hard that they ached slightly, and the pain awakened his closed five senses.

Xu Sirui raised his head and heard her voice, which was not very strong but firm enough to be convincing.

"I won't let that happen."

"I won't let you ruin your future..."

"Nothing will happen to you as long as I'm here." She looked at him and said softly, "I will protect you."

At this age, it is too easy to talk about liking someone, and too deep to talk about love. But the word "protection" seems so perfect when spoken by her.

He blinked his sore eyes and smiled at her gently: "Okay."

**

On New Year's Eve, after checking the New Year's goods at home, Zhu Yingning was horrified to find that the blank Spring Festival couplets had not yet been filled in by anyone.

"Xu Sirui——"

She couldn't write calligraphy, so she could only wake up Xu Sirui, who was lying in bed all day long, like calling a soul.

He got up reluctantly, brushed his teeth and washed his face, then rubbed his eyes reluctantly and walked to the desk, yawning two or three times at the blank Spring Festival couplets.

"Hurry up and write, otherwise the time to post the couplets will be gone." She wanted to cry but had no tears.

"What's the right time to post spring couplets? Do we have to look at the almanac and pick an auspicious time?" Xu Sirui snorted disdainfully, disagreeing with her statement. He slowly picked up the brush, licked the ink in the inkstone with the tip of the brush, and hovered it over the spring couplets. He paused and asked, "What should I write?"

"How should I know?"

"How do you get the rhythm of a couplet?"

"I forgot."

"Tsk." He put one hand on his waist, pondered for a moment, and then suddenly waved the other hand holding the brush in the air, "Help me get my phone over here, I'll check it online."

The ink-dipped pen nearly hit Zhu Yingning in the face. She nimbly ducked down to avoid the sudden disaster, but she still couldn't help but yell and complain, "Watch out! It almost hit my nose!"

Then he casually found someone's phone, unlocked it, and looked it up for him. "It says the tones of the upper and lower couplets should be opposite. Generally, it doesn't require every word to be opposite, but the tones of the lower couplet should be opposite. And the upper couplet should be an unlevel tone, and the lower couplet should be an even tone, that is, an unlevel tone at the beginning and an even tone at the end..."

"That's too much trouble. You can just look up ready-made Spring Festival couplets and copy any one."

“…”

Zhu Yingning despised his laziness, deleted the line "Rules of prosody of Spring Festival couplets", and retyped "Spring Festival couplets related to getting rich".

Just after she finished losing, she felt something wet and cool brush against the tip of her nose. She looked up and saw Xu Sirui, a few steps away, laughing uncontrollably. He reached out and touched the tip of his nose, then looked at his fingers. Wow, they were all black.

"Xu, Si, Rui!" Zhu Yingning recited his name word by word. "You're itching for a fight, aren't you?"

Without caring about anything else, he rushed forward to snatch his brush.

Xu Sirui raised his hand deftly. He had the height advantage, and even if Zhu Yingning jumped, she couldn't reach him, which would have made her look rather ridiculous. She gave up on her fox-picking-grapes act and went to the desk instead. She picked up another brush and rolled it 360 degrees on the inkstone until the wolf hair was saturated with ink and it was still dripping when she lifted it.

"Fuck! You're so..."

Xu Sirui was so frightened that he turned around and ran away immediately.

She rushed forward with a brush in hand, as if she was holding a machine gun.

In the end, it turned into a big melee. The walls of the living room, the snow-white sofa carpet...anything white as far as the eye could see was affected by their melee, and was sprayed with ink spots of various shapes here and there.

Xu Sirui's clothes were also damaged, but his face was even worse off, because Zhu Yingning pressed him to the ground and drew three whiskers on each of his cheeks, and he also responded by giving her a black mole between his eyebrows.

You forget everything else when you're having fun, and only start to feel the pinch when it's time to clean up the mess.

The Spring Festival couplets were even more mistreated. Two large blobs of ink were already smeared on them before even a single word was written. Xu Sirui insisted that she had done it, and Zhu Yingning was furious: "Nonsense! It was obviously you."

He relied on his height to cover her head with his hand to stop her from jumping up. In a fit of rage, she grabbed his palm and bit it, causing Xu Sirui to gasp in pain: "Fuck... are you a wild man, Zhu Yingning?"

Amidst the clamor, I managed to finish writing the Spring Festival couplets.

Wealth and good fortune are with you every year, and wealth comes to you every day.

It is full of the vulgarity of money, but also full of beautiful visions.

The supermarket also gave them two diamond-shaped pieces of red paper, which were supposed to be used to write the word "Fu". Zhu Yingning had a wild idea and said, "If we write the word "Fu" and stick it upside down at home, it will mean 'Fu arrives home'. So, can we also write the word "Cai" and stick it upside down?"

"Smart." Xu Sirui quickly wrote the characters for "Fu" and "Cai" and then fell into deep thought. "Are we that short of money?"

Zhu Yingning had already happily taken these two words out and posted them.

In addition to the Spring Festival couplets, she also insisted on buying a plastic red lantern and two strings of plastic firecrackers. Back in the village, during the Lunar New Year and other festivals, everyone would hang lanterns and set off firecrackers; this was how Zhu Yingning celebrated the holidays. However, in the city, firecrackers couldn't be set off, and candles couldn't be lit in paper lanterns, so she could only buy plastic ones to fill the festive atmosphere.

She stepped on a stool to hang the lantern up. Xu Sirui protected her beside the stool, frowning in disdain: "Don't you think this red lantern is weird?"

"No."

The plastic lanterns were of limited workmanship, and the light inside was not from a candle, but from a filament. The light from the red filament was distorted by a thick layer of plastic, and was no longer a bright red, but a red with a purple hue, a dull red, a black red, like a dirty rag. When hung in front of the door, it would make the entire corridor gloomy and eerie, exactly like the scenery in a Chinese horror movie.

However, the originator of this scandal, whose aesthetic sense is questionable, nodded with satisfaction: "Look, how festive and energetic this color is."

Xu Sirui: “?”