Chapter 211 10% The Fleeting Rain

The uninvited guest was wearing a silver windbreaker with the zipper pulled up to his throat. The upright collar covered his delicate chin. When he breathed, white mist overflowed from his nose and lingered in the air.

"...Xu Sirui?"

After being stunned for a while, Zhu Jixiang's greeting was not very gentle.

Xu Sirui probably didn't expect that it was him who would open the door. He was stunned for just a second, then reached out and pulled up the medical mask hanging on his chin and put it on again.

"?"

Before Zhu Jixiang could get angry at his obvious and insulting behavior, he looked over his head into the house and asked nonchalantly, "Where's your sister? Isn't she home?"

Liu Guifang, who was in the house, heard the conversation at the door. She walked out from the inner room and saw Xu Sirui. She exclaimed in surprise, then stammered, "She... went out in the afternoon, and I don't know where she went... Look, she didn't even bring her cell phone." As she spoke, she raised Zhu Yingning's cell phone and waved it.

"Why are you telling him this?" Zhu Jixiang impatiently blocked the entrance with his body. His face looked unhappy, and his body language clearly showed that he didn't want Xu Sirui to come in. Liu Guifang patted his arm from behind, and he reluctantly moved aside a few millimeters, revealing a gap so thin that even a fly might not be able to pass through.

Xu Sirui ignored him and showed no intention of coming in. When he heard that Zhu Yingning was not at home, he even took a step back and said to Liu Guifang, "I'll go find her."

Liu Guifang hesitated and said, "Do you know where to find her? Or why don't you just stay at home... I'll ask my Xiang'er to go find her."

He shook his head, turned and left without saying anything.

After taking two steps, he suddenly stopped and thought of something. He turned around and asked Zhu Jixiang, "Who died?"

Zhu Jixiang was stunned for a moment. He realized that he had seen the shed outside where the remains were being stored. Thinking of Zhu Dashan and his grandmother's passing, his mood plummeted. He no longer had the heart to argue with Xu Sirui about the past, and replied sullenly, "...My father and grandmother."

The headlight at their doorway cast a bleak white glow. Xu Sirui stood there for a moment, the light reflecting off the jacket on his shoulders like a thin layer of water on a snowy night. He nodded slightly and said indifferently, "My condolences."

After he finished speaking, he turned around and walked towards the back of their house without looking back. His tall figure was quickly lost in the dim night, leaving only a hazy silver.

Liu Guifang said to Zhu Jixiang, "Let's go look for your sister. The funeral will be held early tomorrow morning."

**

Compared with the earth-shaking changes in the village, the changes in the back mountain are minimal and almost negligible.

The path remained the same, a narrow, foot-worn path, muddy and sandy beneath his feet, devoid of any signs of repair. Xu Sirui, backpack on his back, walked further into the village, finding the light from the village lights diminishing, and visibility becoming increasingly difficult. To avoid missing a step and falling down the slope, he resorted to using the flashlight on his phone.

Some of the grassy areas hidden deep in the woods still had traces of snow from a few days ago, and when the flashlight shone on them, they cast a blinding white glow.

He walked with one foot deep and one foot shallow, his shoes sinking into the wet soil. When he pulled them out, a lot of soil was brought out around the edge of the shoes. Occasionally, when he stepped on dry grass leaves, they would make crisp and loud crackling sounds.

The tiny sounds seemed particularly abrupt in the cold and silent forest.

Under normal circumstances, Xu Sirui knew that he would be scared and think of all sorts of things, but tonight, for the first time in his life, he didn't think of anything and was only calm, probably because he knew that he was not the only one in the mountains.

He knew Zhu Yingning was here.

The mountain turtles at the entrance of the cave had withered as early as the arrival of autumn and winter. Now only a piece of yellow-brown dead vines remained, tangled around both sides of the cave entrance. In the middle, there was a hole large enough for a person to pass through. It was pitch black inside, like a huge man-eating abyss.

He pushed aside the few remaining dead vines and actively put himself into the esophagus of the huge mouth.

The cave was not high, and when he came here before, he had to bend down and squat to get in. Now it was even more cramped, and he had to kneel on the ground and support himself with one hand.

The flashlight swept across, clearly illuminating the deepest part of the cave. She was huddled in a corner of the cave wall, her head buried between her knees, her black hair hanging down and scattered on her knees, her ears, red from the cold air, faintly visible among her black hair.

The narrow cave was instantly filled with light. He knew she must have noticed it because her left hand hanging on the ground moved slightly. After a moment, her head slowly raised up, and her eyes narrowed because she couldn't adapt to the bright light. Her face had a numb expression, with the confusion of just waking up, and it seemed as if she hadn't closed her eyes for a long time.

To avoid blinding her, he shone the flashlight underground. The light on the cave wall dimmed a little, blurring the edges of her shadow.

In that dim light, he and she looked at each other silently.

She didn't ask him why he came.

He didn't ask her why she was hiding there.

The faint light of the flashlight burned faintly in her eyes, jumping like a flame, sometimes fading, sometimes suddenly bright.

It seemed as if the concept of time was lost in the cave. After an unknown amount of time, Xu Sirui opened his left arm towards her.

She changed her kneeling posture, straightened her upper body, took a few steps forward on her knees, reached out and hugged him, hooked her arms around his shoulders and neck, and buried her cold face in his shoulder.

He put his arms around her waist, turned off the flashlight with his right hand, threw away the phone, and gently put his hands behind her back to help her.

Zhu Yingning was dressed very lightly. She had taken off her coat and put it aside, leaving her wearing only a sweater which was better than nothing. After holding her for a while, he noticed that every inch of her exposed skin was cold, so he unzipped his jacket, pulled her in, and adjusted his posture in the dark of the cave, leaning her back against the wall so that she could sit more comfortably in his arms.

This posture was not particularly beautiful, because his legs could not be stretched out at all. If he bent them, they would hurt her, and if he straightened them, he would step on the opposite wall of the cave. He could only half-bend them awkwardly.

Fortunately, the cramped space wasn't without its advantages. Soon, he felt the frail body in his arms gradually warm, like frozen buns softening in a steamer. She held onto him, still hunched in his embrace, and he himself didn't want to remind her to let go. The voluptuous night melted the boundaries of daytime decorum. He lowered his head, touched her still-red ear with his cool lips, and held her tighter.

After a while, he touched her head and whispered, "I thought you would cry."

But in fact, she was not crying.

Zhu Yingning shook her head against his neck, her voice muffled, as if she had just woken up, weak and a little unclear: "I can't cry."

If she was only facing the death of one loved one, she might really cry bitterly in this vulnerable yet comforted moment, but after losing two loved ones in a short period of just a few days, her mood could no longer be simply described as crying.

Sad? Maybe. But more than anything, it feels absurd, powerless, and unreal.

"They left before I could do anything," she said.

She was silent for a long time, so long that a light rain began to fall outside the cave. Only then did she open her mouth again and slowly say many words to him.

"Xu Sirui, my father was just a stranger to you. He died, and you probably thought he was dead, without feeling much." She said softly, "In fact, he was bedridden for so many years, in a coma for so many years, that he was almost a stranger to our whole family. I have forgotten what it was like to get along with him, and I have also forgotten what he was like when he was healthy. We all knew he wouldn't get better, and we had vaguely prepared ourselves for this moment, but I didn't expect him to pass away so suddenly at this moment..."

"I used to think that if he were gone, I wouldn't feel much, just a little sadness at best. How much can one feel about something one has already prepared for, about someone destined to be apart? But now that he's gone, his image has suddenly become clear in my mind. These past few days, I've been thinking about those days constantly."

"It's nothing profound, just insignificant details. Before I started school, I was very naughty. I set off firecrackers without knowing how to hide. I crouched very close to them, hoping to see how they exploded. My father saw me, picked me up, and beat me with a cane. On my first exam in elementary school, I got first place in the class, and the teacher gave me a homemade certificate. I brought it home, and he was very happy, saying he had done the right thing by sending me to school."

"He was quite pedantic. If I didn't do the housework, he'd always be the first to lose his temper, saying that girls who didn't do housework would be despised by their in-laws and wouldn't even be able to get married. But one day, I came home with 'How the Steel Was Tempered' that I'd borrowed from Teacher Chen. I've always remembered him sitting by the door smoking that day. He saw the book in my hand and asked me what it was about. I said it was about the struggle for the proletariat."

“What is the proletariat?”

Maybe he was in a good mood that day, Zhu Dashan shook off the cigarette ashes and asked this question.

Young Zhu Yingning then spoke eloquently about the proletariat she had read about in books, the May Fourth Movement, and modern history. When she got excited, she mustered her courage, jumped onto a stone at the door, raised her right hand, straightened her chest, and shouted, "Chairman Mao once said: Women hold up half the sky!"

After she finished speaking, she thought she would be ridiculed again, or urged to go into the house to do housework, but after she finished speaking, Zhu Dashan said, "That sounds good. Why don't you become a person like that in the future?"

"Of course, my father quickly forgot he had said this. These thoughts were like rain falling on his mind, briefly nourishing his thoughts, and then evaporating. It wasn't just my father, my mother was the same way."

"When you get along with her, you might think she's a petty, selfish, and weak woman, bad in every way. When she was young, she especially hated my grandmother because she always gave her a hard time. My mother cursed her to death more than once. But once, my grandmother had a heart attack. We were not at home at the time. My brother and I were in school, and my father was working in another city. She pushed my grandmother to the town hospital in a tattered cart, and both her feet were bleeding."

"She always told me that as an older sister, I should give in to my younger brother. Most of the time, she asked me to do this because she did the same to her own brother. But it was strange. One year, on my brother's and my birthday, there was only one chicken drumstick left at home. During the day, she cooked the chicken drumstick for my brother, but at night, she suddenly ran to a neighbor's house, traded one of her dowry earrings for a piece of foreign chocolate from the neighbor's house, and secretly brought the chocolate to me. She only did that once, and on the following birthdays, everything returned to normal."

"I used to be trapped by family relationships because I always had to wonder whether they loved me or not. Whenever I concluded they didn't love me, they would suddenly seem to treat me well. Whenever I believed in their love, they would personally shatter my illusions."

"These past few years of poverty alleviation work have slowly made me realize that some people in this world lack a self-consistent logical system. My father and mother were like that. Their logic comes from outside. When the outside world they live in has long brainwashed them with a certain idea, they will accept it as the truth without considering whether it is reasonable. When they occasionally come across new and trendy ideas, those ideas may cause their behavior to show some unusual flashes of light, but these flashes are short-lived and ultimately cannot overcome deeply rooted ideas." "There is no need to investigate the meaning of their actions or words, because they themselves don't understand."

"After I figured it out, I gradually stopped expecting their love. I no longer asked for anything from them despite their poverty, nor did I need their love to fill the void in me. I began to treat them as my poverty alleviation targets, wondering if I had the ability to provide them with something in return. For example, my mother, I never expected her to be 100% awakened, that's unrealistic, but as long as she could awaken 10%, 20%, as long as she could realize for a moment that women can live for themselves - as long as that moment exists, my work will not be in vain."

"If we give up on them, there are so many people like them who deserve to be given up, including the village where I work now. Many villagers are not much better off than my parents. But I often think that if I can inject a moment into their generation, the brilliance of this moment may illuminate their next generation. Generation after generation, things will always get better, and fewer and fewer people will be hurt."

"But my father died before he could see that moment... This is what I regret. Xu Sirui, there is still too little I can do."

At this point, the tears that had been welling up in her eyes finally fell. She gave a wry smile and said, "Okay... now I can cry."

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Author's words: Sorry there's only one chapter tonight [Please] I beg you to update more tomorrow