Where is the cat?
Faced with this smile, my alarm bells went off.
"What did you do wrong? Is it enough to warrant a sentence of more than ten years in prison?" The more I thought about it, the more I felt something was wrong. "I support killing one's relatives for the greater good, brother, please explain it to me."
It's not that I'm heartless, it's just that the Zhang family is a bunch of lunatics and idiots. No matter how you look at them, they don't seem like the type who would commit crimes.
How evil must Zhang Tianyi be to have to hide his identity and wander around everywhere?
I just don't believe he could be framed or misunderstood, that would be too stupid.
Could it be... I thought to myself: "Split personality? Hypnosis? It can't be some ridiculous trick like amnesia. Did you delete the entire database and run away?"
Seeing that I was going off topic, he had no choice but to stop me from talking nonsense, saying that it was something that everyone in the Zhang family knew about, and asked me to come back and ask in detail.
I wondered, "Why don't you just say it directly?"
Could it be that I'm misleading, and that he has done something shameful and is just too embarrassed to talk about it now?
Zhang Tianyi said, time is precious, can you give me a question that others cannot explain, and let me ask something else.
One question for another?
This proposal was clearly a trap. I angrily said no way, but after a while, I couldn't help but be curious:
"What's your question? I want to hear it."
Zhang Tianyi was going to send a voice message, which made me very excited. I simply switched to a call. His voice came over in the still noisy background, and he even asked me a question first:
“How was your last experience?”
I was suspicious, isn't this nonsense? Ghost stories are all traps, how can I feel anything?
Although I have roughly sorted out some things, and felt a sense of sudden enlightenment when I woke up, I can't avoid the fear that will follow.
People can easily distinguish between malice and lies, and can intuitively avoid harm. However, from the several strange stories I have experienced, the rules themselves are extremely ambiguous and obscure, and are not aimed at anyone or intended to harm anyone, and there is no malice or deception. Therefore, it is very insidious and difficult to deal with, and it is easy to trigger the rules and face a dead end.
He also asked me what I thought of ghost stories.
I was lost in thought.
If you want to be serious, after experiencing the sentry box, the pit, the banyan tree and the goddess, the rules of the several strange stories are completely different; but when experiencing them, there are always many seemingly similar traces, which makes me feel that there seems to be some closer connection behind these strange stories.
I once made a metaphor for myself, saying that a blind man is touching an elephant in a room. The elephant is so huge that the man can only touch a part of it at a time. When the man touches the ear or the leg of the elephant, he will have completely unrelated fantasies about the image of the elephant in the room, thinking that these are two different things.
At this time, the blind man would not be aware of the existence of the elephant, nor would he realize how the ears and the elephant's legs could be the same thing.
If someone tells a blind person this very simple truth, he will compare the ear and the elephant's leg and find that the two details are confusing and contradictory. He will be unable to understand and will fall into madness.
Although I have always said that the travel agency was a group of idiots, they actually regarded the banyan tree and the goddess as one, and thus made a series of upside-down operations, concocting the tragedy of two world lines within a time scale of eight years, causing endless harm.
But perhaps they just accidentally predicted a deeper truth.
However, if this speculation is true, it would be too scary. If there really is an "elephant in the room", then as a blind person, when you are groping in the dark and accidentally get trampled by the elephant or stabbed by its tusks, you have no way of observing and avoiding it.
At this time, facing my vague worries, Zhang Tianyi said:
"So my question is: Where was the cat in this previous experience?"
Dongzai suddenly heard someone mention him, and meowed curiously on my knees. I stroked the cat from time to time, and for a moment I didn't understand what the question was about.
What does "Where's the cat" mean?
Isn't Dongzai always here? Although I once lost sight of this little fat cat and completely forgot about its existence, it has been with me through all kinds of things.
Wait, I suddenly paused.
I stopped what I was doing and, somewhat belatedly, picked up the cat and looked carefully at its intact legs.
...Where is Dongzai's injury? He should be injured.
When I was trapped on the bluestone, I and the tourists found a backpack in the stream. Dongzai was hiding in the backpack, and ducked into the water to find us.
Although that was Gao Liu's perspective, I also experienced everything and remember the details very clearly. At that time, Dongzai's broken leg was tied with a towel that was only available in the hostel, with a warning message from the team leader, reminding "me" to be careful with the headphones and mirrors.
This was also what awakened "me" and made Gao Liu realize who he was.
Thinking of this, my face suddenly changed.
No, in this whole incident, everything seemed to be closed. The only exception was this short experience of Dongzai, which had no connection with anything before and after.
Where is the cat?
The cat does not exist. It is not in this closed loop.
There is no answer that can tell me in which "story" it found me, or why it got hurt. It's better to say that in the whole environment, it seems that there is no situation that would cause it to get hurt alone.
It was like someone had thrown an extra, thick, and abrupt dot of paint on a beautiful painting. The lack of logic confused me for a moment.
Could it be that, like the female corpse in the pit, this was an independent incident that was out of place, and that this was some new strange story that left its mark? Could it be that Dongzai's fracture was caused in some other place and at some other time?
My head suddenly became as big as a bucket.
If I have to nest and string together some new weird stories and new closed loops, I really can't bear it. If it really comes to that, it will be almost the inevitable arrangement of fate, and there will be no room for struggle at all, so why bother to struggle?
Fortunately, things did not reach the worst, and Zhang Tianyi gave me another reason this time.
He said, "You've heard about how many people in the Zhang family often went missing and had to change their surnames. Your cat is [missing] just like those people."
What does it mean to be lost? At this time, the word seems to have more than just a literal meaning.
And I vaguely realized that Zhang Tianyi seemed to be talking about himself even though he was talking about cats. After we met again, I often felt that he was also like Dongzai in some things, contradictory and "non-existent".
Next, in order to help me fully understand [getting lost], Zhang Tianyi explained it in great detail.
According to him, the Zhang family was initially gathered and established because of the [lost] incident, and that time point can be traced back to the Nestorian period of the Tang Dynasty.
At that time, there was a group of talented people who had encountered strange stories and survived.
What I want to say here is that they did not find the connection behind the strange stories, and did not discover the ultimate "elephant in the room".
But they discovered the aftermath of the strange story.
Even if people who have encountered ghost stories survive, they are more likely to encounter new ghost stories. It's like having their protective shell torn off and being bitten by something, and the state of safety and ignorance is gone forever.
At that time, people often attributed all the strange events they encountered to ghosts and fate. Some people naturally understood that if they encountered evil spirits, they would become more and more ignorant and stupid until they were completely possessed by ghosts.
So they made a lot of preparations, bringing out peach charms, Buddha statues, the cross that had just entered the west, etc., and held a ceremony to exorcise evil spirits.
"...They succeeded?" I couldn't help but interrupt him when I heard this. "It sounds like ordinary feudal superstition, isn't it?"
The ritual is indeed useless.
However, at this time there was a survivor who had probably experienced too many strange stories, and the common sense and order that protected him were very weak. After the ceremony, he reached a critical point and the situation changed.
He [got lost].
It is not alienation, not deformation, he did not turn into any evil ghost or demon, nor did he see the underworld.
He simply woke up and discovered that there were some subtle changes in the world that only he could perceive.
For example, his wife loves to eat maltose, but her sweet tooth has lessened. For example, he got married very early and already has grandchildren he loves, but his son and daughter-in-law passed away early, leaving the family with only the elderly to send off the young.
But that day, his son was sitting there eating breakfast peacefully, with a strange child in his arms.
In other words, this person, just like in movies and TV shows, traveled through time and space and came to a place that was very similar to the original world but with slight differences. No one around him knew about it, and he was the only one who retained his original memory.
Faced with his son's resurrection, the man was ecstatic and quickly accepted the changes in the world. He even began to be grateful for the strange stories he had encountered and firmly believed that the exorcism ritual must have worked.
However, just as he gradually adapted to the new world, without any warning, he found that the interpersonal relationships and some of his life experiences had changed again. This time, all his family members died at an early age, he survived alone, and the means of making a living that he had cultivated since childhood also changed.
"The records say that this person went missing four or five times in a row, and there was no pattern to the time intervals or the length of time he stayed."
Zhang Tianyi said: "When he has just overcome his pain, accepted his new life and gained some kind of warmth, this stability will soon be interrupted. Sometimes a good friend may be drinking with him one second, and the two of them may become enemies the next."
"He was unwilling to admit that he had lost his family and friends. Instead, he claimed that he had been abducted by some evil spirit similar to the flower-beating monster, that he was 'lost', and insisted on finding a way to go back."
“It may be lucky to get lost once in a while. But if you are constantly wandering and are forced to be unable to stop, and your life and all the memories around you are in danger at any moment, then it is a kind of pain that is difficult to end.
Especially when a happy life can go to ruin overnight, this is not something that ordinary people can accept calmly. "
"The original Zhang family was such a group of people. Because they had no evidence other than their memories, they couldn't prove whether they were delusional or not, and they couldn't prevent the bad luck of getting lost again at any time, so they gathered together."
Zhang Tianyi was over there, and seemed to be tapping the table lightly.
"——Back to the cat. Everyone who has encountered a strange story may become lost to some extent at some point in time. But sometimes the change is very small, so small that the person who is lost does not even notice it."
"Isn't the Zhang family's party about to start? The original purpose of this party is to allow this group of people to have a place to "go home" after getting lost, so that they are not completely without any ties. It is also used to observe each other and remind some people that their first loss has arrived."
"Ran Ran, it's not the cat or I don't exist. Do you understand?
If there is a certain experience among the three of us that does not completely match, if we are lucky, it may be due to a strange rule that we are not aware of yet but will eventually experience, just like the closed loop formed by the Goddess this time.
But it’s also possible that one of us is lost.”
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