Dancing Neighbors (Part 4) (Corrected typos)
Not to mention how shocked and frightened Niu Biaoxi and Gou Junshi were after hearing the little girl's extremely weird words, when we reviewed the incident to this point, we all had different expressions on our faces and associated it with many events.
"Tou'er Yan, you said the problem has been solved. You don't mean..." Team leader Zhang Jia glanced at Doctor Hu, and hesitated to speak.
"The prophet is dead, and the fake people attached to it are all dead too." Yan Mo's expression remained unchanged, and he said unkindly, "All possible hidden dangers about them have indeed disappeared."
My eyelids jumped: "That little girl, from what we can see now, is indeed a fake person."
Moreover, she seemed to be related to that Taiwanese guy who was considered to be a loner and crazy among the fake people.
[Someone is watching over the rats in the wall], I have the impression that Taizi vaguely said something similar. But most of his crazy talk has no result. With the death of the prophet, as Yan Mo said, all the disguises of the pseudo-man have been forcibly ended, and I have never forced it.
However, a piece of the puzzle about Tai Tsai has become clearer. It turns out that he was looking for the wall in order to find the banyan tree to make a wish and to overcome the prophet's cognitive confusion.
That's right, the fake man cannot get close to the core of the ghost story, otherwise he will become weird and crazy. He will never be able to reach the lake and the banyan tree by himself. No wonder he has to settle for the second best and look for the rat in the wall.
But the world is indeed ironic and unpredictable. The wall that Taizai had tried his best to find in his entire life was accidentally found by the little girl who had no intention of finding it.
Also, the so-called part-time teacher named Nian. I had a thought and restrained myself from looking at Sanyi. I wondered if the Nian was the missing Nian Huairen. What was he going to do by catching the fake person? The little girl said he should be dead, but what did that mean? Could it be that he had also become a rat in the wall?
Yan Mo continued, saying that the good friend that the little girl made, who was also her unconscious prey target, was called Li Zhaoying, who lived on the sixth floor and was the opposite neighbor of the social animal who had a broken head and needed stitches. From this rather poetic name, we know that this is a child that her family has high expectations for.
At that time, Xu You followed the clues and found his neighbor, who said there was a little girl who met the requirements, but he had no idea about the phone call. He was a step too late and found Li Zhaoying, the genuine owner.
For the convenience of narration, Yan Mo will also use Li Zhaoying to refer to the one-to-one rubbing version of the little pseudo-man.
However, Li Zhaoying's "nonsense" was literally so literal that both Niu Biaoxi and Gou Junshi were stunned and could not digest it at all for a while.
In the past, it was not uncommon to meet those people who claimed that they were not human, but some strange fairy or demon. But now, they both felt that the little girl's ambiguous self-introduction was probably true.
Niu Biaoxi struggled a bit, but his instincts, which had been cultivated from years of being a thief and being beaten, also alerted him, warning him not to go any deeper, and he finally backed off and tried to play dumb. However, Li Zhaoying did not give him a chance and asked him a strange and somewhat creepy question, asking him if he had ever seen a goldfish.
Whale? Or goldfish?
What goldfish? Niu Biao likes to laugh dryly. He starts to make conversation and says, "Haha, this seems to be the word used by weird uncles like me. We have a new era and a new style. Children should not learn nonsense words blindly."
Li Zhaoying did not let him go, and said to himself:
"Have you ever seen those little rockeries in fish tanks? If a fish gets stuck in the cracks of the rocks, it can't move and can only wait to die."
Niu Biaoxi said hoarsely: "...Don't say anymore."
"--How can she escape if there's a very hungry carnivore waiting to come in from outside the fish tank at any moment?"
"Stop talking!"
Niu Biaoxi shouted, his face pale. Although he had some good intentions, he was still a thief after all, and his morals were definitely not high. He stood up in regret, determined to send this evil little girl away immediately, as far away as possible.
Li Zhaoying was still sitting on the sofa, motionless, and almost aggressive, each word faster than the last:
"Although the goldfish can't run away by herself, she can ask passers-by to pick up the entire fish tank and carry her away to a place where predators can't see her. In this way, she will have a chance to try to break free from the rockery."
"—I said, stop talking."
Niu Biaoxi gritted his teeth and said, "I don't care whether you are a human or a ghost. I don't understand what you mean by clothes or walls and I don't want to ask anymore."
He bowed to Li Zhaoying fiercely and said, "We have no grudges in the past and no hatred in the present. Just let it go, brothers."
After saying that, he knelt down without hesitation and kowtowed three times to Li Zhaoying.
Li Zhaoying couldn't help but be silent. She looked at him for a while before saying calmly, "Okay, I won't embarrass you."
Niu Biaoxi felt relieved at once, and he kowtowed to her respectfully several times, until his forehead turned black. Then he wiped the cold sweat from his palms and reached out to pick up Li Zhaoying from the sofa again.
As soon as he held her in his hand, he felt that the little girl was so light that he could hardly feel her weight, reminding him that she was not some Tianshan Tonglao, but just a child of school age, just the right age to act like a spoiled child in her parents' arms.
Niu Biaoxi felt a little uncomfortable for some unknown reason. The joy of having escaped the disaster by chance had disappeared. He looked down and saw that the child's forehead was covered with cold sweat and he was obviously still trembling slightly.
He stopped for a moment, and something suddenly clicked in his mind. He thought that this little girl was really good at bluffing. Although she pretended to be an adult and a troublemaker, it seemed that she was still afraid from beginning to end.
She said all this obviously because she saw that Brother Niu was trying to meddle in other people's business, so she deliberately scared me away to avoid implicating me.
Turning his head to look at Gou Biao again, he saw that the dog-headed military advisor said nothing, as if he had thought of something and disappeared. It was obvious that he understood the little girl's painstaking efforts, so he simply went with the flow and wanted to keep the leader out of the matter.
Niu Biaoxi's face changed several times, and he felt his heart and chest were hot, and his face was burning. He couldn't help but faint and shouted:
"You two are so loyal, what do you think of me, Old Niu? Little brat, you are so young, but you know how to protect your good friend and lead her away from trouble. You are also kind and righteous. Am I not a good guy? Can I watch you get into trouble?"
As soon as these words were spoken, Military Advisor Gou sighed, accepted his fate and closed his eyes.
Seeing that Niu Biaoxi was about to speak, Military Advisor Gou waved his hand and said, "You want to say that you don't want to betray your brothers, so let me go and come back in a few days when the situation is safe, right?"
Niu Biao was choked with joy, and saw that Military Advisor Gou was furious. He angrily cursed him as a loser and pointed at him and scolded him harshly.
Tired of scolding, Gou Junshi seemed to be still angry. He hugged Li Zhaoying back and sat on the sofa with a firm attitude. If Niu Biaoxi continued to nag, they would probably have nothing to do with each other.
Well, now that things have come to this, Niu Biaoxi was embarrassed. It was difficult for them to coax each other between grown men. He really couldn't lose face, so he had to pretend that the previous things had not happened. He asked: "Auntie, now that it has come to this, what else is there to worry about? Just tell me everything?"
Li Zhaoying was silent for a moment, but was somewhat moved. She finally turned her head and quietly wiped her eyes, revealing a bit of a childish demeanor, and whispered:
"I'm actually in so much pain."
When asked what happened, she couldn't find a specific word to express it accurately. According to her, after she completed a targeted stealing from the real Li Zhaoying and stole the other party's original connection with the "wall", she felt that her vision had undergone an extremely strange change.
She saw some obstructions that shouldn't have been there.
It was like some kind of long and narrow cavity, a riverbed exposed after drying up, or an empty pupa abandoned by hatched insects. In short, it was as if the world around me had turned into a crudely made honeycomb briquettes, full of pores that shouldn't be there.
Through those gaps, Li Zhaoying had a crazy illusion, feeling as if he could see through them and touch things that should be somewhere else.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “so I tried to throw things into those spaces where there weren’t supposed to be any. Toys, picture books, snacks, journals, anything I could think of that wasn’t too big.”
"Then something strange happened."
Li Zhaoying touched his dull and unfocused eyes and said, "I found that children like Xiaoying are not isolated cases. They, or maybe they, actually got what I threw out and responded to me by chance."
At first, it was just a difference in distance. The children seemed to think they had found a rabbit hole that only existed in fairy tales. They treated it as a surprise little secret and shared gifts with each other randomly.
But slowly, things started to go wrong.
Li Zhaoying found that the "time" of some gifts was very strange. How to say it, it seemed like they had been out of date for a long time. Logically, they should have been out of fashion among their peers, so it was not easy to buy them.
Some of the notes the children exchanged described the seasons and weather, and there were also some unreasonable contradictions.
But the exchanges between those pores seemed to be irregular, and Li Zhaoying had no way to find the owner of the gift to verify it.
She had gradually relaxed over the past few days and began to have strong doubts and fears about this seemingly dreamy and harmless "rabbit hole". She once again thought of the crazy words said by that "relative" and how she had made up her mind in fear to take away this terrible connection from her good friend Xiaoying.
It was at that time that Li Zhaoying unexpectedly received a children's picture album.
There are some notes written in the blank spaces of the album. The characters are childish and distorted, not very pretty. More than 90% of them are in pinyin, with many mistakes and omissions. But the structure is very clear, and many questions are recorded. It can be seen that the owner of the album is probably a young child of the same age as Xiaoying, who may not have officially started school yet, but just learned some common characters in advance with his family.
The other party asked: "My dear friend who received the gift, do you feel that we seem to have become less?"
Li Zhaoying stared at the line of words for a while before he was sure what the other party meant. He instinctively recalled the number of gifts he had received in recent days, and his mind suddenly became confused and he was unable to think.
"There is one thing I didn't figure out before going to bed." The child wrote in the next line, "Generally speaking, just like a hole dug in the mother's flower pot to bury the seeds, the hole is formed because there is soil around it, but the bubble channel we exchange gifts is also empty and non-existent. What should be the surroundings that really make it exist?"
"If I crawl into the bubble tunnel by myself, will I get stuck on its sides?"
"Will it take me away and share me with you like a gift?"
The seemingly childish words almost made Li Zhaoying tremble all over. She found that the child was right. They were now like a group of fools playing in a pile of pine needles, only caring about stepping on the broken shells of insects on the ground with their feet, but never thinking about what left the empty shells all over the ground, and how far those things were from the newly shed skins.
The child was so perceptive that it was a little scary. Just as she said, what was important and what should be looked at was never the pores, but the things that gave shape to the pores.
Li Zhaoying seemed to sense something and looked around. At that moment, she felt like she had lost her footing and fallen. The honeycomb-like world took away her way of retreat. She was stuck in countless gaps and trapped in a frozen and cramped space, leaving only an extremely narrow space for movement.
"From that moment on, I couldn't see clearly." Li Zhaoying murmured to Niu Biaoxi, "My eyes seemed to be cast in there, as if the outside of my pupils was filled with compacted mud, so that I could only see the scene over there. But the mud was sticky and wet, as if something had just crawled past and brushed past me."
"I was so scared that I didn't dare to move forward or backward. I was afraid to go into those gaps. They were too narrow and I couldn't breathe. It hurt me so much."
"When I woke up, I was already in that room. The man surnamed Nian was dead, his body lying on the floor, covered in blood."
She paused, as if she had trouble facing the scene in her memory, and her tone suddenly became unusually strange. "There was a very small shadow there. I smashed open the bedroom wall and tried to stuff him in to hide him. But I don't know what went wrong. He was stuffed next to me, squeezed in, and squeezed in with me."
Niu Biaoxi's heartbeat suddenly stopped for a moment. He didn't know why, but the subtle changes in the little girl in front of him made him feel an indescribable fear and strangeness.
"You know what? That Nian is dead. I'm sure it's just an ordinary corpse, without any deformities. He's definitely not something like us."
Li Zhaoying said softly, staring straight at Niu Biaoxi, "But he turned his head to look at me. He saw me."
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