The cat that doesn't exist
Perhaps we should start from the beginning.
My name is Xu Ranxing. My father, Old Xu, is an electrician named Xu Feng. My mother, Ms. Zhang, a very modest and gentle teacher, is named Zhang Can.
I have a twin sister named Xu Ping and a brother who is never at home.
Eleven years ago, my young sister Pingping passed away suddenly due to illness. The long-term pain and suffering made Pingping's death very light, like a dried flower that had long since withered and died.
Despite our extreme sadness over her passing, my family and I even felt a little relieved, knowing that she would no longer have to suffer from the pain of illness.
The reason why she was still lying on the sickbed despite her condition at that time was entirely because we, her family members, were forcing her to stay in the world out of painful selfishness.
So that day in the ward, after she barely woke up, she gently asked my brother for help, asking me to help her and persuade her family to give up.
After that day, we sent Pingping away to sleep peacefully forever, and the whole family fell into an inescapable quagmire.
Three years later, in this still depressing atmosphere, my brother, who was two years older than me, left home in silence, as if he had regarded himself as the executioner.
In the eight years since then, apart from occasional text messages and money sent during the New Year holidays, he has not had any contact with his family. As for me, he only sends me a birthday gift every year and asks if my family is doing well.
But he probably didn't expect that as time passed, my parents' grief became more and more intense, and in the end they were completely unable to face the fact that my face and my twin sister's face were almost identical.
Sometimes at night, when I cooked noodles for my dazed and weak parents and persuaded them to eat a little, my mother would look at my face and burst into tears or even faint. My father would often be absent-minded and stay in a daze in the room until dark.
Only when I'm not at home can my parents take a brief respite from the pain of losing their screen.
At the age of fifteen, I was very immature. After some hesitation, I chose to quietly leave home and go to another place. At first, I concealed my age and said that I had a baby face and was young. I did odd jobs with the tacit approval of some kind bosses. When I grew up, I opened a small grocery store to make a living.
I shamelessly begged my former neighbors and friends to take good care of my parents, and sadly, as time passed and my body grew, I noticed that my appearance was slowly becoming different from Pingping's, erasing the last trace of Pingping's presence in the world.
Unlike me, my brother has my mother’s surname. His name is Zhang Tianyi.
After not seeing each other for eight years, it was absurd and blackly humorous that we met again in this strange deep lake, surrounded by countless floating corpses. I almost didn't recognize him, and I completely forgot that the song "Pulling Carrots" he hummed was the most common song he used to coax Pingping to sleep when he was a child.
When their eyes met, the two people who only reported good news but never bad news looked at each other with great unfamiliarity.
At this moment, everything I experienced on the road, including all the details around me, emerged in my mind, and I felt an unknown panic.
I should have thought of this earlier. Unlike me, after Pingping's death completely tore our family apart, my choice was to let time heal the pain. But my brother was unwilling to give up. He wanted to get Pingping back.
This conclusion made me feel like I was falling into an icy cave.
I have been through it, and I know full well that there is probably no hope to be found in these weird stories.
When facing other guys, I can be indifferent, make my own inferences, try adventures, yearn or be curious. Or shed hypocritical tears for someone's death.
But my brother, one of the few family members I have in the world, must not be here.
But I also knew that I had no right to persuade him at this moment. What could I say? To make him forget, to make the last person in the world who was still gritting his teeth and trying to give up Ping Ping?
Pingping's life only stopped at the age of twelve.
"Zhang Tianyi! Tell me what happened!" I almost yelled, "Brother!" I grabbed his sleeve tightly, my stomach aching, and I blurted out, "Take me with you, take me with you. You saw it! I can handle this!"
He looked at me coldly: "Who's going home then?"
I was stunned and felt cold all over.
"I know it's impossible, and I never thought of turning Pingping into those monsters." He said in a very hoarse voice. He probably looked me up and down and smiled, "I just gave myself an explanation."
But I'm already involved, I said angrily, there's no way I can quit now. My voice was completely trembling as I begged.
I don’t know how to choose. If I don’t choose, I will throw a tantrum.
He looked at me helplessly, but his eyes soon returned to being cold again.
The best way to deal with me is to not talk to me at all and not give me any chance to resist. He helped the unconscious cat up, moved his body, ripped off his sleeves and swam to the shore.
This was so sudden that I almost vomited blood. I watched in despair as he put the cat down, turned back into the water, and dived straight into the deep water.
The tree roots floating around the corpses were like living things, flowing along the water and climbing onto him. He broke them one by one, pushed aside the corpses, searched among them, then turned around and made a gesture to me.
Damn, from the look on his face just now, I thought he was going to leave me like this.
This bastard, I calmed myself down and resisted the urge to curse. I picked up the mining lamp he left for me and shone the light over to clear the way for him.
The next moment, he dug out a living person from the floating water who seemed to be just unconscious.
When I saw the familiar equipment on the man, my mind buzzed. My brother, no, the damn Zhang Tianyi had already reached out and tore off the air roots on the man's back and body, kicked the water around to get behind him, and floated him up to the surface.
Those roots seemed to have the function of providing oxygen. Once they were torn off, the unconscious man immediately twitched and choked on water, and his face quickly turned purple.
Without any words, I immediately moved the light, and the mining lamp drew a moving line on the water surface.
With a splash, two people broke out of the water, and the unconscious person was turned over and placed on the ground to spit out the water.
Zhang Tianyi didn't stop, he turned back and entered the water again.
After a while, I don't know how he identified them, but one by one, the guys I was familiar with were pulled out from among the floating corpses and dragged ashore.
After going back and forth like this for about seven or eight times, he stopped for a moment and began to warm his hands and feet again on the shore. Water dripped from his feet and formed a small puddle.
I was worried about the lives of the other guys, and I was also terrified that he would suddenly lose his strength and drown if he continued like this. He moved a little, his chest rose and fell violently in the light, and he turned his eyes seriously and stared into my eyes.
"Of course, there's a big guy down there. So I'll explain some things first, and then go down to rescue the rest. Your position is the safest, don't move."
My heart skipped a beat and I forced a smile, trying to change the subject by asking how old I was and why I was still called by a nickname that I had stopped using when I was eleven or twelve.
"——Xu Ranxing." He said seriously.
Silence, a moment of almost suffocating silence. My mouth felt bitter, and I could only shut up and look at him.
"In order to give you a systematic understanding of the whole situation, I will quickly start from how you accidentally got involved in this matter half a year ago."
When he was rescuing people just now, he also fished out a backpack. He took out a thick blanket and aluminum foil for warmth and insulation from the waterproof compression bag, swam over slowly, threw them to me from some distance, and put the cat back into my arms.
Seeing the cat wrapped up completely and dried in my arms, his face turned from blue to red. He threw me some compressed dry food and stared at me while I ate it.
Then he began to tell the story.
This is a completely erroneous story, and it sounds ridiculous to me now.
Half a year ago, Xu You came to the Chengdong community, which is half a city away from me.
At this point, no one knew where he had been or what he had experienced, but he arrived in a completely distorted and mutated state, extremely tired and in a disheveled state.
Following him came the "post box" which was about to be completely formed after several years.
Under the shadow of this strange story, the first thing that spontaneously changed in the entire city was the number of people going out in the evening.
In the East City Community, the night after about six or seven o'clock has fallen into an abrupt silence, and this uneasiness that is imperceptible to ordinary people is spreading at a very slow speed to the Rongxiang Community where I live.
Compared with ignorant humans, animals are more alert. Large numbers of stray cats and dogs migrate and disappear restlessly, often wailing silently for no reason at night.
At this time, a little tabby cat that had accidentally hidden in the unformed guard post and was nearly hunted by the alienated Xu You escaped to our community and caught up with the daily cat food delivery.
The partially contaminated little tabby cat did not realize that once the "gestation" began, it could no longer be seen normally. At this time, for most people, it did not exist.
Then, Xu You came, following the footsteps of the little tabby cat that was fleeing in panic, and caught up with me who came out to feed it.
He followed me back into the store.
At that time, I had never been exposed to ghost stories and was unaware of many strange things. Compared to that weird world, I was still a simple blind person.
I took him as an ordinary customer and did not notice that Xu You was peeling off the skin piece by piece while sorting the inventory and chatting casually out of habit, hoping to trick the new customer into buying something.
The little tabby cat howled loudly at my feet and turned around in panic.
But at this point, I still had no idea and asked, "Guest, do you need anything?"
Then, the "sentry booth" came.
All the members were present, but the rules of the post were still changing constantly and had not yet been stabilized. Perhaps it was some kind of luck that allowed Xu You to wake up for a second. As a product of complete distortion, he vaguely felt the content of some of the rules of the post.
He immediately made an act of self-rescue.
He started to make up a news story for me, about how a homeless man, halfway outside the city, attacked cats and dogs in a miserable and horrifying manner due to his unconsciousness, and was discovered and forked out by the community security.
This piece of news was very explosive, but no one was hurt and it happened in the far east of the city. I stopped what I was doing immediately and asked him curiously to tell me the details.
Afraid that he would be unhappy, I casually grabbed a cheap 1.5 yuan lighter and handed it to him, then shamelessly put my arm around his shoulder and called him brother.
At this moment, it was like some strange sound buzzing in his ears, and Xu You's adventure had results that he himself did not expect.
Under the warm and enthusiastic gaze of my "family member", Xu You instinctively told me a detailed story for more than an hour, until I was embarrassed to interrupt him and said it was closing time, and he gradually regained consciousness.
Then he took out his entire wallet (which he actually didn't lose), said goodbye to me while carrying a bunch of things, and nodded silently when I said "I'll come next time" with all my heart.
Next, the second day, the third day, the fourth day, and I don’t know how many days passed, customers came and went in my shop.
Coincidentally, every day, a customer who looks familiar but I can't recognize comes to my door and mentions the news about the homeless man.
Since every gossip boss was very generous, I never got bored and always listened with great interest.
Unfortunately, just when I was almost able to memorize the news by heart, this news that was so popular that it supported my sales for most of the year, suddenly, one day, no one talked to me about it anymore, which made me very disappointed.
Once, a homeless man in a hurry passed by my shop, and I looked outside for a long time with some anticipation.
Hearing this, my expression became complicated.
"That is to say... I thought my hard work was finally paying off, and the shop was suddenly flooded with customers." I paused, feeling a little sad.
"In fact, it was just Xu You, who relied on the characteristics of the Mud Demon to repeatedly refresh in front of my door to cheat the buff. He wanted to bully me because I couldn't recognize him, right? How come he has so many wallets?"
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