Chapter 10 He's gay, so where did his child come from?
Su Mu is sleeping exceptionally well now.
The countryside at night possesses a natural, profound, and pure tranquility. It's not the kind of quiet in the city that's interrupted by air conditioner units, distant traffic, and the faint sounds of neighbors; rather, it's like a large, warm, sound-absorbing black velvet cloth gently enveloping the entire world.
The white noise was just right; it wasn't the simulated rain or stream in the headphones, it was real. It was the soft, continuous rustling sound of the old camphor tree outside the back window as the night wind blew through it, and the intermittent, rhythmic chirping of unknown insects in the distant rice paddies, rising and falling.
Occasionally, a dog bark or two would come from the far end of the village, piercing the night sky. These sounds blended together, becoming the perfect background noise, allowing him to fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow and sleep soundly through the night until dawn.
They eat regularly and healthily.
No social engagements, no takeout, no hastily stuffed food into your stomach just to save time.
Three meals a day were prepared by Su's mother using vegetables she grew herself, chickens she raised herself, and fresh bean products from the tofu shop at the village entrance, in a variety of ways.
It's light on oil and salt, but the flavor is real. A sip of hot soup can warm you up to your very core.
People generally go to bed early, and as soon as it gets completely dark, the lights are turned off one by one.
Sometimes, when he was bored out of his mind during the day, a vague, long-dormant restlessness would quietly surface in Su Mu's heart.
If Jiang Ran happens to call from a new number at this time, since he really has an endless supply of new numbers, Su Mu will answer every few calls, almost as if playing a prank.
What came from the other end of the phone was always Jiang Ran's hoarse, barely suppressed anger, threatening tone, or furious questioning.
Strangely, Su Mu listened without feeling scared or annoyed. Instead, a strange, tingling sensation spread through his heart, precisely arousing a deep, dormant excitement within him that was difficult to express.
Su Mu felt that he might actually have some unknown quirks.
The more ruthless Jiang Ran became towards him, the more intense her words, and the more possessive and destructive her tone, the more excited he felt...
The feeling of being needed and held tightly by another person so intensely, even in a negative way, strangely filled a certain unspeakable uncertainty and emptiness in his pregnancy.
Su Mu's complexion has visibly improved recently. He no longer looks like a wilted, pale cabbage that has been hit by frost in the ground.
Her skin had a healthy, rosy glow, with a luminous sheen, and her eyes looked much brighter.
Every day, Su's mother tried different ways to nourish her son's body. Seeing that he ate well, slept soundly, and his cheeks gradually became plump, she felt a great sense of accomplishment.
That evening after dinner, as she cleared the dishes, she looked at Su Mu, who was sitting on the sofa, idly touching his belly: "Son, look how well you look at home now, you look so healthy and energetic. I think you should just stop thinking about going out and stay here at home, and find something easy to do."
“Your dad and I only have you. Once this little one in your belly is born safely, we can help take care of it. You can go to work and do whatever you want. Isn’t that great? Being together as a family is better than anything else.”
Su Mu was holding his phone: "Let's talk about it later, Mom. This matter... can't be rushed."
"Ugh, really... This stupid phone keeps sending me all sorts of prenatal education tips, golden period for prenatal education, must-haves for new mothers, and the idea that you need to start looking for a good school district from the embryonic stage... It's giving me a headache."
Perhaps because he had searched for information related to prenatal checkups a few times, big data seemed to have finally captured the abnormal changes in his body and began to tirelessly bombard him with various parenting knowledge, advertisements for maternal and infant products, and terrifying predictions about future educational competition.
Su Mu simply uninstalled all the short video platforms.
On his day off, he had nothing to do, so he stayed home and played games on his phone.
The game was the simplest kind of match-3 puzzle, where brightly colored blocks disappeared with a crackling sound, and the volume was kept very low.
A message suddenly popped up at the top of my phone screen, from Thin Monkey.
Su Mu hesitated for a moment, then clicked on it anyway.
Skinny Monkey: Wood, are you there? What's going on between you and Young Master Jiang? He keeps coming to see me lately, asking if I've been in contact with you, if he knows where you are, and what you're doing. He's been asking so many questions, I can hardly keep up.
Jiang Ran's relentless drive to achieve his goal carried a stubbornness of a young master and a certain annoyance at being offended.
Su Mu finally saw it for himself.
He replied quickly, feigning nonchalance: "It's nothing, just like that. He's just acting impulsively for a while, he'll be fine in a bit, just ignore him."
Skinny Monkey: What's going on here? Weren't things fine before? How come you broke up with him so suddenly, and now he's looking for you all over the world like he's seeking revenge?
What's wrong?
What else could happen?
It was all because he was confused for a moment and stole Young Master Jiang's supposedly invaluable first time.
It's like picking a carefully cultivated, precious flower that everyone thinks is unattainable, only to find that besides being beautiful, it's nothing special, and even has thorns that prick you.
To make matters worse, he picked it and now he can't find anywhere to return it.
Now, the direct consequences are even worse.
He recalled a time in college when a group of people would gather at a barbecue stand, getting drunk and making inappropriate jokes.
I don't know who started it, but people said that Young Master Jiang comes from a good family, is good-looking, and has high standards. His chastity must be extremely precious and should be treated like a family heirloom. He shouldn't give it away easily, otherwise it would lower his value when he gets married in the future.
Jiang Ran was sitting right across from him at the time. Through the smoke swirling around the barbecue stall and the swaying beer foam, when she heard these words, she looked up and stared intently at Su Mu for several seconds.
Su Mu thought he had offended the young master by joining in the commotion, so he awkwardly shut his mouth.
However, driving a forklift made Su Mu's life much more leisurely.
Although the machines in the factory are running non-stop, and the bed boards and keels are being cut, polished, and assembled every day, forklifts are not needed for moving things all the time.
Most of the time, he only needs to be on standby or do some simple vehicle maintenance.
So, in his spare time, he liked to wander around the guardhouse.
The gatekeeper's surname is Zhao. He just turned fifty this year. He's a chatterbox and loves being around people. He's been divorced from his ex-wife for many years, and his daughter is studying at a university in another city. He only sees her a few times a year.
He guarded the factory gate alone and thought the place was quite nice. It wasn't too cold in winter and had a breeze in summer, which was much better than being exposed to the wind and sun outside. In his words, it was a place with warm springs and cool summers, a paradise.
His biggest hobby is live streaming. It's not the kind of serious talent show; he just holds up his phone, faces the road at the factory gate, faces the people and cars that occasionally come and go, faces the birds flying in the sky, or simply faces his own deeply wrinkled face, and chats about all sorts of things.
We talked about everything from international affairs to pork prices in the market, from my first love thirty years ago to the plot of the TV series I watched yesterday.
There aren't many people in the live stream room, just three or five regulars. Occasionally, a newcomer might accidentally wander in, and he'd greet them warmly for a long time.
The security guard was very persistent about creating the video together, mentioning it to Su Mu several times a day whenever he saw him.
"Little Su, just listen to your uncle's advice. I have experience and a good eye, but I'm old and I'm getting tired of seeing the same old thing. You, on the other hand, are different."
He said to Su Mu, "If you had my keen insight and willingness to go all out, you would have been a superstar by now. Listen to me, you're right. Just put your phone in front of you, you don't even need to say a word. Just drive your forklift, move your timber, do whatever you need to do, and leave the rest to me to film, edit, and add music. I guarantee it will be even more popular than the last one!"
To persuade Su Mu, he even dug out his video of "the factory worker driving a forklift" and held it up in front of Su Mu.
The number of likes on the screen was indeed staggering, with hundreds of thousands of red hearts densely packed together, and the comments were still constantly scrolling and refreshing.
The middle-aged man swiped his finger across the screen: "Look, look at this popularity, this traffic. So many people are waiting to see what happens next. This is market demand. If you don't make it, wouldn't that be a waste?"
Su Mu looked at the astonishing number and raised an eyebrow, wondering if Jiang Ran would see it.
But shouldn't the sporadic activity of this small-town factory be able to reach Jiangzhou, thousands of miles away? Or reach those glamorous yet oppressive circles where he once lived?
Besides, Su Mu knows Jiang Ran very well. He never bothers with short video apps, thinking it's a waste of time.
In Young Master Jiang's world, there are financial news, high-end summits, private galleries and racetracks, and at the very least, internal news groups of upscale clubs.
This kind of rural factory livestream probably wouldn't catch his eye.
Thinking about it this way, Su Mu decided it didn't matter anymore. Let him take the pictures; he was just killing time anyway, and it would make the uncle happy and save him from nagging all the time.
However, Su Mu clearly underestimated the internet's almost ubiquitous and irrational dissemination capabilities. Like an invisible yet enormous net, it can easily transcend geographical, social, and even cognitive barriers, forcibly pulling together seemingly unrelated people and events.
You never know which pair of eyes in which corner will happen to see you and recognize you on the screen.
The situation is completely different for Jiang Ran.
The initial rage and humiliation were followed by a more intense, almost burning urgency that threatened to erode reason.
He used every conventional means at his disposal to find Su Mu's whereabouts, asked all his old friends who might know where Su Mu was, checked Su Mu's credit card spending records, only to find that it had been deactivated, and even tried to inquire through Su Mu's former colleagues, but all to no avail.
Su Mu seemed to have vanished into thin air, severing all ties with the past and disappearing completely.
He even considered turning his attention to some gray areas, to methods that involve moral boundaries or even the edge of the law, and to use certain special channels to uncover Su Mu's more hidden online traces, IP addresses, and various platform accounts he had registered.
He knew it was wrong, that he had crossed the line, but he couldn't control himself.
He couldn't find Su Mu.
This feeling of powerlessness drove him almost insane.
He was so eager that he could temporarily set aside so-called rules and dignity, and he didn't mind using some less-than-honorable means.
He needed to catch that audacious and cunning swindler again, to confront him face to face, to... to get an explanation, or at least a resolution.
After that night, he thought... everything would be different.
Those intense entanglements, the sweat, the panting, the warmth of skin touching—he thought it would be a beginning, or at least, a substantial shift in the relationship.
And what was the result?
As a result, Su Mu gave him the most resounding slap in the face with his actions. It wasn't progress, it wasn't a stalemate, it was a complete and utter regression.
The situation deteriorated even more than when they first met.
So, encouraged by the security guard and cheered on by the few but exceptionally enthusiastic fans in the live stream, Su Mu actually tried making forklift tutorial videos.
He chose a sunny afternoon when the forklifts in the factory were idle, asked the uncle to hold up his phone for him, and then sat in the cab of the bright yellow forklift.
He explained very carefully, from basic safety checks and starting procedures to the functions of the control lever, steering precautions, and how to smoothly raise and lower the forks and align them with the goods.
His voice was not loud, carrying a pragmatic tone and a hint of barely perceptible tension, as he tried to break down each step clearly.
Finally, he would add to the camera with a sincere expression: "Actually, driving a forklift is not difficult. As long as you follow the procedures and practice more, you'll be fine. If you're really interested and want to learn a skill, it's best to enroll in a formal training institution, get a certificate, and safety comes first."
When the older man occasionally dragged her into live streaming, Su Mu felt even more helpless.
The comments scrolling across the screen were dazzling to him, mostly teasing comments like "This guy is so handsome," "His hands are so beautiful," "His voice is so soothing," and "Look at me, the factory heartthrob," with a few genuine technical questions mixed in occasionally.
The small gifts that were being tipped kept popping up, and the jingling notification sounds made his ears burn.
He felt that these netizens were incredibly enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, Jiang Ran, on the other side of the city, downloaded almost all mainstream social media and short video apps, trying to search for Su Mu's phone number, which he knew by heart, or looking for possible alternate accounts through related information.
Su Mu's previously frequently used accounts have clearly been inactive for a long time. The last post was from several months ago, the IP address still showed as being in City B, and the content was unremarkable, with few comments or interactions.
In one of his almost abandoned accounts, he found the latest post he liked, which was a post by a parenting blogger with the title "Smooth Sailing to Prenatal Checkups".
Is he a relative of Su Mu? A friend? Or...?
Jiang Ran gets very irritated whenever he sees anything related to babies. He's been having frequent dreams lately, and when he searched online, he found out they were pregnancy dreams.
Jiang Ran was speechless. He was gay, so where did he get the child?
Jiang Ran had previously printed a copy of Su Mu's ID card. The address on the ID card seemed to be something like Phoenix Village, Hehua Town, Qu County, Hebei Province, with some suffixes, which Jiang Ran couldn't quite remember.
He immediately typed the address into the search bar and aimlessly sifted through and filtered through the vast amount of online information.
Searching, searching.
After an unknown amount of time, as my fingertip mechanically swiped across the recommendation page of a short video platform, a live stream cover suddenly popped up.
The image is a bit shaky, with the familiar blue-roofed factory buildings and stacks of timber in the background, and in the center of the image, a person sitting in the forklift cab, turning his head to adjust the rearview mirror.
Jiang Ran's fingers suddenly stopped, and her pupils contracted sharply.
It is sappanwood.
He looked... abnormally healthy.
The camera was slightly backlit, outlining his clear profile. His skin appeared fair and delicate in the natural light, even with a healthy, subtle glow.
He was wearing an ordinary light gray work shirt, with the sleeves casually rolled up to his elbows, revealing his slender but well-defined forearms.
The time he came to Jiangzhou on a business trip, he always looked slightly tired after staying up all night, and his eyes were filled with a professional Su Mu, making him seem like a completely different person.
The live stream seemed to be an interactive segment, so Su Mu took off his usual thin-rimmed glasses and casually placed them on the control panel next to him.
Without the lenses obscuring his eyes, they were fully visible. When looking at the comments on the screen from a distance, he would unconsciously squint slightly, appearing somewhat confused and strained, his long eyelashes casting small fan-shaped shadows under his eyelids.
When he tries to see something close by, such as a sign on a joystick or to look closely at the comments scrolling on his phone screen, his face will come right up to the camera without warning.
As a result, everyone in the live stream could clearly see his eyes, which appeared misty due to slight nearsightedness but were exceptionally clear. His long eyelashes trembled gently with each blink, and his pupils appeared a gentle light brown under the light.
One commenter asked him, "Why did you decide to learn to drive a forklift? You're so versatile!"
Su Mu leaned closer to read the comment: "I was interested before, thinking that if I couldn't make it in the finance industry one day and couldn't find a job, at least I'd have a skill so I wouldn't starve. It's always good to have more skills, right?"
He used a new term he had just learned from viewers in the live stream: "Zhu Bao used to be a proper finance professional."
Jiang Ran pointed her finger hard at the most expensive virtual gift icon at the very top of the gift list, swiping it several times.
The dazzling special effects instantly filled the entire live stream screen, drowning out Su Mu's somewhat bewildered face amidst the exaggerated animations and system notification sounds.
Jiang Ran thought Su Mu was incredibly stupid. Couldn't he see how many of the comments in the live stream, such as "Brother is so handsome," "Husband, look at me," and "I really want to ride in your forklift," were genuinely asking for advice, or were simply trying to tease him?
However, Su Mu's clumsy nature is what makes him so worried.
id6653365211: Don't teach the main package today, take a break.
Su Mu was clearly taken aback by the continuous stream of expensive gift effects. He paused for a moment before squinting and trying to make out the comment that had been flooded with gifts and had a strange tone.
He looked puzzled and said earnestly to the camera, "Friend with ID 6653365211, I didn't start live streaming to make money. I genuinely think it's good to have an extra skill, in case someone wants to learn it. I'm spreading knowledge."
A note from the author:
id6653365211: ...Cute, please give a reward.
Sassy fans are coming! [doge][doge][doge]
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