Ruan Bei felt a pang of sadness at Niu Niu's cries. She was too young to even understand what death was.
The ghost couldn't sense changes in the weather, nor the weariness and hunger of a human, thus blurring her perception of time. Niu Niu had been dead for over a year, yet she always believed it was punishment for disobeying her grandmother.
Ruan Bei felt sad and quickly squatted down to comfort the little girl: "Niu Niu, don't cry, it's okay. That big brother is very powerful. He can break your grandma's magic and let your mother see you."
Niu Niu sobbed for a moment and asked softly, "Really?"
Ruan Bei nodded, and Qin Gu, with the Eye-Opening Talisman between his fingers, walked out of the woods.
Zhou Linlin also heard Ruan Bei's voice. She turned her head in alarm and saw Qin Gu and Ruan Bei standing and squatting respectively. The two boys had clearly just left her house.
"It's you? What are you doing here?" Zhou Linlin became wary and took a few steps back, clutching her phone tightly in her hand.
Qin Gu was impatient to waste words. He figured that once the eye-opening talisman was applied, everything would be clear. So he ignored her and walked straight towards her.
Zhou Linlin was so frightened that she ran away. These two people were too strange. The one who was squatting, judging from his posture and the way he was talking, looked like there was someone in front of him. The other one was holding yellow paper and talking nonsense.
But she couldn't outrun Qin Gu. Qin Gu caught up with her, and with a flick of his eye-opening talisman, Zhou Linlin immediately heard her daughter's clear, innocent cry: "Mommy! Mommy, don't go! Niu Niu is here! Don't leave me..."
Startled, Zhou Linlin stopped and turned around. In the distance, she saw that there was now a little girl in the woods where only the boy had been. It was her Niu Niu!
"Niu Niu?!" Zhou Linlin burst into tears instantly, staggered and ran towards her daughter, rushing straight to Niu Niu and opening her arms to hug her.
But his attempt to hug her ended in vain.
The mother and daughter crossed their arms, passing right through each other. Niu Niu was stunned for a moment but not surprised. She just looked up at Ruan Bei and said, "Brother, can that big brother break Grandma's spell a little more? I want Mom to hug me."
Ruan Bei glanced at Qin Gu, who shrugged. Ghosts are formless and intangible; to put it bluntly, they're just a wisp of air. Who can embrace air? When Ruan Bei first mentioned Ran Yusheng's method of communicating with his wife, he thought it was quite insightful.
Ruan Bei could only shake his head regretfully at the expectant little girl.
"I know, it's because my grandma's magic is too powerful. Even the police officers couldn't see me. Big brother is already very good." Niu Niu sighed like a little adult, but she didn't throw a tantrum or cry. Her well-behaved appearance made Ruan Bei feel even more guilty.
"What kind of sorcery? How could this be?" Zhou Linlin snapped out of her daze and reached out to hug her daughter again, but missed each time.
Her child was right in front of her, just like in her countless dreams, but wasn't this reality? Why couldn't she hold her child, just like in her dreams?
"How could this happen?! My Niu Niu, what happened to my Niu Niu?"
With tears streaming down her face, Zhou Linlin looked pleadingly at the more approachable Ruan Bei: "Two... Masters, what happened to my Niu Niu? Why did she become like this?"
Ruan Bei turned his head away, unsure of how to begin. Niu Niu was too young to understand the situation, but Zhou Linlin probably guessed something, though she just couldn't believe it.
Niu Niu reached out to tug at her mother's sleeve, but missed. She wasn't angry; instead, she stretched out her little hand to wipe her mother's tears: "Mom, don't cry. Grandma made me like this. Nobody can see me anymore. I miss you so much. Let this brother who can see me call you for me."
"Your grandma?"
Niu Niu recounted what she had told Ruan Bei before. Zhou Linlin grew angrier as she listened, and when she heard that her mother-in-law had smothered her daughter to death, she gritted her teeth in hatred and was filled with grief and indignation.
The person who suffered the loss is already dead. If her mother-in-law were in front of her, she would tear her apart alive right now!
When her daughter went missing, she suspected that her mother-in-law might have lost Niu Niu as revenge for her insistence on not having a second child.
But she never expected that the old hag would be so cruel. Niu Niu was someone she had raised herself!
"My Niu Niu—" Zhou Linlin looked at her innocent-looking daughter in front of her, feeling as if she had been stabbed in the heart. Her throat was sore and dry, and her sobs sounded like the mournful cries of a mother animal who had lost her cub.
“Mom, don’t cry. If you cry, Niu Niu will want to cry too.”
Zhou Linlin felt a metallic taste in her throat. She swallowed the bloody taste with difficulty and smiled as if she were crying: "Okay, okay, Mommy won't cry. Mommy has finally found Niu Niu. I can't cry."
Niu Niu stopped crying and smiled, snuggling closer to her mother. She said sweetly, "Mom, I've been waiting for you for so long, so very long. I was so scared when you didn't come. Luckily, my brother helped me."
Zhou Linlin knelt down before Ruan Bei with a thud. She was a girl who had grown up with the education of the new era and had never seen or believed in ghosts or metaphysics before today.
But now, she knelt before Ruan Bei with the same sincerity as her parents would when praying to gods and Buddhas during festivals, her forehead pounding heavily on the ground: "Please, Master, save my daughter, I beg you..."
Ruan Bei was startled and dodged away. Zhou Linlin then turned to Qin Gu and kowtowed several times, but Qin Gu also refused to accept it and dodged away.
"Please, please, save my Niu Niu..." Zhou Linlin pleaded helplessly, "I'm willing to give away all my wealth, just to ask the two masters to give my daughter a way to live, even if it costs me my life, she's still so young..."
Ruan Bei felt distressed. If he could really help, he would, of course. But the dead cannot be brought back to life. Niu Niu had been dead for over a year. What could he do?
Seeing his predicament, Qin Gu thought for a moment and changed the subject: "We have something else to tell you, it's about your mother-in-law."
Zhou Linlin, being obedient and understanding, knew that he meant Niu Niu shouldn't hear it, but she couldn't bear to part with her daughter, and was immediately caught in a dilemma.
Ruan Bei knew that Qin Gu was going to talk about Grandma Sun's ghost. After what had just happened, he didn't believe Grandma Sun's words at all. No wonder she was talking nonsense. Zhou Linlin didn't seem like the murderer who killed Grandma Sun at all.
The question remains: who killed Grandma Sun? And why did she lie? Why did she place all the blame on her daughter-in-law?
“Niu Niu, I’ll keep an eye on this for you. Listen to this; it really is important,” Ruan Bei advised.
Hearing him say that, Zhou Linlin no longer hesitated. In addition, she was indeed filled with hatred and wanted to know what kind of evil that old woman had done. She no longer wanted to regard Granny Sun as her mother-in-law. She was a heartless and crazy murderer!
So Ruan Bei stayed behind to look after Niu Niu, while Zhou Linlin went with Qin Gu to the outside of the grove to listen to Qin Gu tell her the whole story of how he met Granny Sun.
After hearing this, Zhou Linlin's mind went blank, and she was stunned for a long time: "She...she said that I killed her?"
Qin Gu nodded silently, then Zhou Linlin suddenly burst into laughter: "She said I killed her, hahaha, karma, it's all karma..."
As she laughed, her smile vanished abruptly, replaced by a chilling hatred in her eyes. She muttered, "So, the old lady's ghost is still here? How wonderful, how wonderful, hahahaha..."
Qin Gu: "..." Has this woman gone mad from all the stimulation?
“I didn’t kill the old woman.” Zhou Linlin’s lips curled into a sarcastic smile. “Her good son accidentally pushed her down and she fell to her death.”
Qin Gu: "?" What a bizarre turn of events.
Zhou Linlin felt that her mind was extremely clear at this moment, clearer than ever before. The events of the past year flashed through her mind, and all the incomprehensible information was strung together into a line.
She murmured, "No wonder he only searched for Niu Niu for a few days after she got lost. He knew that Niu Niu had been killed by his mother and that he couldn't find her anyway, so he didn't want to waste his energy."
"No, we absolutely can't find him. If we do, he'll have a murderer as his mother, so we won't want my Niu Niu anymore..."
"No wonder they were arguing, no wonder he said sorry to me... sorry to me? Where's my Niu Niu..."
A chilling hatred flashed in Zhou Linlin's eyes: "Master, I want to avenge Niu Niu, please help me."
Qin Gu had to remind her, "Your mother-in-law is dead."
Zhou Linlin sneered, "I know, her ghost is still here, isn't it? How devoted a mother is to her son, even after being killed by him, she still tries to cover it up for him."
Qin Gu frowned and asked curiously, "She knew her son killed her? Then why did she come to us to complain? Does she think we're easy to fool?"
Zhou Linlin said, "Master, you don't know this. My mother-in-law regarded her son as her life. I'm afraid she didn't make a false accusation, but rather she didn't believe that her precious son killed her. So she subconsciously found a murderer so that her son would still be innocent."
Zhou Linlin has lived with her mother-in-law for several years, and sometimes she really feels that her mother-in-law is too much to her husband. She doesn't treat him like a mother would treat her son; she treats him like a god.
She secretly told her mother, who said that her mother-in-law was a widow who had lost her job and raised her only son alone. It was understandable that she might be overly attached to her son, but someone like her might have some psychological issues, so her mother told her to be careful.
Therefore, Zhou Linlin became more restrained in front of her mother-in-law and her husband, for fear of upsetting her.
But she never expected that her daughter, Niu Niu, would suffer in the end. She had always seemed to treat Niu Niu very well, otherwise she would not have felt comfortable letting her mother-in-law take care of the child.
If she had known this would happen, she would have preferred to divorce with her child rather than have caused her child to lose their life.
Hearing her say that, Qin Gu was somewhat convinced, so he asked, "How do you want to get revenge on her? Make it clear first, don't come after me for murder. As for the rest, I'll discuss it with Xiao Bei."
"Don't worry, I'm not that stupid. Niu Niu only has me left, I can't abandon her."
"Isn't the old woman most concerned about her precious son? Isn't she always thinking about continuing the Tong family line?"
Zhou Linlin's lips curled into a malicious smile: "Then I'll make her watch her precious son be sentenced to prison, the unfilial son who murdered his widowed mother. This time, the Tong family will be famous! Want to have a grandson to carry on the family line? To carry on the family line of murdering one's own family?"
Ever since she deduced that Tong Hanming had known all along that Niu Niu had been killed by his mother but had kept it from her, Zhou Linlin had come to hate him.
Qin Gu immediately understood: "You have evidence that Grandma Sun was killed by her son?"
Zhou Linlin took a deep breath to calm herself down before speaking: "Yes, Niu Niu has a teddy bear with a big heart on its chest that can record audio. It can only record a short segment, and repeating the recording will overwrite the previous one."
“I miss her, I miss my Niu Niu. When I saw that bear, I wanted to hear Niu Niu speak, but when I turned it on, all I heard was Tong Hanming and his mother arguing.”
Zhou Linlin sneered: "I knew it was retribution. The mother and son probably bumped into the bear while they were struggling and accidentally turned on the recording switch."
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