Hospital duty office.
He Jingsheng repeated Ye Ying's words, still feeling as if he were still immersed in the disbelief he felt at that time: "At that time, I had no idea that this kind of development would happen, but what I didn't expect even more was..."
"He agreed." Song Yecheng continued.
It's not a question, but a firm statement.
He knew Jiang Que too well.
At that time, Jiang Que had already blamed himself for Jiang Di's accident, and Ye Ying's words seemed to say "you owe me this", and Jiang Que had no room to refuse.
He Jingsheng nodded: "Although I opposed his decision at the time, I couldn't make the decision for him. In the end, I could only accompany him to send her adoptive mother back home."
After arriving at Jiang Que's house, He Jingsheng was still trying to persuade him to change his mind, but he seemed to have completely ignored He Jingsheng's words and only said, "You go back first. I won't be going back for the time being."
At that time, in order to accompany Jiang Que to handle the funeral, He Jingsheng had stayed in Sucheng for more than half a month. He couldn't stay there forever, so in the end he had no choice but to leave Sucheng temporarily with helplessness.
"After I got back, I was actually quite worried. After all, the way his adoptive mother said that really sounded like she had bad intentions."
"But every time I called or messaged him, he said nothing was wrong and told me not to worry. Later, I couldn't help but wonder if I was overthinking it. After all, the doctors said his adoptive mother's condition wasn't that serious. Maybe I was overthinking it."
At this point, He Jingsheng sighed again: "It wasn't until more than a month later, when I flew over to see him without prior notice and knocked on his door, that I realized what kind of life he was living."
That morning, He Jingsheng went straight to Jiang Que's residential complex as soon as he landed. He bought some nutritional supplements suitable for visiting the patient at the supermarket at the door, and then carried the things upstairs.
Unexpectedly, just as he arrived at the door, before he could press the doorbell, he heard a crisp "crash" sound from inside the door, as if some glass container was broken.
"What do you mean by writing this?!"
Ye Ying's rebuke was heard through the door. Even though it was separated by the heavy door, it still made people feel nervous.
Her question went unanswered, and then He Jingsheng heard a long "squeak" sound, like the sound of paper being torn: "Why did you write about her falling from a building? Why did you write about her adoptive mother being next to her?"
This sentence still didn't get an answer, and then there was another "squeak" sound: "Aren't you just trying to imply that I killed Huangmao?"
These words were followed by a few cold laughs: "You already knew this, didn't you? Who are you trying to hint at? - Yes, I was the one who killed it, so what?!"
Crash!
There was another sound of breaking glass.
He Jingsheng didn't understand the meaning of these words at all, but he was already frightened and quickly raised his hand to press the doorbell:
Ding Dong——
All the sounds in the room stopped abruptly.
But He Jingsheng waited for a long time, but no one came to open the door.
Ding Dong——
Ding Dong Ding Dong——
He Jingsheng pressed the button several times in succession, as if he was asking for his life.
Finally, light footsteps were heard, and a moment later, the door was unlocked with a "click".
The moment the door was opened, He Jingsheng almost didn't dare to recognize the person in front of him.
Jiang Que looked so haggard.
The dark circles under his eyes, messy hair and pale complexion made him look like a terminally ill patient.
The moment he saw who was outside the door, Jiang Que was obviously stunned. Then, as if he wanted to hide something, he reflexively closed the door a little further inward: "Wait a moment, let's talk outside."
However, He Jingsheng had already realized something and did not give him the chance to close the door. He forcibly stopped the door from closing, pushed it open and squeezed in.
The light in the room was extremely dim.
All the windows around were covered tightly with something like newspaper, the sofa and coffee table were crooked, and there were a lot of messy things scattered on the ground.
The light was so dim that He Jingsheng couldn't make out what those things were. He could just barely see Ye Ying sitting on the crooked sofa, holding a book and two torn pages of paper in her hands, looking at him expressionlessly.
Out of politeness, He Jingsheng finally opened his mouth: "Aunt Ye."
He raised the nutritional supplement in his hand slightly and wanted to add, "I'm here to visit you," but he saw Ye Ying had turned her eyes away indifferently, threw the book in her hand on the coffee table with a "bang", tore the pages into pieces and threw them away, stood up and walked straight back to the master bedroom, slamming the door shut.
He Jingsheng ignored her rudeness. He had already seen it before. He just put the things in his hand on the ground and turned to ask Jiang Que, "What was she saying to you just now? Who is Huangmao?"
Jiang Que said: "It's the cat I raised before."
Recalling what he just heard, He Jingsheng asked, "Was he killed by her?"
Jiang Que nodded.
He Jingsheng glanced at the tattered copy of Dust on the coffee table and quickly realized, "Does she think the plot in your book is deliberately hinting at this?"
Jiang Que nodded again.
He Jingsheng was speechless: "Does she have——"
He wanted to say "Are you sick?", but when he thought that she really was sick, he was choked. In the end, he could only hum as if to vent his anger and turned on the headlights with his backhand.
Before Jiang Que could stop it, the light above his head had already lit up.
He Jingsheng hadn't thought too much about it at first. He turned on the light simply because he felt the room was too dark. But the moment the light came on, he almost thought he had stumbled onto the set of a horror movie.
The windows were covered not with newspapers but posters, which were covered with curses and insults scribbled with something that might be blood or red paint. The tilted sofa and coffee table were covered with broken CDs, and the ground was littered with all kinds of torn magazines, photos, and broken glass or pottery fragments.
——Those are all around Songye City.
He Jingsheng looked at those things back and forth, feeling horrified: "This... this was all done by her?"
Jiang Que could remain silent when being scolded, and could also remain silent when being angered for no reason. However, when his eyes touched those posters and the surroundings, a trace of pain clearly flashed across his eyes, and he lowered his eyes as if he couldn't bear to look directly at them: "Hmm."
"Just because of that billboard?" He Jingsheng was puzzled.
It is true that there was a poster of Song Yecheng on the billboard that caused the car accident, but highway billboards are originally commercial rental spaces. The accident investigation at the time also clearly determined that the cause of its collapse was the fracture of the lower column, which means that the main person responsible was the owner of the advertising column, not the user of the advertising space.
Even if it is really the user's responsibility, it can only involve the advertiser Yongquan Water at most, and it can never be blamed on Song Yecheng.
Jiang Que was silent for a long time, and finally said: "She doesn't hate him, she hates me."
He Jingsheng was stunned for a moment, then he suddenly understood.
Ye Ying's anger towards Song Yecheng was not because of the billboard on the highway, but because... he was the person Jiang Que liked. Or rather, it was precisely because he was the person Jiang Que liked that she wanted to pin the blame on him even though she knew that he had nothing to do with the car accident.
Everything she did to these people was not so much out of hatred or catharsis, but rather to torture Jiang Que, making him watch with his own eyes the things he cherished being destroyed one by one, so as to get the pleasure of revenge.
He Jingsheng looked at the mess around him and finally suppressed the urge to curse. He said sullenly, "Let me help you clean it up."
He was about to bend down to pick something up, but Jiang Que raised his hand to stop him: "No, she won't let you."
He Jingsheng was stunned for a moment, then he was filled with anger and disbelief: "If she doesn't let you, then why don't you accept it? What will happen if you accept it?"
Jiang Que was silent for a moment, as if he was helpless and a little powerless: "She will hurt herself."
Not only will they harm themselves, but they will also make the "arrangements" even worse.
He Jingsheng subconsciously looked at the red marks on the posters and said uncertainly, "So that really is..."
Jiang Que said: "Yeah."
He Jingsheng was dumbfounded. He had never seen such a psychopath in his life. But when he thought that Ye Ying was indeed "sick" in the true sense of the word, he was so blocked that he didn't even know where to start scolding. Finally, after holding it in for a long time, he could only shout "Fuck" angrily.
At the same time, he finally realized why Jiang Que didn't turn on the lights. He couldn't bear to look at the mess in the room, but he couldn't do it. Not turning on the lights could at least block his view.
He Jingsheng felt very depressed, but at the same time, many words were stuck in his throat and he didn't know which one to say first. He simply turned around and prepared to turn off the light again, but was stopped by Jiang Que: "It's okay, leave it on for now."
Normally he didn't turn on the lights because he didn't want to see the surrounding scenes, but he didn't want He Jingsheng to turn on the lights just now because he didn't want him to witness these things. Now that he had seen everything, he had nothing to hide. He Jingsheng came all the way here, it wouldn't be good to let him stand at the door in the dark.
"Please sit down for a while." Jiang Que gestured towards the sofa which still had some space.
He Jingsheng carefully stepped over the debris at his feet and walked to the place where Ye Ying had sat before and sat down. But as soon as he sat down, he felt something poking him near his tailbone. He reached out and touched it, and actually caught a few dark unknown particles.
"What the hell is this?"
He Jingsheng frowned as he looked at the thing that looked like some small animal feces, and even leaned over to smell it.
Jiang Que took a look and said, "Cat food."
He Jingsheng subconsciously looked around, thinking that there was a cat in the room. However, he didn't see the cat. Instead, he saw a bag of opened cat food stuck in the gap between the armrests of the sofa, and a few bags of cat food were scattered in the corner next to it.
"There is no cat." Jiang Que saw his confusion.
He Jingsheng was even more confused: "Then this..."
"She bought it." Jiang Que said, then hesitated for a moment as if he didn't know how to explain further before simply saying, "She bought it for me to see."
This logic was beyond the comprehension of a normal person. He Jingsheng was stunned for a long time, and finally thought about what he had heard at the door. He had an incredible guess: "She killed your cat, and she's buying cat food to provoke you?!"
Jiang Que didn't say anything, but He Jingsheng's guess was not wrong.
When he first found out that Ye Ying had bought a whole box of cat food online, he didn't realize what she meant. He even thought she was bored at home and wanted to get a pet.
Until one day, Ye Ying opened a bag of cat food in front of him, grabbed a handful and shouted to everyone around her: "Yellow hair? Yellow hair?"
After shouting a few times, she seemed to have just remembered something and said with a sarcastic smile, "Oh, I forgot, it died a long time ago? It can't eat cat food anymore."
It was then that Jiang Que realized that this was just one of her methods of torture that she never tired of.
Although it is clumsy, it is cruel.
He Jingsheng knew that he had guessed right just by looking at his expression. He immediately threw away the cat food in annoyance and glanced around with disgust at the extremely messy surroundings.
He had only been in this environment for a short while but he already felt extremely depressed. When he thought about Jiang Que living this kind of life every day, he almost felt suffocated for him.
"What are you going to do?" His gaze finally fell back on Jiang Que's haggard face, and he asked worriedly, "If her illness doesn't get better, are you really going to keep enduring like this? Are you going to be tortured by her for the rest of your life?"
In his opinion, Jiang Que shouldn't have taken over this mess from the beginning.
If Ye Ying were a normal adoptive mother, and she fell ill, Jiang Que, as an adopted son, would have been perfectly justified in fulfilling his obligation to support and care for her. But Ye Ying was anything but normal. She was clearly using her illness as an excuse to bully others and use moral coercion against them. By allowing Jiang Que to return, she was clearly trying to trap and torture him.
Jiang Que lowered his eyes to look at the ground, his pale face expressionless for a long time. It seemed as if he was answering his question, but it also seemed as if he was just talking to himself: "Let it go."
At that moment, a deep sadness suddenly surged in He Jingsheng's heart.
It was not only because of the current dark and gloomy situation that seemed to have no end in sight, but also because he heard a kind of indulgence in Jiang Que's words, a kind of "live one day at a time" mentality of muddling through.
He suddenly realized that perhaps Jiang Que had known very well from the beginning what it meant to agree to come back, knowing that it would mean endless pain and torture.
But he accepted the torture.
He regarded this as punishment for "killing his adoptive father".
It is like the desperate Christians in the Middle Ages, who endured the torture-like whipping with their broken bodies and redeemed their self-surrendered sins with blood all over their bodies.
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