His Thirteenth Year

"...... If this is the last truth I can restore, if this truth can release you at the end."

"......"

"Then I'll tell you."

--

Nineteen years ago.

Yanzhou.

Thirteen-year-old Xie Qingcheng walks down the hutong street in the harsh winter with her school bag on her back.

He had a green-screen Nokia in his hand, and it was the most valuable thing he had in his body.

His parents have been gone for months.

In the past few months, Xie Qingcheng was like a soul left behind in the world, the continuous blows made his heart empty and rotten. He had collapsed, despaired, and had had countless heated arguments with people.

But what's the point.

He woke up countless times in the night, dreaming of the day he arrived to be notified of his parents' deaths.

That day, it was raining very, very hard in Huzhou, and he was in a school classroom, taking a math test like all normal students.

The homeroom teacher suddenly came in, exchanged greetings with the math teacher, whispered a few words, and the math teacher immediately made a huffing sound.

The students only looked up, numb, the vapors of equations and numbers even floating in their eyes, before they all looked down again and scrambled to continue working on the problem.

Xie Qingcheng didn't even look up, he was checking the answer to the last big question.

A girl next to him is sneaking glances at him, and I don't know if she's glancing at his answers, or at the handsome man's face.

Suddenly--

A shadow was cast over Xie Qingcheng's test paper.

The tip of Xie Qingcheng's pen lurched, and he raised his head, frowning slightly as he looked at the homeroom teacher who had come to his seat.

He is different from ordinary students, it can be seen by looking at the eyes, very sharp, calm, clear, seldom confused or numb, all kinds of subjects can not defeat him, he will not be tortured by the knowledge, but is often easy to use.

No teacher would dislike such a student.

This is the first time - Xie Qingcheng met the eyes of the class teacher, but the class teacher was not wearing a smile.

He was slightly stunned for a moment, wondering what was going on; he was not one to get into trouble.

"Xie Qingcheng," the homeroom teacher tapped him on the shoulder with an odd expression, like she was trying to suppress something. Her thick glasses were just enough to reflect under the fluorescent light, obscuring most of her emotions.

But Xie Qingcheng heard a tremor in her voice, like the aftertaste of a plucked string.

"You come out here for a minute."

Now the students are surprised, the test is not important, they have necks, watching Xie Qingcheng followed by the class teacher to leave the classroom.

"What's going on ......"

"Why are you calling him out at this hour?"

"He's not making a mistake, is he, cheating?"

"What are you talking about ...... does he need to cheat ......"

There was a lot of gabbing until the math teacher knocked on the desk, "What's all the cross talk about? Exam!"

But after he had reprimanded them, his own eyes couldn't help but follow the two men who had disappeared at the end of the aisle - and if the students had looked closely, they would have noticed that a layer of blood had peeled from the math teacher's face.

The math teacher shakily grabbed the thermos on his desk, opened it, and took a sip of the warm water inside.

Hot water trickled down his throat, barely warming his chest, which had gone cold at the news.

But he knew--

Xie Qingcheng This child's heart, for a long time to come, I'm afraid it will never be warm again.

"Teacher, did something happen?"

Xie Qingcheng couldn't help but ask this question as she followed her homeroom teacher down the stairs.

The homeroom teacher didn't say anything until she reached the door to her office on the top floor, and only before she pushed the door in did she take a deep breath and look back at the student she'd always loved.

Her facial muscles tightened, and in the gray sky light outside the window, Xie Qingcheng was shocked to find two lines of tears rolling down behind her thick glasses.

The teardrops were like ominous notes, and the thunder outside the school building kicked off the tragedy.

Xie Qingcheng's heart thumped.

"...... There are people inside looking for you, let them talk to you ......"

The homeroom teacher's skin-crinkled hand was on the doorknob and pressed down.

The door opened.

Lightning flickered outside the window, and inside the house was dark as if it was under a heavier cloud than outside. Thunder and lightning broke through the cumulonimbus clouds outside, and Xie Qingcheng's entrance broke through the darkness in the room--

A large, subdued swath of navy blue.

Clouds of crowded police.

At the head of the group was Uncle Zheng, who had the best relationship with his parents.

They all turned back when they heard him coming, but no one spoke first.

Xie Qingcheng heard his own voice, hollow like the shell of a cocoon that had been left behind on dead wood.

"What happened to my parents."

"......"

Word by word, he asked in a fixed voice, "Uncle Zheng, what happened to my parents."

Xie Qingcheng couldn't quite remember how he had listened to Zheng Jingfeng's explanation of the situation that day, but his vague impression was that he seemed to be very calm.

Calmly as if he were dead, standing still to listen to these words, a clay statue, a corpse.

Not only at that time, it seems that for a while, for nearly ten consecutive days, Xie Qingcheng was as cold and numb as a corpse - except for the moment when he saw his parents' bodies with his own eyes, he broke down and cried bitterly, and for the next ten days or so, he was just like a machine, like a symbol - - constantly signing and signing that one ruthless document after another, signing and signing that one ruthless document after another. -Continuously sign, sign, sign that one after another merciless documents.

Cremation ......

Legacy ......

Notarized ......

The living becomes words on paper and ashes in the furnace.

My sister is still young and unsophisticated, but she knows that mom and dad haven't been back in a while, babbling and crying - and -

There are other things that Xie Qingcheng doesn't even want to think about.

When one is in so much pain that even the heart to shed tears boils dry, one realizes that to be able to feel sadness well is also a great mercy given by God.

Xie Qingcheng doesn't even deserve this bit of mercy.

-Car moves forward automatically, crashes and explodes in cockpit...... How could this have been an accident?

His body and soul felt like they had been destroyed by a sudden and tremendous weight, and he could only hold on with one breath as he kept running to the police station, grabbing any uncle or aunt he once knew well, stubbornly repeating over and over again that my mom and dad had been murdered.

My mom and dad must have been killed.

I want the truth ......

Please give me the truth ......

At first, all those people would still sympathize and shed tears, but after a long time, repeatedly being pestered like this by a child would be annoying in the end.

Someone started to say to him, "I have told you many times that we will definitely investigate carefully, but now that there is no evidence whatsoever, we have to follow the procedures, don't we?"

"Give us more time."

But how long is a little time?

Xie Qingcheng later learned that it was a full nineteen years.

He did not yet know that the wait ahead would be so long, but by then he had also come to understand that his parents' deaths could only be characterized as an accident, and that his mother and father, could not be dressed in police uniforms and buried as martyrs who had died in the line of duty.

He finally had to pick out a snow-white shirt for his father, one of the best pieces of clothing his father had only ever acquired since their family fell from grace.

And his mother wore a cheongsam hand-sewn by Lai Miu-kuen - the female superintendent was not able to be buried by a long police car, but the day she left, in addition to her colleagues, came many of the poor, the rich, the criminals, the victims that she had helped in her life ......

She treats every living being as an equal, and she never wears colored glasses to discriminate against any human soul. She was always willing to give her hand to those struggling in the mire, as long as those people were still willing to turn back.

As a result, she gets all of their respect.

But she didn't get the dust of the truth until she was in the ground.

Xie Qingcheng then went to check it out himself.

Even though he is still very young, a middle school student, and even though the clues he gets are very limited ...... he still refuses to give up tracking, and he spends all of his free time on the matter of investigating the cause of his parents' deaths.

And then, perhaps it was a royal flush.

From an uncle at the police station, he had pried into the fact that his parents had made a trip to one of the most fishy nightclubs in Yanzhou before the accident.

"Exactly what was done and who was seen, that is all a secret, everyone is not too clear, but shortly after that, the superiors received a report from the public, saying that the two of them were embezzling and accepting bribes, and also took out some evidence ...... Even though the chain of evidence is not enough to support the content of the report, and does not rule out the possibility that there is a possibility that there is a planting of evidence to frame the victim, but that The two of them have been demoted again. They are still once again demoted and transferred."

"The two of them have been suspended twice in the past few years, before and after adding up, there are dozens of big cases that are involved in the pending cases, which involve hundreds of characters, and to count down, thousands of characters may be possible, and these thousands of people have tens of thousands of heavy relations. It's almost impossible to really investigate them one by one without a clue."

The uncle patted Xie Qingcheng: "Don't think so much, kid. There are still us. Leave these things to us to find a truth."

But Xie Qingcheng didn't know how long he would have to wait for the truth if he relied on them. Or, he simply can't wait for the day when the water comes out.

So he settled his sister down during winter vacation and traveled alone to Yanzhou, to that nightclub his uncle had mentioned.

He wanted to follow the trail to find it.

That's when the accident happened.

He originally contacted a good hard to know something about the situation of the waiter, the other party, despite the panic, but in the end the conscience is not dead, see the child is really too poor, then agreed to the weekend afternoon two people in a hutong mouth of the small hot pot restaurant to meet.

- "I don't know exactly who I saw, they came in a mysterious way, even our boss is not too clear about the situation. But I am responsible for that private room sanitation cleaning, after they left, I found an earring inside ...... You can come to see if it is your mother's, if not, then perhaps it belongs to the person she met ...... "

The waiter kindly sent Xie Qingcheng a MMS photo in advance before meeting him.

At that time, the Nokia cell phone was not particularly fast to receive MMS, and had to be downloaded little by little. After the photos were downloaded, Xie Qingcheng sat down at the curb and clicked on them.

It was a very oddly shaped earring.

The earrings are solid gold, very showy, in the shape of a bone cross with a circle in the middle, in the center of which is set a blood-red crushed diamond, around which are circled three letters: R.I.P.

Rest in Peace.

Although the clarity of the cell phone MMS at that time was very shabby, can be called AV picture quality, but the exquisite degree of this earrings or through the screen, it is exquisite workmanship exquisite, is by no means a stall on the ground to buy random gadgets, and normal circumstances, such as ZhouDaFu LaoFengXiang such as the gold jewelry store, and by no means will be able to produce this kind of inexplicable jewelry modeling.

It was most likely customized by the person in question.

The earring is different from other things, its pin is in contact with the person's ear hole for a long time, it will rub on the owner's sweat, secretion, and even skin tissue, if the earring is brought back to Zheng Jingfeng for testing, perhaps the whole case investigation can make some headlines.

"To tell you the truth, I'm really quite a greedy person, I'm not a good person. I found this earring, originally intended to take it to sell some money, so I never gave it to the foreman, but the other day I heard you talking to the foreman over there ...... I think maybe it's better to give this earring to you."

"Nothing ...... My mom went early too, I understand all that."

--

These two paragraphs became the last message the waiter left for Xie Qingcheng.

Xie Qingcheng In the afternoon before they arrived at the hot pot restaurant where they had agreed to meet, he saw the rushing fire burning up, the onlookers like a tidal wave, the sound and heat waves hit his heart cavity. He rushed over and scared several old moms and old men.

"Ouch, what's the lad squeezing this is."

"It's so risque, who's kid is this ......"

Other words Xie Qingcheng no longer listen to, he stood in the front of the crowd of onlookers, further ahead is the police cordon. He saw the firefighters carry out several bodies from inside, and the high-pressure nozzles rushed to the burning hot pot restaurant and kept pouring ......

He stood stiffly over there, a blazing fire reflected in his eyes.

He knew that he was already too late.

What was even more terrible was that when the rescue was over and the fires were extinguished, he watched as the pale-white body bags wrapped around the remains were carried out one after another. In an instant, Xie Qingcheng was struck by a strong sense of guilt, a feeling like the tiger of the mountains and forests roaring toward him, pounding on his heart and roaring in his ears.

For the first time, he felt that his investigation was so childish, simplistic, pointless, and even, woe betide him - he felt that every body was because of him.

He slumped down at the intersection of the road, clutching his shoulder, and clutched tightly in his sweaty palm was the Nokia cell phone that stored the picture of the earrings.

He was so desperate, so condemned inwardly, that he sat down with his head bowed, at the mouth of the curb, like a departed soul.

Therefore he did not notice that in the street, where the crowd had already dispersed, there was a black private car with a black registration plate, in which a bearded man in a baseball cap was sitting, lighting a cigarette and looking at him slyly.

When he finally got up and silently left the field of rubble, the private car started up with him, following him all the way to the bus, heading for his residence in the outer ring.

Xie Qingcheng got out of the car and had to walk a bit to get back to the hotel where he was staying. He didn't have much money and had to save it, so the place he was staying was shabby and remote. The surveillance cameras in Yanshou were not that dense in the early years, especially in the outer ring, and there were many blind spots.

The bearded man tugged at his baseball cap in the dark night, spit out the butt of his cigarette in one puff, gripped the steering wheel and pressed the gas pedal hard, the headlights dazzled, and he crashed straight toward Xie Qingcheng's back in the ear-splitting sound of the engine-!

Dead Silence.

"I was in a car accident." In the waterlogged studio, Xie Qingcheng told He Yu that it was the first time he had ever revealed his long untouched scars in such a complete manner, "That man was supposed to clean up the body after he ran me over, but I sensed him at the end, dodged a bit, and wasn't killed instantly."

"The wheels were running back and forth on my legs and I saw him trying to get out of the car ......"

"But at that point a group of people from a nearby construction site came back from work in a group and just happened to be passing by - the man then fled, too late to carry me to my car, only to take my cell phone on his way out."

"Then later, I was taken to the hospital by those workers ...... The doctor gave a critical illness notice then. I woke up a few times in a blur, but I couldn't feel my body." Xie Qingcheng downplayed, "I already knew then that I was dying."

He talks about his pain and near-death in a very reticent way, as if it was nothing at all.

Xie Qingcheng's gaze was not touched until the end, when he mentioned the name of an elder.

He said, "Just as I was waiting to die, I met someone."

--

"Qin Ciyan."