Chapter 241 - A Perfect New World (V)
Chapter 241 – A Perfect New World (V)
Chi Xiaochi crouching at the bottom of the stairs feeding the dog.
Dog Meat is not a puppy anymore, but still likes to cuddle and cuddle with Chi Xiaochi.
After playing with Chi Xiaochi, the dog goes round him again, barking into the air as if to catch Lou Ying who is playing hide-and-seek.
Chi Xiaochi carries the rice and runs after the dogs that are wandering around, “Dinner’s on, I’m leaving if you don’t eat.”
The dog had to turn back with reluctance and ate a couple of bites, his hair standing up slightly, raising his shaded eyes as if to ask why it didn’t taste good.
”I didn’t do well.” Chi Xiaochi knelt down, hugging the dog’s neck and whispering his mistake, “I’ll keep trying.”
The dog was a good boy, giving a tame owl from his throat and nuzzling Chi Xiaochi’s chin with his ear before continuing to eat.
Chi Xiaochi was holding the dog when the shadow of the pagoda came over him again.
One knee rested against his back, grinding ambiguously.
Zhu Shoucheng’s ghostly voice came from behind: “Xiaochi, here to feed the dogs again.”
Chi Xiaochi didn’t even look back.
He hung his face very low and tightened his shoulders, imagining he was now in a cold room, and after the mental suggestion, his original goose bumps spread even further.
…… He is playing “Fear”.
Such a weak gesture makes the back rubbing even more indulgent.
But Chi Xiaochi’s negative feelings soon spread to the dog, who stopped eating, the fur on his back exploding in layers, showing his white teeth and barking twice at his enemies in the darkness.
Soon, some of the residents in the upper floors of the silo cursed, “Who’s the dead dog? Who’s the dog? Tomorrow we’ll kill you with rat poison!”
Fearing that someone might see him, Zhu Shoucheng had to leave with a longing look on his face.
Chi Xiaochi turned his head to look at him, met his eyes and turned his head back in “shock”.
Zhu Shoucheng, who looks back one step at a time, smiles brightly at his back and goes upstairs contentedly.
After he left, Chi Xiaochi continued to feed the dog, expressionlessly, scratching and smoothing out the hair that had stood up on the dog’s back, little by little.
There is nothing that Chi Xiaochi can do about Zhu Shoucheng.
The only weapon he has is himself.
Chi Xiaochi puts up with his sickening, one by one disgusting harassment with a rather clear purpose.
Zhu Shoucheng is so skilful that it certainly won’t be the first time, nor is it likely to be the last.
Chi Xiaochi’s goal is to be his “next”.
He bought pencil sharpeners from the kiosk, the kind every child carries, sharpened to a point where he could carry them around as a Wen tool without arousing anyone’s suspicion.
He has a small tape recorder given to him by Lou Ying to record his voice, which he carries with him every day and never leaves his house.
He pretended to be afraid, to be weak, to run whenever he saw him, to pretend not to see if he couldn’t, and to constantly and unobtrusively fuel his arrogance.
Chi Xiaochi was waiting for an opportunity to wait for Zhu Shoucheng to slow down and get back to work on him.
As soon as he is called in for another ‘tutorial’, the day will come when the opportunity arises.
All he had to do was to let Zhu Shoucheng leave enough marks on his body to prove his guilt, and then, with a pencil sharpener at the ready, slit his throat.
When the time came, he could tell the police that Zhu Shoucheng was going to do that to him and that he had no choice but to kill him because of self-defence.
The knife is for sharpening pencils and the tape recorder is for recording his voice.
When the time comes, he will buy a megaphone and play the disgusting things he said in the silo and at his school, so that he will be famous after his death and become the ancestral joke of the people in the area.
But he underestimated the old fox’s caution.
After the last accident, Zhu Shoucheng has learnt a lesson.
Although Chi Xiaochi is now as well-trained as a puppy, he still remembers Chi Xiaochi’s near-mad resistance.
Learning from experience, although Chi Xiaochi is a tempting piece of meat, there is no need to risk too much for him since it is not easy to get into your mouth.
Chi Xiaochi soon realised this.
So he began a protracted stalking and tailing.
Chi Xiaochi obtained a school uniform from the public junior high school where Zhu Shoucheng teaches and paid 20 yuan to have a student card forged.
Zhu Shoucheng’s public secondary school is the second highest among the five local secondary schools and is very tightly focused on studies, while Chi Xiaochi attends a high school where the school hours are almost the same for day students and Zhu Shoucheng is also the instructor of the school’s gifted class and often does not return home until after 8pm.
So when Chi Xiaochi appears near Zhu Shoucheng School at the end of the school day in his school uniform, he easily blends in with the flow of students.
He went to inquire about Zhu Shoucheng as a senior, and with just a cup of beef noodles, he got a lot of information about Zhu Shoucheng from a second year student.
Zhu Shoucheng is a maths teacher who is one of the top teachers, has an excellent reputation among his students, has a good temper, never loses his temper with his students and cares about the mental health of children with special family circumstances.
Not long ago, because of the heavy teaching load in the junior year and his age, he took the initiative to apply for a transfer from the junior year, instead of teaching the junior year with his class, he went to be the class teacher of the first year instead.
The junior boy said without regret, “Mr Zhu is so nice, anyone who is taught by him is lucky.”
Chi Xiaochi laughs, “Yeah, I used to think so too.”
Chi Xiaochi believes that there must be a reason why Zhu Shoucheng is teaching the first year.
Fittingly, he soon made a discovery.
Recently, Zhu Shoucheng has been going home with a first year boy after school on the pretext that he is on his way home.
It was a boy from a single-parent family, not a bad student, one of the students in the honors class, with a hazy perception of the world, malice and sex, still in the state of blind obedience and respect for his teacher as a primary school student, like a little dumb goose.
On the winter solstice, Zhu Shoucheng takes the boy home after school at noon and cooks him dumplings for him to eat.
Chi Xiaochi stands outside the door on the first floor in the freezing day, leaning against the railing with his back to Zhu Shoucheng’s door, smelling the aroma of dumplings wafting from under the threshold of the next door, clicking on the lighter, lighting the paper end of his cigarette, calming himself with the aroma of nicotine and thinking about what he should do next.
Call Zi Yu now.
But nothing had happened yet, and he didn’t know if anything would happen.
Chi Xiaochi hated to switch places with the boy.
He knows what it’s like and he’d rather do it himself.
Luckily, the boy returned to school with Zhu Shoucheng in the afternoon, looking neatly dressed and normal, and grateful to Zhu Shoucheng.
Chi Xiaochi is in no hurry.
He wondered why Zhu Shoucheng hadn’t done it when it was such a good opportunity.
One possibility is that he had classes in the afternoon and was not in a position to lay hands on the boy; another, perhaps, is that he did not want to do it in a home where someone had died.
After all, one accident is a coincidence; once you miss again and have two accidents, it’s impossible to tell.
With this in mind, Chi Xiaochi continued to wait patiently.
Zhu Shoucheng, having set his sights on this young boy as his prey, would not fail to strike.
After the winter solstice, the winter holidays are not far away.
Chi Xiaochi knows the road from Zhu Shoucheng’s school to the silo so well that he knows that the surveillance in the area is a mere decoration, not only sparsely installed, but also broken.
The invisible mould of decay grows beneath a blind “eye in the sky”.
On a cold, thin night, Chi Xiaochi once again follows the boy and Zhu Shoucheng, who takes him home.
He listened to English with his headphones in one ear, deliberately distancing himself from them in the misshapen streets.
It had just snowed and the thin layer of snow had absorbed all the noise between heaven and earth, so it was surprisingly quiet, except for the muffled sound of their feet crunching in the snow and the distant sound of wind chimes like bicycle bells.
Chi Xiaochi deliberately stretches his stride to the exact same speed as Zhu Shoucheng, hiding his own with the sound of his footsteps.
This is just the experience gained from countless stalking sessions, and Chi Xiaochi is prepared for another flop.
Thus, at the sudden stop of the footsteps, his feet, which had been raised into mid-air, hung without falling.
He poked his head out of the alley.
The two students and teachers, stopped in front of the iron gates of a small, detached courtyard, close together and were talking about something.
Chi Xiaochi’s heart skipped a beat.
As far as he knew, the small yard was being put up for sale and had just been burgled some time ago, presumably by a novice who found the owner had not returned home for a long time and wanted to make a profit, who thought that all the furniture had been removed and the thief had walked away empty and smashed a lock for nothing.
The owner had gone away on a business trip and could not return for a while. The neighbours were not kind enough to pay for the lock and there were no valuable things in the house, so they symbolically took a branch and bolted the door from the outside.
The sound of their conversation was extraordinarily clear in the snow.
Zhu Shoucheng There was a bit of reproach in his voice: “…… Teacher’s hands are cold, won’t you warm them up for him?”
The little boy clearly didn’t get the picture: “Teacher, why don’t I give you my gloves?”
Zhu Shoucheng knelt down and looked at him with burning eyes, “No, the teacher is too cold to bear, so warm him up, ah.”
The boy had never seen such a Zhu Shoucheng, and for a moment his mind was at a loss, except for the hand coiled around his waist, cold and slippery, like a poisonous snake coiled along it.
In the current paucity of sex education, girls are taught how to deal with assault and harassment, such as never touching the parts of their skin that can be covered by a swimming costume, but very little thought is given to teaching this to boys.
Zhu Shoucheng lifted his head slightly, his demeanour one of strange fascination: “Teacher’s hands are really cold.”
The little boy opened his mouth.
Now he finally sensed that something was wrong.
He tried to scream, but Zhu Shoucheng was experienced enough to cover his mouth tightly.
The boy had not yet changed his voice, and when he whimpered under the giant palm, it resembled the cry of a baby when a small wildcat is in heat on a springtime winter day.
Zhu Shoucheng easily pinned the boy to the wall with one hand and turned his hand to pull at the branch bolted to the door, not realising that the more he rushed, the less he could do and the more he pushed the two iron doors into a rattling mess.
The scraping of the cotton jacket, the gurgling of hot blood on the head, and the thin sound of the boy’s struggling whimpers drowned out the sound of footsteps sprinting from behind.
When Zhu Shoucheng realised something was wrong and looked back, a dull pain shot through the back of his head.
Zhu Shoucheng even heard a loud click with the force.
He suspected that his skull had cracked.
But he turned by inertia to see the face of the visitor.
The filthy blood running down from his hair into his eyes made his face look unusually hideous.
He looked like he wanted to say something, but Chi Xiaochi had no intention of stopping, swinging a half-rusted, bloodied iron pipe and smashing it head-on into his face, caving in his nose so deeply.
After the smash, he grabbed the hand of the still dazed young boy and ran wildly all the way out.
After running through an unknown number of alleys, he stopped by a tree.
The boy couldn’t stop panting, but on a hunch, he said “Thank you, brother”.
Chi Xiaochi, however, could not hear anything.
He leaned his back against the trunk of a tree and the snow shook off the branches and landed on the back of his neck and hair.
The fresh, cold snowy air flowing through his lungs put him in a particularly good mood.
Chi Xiaochi’s right hand loosens its rigid grip on the iron pipe, grips the shirt on his left breast and lets loose a loud, shaking, near-collapse laugh.
Chi Xiaochi waited overnight for news that Zhu Shoucheng had been taken to hospital overnight with a severe concussion and a full fracture, but he was alive and well.
Zi Yu contacted Chi Xiaochi on his mobile phone the afternoon Zhu Shoucheng was removed from the situation.
Zi Yu on the other end of the line got right to the point: “Is it you?”
Chi Xiaochi asked, “Did he say it was me? Or did he say that someone robbed him and didn’t see the face?”
Zi Yu was silent for a while, which was tantamount to acquiescing to his suspicions.
Chi Xiaochi let out a soft laugh as he bowed his head, “I knew it. Because I saw him doing that sort of thing again.”
Zi Yu : “Then you should call the police ……”
”Call the police, will you arrest him?” Chi Xiaochi hit the nail on the head, “He didn’t get away with it, I don’t have surveillance, what can I, with the little boy’s mouth, prove? Do you really have to wait for him to get his way before you can arrest him?”
Zi Yu is silent.
Chi Xiaochi lifted his chin slightly: “Even if he loses his reputation, all he has to do is quit his job, follow his son and move elsewhere, change his name at most, and he can live the rest of his life free again, can’t he?”
Zi Yu’s voice was pained but helpless: “……Xiaochi.”
”Since justice will not extend itself, I will.” Chi Xiaochi, with her eyes forward, said to the other side of the phone, “See you later, Sister Zi.”
He hangs up the phone, carries a bag of apples and knocks on Zhu Shoucheng’s ward door.
The door is opened by Zhu Shoucheng’s son, a rather simple-looking man.
In response to his questioning gaze, Chi Xiaochi bent tamely: “Uncle, do you remember me? I am Mr. Zhu’s neighbour, I heard he was injured and I came to visit him.”
Zhu Shoucheng’s son did not suspect anything and welcomed him in, while he went outside to pour water in the pantry.
”Hello.” Chi Xiaochi sat down next to his bed, “…… Mr. Zhu.”
Zhu Shoucheng, lying on the bed, has a swollen face covered in gauze, around which yellowish and reddish drops are oozing.
He couldn’t see Zhu Shoucheng’s expression, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he did next.
Chi Xiaochi pulled out the small tape recorder he always carried with him and calmly pressed the play button.
”…… Teacher’s hands are cold, won’t you warm them up for him?”