chapter 5

He was right about that.

For the past few months, my mom has always had mysterious wounds on her body.

When I come home from work, I often see her fingers wrapped in band-aids, but she only tells me that she accidentally cut her finger while chopping vegetables.

Sometimes she sits with me in the living room watching TV, and out of nowhere, her nose starts bleeding. But she just says the weather has been too dry lately, causing her to get overheated.

I hadn’t said anything yet.

Other people in the livestream chimed in.

[Uh… does your period count? Hahaha.]

[This is hilarious, this charlatan just makes random guesses and always gets a few right. I bet his next line will be, “Has your mom been losing a lot of hair lately?” Hahaha.]

[Speechless, aren’t these just menopause symptoms?]

…

I didn’t have time to care, because his next few sentences

made my hair stand on end.

He said:

[Your mom has been making you a bowl of soup every day lately. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve been drinking it for Forty-Nine Days straight. So even if you interrupt her dancing, she can still exchange your fate.]

[During these forty-nine days, every day she’s been dripping her own blood into the soup, watching you drink it with her own eyes.]