Chapter 6

Chapter 6

I knew Chen Zhen didn’t like me.

Once, while I was explaining a problem to her, she wrote three words on a piece of scratch paper-

“You smell bad.”

I asked her why, feeling bewildered.

She drew a cigarette, then looked up, seeing right through me before lowering her head again.

At that moment, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning.

She knew I had smoked before.

Back in elementary school, after my mother abandoned me, I gave up on myself and skipped school to hang out at shady internet cafes.

I learned to smoke from the older delinquents there. It was only a few times, and I never got addicted.

By junior high, I had said goodbye to that past. I worked hard on myself, striving to be a good student.

I thought I had been reborn. Who could tell that I had once taken a wrong turn?

But in the end, what’s done is done. You can’t be the same as someone who never did it at all.

That acrid smoke had once entered my chest; the stubborn nicotine had lingered in my lungs. The breath I exhaled was subtly different from everyone else’s.

Others couldn’t smell it, but Chen Zhen could. Even if I brushed my teeth meticulously and used oral spray, she could still sense it.

That was why I had told Teacher Lu that Chen Zhen was actually very observant.

I couldn’t completely escape my past. A person who is broken is simply broken; there is no way to become a whole, good person again.

I was just a bad kid.

Two months later, on an early winter night, I heard the wail of fire engines racing past while I was half-asleep.

Looking out the window, a faint red glow shimmered at the edge of the night sky, staining the clouds on the horizon.

Smoke spiraled upward, merging into the cloud layer. Heaven and earth met in a scene that felt like a dream.

It was a tragic fire that broke out on the fifth floor of a public housing building.

A mother and daughter lived there.

The accident happened in the middle of the night. Because the neighborhood was poorly managed-riddled with illegal structures and chaotic parking-the fire engines were delayed on the perimeter for a while before reaching the scene. Consequently, the blaze wasn’t brought under control in time.

The subsequent investigation determined the cause to be a fire triggered by the aging insulation on an external air conditioning unit’s wiring. There were a large number of books in the home, all of which became fuel. It was a very windy night, which caused the fire to spread rapidly.

Various authorities concluded that the fire was an accident.

Was it?

The Japanese author Edogawa Ranpo once said that the more simple an accident seems, the more likely it is a carefully planned murder.

However, I hadn’t carefully planned anything. I simply followed the natural course of things.

The last time I ate at Teacher Lu’s house, I had stood by the window and seen that old external AC unit, along with its frayed wires.

There was a bookshelf right by the window, and the house was filled with books. These were fire hazards to begin with.

Later, those wires and those books appeared before my eyes constantly.

They told me: let it go, just let it all go.

That mother and daughter would never find happiness; they had simply found a different way to continue struggling in their misery.

I wouldn’t find happiness either.

So why bother?

On that windy, late night, I went to that neighborhood.

The area was full of surveillance blind spots, and the streets were deserted.

Standing in the darkness of the fifth floor, I calmly finished a cigarette.

Then, I put on gloves, climbed out of the hallway window, and scaled the building to the north-facing window, stepping onto the platform where the AC unit sat.

I saw the wire, the open window behind the security bars, and the books nearby.

Everything was perfectly timed. I was the one who delivered that fire.

Afterward, no one discovered the truth, and the cause of the accident was exactly as I had expected.

I had intended to end everything right then and there.

I never expected that even at this stage, things could take a turn.

It was a wish I hadn’t dared to dream-

There was only one survivor of the accident: Teacher Lu.