Chapter 138

Chapter 138

Hu Yonglan did not go looking for Qin Zhiyuan again.

She moved back home and lived with her mother for five months.

Only when her belly gradually grew large enough that people would be able to tell she was pregnant did she move out again and live alone.

She planned to keep it from her family and give birth to the child in secret. That meant she absolutely could not see her mother for the next five months – so she had deliberately stayed at home for so long, pretending everything was perfectly normal.

Most people in her situation would have decisively gotten rid of the child and started a new life. No one knew why Hu Yonglan was so stubborn.

Over the many months of her pregnancy, Hu Yonglan developed a strange habit no one else knew about.

It started because the hormonal changes during pregnancy had made her somewhat constipated.

When she could not use the bathroom smoothly, Hu Yonglan would clutch a roll of toilet paper and squat there in a daze.

Almost every day, she would think of Qin Zhiyuan, Song Fengmei, and the child in Song Fengmei’s belly.

In her heart, she called that child Little Bastard.

Every time she thought of those three people, a wave of disgust would rise in her. Right after that, her stomach and intestines would feel faintly uncomfortable, giving her the urge to have diarrhea – and by some strange twist of fate, it ended up solving her constipation.

The method worked every time. So almost every day when Hu Yonglan went to the bathroom, she began turning those three people over and over in her mind. Before she knew it, it had become a habit, then a dependency.

If she did not think about them, she could not go.

Gradually, she even began to feel a kind of painful pleasure from the process.

The painful memories and the feeling of being betrayed made her heart race and sweat break out all over her body, yet she insisted on reliving that agony in her mind every single day.

If Hu Yonglan had been a little more open by nature, or if she had even had a few close friends, she would never have sat at home wearing herself down like this.

And so, poor Hu Yonglan slowly stifled herself from the inside out.

Hu Yonglan was fairly tall and had a large frame. Logically speaking, a build like hers should have made childbirth a little easier.

However, the fetus in her womb was also large – eight jin and six liang. During labor, she nearly lost half her life.

When she could not get out of bed or walk, she blamed all of it on that shameless couple and Little Bastard.

When it came time to name the child, Hu Yonglan once again thought of the Five Sacred Mountains Qin Zhiyuan had once mentioned.

She had never remembered which five mountains they were. She only remembered that two of the mountains had names pronounced the same way, and Qin Zhiyuan had once used a tree branch to show her the written characters on the ground.

She remembered that the pronunciation was “heng.”

Hu Yonglan was not well educated. She did not know that some characters pronounced “heng” could carry meaningful implications in a name. All she knew was the character for the horizontal stroke in writing.

And so, Hu Heng came into this world.

Ever since he was little, Hu Heng had been sturdy and bright-eyed, obedient and adorable.

Hu Yonglan told Hu Heng that his father had died before he was born.

Hu Heng was very filial. He listened carefully to everything Hu Yonglan told him and did it all earnestly.

Even after she had Hu Heng, Hu Yonglan still spoke very little at home. Not only did she not express love to a romantic partner, she did not express love to Hu Heng either. Hu Heng would beam and try to make her happy, but she would only look at him indifferently, at most twitching the corners of her mouth.

Every joke Hu Heng told, she called boring. Every interesting story Hu Heng shared, she turned into an example to lecture him with.

In an environment like that, Hu Heng grew into a cautious people-pleaser.

Hu Yonglan did not let go of her obsession with Qin Zhiyuan’s family just because she had entered a new phase of life. Her strange habit worsened day by day.

She remembered with terrifying clarity the day Qin Zhiyuan and Song Fengmei got married, and the day their child was born.

She even secretly found out the name of the Little Bastard in Qin Zhiyuan’s family – Qin Song.

She marveled at the tacit understanding between them. Without ever discussing it, they had both chosen names for their children from the Five Sacred Mountains.

Gradually, Hu Yonglan was no longer satisfied with simply asking around. She wanted to see with her own eyes.

She wanted to buy a pair of binoculars, but she was afraid they would look too conspicuous. What kind of person who did not climb high to enjoy the view used binoculars? It would be as good as announcing to others that she had a voyeuristic streak.

So she changed her approach and bought a camera instead. A camera lens could zoom in from a distance, which was more or less the same as binoculars.

Where Qin Zhiyuan’s family lived, which kindergarten Qin Song attended, which street their family of three went to on weekends to buy things… Hu Yonglan knew it all by heart.

Every weekend, Hu Yonglan was in an excellent mood, because she could once again carry out her special hobby.

This “special activity” was both fun and thrilling. Usually, she would hang the camera around her neck and hide excitedly along the route Qin Zhiyuan’s family of three was bound to pass, waiting for them.

Qin Zhiyuan’s family had no idea they had become the observed protagonists of someone else’s life. They went on living as usual, and naturally never noticed Hu Yonglan crouching in the shadows.

Through the camera, Hu Yonglan watched every smile and frown of the three of them with perfect clarity, feeling both jealous and satisfied.

Later, she felt it was too wasteful to use the camera only as binoculars, so she began pressing the shutter, freezing the scenes in her view into one tangible photograph after another.

Every month, Hu Yonglan would take a long-distance bus to another city, randomly find a place that developed and printed photographs, have the pictures printed, and then return.

She did not dare go to a local photo studio, afraid that her strange habit would spread among people who knew her.
Hu Yonglan’s photos kept piling up until they filled two drawers of her vanity.

Once, Hu Heng came down with chickenpox and had to stay home from school, while Hu Yonglan went to work as usual.

Bored at home, Hu Heng hopped out of bed and decided to sweep the floor. He very much hoped that when Hu Yonglan came home from work and saw how suddenly clean the floor had become, she would praise him.

Hu Yonglan’s bedroom door was shut tight. Holding the broom, Hu Heng pushed the door open and went in, then began sweeping his mother’s room in earnest.

When he swept beneath the vanity, Hu Heng saw a photo lying on the floor. He thought his mother might have dropped it by accident.

He bent down, picked it up, and took a look. In the photo was a boy about his age.

Hu Heng was a little puzzled.

After staring at the photo for a while, he pulled open the vanity drawer, intending to put it inside.

But the moment he opened it, several thick stacks of photos, packed to the brim, appeared before his eyes.

Hu Heng was stunned. He threw the broom onto the floor and began rummaging through those colorful photos.

He looked through them for more than an hour before he finally realized that his mother had been documenting the life of a family of three as a voyeur.

Why would his mother do something like this? Hu Heng could not make sense of it no matter how hard he tried.

That evening, when Hu Yonglan came home, Hu Heng asked her point-blank what was going on with those photos.

Hu Yonglan looked at him for a while, then strode into the bedroom without even changing her shoes. With a bang, she slammed the door shut and locked it with a click.

Hu Heng burst into tears in the living room. Hu Yonglan ignored him completely.

Hu Heng kept crying, then ran over and knocked on the bedroom door.

At that moment, in his childish mind, he mistakenly believed that the boy in the photos was his mother’s other child. He wondered if his mother loved that child very much and did not love him.

At last, Hu Yonglan opened the bedroom door and yanked Hu Heng inside.

Hu Heng wiped away his tears and saw that his mother had thrown all the photos out of the drawers. They lay scattered everywhere, in disarray.

Calmly, Hu Yonglan said to him, “Yes. It’s exactly what you saw.”

Hu Heng opened his mouth, then started crying again.

Hu Yonglan suddenly lost patience. She grabbed a few photos at random, ripped them hard into pieces, and flung them onto the bed. Then she screamed, “What are you crying for!”

Hu Heng no longer dared to cry. He tried his best to clamp his mouth shut, his throat twitching with sobs.

Tears streamed down Hu Yonglan’s face. “Do you think any of this has been easy for me? What the hell did I do wrong?”

Hu Heng asked her cautiously, “That kid… is he your child too?”

Hu Yonglan pointed at a photo of Qin Song and asked, “You mean this kid?”

Hu Heng nodded.

Hu Yonglan let out a cold laugh. “He’s a bastard. An evil thing. A damn curse. The spawn of a beast. How could he be my child?”

Hu Heng stared blankly at Qin Song’s photo. He did not know what unforgivable thing a child his own age could have done to make his mother judge him like that.

Summoning his courage, Hu Heng said, “Mom, you shouldn’t talk about a kid like that. Our teacher said parents should…”

Hu Yonglan grabbed a stack of photos and hurled them at Hu Heng. “Should or shouldn’t? Who cares!”

She got up, shut the window, then turned and walked toward Hu Heng. “I’ll tell you right now who that little beast is.”

Watching his mother stride toward him, Hu Heng was so frightened that he actually backed two steps into the corner.

Hu Yonglan told Hu Heng the whole story of the love and hatred between her and Qin Zhiyuan, regardless of whether Hu Heng could understand it or not.

Only then did Hu Heng learn that he and Qin Song were actually half-brothers with the same father.

Even more unexpectedly, little Hu Heng actually understood the adults’ tangled mess.

This was how he responded to Hu Yonglan:

“Mom, Qin Zhiyuan hurt you. That was his fault. But Qin Song didn’t do anything wrong. You shouldn’t curse him like that.”

Hu Yonglan asked him, “So you think Mommy was wrong?”

Hu Heng nodded. “Taking photos like this… isn’t good.”

Hu Yonglan’s shoulders began to tremble nonstop, and she broke down crying uncontrollably. “I never thought that now even you would despise me…”

Hu Heng wanted to explain, but Hu Yonglan pushed him out of the bedroom and locked herself inside again.

She locked herself in for an entire day and night without coming out, and Hu Heng kept watch outside her door for that entire day and night.

In the end, Hu Heng could not hold on anymore. He pounded on the door desperately, calling for his mother to come out and eat something, to drink some water.

Lying on the bed, Hu Yonglan said hoarsely, “I know I’m disgusting. Go on, leave. Find someone else to call Mom. I’ll just die here by myself.”

Hu Heng started crying again. He began apologizing to Hu Yonglan.

“Mom, open the door. I was wrong.”

“Mom, it’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have gone through your things.”

“Mom, do whatever you want to do.”

“Mom, please don’t abandon me.”

At last, Hu Yonglan finally opened the door. Her eyes were red as she asked Hu Heng, “Do you still blame Mommy?”

Hu Heng threw his arms around her. “I don’t. I don’t blame you anymore. Mom, I’ve thought about it. It’s too hard for you to raise me all by yourself. I’m the one who’s bad. I’m bad…”

And just like that, mother and son reconciled through their tears.

From that day on, Hu Heng inexplicably became a stutterer.