Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“We searched everywhere. Back then, the Skynet surveillance system hadn’t reached that small path yet; cameras were only on the main roads. My whole family was like headless flies, searching frantically.

“We used bamboo rafts to dredge the roadside ponds-three times, and found nothing. We hired people to go down into the nearby wells, but there was nothing there either.

“After we reported it, the police checked the surrounding surveillance footage and found no suspicious persons. They interviewed the neighbors and villagers from several nearby villages, but not a single person had seen my sister.”

Just like that, my sister had vanished.

My mother beat me, sitting on the ground and wailing in heartbreak. “How could you be so lazy? Why didn’t you deliver the food? Why did you let her go instead?”

My grandmother, a devout Christian, said her Lord would never forgive a child who lost her sister out of laziness and selfishness.

In a fit of rage, my father kicked me five or six times, knocking me to the ground.

The neighbors, unable to make sense of the situation, didn’t step in to stop them. Instead, they stood around pointing and whispering at me.

Like a puppet, I didn’t shed a single tear. I walked silently to the path where my sister had disappeared and stood there stubbornly for three days, staring at the intersection without blinking, waiting for her small figure to appear.

But no miracle occurred.

After that incident, my family barely spoke to me. My mother, in particular, didn’t say a single word to me for the next decade or so.

Once I started middle school, I lived in the dorms. I would return home once a weekend just to grab my money and clean clothes before leaving immediately, not daring to stay a moment longer.

During those years, I walked the path my sister took to deliver that meal over and over again. I examined every blade of grass and every tree, trying to find the slightest clue, imagining countless possibilities.

It was torture.

“How long did you usually nap back then?” Lao Yu asked, flipping through the case files I had brought. He seemed very interested in this case.

At the time, it had been classified as a missing person case and had sat untouched for over ten years.

“It depended. Sometimes long, sometimes short. But for some reason, I was especially sleepy that day. I slept for over two hours until my father woke me up.”

“You said you had heatstroke. What did it feel like at the time? Do you remember?”

I tried hard to recall the sensations from that afternoon.

“Weakness all over, drowsiness, dizziness, feeling light-headed…”

Lao Yu listened and fell silent for a moment.

“Have you ever considered that it might not have been heatstroke?”

My scalp went numb, and my eyes widened as I looked at him.

“Symptoms of heatstroke include dizziness, blurred vision, ringing in the ears, headaches, weakness in the limbs, nausea, vomiting, cold sweats…

“Your symptoms don’t sound like heatstroke. They sound more like you took…”

My heart skipped a beat. Before he could finish, I blurted out, “Took what?”

“Sleeping pills, or some kind of sedative,” Lao Yu said, giving me a meaningful look.

How had I never thought of that?

The symptoms of taking sleeping pills and heatstroke do share many similarities.

However, heatstroke has two very distinct characteristics-nausea and cold sweats.

I remembered clearly that on that day, I had neither!

The hair all over my body stood on end.