A huge dream that ends with the rumbling of mud covering the ground above.

If you looked up, you could see a group of blurry figures shovelling the mud with shovels, and a man looking down at it.

It was hard to make out his eyebrows, but his voice was surprisingly clear.

“I remember the first time I saw you, in your country clothes, not very pretty, earthy, but you had beautiful eyes, and I was immediately drawn to you.”

The woman in the pit was beautiful, but not too overwhelmingly beautiful; there was some rhythm to her.

Flirtatious, immodest, but outwardly conservative and cheerful.

At first glance, she is not a very nice woman, and it is impossible to tell what is wrong with her.

Simply put, she is a woman with a heart of gold, a woman who knows how to pretend!

She looked up at him, “I felt the same way then and now about it.”

He laughed, “You tell me.”

She laughed back, “I feel like I’ve had shit poured in my mouth.”

He was calm, “But you swallowed that shit, and swallowed it many times.”

A double meaning, ambiguous and vile at the same time.

“Like you’re proud of it?”

“Not proud, just sad, after all, this is the woman I slept with for so many years, buried alive, which I’m afraid is not very nice, and a bit heartbreaking.”

A reckless insult that had to be returned in some way.

“Economic crimes on one list down I can’t even say, stock market crash, foreign assets have been frozen, hands stained with the blood of how many people, you know in your heart, the investigative order has come down, you now have to buy a ticket for our country kind of dirty bus not too easy right people go higher, the more painful the fall down.”

She said it lightly, but it made the shovelheads wonder.

Why bury her alive?

He exhaled a ring of smoke and spat out an obvious curse Qin Yu, you bitch!

The cigarette fell out of his fingers and the light of the fire fell on her face, scorching her with heat and choking her with dirt.

And yet after the anger came the sound of his laughter.

“But you’re also too naive, some things rattle and rattle and people who haven’t mastered the rules in their circles think they’re only making themselves look ridiculous and pathetic by playing with them like you are now.”

He squatted down like an unwary teenager squatting by a stream and watching the fish swimming in the water to pass the time.

“Iron evidence is as good as doubt, and there’s no point in spreading this pavilion even wider if you can’t catch me, but you probably won’t have much chance of seeing it.”

She did lose sight of him as the last shaft of mud disappeared from view.

It was dark.

The village medical centre was only three miles east of Junay and was the only one of its kind in several villages, and no one knew when the young girl lying on her sleeping bed, separated by a white curtain, opened her eyes, but the world of many people changed for a moment.

For what happened was that the power went out.

Visibility was already poor in the autumn evening, and when the light bulb dimmed, it became much darker in the house. Only when Qin Yuan, the famous elm of Zhongwei Village, realised that his daughter was awake did he immediately stand up, his initially mute face moving, but he was still not very well spoken, uttering only a dry phrase: “Little Fish, how are you, are you still uncomfortable? Aren’t you going to faint?”

Qin Yu suddenly saw this slightly scratched and dirty face, and for a moment his eyes went a little blank.

He couldn’t understand it, but as a father, Qin Yuan understood, but he was so upset that he was just about to say something when Qin Yu fainted.

Qin Yuan called the doctor, and soon a lazy, yawning doctor came in, looked at Qin Yu’s pupils, then at his face, opened and closed his mouth to say something, and finally waved his hand impatiently.

“What’s the point of coming if you know you can’t understand, you might as well take a wife!”

This was just overheard by the doctor’s wife, who was looking ugly and swearing. The doctor was outraged and told Qin Yuan with a straight face, “You still have to listen to the doctor’s orders, otherwise why else would you need a doctor? Forget it, you can’t hear, even if I tell you, you’re deaf.”

The lowly doctor took a piece of paper and wrote a few words, tossed the paper to Qin Yuan and opened his palm, making a gesture signifying that he wanted a hundred.

In the early twenty-first century, a hundred dollars was a lot of money in the countryside. Qin Yuan didn’t understand why the other side wanted so much money just to look at her daughter and not even give her medicine, but he couldn’t argue with the other side as they only had one doctor on their side.

He could not afford to offend her.

Qin Yu was unaware that her father was bleeding profusely due to his clenched teeth, but after she lost consciousness, her mind seemed to return to the pit where a lot of mud had fallen, but after she subconsciously raised her head in pain, she vaguely heard a catcall.

The mud came back abruptly.

It was like the effect of pulling back a line of sight with a mouse on a video programme screen on a computer.

Or a more obvious frame-by-frame fast-forwarding on the flash.

The dirt went back into the shovel, the shovel backed up, the man with the shovel went back into the car, she went back into the car, the windows closed and the car drove backwards.

As she blinked, a scene flashed outside the window, tall buildings began to crumble, fancy new billboards rotted from steel, words became a blur, the ground took on the scent of flowers and plants and began to rot again, insects crawled out of the rot, insects retreated and climbed back into the tree, and atop the tree through the window she saw a man nestled inside her, from old to young, from stupor to pain, from pain to despair, from despair to hope.

The masters who studied the years and created thick stacks of books could hardly have guessed that she would see the twists and turns of untold years from the young, like wine and song.

Perhaps because they never died.

But in any case, time had rolled back, and she had returned from the bustling city of the afterlife to the backward countryside and fields to see a couple rising in the darkness of early morning to dress, wash and prepare food, and trying not to be awakened.

It was her parents.

They would go off to work together and she, as a little girl, would get up sneakily, grab a small hoe from a corner and run out of the house.

A few strokes with the hoe and she seemed to dig up something that, before she could look at it, exuded a horrible stench.

It appeared to be

dried salted fish? Then she saw the horrible ghostly aura turn into a horrible evil cat’s face.

The dream was cut short, and she awoke with a jolt, only to realize that she was lying on a wide warm back.

The dream shattered, was it reality before her eyes, or was she in a butterfly’s dream?

Was she dead or alive?

The man carrying her was tall, with a brisk gait, and it seemed to be late evening, a little windy and cold.

She couldn’t help but crinkle, she was so cold she cursed the butterfly!

“Little fishy, is it cold? It stinks a bit in here, Daddy come quick, it’s strange how this wasteland stinks outside.”

He was a deaf man and couldn’t hear what his daughter was saying, so after he finished himself, Qin Yu’s footsteps got louder and louder, but Qin Yu strained her throat for a moment, being in a trance because this dream was affecting her greatly.

It seemed real and not real.

Until in the trance she saw something looking at her from the grass and she subconsciously looked back to see something crouching in the grass.

A cat.

A cat hiding in the stinking grass.

It was looking at her with green, amber-yellow eyes.

It was strange that she could see his eyes clearly, given the distance, her poor eyesight and the darkness.

The cat’s eyes were clearly eerily playful, her paws were up, she was licking the back of her paws, tall and cold and explosive, but suddenly her cheeks puffed up and she made an eye roll plus a gag.

The image struck her too hard and suddenly a jerky phrase popped into her head, one not too susceptible to country girls This dead cat is such a bloody bitch, it looks like a pack of emoji begging to be beaten.

When she looked back, he was gone again, leaving what looked like a misty, cold, dark autumn night.

A candle glowed in the hut, and from afar Qin Yuan saw a long, thin shadow in the doorway, which stared at them absently in the light of the night and the candle, and soon walked quickly away.

Qin Yuan’s footsteps also quickened.

But when the two couples met, they were at a loss for words.

The deaf who could not hear and the mute who could not speak – it was impossible to tell whether it was God’s miraculous disposition for them to approach each other, or whether it was cruelty that added insult to insult.

But Qin Yu lived in a family where she could not communicate heart-to-heart.

Whatever the case, she had to run to her mother and hug her.

She looked a little wary and upset and reached out to touch Qin Yu’s forehead, but she didn’t know what came into her head, so she pulled away and touched Qin Yu’s slightly disheveled hair.

If it had been an ordinary girl, she probably would have thought her mother disliked her.

But Qin Yu knew that this was how they got along as mother and daughter, and that her daughter’s resistance had led to her mother’s weakness.

Once upon a time she had grown accustomed to this, but today it was a little different. A desire arose in the depths of her heart, perhaps because this dream was too horrible and too real.

The feeling of satisfaction that comes with losing and gaining something need not be the same, but also the fear of not losing it again.

So subconsciously she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Mother Qin’s slender waist.

The scent of light wheat and some soap powder reached her.

Qin Yu immediately dispelled all those strange memories, because it was a dream, right?

The parents were so real that they were living in front of his eyes.

The whole real thing was not a bloody corpse falling to the ground.

“Mum,” she said and realised her voice was incredibly soft.

Like a little girl’s.

No, she was a teenager.

Sixteen years old!

The Qin spouses were also amazed at the way their daughter, who was usually so aloof and terse towards them, was behaving today.

But the couple did not know how to communicate, and as a mother, Qin’s mother had the courage to reach out and button the top three buttons of Qin Yu’s dress for her.

She was afraid that her daughter might get cold.

Qin Yu suddenly realised that her collar had been unbuttoned three times, so no wonder she was cold now.

But she hadn’t unbuttoned anything before she passed out.

Who did it? Maybe that creepy cat?

The cat seemed a little excited.

While the family greeted her, Qin Yu, perhaps thinking of the creepy cat, subconsciously looked around, and quite by chance she noticed a dark shadow flicker behind a tree in the dim night light, and then looked around to hide behind it.

The height of this dark shadow was nothing like a cat.

Qin Yu felt a vague unease.