During the winter vacation, the newly opened amusement park in A City still had many facilities not yet open to the public. Su Baixue, dressed in a Pikachu mascot costume, stood outside the east gate of the amusement park, distributing colorful balloons to children entering the park. From the perspective of the Pikachu costume, she could see the huge Ferris wheel in the park. Five hundred meters from the Ferris wheel was another gate of the amusement park, the west gate. By the west gate stood Shao Li, dressed in a white bear mascot costume. The two of them distributed balloons separately. There weren't many people in the morning, and with this weather, there were even fewer children. Su Baixue distributed balloons for a while, then took off her headpiece to breathe fresh air and went to the side to pick up her water bottle for a drink. The water had already gone cold and wasn't pleasant to drink. Winter was almost over. Spring would begin in half a month.
Su Cui sat in a McDonald's not far from the amusement park, flipping through a magazine called Famous Guns while drinking hot milk and waiting for delivery, occasionally checking on Su Baixue's movements. As she watched, her hand paused...
In front of the transparent window, a limping orange cat, shivering from the cold, walked by slowly. Its half-broken tail was shocking to see. Su Cui stood up and left her seat, taking the magazine and hot milk with her. When she reached the window, the orange cat had already hidden. She poured some hot milk into the upside-down cup lid, then pushed the lid into the hidden bushes. After leaving her spot, she walked a few hundred meters forward, then turned back to see the orange cat slowly enter the bushes. Cats that have been hurt are always very wary. Su Cui shook her head, took a photo, searched on Weibo for a dedicated A City stray cat rescue account, sent the photo as a private message, and left the address.
At that moment, the delivery she had ordered arrived. Su Cui called the delivery guy over and pointed to Su Baixue at the entrance: "Young man, I'll give you an extra five yuan. Could you walk over and deliver these two cups of hot milk tea to that Pikachu at the east gate giving out balloons and the white bear at the west gate? Don't tell them who I am."
"Sure." The delivery guy thought for a moment and agreed readily since his orders were all nearby. Su Cui watched with a smile as he walked away. She had followed Su Baixue out in the morning but didn't know what mascot costume she would be wearing, so she had to order on the spot. She had observed for a long time; there were few people in the morning, and Su Baixue and Shao Li could take breaks to drink water from time to time, so sending milk tea was definitely fine.
Seeing that the hot milk tea was successfully delivered to Su Baixue's hands, the delivery guy took the other portion to give to Shao Li. Su Cui stepped aside and made a phone call.
"Hello, is this Dongqiao Swimming Pool? I'd like to inquire about the opening hours and training class prices... Yes, I'm looking for a one-on-one professional swimming instructor who can teach me to swim as quickly as possible."
"Mm? What? My grandson's age? No, it's for me... I'm not that old, just over sixty. That's not old!" Su Cui laughed and emphasized, "Don't worry! I don't have heart disease!"
"No respiratory or skin diseases either... No rheumatism. I'm very healthy. Just a bit older, but I didn't have time to learn when I was young..."
After hanging up, Su Cui looked at her wrinkled skin and touched her chin. She felt a little unhappy. Watching the melted snow flow through the cracks in the ground, she couldn't help but feel regret for the youth she could never get back.
In the blink of an eye, the day passed peacefully. Su Baixue and Shao Li successfully obtained free tickets and agreed to play at the amusement park early the next morning. By the next evening, Su Baixue returned home happily from the amusement park and kept telling Su Cui about the fun things she encountered there. Su Cui had followed them all the way and was a bit tired, but she listened seriously with a smile. Under the warm yellow light, the small home was filled with warmth.
Happy times always pass quickly. In the blink of an eye, spring arrived and everything revived. On this day, Su Baixue accompanied Su Cui home from the swimming pool and saw new buds sprouting on the bare old tree at their doorstep. She pointed them out to Su Cui with novelty. Bright sunlight, warm spring air—after the beginning of spring, Su Cui experienced her first Spring Festival in the book world.
Preparing New Year goods, spring cleaning—for good luck, Su Cui not only pasted new couplets on the door but also two large door gods. She led Su Baixue to a temple to pray. Looking at the decorations of the entire old community and the flourishing incense in the temple, Su Cui couldn't help but sigh more than once: If she hadn't transmigrated into this book, who could tell that this world was not the real world but just a book world of a harmonious novel? Being in the game, you don't know it's a game; being in the book, you don't know it's a book.
After finishing their prayers, Su Cui led Su Baixue away. As they descended the temple steps, a low-key black car drove past, brushing by Su Baixue. Inside the car, Zhou Shixiang saw his grandson looking out the window and asked the person beside him, "What are you looking at?" The boy inside lowered his head. "Nothing."
"This surgery was so successful that Grandpa can finally breathe a sigh of relief." Zhou Shixiang patted his grandson's head. "Grandpa made a wish at Hongde Temple before. Today, I brought you here to fulfill it." The car stopped, and the door opened from the outside. The pale-faced boy inside, supported by a security guard, slowly stepped out. Gazing at Hongde Temple, his eyes moved slightly as he spoke an ambiguous sentence: "So it really is like this."
"Yangyang, what are you saying?" Zhou Shixiang walked over with his cane. The recent turmoil in the family had aged this well-maintained, elegant old man significantly, and the fatigue on his face was almost impossible to hide. Su Yang waved off the security guard's approach, stepped forward, and obediently supported Zhou Shixiang. "Nothing."
Zhou Shixiang sighed. "You should stop keeping everything bottled up inside." Since his grandson woke up a year ago, he had become increasingly silent. Even he couldn't understand what his grandson was thinking. Recalling the nanny's report that Su Yang had been secretly smoking, he now didn't want to let Su Yang out of his sight for a moment. He had always loved his youngest son the most, and his son had been promising, but unfortunately, he had passed away too early, leaving only Su Yang as the sole heir. How could that not be disheartening?
*
In the evening, Su Baixue turned on the TV and watched the Spring Festival Gala with Su Cui while enjoying a sumptuous New Year's Eve dinner. Su Baixue also took out her phone and sent a few New Year greetings to her teachers and Shao Li. She wanted to send one to Su Yang too, but since he had never contacted her and she didn't know his number, she had to give up. This year's Spring Festival Gala program was very exciting. Perhaps because she had never had time to watch it in previous years, Su Baixue felt that this year's gala was the best she had ever seen. When she heard Su Cui ask which director was in charge of this year's gala, she immediately searched for it on Weibo with great interest. After finding out and telling Su Cui, she couldn't help browsing local news in A City for a while.
Her finger moved up the phone screen. Suddenly, a piece of news caught her eye. In the photo displayed, an incompletely obscured part made her break out in a cold sweat. She exclaimed in surprise, "Grandma!"
"What's wrong?" Su Cui was eating sunflower seeds. As she spoke, she spat out a shell, but a small piece got stuck in her teeth.
Su Baixue quickly said, "I saw a local news report that there have been several cases of cat abuse in A City recently. It's terrifying! All the cat skins were stripped off, and the bodies were dumped by the river. Two days ago, they even spelled out a line..."
"What?" Su Cui hurriedly stood up to find a toothpick on the table.
"They spelled out a line of words, bloody letters. It looked like the character 'wait' and the character 'me'.'" Su Baixue looked at Su Cui, who had found the toothpick container. The cold cylinder in her hand made Su Cui's heart skip a beat. She turned around, took Su Baixue's phone, and looked at the news.
The snow by the river hadn't completely melted yet. The ground was wet and muddy from passersby. The cat bodies in the photo had been blurred by the publisher, but they were still an expanse of red. From the comments below and the description of the news, it was evident that all the cats had been skinned. The photo showed a pile of cat bodies arranged messily yet orderly on the ground, exactly forming two characters: "Wait for me."
Su Cui frowned. Although she roughly knew some names of the twisted scumbags in the book world, she had skipped many parts after discovering it was a harmonious novel. She knew the twins' names but not the related events, only that Su Baixue was very afraid of these two characters. Now that she thought about it, there was a chapter she had read where the twin brother Tapana often forcefully grabbed Su Baixue's hand to make her touch the fur inside his clothes. Every time he asked her to do that, Su Baixue would collapse and let out a piercing scream. She hadn't understood it at the time. Compared to his younger brother, Tapana was considered gentler among the group of perverts toward the heroine. So why was the heroine in the book so terrified, even more than she was of Tapana's younger brother? After all, the younger brother Tapas had personally made "dolls" in front of Su Baixue. Yet in her interactions with the two, Su Baixue remained calm toward the doll-making younger brother but showed more fear and stronger reactions to the older brother. She would vomit, even repeatedly clean the hand that had touched Tapana. She would tear at her own hair and even thought about stabbing Tapana to death, though in the end, it was just a thought. The twins appeared in the original story at the middle stage, long after Su Baixue had completely closed herself off. When Su Cui skimmed through this part, she had thought Su Baixue was about to resist. Hoping that The Melody of Spring Snow would finally deliver a face-slapping moment and elevate the theme, Su Cui patiently read through several chapters from that point, only to be disappointed to find that the heroine still did nothing. Only her aversion to Tapana's touch was particularly intense.
There was a sentence in the chapter Su Cui had read that puzzled her: "Tapana is a gentle man with an extreme collecting obsession." At the time, anger at the book had made her skip it. But now she thought: What did this extreme collecting obsession refer to?
The photo in the news was a blur of blood. Through those flesh lumps with raised heads, Su Cui thought of the limping cat she had seen at the amusement park. Outside the bright, warm glass window, those vertical pupils were like a half-closed door, and from within the door came whispers, indistinguishable as prayers or fear.