Chapter 26:
He might be crying behind bars!

Jing Qizhen took a breath of chilly air. Without caring whether the man who was boiling water in the house might become suspicious, he took a flashlight and ran out of the west room again while shouting in a hurry, “Hey, I seem to have accidentally dropped something. I’ll go look for them outside!”

Yan Hong naturally knew Jing Qizhen’s intention. “I’ll help you find them together!”

Lu Lingxi’s situation outside was currently unknown. A girl’s voice was suddenly heard in the middle of the night; it didn’t seem like a good thing. Yan Hong picked up a flashlight and swiftly followed Jing Qizhen out.

The woman had just taken out two beddings from her dowry storage at the moment. The quilts were bright red and purple, but over the years, the colors had inevitably become dull.

The woman frowned seeing Jing Qizhen’s irritated and anxious look, but she still said to her husband with scolding words, “You can also help them!”

Manman was attentive and worried that the couple would join the fun outside. If a human couple went out at night and triggered a new event, it would only add fuel to the fire. She quickly stopped her and said, “No, no, no. They are two grown men, they can just go out and look for their own things. Elder sister, you haven’t said what’s your name yet.”

Upon seeing them, Grandma Fang and Jin Guijuan spoke in unison, “Is this your child? How old is he? He looks smart!” Grandma Fang looked at the little guy peeking out from behind the curtain with a smile,

As soon as the child was mentioned, the topic naturally grew.

The woman’s attention was naturally focused on the child, and she couldn’t help but urge, “It’s so late. Why won’t you go to bed?!”

When the man saw Old Xiao still sweating and his forehead beaded wet, he deliberately asked with more concern, “What’s wrong, brother? Are you feeling unwell?”

Grandma Fang sighed and said nonsense, “Hey, it’s all because of work. He usually sits in the office and doesn’t exercise, and now his bones are weak. It’s really bad. As soon as he hiked on the mountain road, he was paralyzed with fatigue.”

Lu Lingxi hiding in the tree naturally heard Jing Qizhen’s actions through his earphones, and he wanted to tell them in his heart, ‘Don’t come here!’ But he didn’t dare to speak rashly, for fear of attracting more attention from the girl behind him.

Because of extreme panic, time seemed to be stretched infinitely in the short wait.

Behind him, the girl’s doubtful voice sounded again, “Big brother?”

Lu Lingxi was so nervous that his breathing became rapid. He gritted his teeth and stiffly and vaguely answered in a low voice, “There is no place in the tree for big brother to live…”

The girl was silent.

After a moment, her hesitant voice asked, “Is that so? I have seen that birds’ homes are all in the trees.”

In such a short time, Jing Qizhen and Yan Hong had already rushed out of the courtyard of the house.

The strong light from the flashlight beamed straight at her.

The girl flinched from the light, and she suddenly exclaimed, “Ouch!”

Under the tree where Lu Lingxi was hiding, stood a girl who was about seven or eight years old. She was wearing a dirty and ill-fitting tattered cotton-padded coat, and wearing old cotton-padded shoes that were too big with her toes exposed. She was raising her head as she looked in Lu Lingxi’s direction, her confusion and fear evident.

Because of the strong beam from the flashlight, the girl subconsciously turned her face away.

Jing Qizhen was shocked to see that the little girl in shabby clothes had some dry and cracked skin on her face and vague frostbite on her hands.

She sniffled, but her voice was naïve, filled with uneasiness and confusion. “Big brother?”

The most important thing was that the little girl seemed to be an ordinary human being, at least for now.

Lu Lingxi, who was still frozen while holding the gun, slowly turned his head. He felt that his neck was almost rusty, and his spine might make a creaking sound.

Jing Qizhen made a calm gesture to Yan Hong behind him. He took a deep breath, walked forward, squatted down, and asked as gently as possible, “Little sister, it’s so late at night. Aren’t you cold?”

Jing Qizhen originally wanted to ask her why she ‘didn’t go home’, but looking at the way the little girl was dressed, he knew that her ‘home’ was obviously not a safe place. Halfway through his words, he forcibly changed them.

While talking, Jing Qizhen took off his coat and put it on the little girl.

As Jing Qizhen and the little girl began to talk, Lu Lingxi finally took a breath and turned to look at the girl properly.

The seven- or eight-year-old little girl was extremely scrawny and thin due to malnutrition.

With Jing Qizhen’s height reaching 1.8 meters, his outermost windbreaker basically covers the little girl’s whole body.

Relying on that fact, Jing Qizhen didn’t let the little girl put her arms into the sleeves at all, but just wrapped her up tightly and then quickly pulled up the zipper. Even the hood was lifted and directly covered the little girl’s head.

Finally, he tightened the ties of the hood. Regardless of whether there was any abnormality with the little girl who appeared in the middle of the night, Jing Qizhen’s windbreaker definitely played a very good role in restricting movement and giving a deceleration effect…

Lu Lingxi and Yan Hong: …

They felt that Jing Qizhen definitely did it on purpose.

Just as Lu Lingxi and Yan Hong thought so, Jing Qizhen also stretched out his hand to tie a bow under her chin.

His series of movements flowed smoothly. After finishing them all, Jing Qizhen patted the little girl’s head and asked in a gentle and nonchalant voice, “Are you warm now?”

The windbreaker still retained the temperature from the owner’s body. Its hem hung down to the ground, slightly stained with dust, but for the little girl in shabby clothes, it was so warm that it made her feel lost.

The little girl was wrapped in a warm windbreaker and covered with a wide hood, her small face almost could not be seen.

She moved a little, and the windbreaker also swayed a little, looking a little clumsy.

“…It’s very warm, thank you, big brother,” after a while, the little girl spoke softly, with some inexplicable vulnerability and hesitation in her childish voice.

After thinking for a moment, Jing Qizhen temporarily avoided any mention of ‘going home’ for the sake of safety, and instead asked the little girl, “How did you notice that big brother was in the tree?”

Lu Lingxi, who was suddenly called and still stayed in the tree, hid his gun calmly. Then he subconsciously raised the corners of his mouth, revealing a stiff but extremely innocent-looking smile.

The little girl raised her head again, with a stubborn brightness in her dark eyes.

After a slight hesitation, the little girl said softly, “You are not from the village. I have never seen you in the village!”

Jing Qizhen: “We are tourists from outside, and we accidentally got lost here.”

The little girl: “But I don’t remember tourists like you at this time before!”

Realizing the subtle meaning of the little girl’s words, Lu Lingxi and Yan Hong suddenly felt chills running down their spines.

Although Jing Qizhen was sweating inwardly, his face remained calm and his words were as gentle as ever, “Little sister, have you ever heard of a theory of parallel time and space in physics?”

The little girl was startled, her dark eyes fixed on Jing Qizhen, and she shook her head. “What is that?”

Jing Qizhen breathed a sigh of relief. Shivering in the cold, he gently held the little sister’s shoulders with his hands through the thick windbreaker jacket. He recalled the many popular science theories about the universe and space that he had read. Using the simplest examples, he began to teach the little girl endlessly.

Ten minutes passed by just like that.

Jing Qizhen had already talked about the double-slit interference experiment in quantum mechanics from the mythical beast of physics, Schrödinger’s cat. He also briefly introduced the boundaries between macro and micro in physics. Then, the topic directly turned towards Marxist materialism. Gone were the worldviews and classical idealism in classical philosophy.

Lu Lingxi and Yan Hong, who were listening to them nearby: …

The others in the house who were listening to the live broadcast through the earphones: …

If he previously used Ms. Li’s work compulsion that manifested even after she became a ghost to go through the erosion area, now he simply aimed to smash the little girl’s worldview to pieces and completely rebuild it.

After Jing Qizhen eloquently narrated to her ten thousand words of popular science, the little girl’s eyes which looked a little strange at first became dazed. She was probably so shocked that she didn’t know what to say.

The still squatting Lu Lingxi on the tree also questioned his life, and glanced at the time on his watch in a daze.

Finally, Jing Qizhen concluded, “So, maybe, the two couples in the village who quarreled loudly tonight may affect whether we come here after we got lost today or not!”

The little girl: …

Yan Hong: …

Everyone in the west room still listening to the live broadcast through earphones: …

Lu Lingxi’s weak voice came from the tree. “Can I ask why?”

Jing Qizhen helped analyze with clear logic and concise words. “If they didn’t quarrel, they would probably go to bed directly. There would be no lights in this village that attract our attention. When we got lost in the mountains, we might continue walking in the dark to another place. If we hadn’t come to this village, Little Lu wouldn’t have been able to climb the tree–”

At that point, Jing Qizhen, whose legs had been numb from squatting for a long time, finally stood up straight and stretched a little. Then he said to the little girl seriously and righteously, “If Little Lu did not climb the tree, little sister, you won’t see us big brothers tonight, right?”

The little girl: …

Yan Hong: …

Lu Lingxi whose eyes crossed: …

After a brief stalemate, Jing Qizhen was thinking about what other topic he could teach, but the little girl wrapped in a windbreaker suddenly took a small step back. Then she tripped on the hem and staggered a little.

Jing Qizhen quickly reached out to help her – just in time to grab the windbreaker’s collar and lift the little girl upright.

The little girl who was being held by the collar raised her head, her pupils strangely dark in the night.

She looked at Jing Qizhen intently, her eyes unblinking.

The little girl’s face clearly still carried frostbite and cracked marks, but the rest of her cheeks were too delicate and clean.

The contrast between the smooth skin and the scarred skin was truly astonishing, and it gave people an extremely strong sense of dissonance.

The little girl’s voice was childish and confused, “Big brother, neither dad nor mom likes me. When dad left, mom hated me even more. Why doesn’t dad come home?”

Jing Qizhen’s mind instantly imagined countless bloody dramas among the locals. However, facing a little girl who looked like a child but might actually be a dangerous creature, he still chose a safer explanation.

Jing Qizhen: “There must be a reason why your dad doesn’t come home. It’s not necessarily because he’s busy. He might have been caught hiring a prostitute! You should understand that right now, your dad may be crying behind bars, sad and lonely!”

The little girl froze there.

Lu Lingxi: =口=???

Yan Hong coughed, and couldn’t help but whisper in a low voice, “What are you talking about to a child?!!!”

Dahliya: To standardize, I’ll be changing Xiao to Little. So it’ll be Little Jing, Little Lu, and Old Xiao. Sorry for any confusion.