Yes.
Naturally, unsurprisingly.
Even a vicious tiger will not eat its cubs. Unless there were doubts about Huo Ranyin’s parentage, the probability of both parents in a family treating their own child with such cruelty was extremely low.
“And then?” Ji Xun immediately followed up with a question, without stopping to comfort Huo Ranyin.
He could not offer comfort for things in the past. On this matter, the wound in Huo Ranyin’s heart had been stitched up tightly with dense stitches over the years, forming a thick scab.
Shallow words of comfort, light as a floating feather, could not penetrate that armor-like scab at all.
All he could do was repeatedly ask questions, digging into the past, digging into the wound… digging out everything hidden in the past, and then piecing together the true truth, a dose of good medicine that could truly cure Huo Ranyin.
“Although it’s a bit late to say this now. But the older I get, the less I resent… my mother, Huo Qiyu.” Huo Ranyin understood Ji Xun’s deep meaning. In order to give the detective the most objective clues, he concentrated his thoughts and carefully weighed every word. “She was 21 when she was pregnant with me, and she hadn’t even graduated from university yet. I take after my mother, inheriting her looks, but I’m nowhere near as beautiful as she was.”
As a man, Huo Ranyin’s appearance was already extremely striking and gorgeous. What would a woman far more beautiful than Huo Ranyin look like?
For a moment, Ji Xun could not imagine it.
Perhaps as radiant as a gemstone, as bright and pure as the moon.
He continued to listen to Huo Ranyin’s description.
“My grandfather doted on her very much, and also worried about her a lot. He always had family servants follow her around, afraid that something would happen to her,” Huo Ranyin said. “But my mother had a lively personality back then and loved socializing. After she got into a university, which was rare in those days, she met a group of like-minded classmates, so she often wanted to shake off the servants following her. That year, my uncle, her older brother, had just passed away from illness, and her father had also suffered a heavy blow. His spirit declined, and he was often drunk. The entire mansion was shrouded in an atmosphere of decadence and decay. She felt increasingly agonizing and unable to bear it, so she went out alone to attend gatherings more and more frequently.”
“Something happened at a gathering?” Ji Xun couldn’t help but interject.
“…Mm,” Huo Ranyin said. “A poetry gathering was held in a hotel. Someone suggested drinking halfway through, and everyone got roaring drunk. My mother was in the room next to the poetry gathering when she was gang-raped by two strange men.”
“…” Ji Xun’s expression darkened.
With Huo Ranyin’s description up to this point, he could already guess many of the things that followed.
Things that were unbearable to guess.
“The fact that such a thing happened was already tragic enough. But I’m afraid my mother didn’t realize at the time that this hellish night was merely the beginning of the misfortune.” When Huo Ranyin spoke of this, his speaking speed suddenly increased. Although he spoke fast, he still spoke clearly. “Later, she was bumped into by her classmates with her clothes disheveled, and she was also seen by the people in the hotel.”
“There were too many people. By the time she returned home, panicking and at a loss, and finally managed to fall asleep under the comfort of her father, who was shocked to hear the news… the news that the Huo family’s daughter had been gang-raped by hooligans had already spread throughout all of Qin City.”
“Rumors?” Ji Xun asked.
“Not just rumors, but photos too,” Huo Ranyin said.
“This was premeditated…” Ji Xun murmured.
“Perhaps,” Huo Ranyin said. “How could the Huo family, capable of taking on such a huge business, not have enemies? Huo Shanyuan’s only son had just died of illness. If his only remaining young daughter were to suffer any mishaps because of this blow, the entire Huo family would collapse like a tree falling and scattering the monkeys… Defeating a massive family without spilling a single drop of blood; I imagine many people would be tempted by this. It’s just that the criminal investigation methods back then weren’t as comprehensive as they are now. They investigated back and forth back then, causing an uproar throughout the city, but in the end, they never found those two hooligans.”
“At this time, something else happened…”
Speaking up to here, Huo Ranyin uncharacteristically stopped.
Ji Xun saw a complex look surface on Huo Ranyin’s face. Before he could distinguish what kind of emotion this complexity represented, Huo Ranyin had already spoken:
“My mother discovered that she was pregnant… The child staying in her belly, with an unknown father, was me.”
“It’s really strange.”
Huo Ranyin said lightly.
“Even though she had already taken medicine and taken precautions on the night of the incident, I still shamelessly, like a wild weed… remained in her body.”
“Back then, the Huo family were prominent figures in Qin City. As the youngest daughter of the Huo family, my mother was beautiful and smart. From a young age, the stream of men showing her goodwill was endless. By the time she was 21, she already had a prospective fiancé. After this incident happened, her fiancé naturally disappeared without a trace; the rest of the men who had been pursuing her relentlessly all scattered to the winds… This wasn’t something entirely unpredictable. This scandal caused too big of a fuss. Even today, the woman wouldn’t be able to show her face in society, let alone back then.”
“By the time the pregnancy was discovered, the child was already three or four months along. They went to the hospital. Since that incident, my mother had been depressed, and her body had never recovered. If she were to get an abortion, there was a risk of harming her body… That is to say, it was highly likely she would never be able to conceive again in the future.”
“This was fatal news for both my mother and my grandfather.”
“Her brother had just passed away; he had married and divorced my aunt, leaving behind no children. My mother was my grandfather’s youngest daughter. When she was 21, my grandfather was already 58, and my grandmother had passed away many years prior. It was even more impossible for him to have any other flesh and blood. My mother was my grandfather’s only remaining legacy; the child in my mother’s belly was also the Huo family’s only hope.”
Huo Ranyin stated this plainly.
This concept might seem outdated in the minds of some people today, but back then, and even in the minds of the vast majority of people now, it remained an ingrained and unbreakable belief.
A person lives in this world for a fleeting few decades; they must always leave something behind to prove they were here.
Bloodlines are the simplest legacy and hope a person can leave behind.
“In the end, my grandfather and mother agreed to keep the child and find a man to marry into the family,” Huo Ranyin said. “My father, Xu Chengzhang, stepped forward of his own accord at this time.”
The sun had completely set in the west, and its afterglow was entirely gone. The red clouds were about to dissipate, and a grayish blue began to eat away at the sky.
Ji Xun’s gaze shifted from the sky to Huo Ranyin’s face.
A shadow falling from the clouds shrouded Huo Ranyin’s face.
Huo Ranyin took a step forward, crossing past this cloud and sweeping away the gloom shrouding his face.
He was concise, finishing his last few sentences:
“My father treated my mother very well after they got married. If it weren’t for the fact that my mother had a difficult labor and severe hemorrhaging when giving birth to me, resulting in her never being able to conceive again and give birth to a child with my father’s true bloodline… perhaps they would have eventually had a much happier and more perfect life.”
The serious matters were finished. The weather was still fine, and neither of them wanted to return to the hotel at this time, so they tacitly walked down the embankment and strolled along the abandoned port.
Although the port was already abandoned, with weeds, gravel, and lonely, rusted steel bars everywhere, that kind of open, unyielding wildness was surprisingly preserved intact. Mixed with the sea breeze, it hit Ji Xun’s face.
Ji Xun walked for a while, feeling his mood lighten significantly, and also opened the chatterbox:
“When the shipyard was still around back then, it must have been extraordinary. If… I’m saying hypothetically, if your grandfather had lived longer, would you have become the new generation’s shipbuilding tycoon?”
“No.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because I don’t like building ships,” Huo Ranyin said concisely.
More so because if I built ships, I couldn’t be a police officer and wouldn’t have met you.
“That’s good too. If you had become a shipbuilding tycoon, I might never have met you, and that would have been too much of a pity.”
Ji Xun’s emotional sigh rang out at the exact same time as Huo Ranyin’s inner thoughts.
Huo Ranyin pursed his lips slightly, feeling a bit of regret.
For the past two days, it had always been Ji Xun confessing, seizing every opportunity to say all sorts of sweet words.
Next time… he absolutely had to… speak a little faster.
They walked past the hardened sandy beach and arrived at a crooked wooden pier. Without dedicated maintenance, half of the wooden pier had been corroded by the seawater, and half of its body leaned askew toward the sea. Corresponding to this, the wooden pilings that should have been submerged beneath the seabed instead poked out, floating brazenly on the surface of the sea.
Ji Xun casually pressed down on the wooden piling closest to him. As he gazed out at the surface of the sea, Huo Ranyin, who was standing beside him, suddenly said:
“There’s something under the pier.”
“What is it?”
Just as Ji Xun spoke, Huo Ranyin had already bent down and picked up the thing moored on the surface of the sea under the pier.
It was a small wooden boat, smaller than an adult’s palm. Embedded in the center of the wooden boat were several irregular blue crystals. There were round ones, shell-shaped ones, and long, narrow ones. As the residual daylight glinted off these crystals, they reflected a shimmering blue light that was clearer than the ocean itself.
“This is…” Ji Xun was amazed for a moment, holding the wooden boat up against the sun. “It’s made quite beautifully, a handicraft?”
“Perhaps,” Huo Ranyin replied. “Look to your left.”
Ji Xun looked in the direction Huo Ranyin pointed and saw an astonishing scene.
Rows upon strings of palm-sized wooden boats, numbering in the hundreds and thousands, bobbed up and down with the ocean waves. Those irregular blue crystals embedded at the bottom of the wooden boats also rose and fell along with them. A gust of cold sea breeze brought a boundless expanse of glittering phosphorescence; a crash of white foam against the shore brought an expanse of clustered, twinkling fallen stars.
It truly was a magnificent spectacle.
“The source is over there,” Huo Ranyin said, taking the lead and walking forward.
The direction he walked in was where the wooden boats were densest.
He didn’t judge incorrectly. When Ji Xun followed Huo Ranyin and walked for a good ten minutes, arriving near the abandoned shipping containers at the port, there were still about a dozen wooden boats on the port that hadn’t been put into the water.
Ji Xun bent down and looked at the surface of the water. “Why put so many wooden boats into the water? To set up a scene for taking photos?”
Huo Ranyin, on the other hand, looked around. He didn’t see anyone, which made his gaze sharpen slightly: “If they were taking photos, why would they hide from us?”
“They might not necessarily be hiding from us,” Ji Xun said. “They might have gone back to the car to grab something.”
“Going through the trouble of setting up such an elaborate scene, and then going back to the car to grab something?” Huo Ranyin questioned. “Do you think that’s believable?”
“Nature calls, it happens,” Ji Xun said. “Once you become a police officer, you get too suspicious.”
As they were talking, they did not notice—they did not discover that another gaze had quietly fallen onto their backs from a dark corner, and then climbed all the way up, creeping past their spines, their necks… and finally, silently falling onto their faces.
The gloomy gaze was like invisible spiderwebs, strand by strand, covering their faces.
