Chapter 31: Thirty: Wife

Thirty: Wife

Li Jiahong returned to the bustling streets clutching the Business Card, and only when he accidentally bumped into the shop sign of a small restaurant did he realize he had safely walked out of that eerie little shop in the woods; while apologizing to the restaurant owner, he walked under the scorching sun with lingering fear.

He kept feeling that it was all somewhat unreal, yet the Business Card in his hand served as a constant reminder that his previous experience was real.

"Where exactly is my child now?" Li Jiahong sat on the long-distance bus returning to his hometown, clutching his luggage; he looked at the bright blue sky outside the window, yet he felt the world was gloomy and dim.

The things he heard in the shop were too bizarre and strange, and knowing that his wife, who was still persisting in her recovery at the hospital, might be in danger, he traveled across four cities overnight, arriving back by his wife's side just before twelve o'clock at night, exhausted from the journey.

Li Jiahong didn't even have time to put his luggage away at home before coming to the hospital to visit his wife.

Arriving at the bed with the "Jiang Gu" name tag hanging beside it, seeing his wife still sitting at the head of the bed struggling to flip through a photo album, Li Jiahong let out a sigh of relief.

Seeing her husband return suddenly, looking exhausted and anxious, Jiang Gu was somewhat surprised, "Why did you come at this time? When did you get back?"

Now, whenever she saw that withered, yellow face that had weathered the wind and sun, Jiang Gu couldn't help but feel a pang of heartache; her husband had once been a young, promising, and handsome man, but now he had become this way because of her, and although Li Jiahong always said he didn't care, she couldn't help but care, and often felt ashamed because of it.

She raised her weak hand, wanting to properly touch her husband's cheek; Li Jiahong lovingly took her hand, letting her stroke his face.

"I just got back, I was a bit worried about you, so I rushed over to see you immediately." Li Jiahong's voice was soft as he gently smoothed Jiang Gu's furrowed brow.

As soon as he finished speaking, he keenly felt his wife's hand stiffen and pause slightly.

Seeing that Jiang Gu's expression was off, he immediately followed up with a question: "Nothing happened while I was away these few days, right?"

He cupped Jiang Gu's rosy cheeks, making her meet his gaze, and said earnestly: "No matter what happens this time, we must face it together, okay? I said before that I would protect you and our child well; I have already lost one chance, will you give me another chance?"

Jiang Gu gazed into Li Jiahong's eyes, as affectionate and firm as ever; it was precisely because her husband would always keep his vows that she had fallen for him and been captivated by him back then.

"Don't worry, I already know a lot about that thing, you don't have to lie to me." Seeing Jiang Gu hesitating, Li Jiahong continued to add in a low voice, "So, you don't need to worry about what consequences there might be for me wading into these muddy waters, because I am already in them."

"Why are you so foolish." Upon hearing this, Jiang Gu's eyes immediately blurred with tears, and she couldn't stop crying; the couple embraced, but both were very restrained, and Jiang Gu did not cry out loud, "Why are we so foolish."

"Otherwise, why would we have become a married couple?" Li Jiahong laughed, gently rubbing his wife's skin-and-bones back.

Jiang Gu did not answer this, only sobbing softly for a few moments, and then she slowly told her husband everything that had happened since she woke up while Li Jiahong was away.

During the fifteen years she was in a coma, Jiang Gu endured the torture of the Dream Demon every day and night, repeatedly cycling through the entire memory of her child being snatched away and her falling from the high building back then.

In that memory, she would always see a Black-robed Man eight feet tall; beneath the brim of his grayish-black flat-topped hat was a pair of hellish, flaming, fire-red eyes staring fixedly at her; he stood with a group of people with deformed bodies and twisted faces, surrounded by them, and she could vaguely see his fissured lips moving beneath the shadow of the brim, reciting a language she had never heard before, interspersed with phonetic rhythms impossible for humans to produce.

In that language, only the frequently appearing "huo-gu" pronunciation left a deep impression on her, and it was precisely these two syllables that made her immediately recall those unbearable university memories, and she thus realized that this group of monsters who had traveled through the deformed Tunnel of time and space were a group of creditors coming to collect a debt.

They violently snatched her child away and wanted to kill her with some kind of sharp, rod-like weapon she had never seen before; it was also while dodging the assassination that she accidentally fell from the high building and almost lost her life.

Perhaps because he was the leader of that group of deformed people, that guy in the round hat thought she would surely die falling from such a height; it just looked down from the edge of the rooftop at her desperate fall, and then vanished without a trace, taking her child and that group of deformed subordinates with it.

But no one expected that not only did she survive the fall from over a dozen stories high, but she also woke up fifteen years later.

What no one expected even more was that, at the very last moment of her fall, she had actually seen the face hidden beneath the hat, and in her recurring nightmares, her impression of that face became doubly profound and clear; every facial detail was engraved deep in her mind like the most primitive tattoo.

What kind of hideous face was it? It didn't need the addition of hatred or grief; any human who took a single look would be horrified, wailing to the heavens, cursing God and hating the Creator for why they would create such an ugly face.

At first glance, it was a rat-like face with cold eyes, but a closer look revealed that what covered the entire face was not hair, but living biological ducts, like capillaries exposed on the surface of the body, forming the illusion of hair through visual deception; the body fluids flowing inside flowed through every complex "hair duct," and its mouth had no teeth, but a retractable secondary mouth, with a sharp black thorn at the tip of the tongue buried deep within the bloody maw, making one wonder if they might feed like vicious blood mosquitoes, and it also had a tongue that could be ejected like a chameleon's...

That was not human, and it could absolutely not be a species from Earth.

Trapped in the cycle of the Dream Demon, Jiang Gu felt immense regret; regret for her ignorance and frivolity back then, regret for having too little awe for this world, and even more regret that she shouldn't have participated in that no-way-out ritual due to a momentary obsession.

After being liberated from her vegetative state, Jiang Gu hadn't been able to sleep peacefully for a single night; at first, it was because of her inner guilt, but later, while her husband was away, she began to notice that several gazes from unknown origins seemed to be spying on her, and she could feel that they must be those hellish, fire-red eyes from back then.

It had returned, realizing its mistake from back then, and now it was here to eradicate its error, and this time it would not miss again.

From the day she first felt the gaze, she was always extremely sensitive to red things; she would even scream in a frenzy because of the red flowers a patient's family brought to the next bed, and would be terrified to the point of a hideous expression upon seeing blood droplets left on a syringe.

Every night she dared not turn off the lights to sleep; if forced by the hospital, she would cover her head with her quilt, and even if she suffocated, she would not stick her head out to breathe before dawn, because the medical equipment monitoring her vital signs beside the bed would also flash red alarm lights in the dark.

Therefore, she could only flip through the photo album before sleep, hoping to find courage and the strength to survive from the happy times spent with her family, waiting for her husband's early return.

Fortunately, her husband returned suddenly tonight; his appearance calmed her long-tense emotions, and she felt a long-lost warmth and tranquility in his sweat-scented embrace.

"Take this, this is an amulet I prayed for for you, keep it safe." After hearing his wife's ordeal, Li Jiahong fell into a silence; he was both heartbroken and fearful, grateful that he had returned in time; he reached into his bag and took out a Black-edged White Feather from a crevice, nearly thirty centimeters long, with soft quills and tough filaments, not knowing which species of bird it came from.

"What bird's Feather is this?" Jiang Gu took the Feather in surprise; it was the first time she had heard of such a simple amulet.

The moment the Feather was in her hand, Jiang Gu only felt that the Feather had a kind of magic, wanting to keep it tightly in her hand, unable to put it down.

Li Jiahong chuckled dryly, only saying he didn't know either, inwardly hoping that this Feather would truly have some miraculous effect of protecting its owner, just as Lin Laoban had said.