Chapter 33: 32. Luck

32. Luck

Gathering his courage to step into the house that seemed to have been uninhabited for a long time, Li Jiahong searched the space, thick with cobwebs and dust piled high like soil, for any potentially useful clues.

The items in the house had basically been cleared out, leaving only some large or damaged furniture behind, so it did not take Li Jiahong long to search through those pieces.

From the bedrooms to the kitchen, Li Jiahong finally found what appeared to be a utility room.

The utility room was not large, about ten square meters or so, with four storage shelves placed against the walls.

And it was here that Li Jiahong's discovery finally had a breakthrough.

Perhaps due to long-term disrepair or the adhesive losing its effectiveness, Li Jiahong discovered an unusual protrusion on the third shelf of the rack directly facing the door; it was hollow in the middle, and this shelf was actually made of two thin wooden boards glued together.

Tearing apart the two layers of wood that could no longer hold together, Li Jiahong found a yellowed piece of letter paper inside.

The letter read:

I do not know who is reading this letter. When you see this, regardless of how you discovered it, I hope you will stop at mere curiosity. After reading this sentence, please do not continue reading further. I suggest you had best burn the letter directly; even selfishly discarding it is better than losing the confidence and courage to live on after learning the cruel truth that follows.

If you have come for the secret I carry, perhaps you are already being hounded by those loathsome rats, then please, read on boldly. I hope the contents I have recorded here can help you find the answer you seek...

Li Jiahong continued reading. The first half of the content was the author describing his life in the Huogu Lair. Most of the time, people snatched by the Huogu were soaked in a "water vat," with only a few people left behind to manage those dormant in the "vats." Even during the dormancy process, they did not have peace; many would find that after closing and opening their eyes, their organs and physiological structures had undergone earth-shattering changes.

Children raised by the Huogu rarely awakened like the author, because the vast majority of children brought to the Huogu Lair had undergone surgery to excise their brain's emotional regulation from the start. The author was no exception, but he was lucky enough to recover his lost emotions due to a special opportunity one day, slowly regaining his reason and beginning to want to escape from the Huogu.

It was also during an operation assigned by the Huogu that he seized the chance to run, distancing himself from the lair, fleeing from his companions at the time, and then remaining on Earth.

It was just that at that time, due to a moment of negligence, he no longer possessed the appearance of a normal human. The posture he displayed when he suddenly burst into a busy downtown area was like a ferocious beast crawling out of hell to devour men, immediately causing panic and screams among the locals.

Only then did he finally understand that from the day he retrieved his memories, he was already an outcast in both worlds; there was no room for his survival in the vast universe.

Afterwards, while accepting the meager help from a human organization called the Xuanmi Group, he struggled to survive in the human world while fighting against the "children" sent by the Huogu to finish him off. At the same time, he hoped that before his life withered away, he could find the destination of his former life, find his parents, and no matter what, at least leave a letter for them.

Unfortunately, he did not live to see that day; his life slowly came to an end because he lost the medicine that maintained the vitality of his modified body.

Before dying, he recorded in the letter the method he used to escape the Cross-dimensional Node and some secrets about the Huogu race. I hope that any unrelated person who sees this letter can keep their mouth shut until they are buried in the grave. I hope that if there are escapees in the same situation as he was, they can live well. If they are parents looking for children taken by the Huogu, I do not support them continuing to look for the children, but rather hope they can find a new partner and live the life of a normal person.

After finishing the letter, Li Jiahong fell into a long silence. From the distorted strokes of the writing, he could feel the image of a child longing for love and redemption. Although he could occasionally sense the twisted values the other party held due to their inhuman upbringing from certain words in the letter, once he put himself in the other party's shoes and thought that his own child might now be the same as the author was back then, he understood such changes immensely and felt a deep, painful pity for this child he had never met.

"The shadow under the Huogu's feet connects to another world." Li Jiahong memorized this most important key piece of information, believing there would be a day it would come in handy.

Turning to the back of the letter, it recorded several secrets regarding the Huogu.

1. The Huogu were not Huogu from the beginning; they are transformed from new children.

2. Because the Huogu are very timid and afraid of being hurt, their civilization has therefore stagnated.

3. The Huogu can only find a sense of security at night and only dare to act when the children are all by their sides.

4. Earth was once a graveyard for the Huogu; perhaps other entrances and exits can be found.

Seeing these four concise secrets summarized, while his brain processed the massive amount of information, Li Jiahong could not help but feel a surge of excitement.

"There are actually other passages in and out of the Huogu Lair." Li Jiahong clenched his fists. He swore that if the Huogu's shadow was truly a Cross-dimensional Node, then he must find a Huogu corpse on Earth.

He hurriedly put away the letter, then rushed out of the abandoned house in the forest, returning to the hospital in his hometown of Shenzhou before eight o'clock in the evening.

Returning to his wife's side and taking over the shift from her parents, finally having a chance to be alone with his wife, he couldn't wait to share his discovery with her. He gripped his wife's hand tightly and said with some excitement: "We will soon have a chance to find Xiaoqing. These fifteen years of hard work were not in vain."

"I am also very happy." Jiang Gu was also teary-eyed, and afterwards, she shared a new piece of good news with Li Jiahong.

In front of her husband, she slowly climbed off the bed. Under Li Jiahong's worried and then shocked gaze, Jiang Gu, who had been bedridden for years with her limbs almost atrophied, actually stood up shakily and with difficulty.

"It won't be long before I can walk... I can look for our child with you." Jiang Gu smiled, her face flushed and neck red, as if she had accomplished something remarkable while panting heavily.

Li Jiahong immediately embraced his wife excitedly, as if he could feel the vitality awakening within that gradually firming, soft body.

Everything was moving in a good direction. Had his fifteen years of dormant bad luck finally begun to reverse?

With one happy event after another, Li Jiahong and his wife both seemed to feel the exhaustion of depleted energy after calming down from their excessive joy, and they both lay on the bed, embracing as they fell asleep.

This night was a rare, peaceful sleep for Li Jiahong, even though in his dream that night, he dreamt of that strange female bird again, and he had absurdly held that bizarre female bird in his arms...

After waking up the next day, Li Jiahong looked at his wife sleeping soundly in the crook of his arm. He glanced at the phone on the bedside table and made a bold decision.

He opened his WeChat and posted a recruitment message in a group chat.

Me: I have something I want to say to everyone in person regarding the child. If you are free, I will be waiting for everyone at the New Chaji Restaurant in Shenzhou at three o'clock this afternoon.