Chapter 4223

This was originally a completely normal greeting, but the agent keenly grasped the difference within it: Aunt Kane said "hot water," not "hot tea" or "hot coffee." This is really strange.

Of course, in Eastern culture, patients are best off not drinking tea and coffee. Traditional Chinese medicine believes tea neutralizes medicine, and milk should also be avoided, as milk is a "triggering food." The best option is to drink only hot water.

But in Western culture, it's not like that. Westerners fundamentally have no tradition of drinking hot water. This is actually due to historical reasons: both Eastern and Western people once faced the problem of how to sterilize drinking water. They all knew drinking raw water directly would cause trouble, so they researched different methods to produce safe drinking water.

Easterners chose the simplest method: boiling water. This also benefited from Eastern pottery and ironware developing earlier, allowing them to cook better.

Westerners, on the other hand, brewed water into light beer. This fermentation process kills most harmful bacteria and viruses. Most people in the Middle Ages drank only light beer, which also gave them a long-standing beer culture.

That's why they don't have the habit of drinking only hot water. In their view, heating water is for brewing something, like tea and coffee. Moreover, they believe such stimulating things are beneficial for illness.

So when there's a sick person, people's greetings often go like "Have a cup of hot tea" or "Have a cup of hot coffee," not like Easterners saying "Drink more hot water."

The agent observed no other Eastern traits in Aunt Kane at all, not a single one. Given that Eastern and Western cultural differences are huge, any contact with the other side makes influence hard to avoid. Yet Aunt Kane shows no such traces, proving her desire for hot water is not due to her understanding of Eastern culture.

Could it be because of poverty? The agent also thought impossible. This also needs to mention another Western culture, precisely American culture. Put colloquially, it's "die for face, live in suffering."

The two points most deeply misunderstood are "America has no human warmth culture" and "America has no face culture." In fact, it's the opposite: America is the region where human warmth and face culture are most severe, without exception.

Due to class segregation policies, people of one class live in the same area and must maintain good relations with everyone in that area—neighbors, police, city officials, etc. —to ensure continued survival in that community.

To maintain good relations with this group, you must make them feel you are one of them. Your attire, speech and behavior, house, car, and lifestyle must all be the same as others'.

If you live in a middle-class community, you absolutely cannot be discovered going to a cheap neighborhood; if you live in a rich area, you must drive a good car. Moreover, this behavior must permeate every aspect, including how to entertain guests.

Middle-class community members hosting banquets must provide tea and coffee of decent quality, and wine must also have a certain standing. Once considered poor and shabby, it's utterly over—you might even be kicked out of the community and forced to live in slums.

Thus, Americans have long cultivated a habit: spending large sums of money to maintain face. Only this way can they preserve their current class; otherwise, they will surely face terrifying class decline.

In Eastern culture, everyone feels happy buying something good, cheap, and practical; but in American culture, that's not acceptable. At least on the surface, they cannot pursue good value and low price, but rather "don't want the best, just want the most expensive"—they must spend enough money, even if it's wasted, to show they deserve their current class. This is also the chief culprit behind Americans' near lack of savings, because maintaining face projects is too costly, and it's percentage-based damage—even Bill Gates would lose half his health from this blow.

Moreover, it's even more terrifying that America's middle-class standard is terrifyingly low—no, it's low, not high. As long as you have a fixed residence, no matter how dilapidated or old the house, you are middle-class and must spend heavily to maintain face.

Moreover, although Aunt Kane's house is a bit old, one can tell the neighborhood used to be decent; her personal attire and appearance are also acceptable, and one can see she once came from a wealthy family. Such people understand this American system well; long life experience makes them subconsciously follow these rules, and she certainly wouldn't be ignorant of hospitality etiquette. Thus, she should understand that, under this system, offering only hot water to guests is extremely rude.

Even without tea and coffee, offering a cup of milk wouldn't be hard? Western dairy products are indeed relatively cheap; if you don't insist on organic, you can drink it freely. Hot milk is almost already the baseline.

The agent suspected Aunt Kane might have misspoken. But shortly after they went upstairs, Aunt Kane came upstairs to knock on the door, bringing in exactly a cup of hot water. When the agent took the hot water, he even doubted life—having lived in America for so many years, this was indeed the first time he received hot water from a host, and it actually gave him a feeling of home.

He quickly shook his head, exchanged a few polite words with Aunt Kane, and the door closed. But the agent then noticed another detail: Aunt Kane seemed completely unconcerned about her daughter.

America is not exactly an open country, especially these inland states—some places are conservatively absurd compared to the East, not to mention gender segregation, but it's pretty close. That stereotypical image of openness basically only applies to a few coastal cities; conservatism is the norm.

Linda is a grown young woman who went out all day with the agent, and Aunt Kane didn't ask a single question. This could be excused as Aunt Kane wanting to matchmake them; but now, the agent and the hunter—two adult men—are sharing a room with her, a man and a woman alone, and Aunt Kane doesn't say a word or ask anything, which is abnormal no matter how you look at it.

Moreover, the agent vaguely felt Aunt Kane seemed rather pleased with this development, and matchmaking isn't usually done like this?

As doubts grew denser, the agent vaguely felt he was about to grasp the thread leading to the truth. However, the current main task is still to comfort Linda first.

Perhaps there's a strange attraction between illness and illness; Linda really does seem more interested in the hunter. She walked to the chair by the window and sat down, staring fixedly at the hunter.

The hunter slowly sat up from the bed. He sat on the edge of the bed, slightly lowered his head, lifted his eyes to look at Linda, gently inhaled, and then said: "You went fishing?"

Linda nodded. She tightly pressed her lips together, kept pulling at her clothes with her hands, looking tense but also carrying a hint of anger.

"How are the fish doing?"

"Not good." Linda suddenly said coldly, "They're not good at all."

"No, I think they're quite fine." The hunter's tone was very slow, and the gaps between his sentences were long, as if he were slightly out of breath.

"Where are they fine?" Linda raised her tone, saying, "They can only stay in the water, they can't come out at all. I even killed one today—I speared it to death with a fish spear! I also stomped those fish eggs to pieces!"

"You've become just like them." The hunter took several breaths before saying, "Using what they did to you back then on the fish—does that make you feel happy?"

Linda seemed to suddenly turn to stone. The agent could visibly see her soul beginning to detach, as if falling into some terrible nightmare. After a while she came to, seeming to have lost a segment of memory.

"I should have brought that fish back, so we could have fish soup."

"You know you can't." The hunter said again, "Your mother wouldn't agree. You know why."

Linda began to detach again, and after a while she returned to consciousness, just about to continue saying something, when the hunter added: "You know that wasn't a dream, nor was it fake—it was something that truly happened. His corpse and tombstone are still……"

"No!!!" Linda let out a scream. She was like a machine suddenly activated but broken, beginning to operate in a chaotic manner.

She jumped up, then reached out and smashed the candlestick on the nearby table, and immediately rushed forward to beat the hunter.

The agent was stunned—he had never seen such bravery. But of course he couldn't let Linda do that, even if the injured hunter wasn't something this girl could slander—if this character died, they'd also be near death.

He rushed over to press down Linda, then discovered Linda was stronger than he thought, and he really couldn't hold her down.

The agent cursed in his heart: "Not letting me remove muscle limits, you let the plot character remove them! Just let the plot character be mentally ill, but not me?! Is the restriction system broken?!"

After struggling for a long time, he finally managed to press her down. Linda then became like a corpse. But at this moment, the hunter turned his head to look at him and said: "What is a person, what is a fish—can you tell them apart?"

Linda stiffly turned her head to look at him like a robot. The hunter turned his head back and said: "In this world, there are always people who can't tell them apart, right?"

In just a few seconds, this girl suddenly shifted from an angry berserker state to sadness. As the agent stood up, Linda rolled over, lay on her back on the other side of the bed, and began to silently shed tears.

She kept wiping her tears with her hands, but couldn't dry them completely. She seemed very angry about this, so she sat up and began to randomly wipe her face with the skirt of her suspender dress, until her face was a mess, then silently sat in place, letting tears flow down.

"Yeah…… why can't they tell them apart?" Linda stiffly moved her head, each word requiring a head shake, but her neck was very stiff, becoming more and more like a broken robot.

"Why can't they tell them apart? Why?! From initial muttering turning into a roar: 'How could they not tell person from fish?! How could they……'"

"You can too." The hunter suddenly spoke.

Linda's roar cut off abruptly. He was like having a bucket of ice water poured over his head, the whole person stunned.

"I……"

"You did very well today, didn't you?"

Linda became even more dazed.

"Your mother doesn't let you kill fish, so you go kill fish, as if taking revenge on her, as if taking revenge on them. But you know this isn't a good method."

"Yes, this isn't a good method." Linda also suddenly spoke, "It's useless—my mother still wants to hit me. It's useless…… what should I do?"

She then rushed over like a madwoman, shouting at the hunter: "What should I do? Tell me, what should I do!!!"

"I said, you did very well today."

Linda slowly straightened her body. After a long silence, she lifted her head, staring straight at the sky—there was nothing there, but she seemed to really see something, and then she revealed that chilling smile.