Chapter 343: The Throat of the Dark Night

"The Lord regards us as parents regard their own children; as long as there is sincere repentance, no fault is unforgivable." Dominic's voice grew even gentler.

He was a cautious explorer, groping through a mental labyrinth constructed of ambiguous and obscure words, approaching something that vanished at a touch.

In the moment the Basket-Weaver wavered and prepared to bare his soul, that thing revealed a shadowy glimpse beyond concept; before he could ponder it carefully, it vanished amidst the fragmented information.

Perhaps a shift in tone, a seemingly unintentional frown, metaphorically hinted that it had been there.

"Cast those burdens you feel unable to bear upon Him, for the Lord understands your struggles better than you; every sentence, every word, He will hear."

When he came to his senses, his hand was already resting on the other's shoulder, seeming like steady, gentle encouragement, or perhaps pushing someone to take their first step.

"My father... he may have committed some acts that disturbed the peace of the dead." As if these words had drained all his strength, Little John buried his face in his arms, his whole body hunching over.

Field alertly scanned the surroundings, ensuring no one was passing nearby.

"Why do you say 'may have'?"

"I did not see it with my own eyes, but during that time... he was very strange."

Unlike a son describing his father, the emotional color in his language was changing, losing its warmth at a speed he himself did not notice, sliding toward the alienation of a stranger, even a hint of fear.

The independent family member, the gifted artisan, the father who made his children proud—once these labels were torn away, what remained was strange behavior that even his family found incomprehensible.

"I cannot describe it to you. He was weaving things all day as usual, but something had changed; for him, it was no longer work, but a matter that captivated him."

Little John wiped his face, raised his head again, and looked at the old but sturdy roof of the house. "The roof we use now was also made by his own hands."

"I apologize for wandering off; I just wanted you to know that although he was originally rather reclusive, he was not that kind of person."

"I understand what you mean. Even Saint Peter denied being a disciple of my Lord three times. For ordinary human frailty, being momentarily lost due to external temptation is normal; it is merely a good soul briefly covered in dust."

"Thank you, thank you, I thank you."

The cultivator sitting beside him was backlit; his tranquil face was immersed in shadow along with his own. The light coming from behind spread along the outline of his body, outlining a soft and hazy halo.

Little John looked as if he were about to shed tears; the pressure brought by that matter seemed far greater than imagined.

After repeated assurances, he finally agreed to speak to the Servant of the Heavenly Father, tearing open a corner of memory to let the dark mist accumulated within flow out.

Even after several years, some details remained as clear as if they had happened yesterday.

It was an afternoon thick with dark clouds. The father, who had been burying his head in handling branches all day, suddenly stopped. Rarely, for a reason other than eating or sleeping, he shifted his gaze away from those coiling and expanding spirals.

He had not stood and walked for long periods in too long. The work of collecting raw materials and selling finished products had been handed over to his son. He often did not step out of the house for a whole day, busy from morning till night, with finished products piling up to fill half the room.

Little John had tried to persuade him, but only received meaningless silence. Sometimes, waking up startled at night, he would hear the faint sound of branches bending and twisting. The family certainly would not waste candles at night; he could not imagine how or why his father had completed the weaving.

Perhaps the answer was the back, curved and arched like the soft branches in his hand, and the hands with stiff shoulders and elbows but exceptionally flexible and agile wrists and fingers.

Bloodshot eyeballs were deeply sunken in their sockets; the pupils, having worked too long in dim light, were dilated, yet sometimes异常 bright, carrying a light kindled after peering into some secret. Yet he almost never went out to communicate with others; all the information he knew came from Little John's retelling.

They were all trivial village matters: who had given birth recently, who had luckily received work, or which well-known person had passed away.

The father just listened quietly, saying not a word.

Just on that day, very suddenly, he left the homemade chair that bore the indentation of his weight, picked one basket from the mountain of piled baskets, took up a rusty iron shovel, and said he was going out for a while.

At first, Little John did not think much of it; his father voluntarily willing to go out for a walk was not a bad thing, perhaps a sign of improvement.

He took the opportunity to clean the place where his father often sat, collected small broken branches to light a fire and warm the evening bread, and sat at the door waiting.

The barren fields after the autumn harvest were covered with sharp wheat stubble. Drizzling raindrops fell, gradually becoming denser. The clouds grew even more gloomy. A damp, decaying wind swept down from the mountains, whipping up grass stems and then silently casting them far away. The wind carried the sour smell of fermenting plant debris.

He began to feel worried. The cumulonimbus clouds, turning black-gray, stacked and interlaced, blurring the boundary between dawn and dusk. Under the push and shove of the high-altitude gale, they rolled slowly, reminding one of the newly built roof of the house: dense, dim, and upon close inspection, revealing subtle, deep vortex-like textures.

It was a precursor to heavy rain. Local residents were most familiar with this weather; unless they had something they absolutely could not put down, everyone would hasten to find a place to take shelter.

The clamor of people returning in groups rose and then vanished. The sparks in the furnace died out, and the sky turned completely dark.

Torrential rain fell like lead plates. He called on neighbors and friends to try to go out and search, but no open flame could be lit for illumination in the rain. Visibility was less than two steps; even the voice of calling was swallowed by the sound of water, and they nearly got separated.

Everyone was quickly forced back, gathering together to warm themselves by the fire, praying for a miracle.

The waiting time was exceptionally long and torturous; he only remembered the successive booming of thunder. Perhaps it was a psychological effect, but he always felt that the thunder was different from usual, lacking regularity, more frequent and terrifying. Every time it sounded, it triggered an involuntary shudder in his body.

Finally, around the second half of the night, when everyone had lost hope and were preparing to wait until the rain stopped the next day to consider further, the father returned.

Covered in mud and water, his soaked shoes made a dull sucking sound with every step, caught by the muddy ground as if trying to pull him back into the rain.

In that mad rainy night, he did not even have a scrape from falling. In full view of everyone, he pushed open the door, clutching a rattan basket containing something, and demanded that everyone leave the house, including his own son.

This drove the already distant relationship between the family and the surroundings to freezing point. So much so that when the Stonemason accused Old John of desecrating the graveyard, not a single person was willing to step forward to say a few good words.

News even spread early from the mouths of those present, claiming that his haste in driving everyone away was to dispose of stolen goods.

As for that basket, when Little John returned the next day from a kind neighbor's house, aside from congealed mud, it was completely empty.

"I should not have left back then. Even if my father truly did something wrong, I should have forced myself to stay and persuade him to repent."

"So, even you cannot be certain whether he really committed acts that disturbed the dead?"

"Yes, he said nothing. After another rainy outing not long after, he never returned. We only found the basket he left behind; no body was found in the valley nearby." Little John grabbed his messy hair; this ending, which was hardly an ending at all, left him unable to let go.

To this day, he feels that if he had not fled due to inexplicable fear that night, but had stayed to offer guidance, the course of events might have been different.

"Could it be that he felt he could not endure the town's opinion, so he left?"

"Aside from carrying the basket, he took almost nothing. Where could he have gone?"

The whole matter emitted a strange smell. Dominic vaguely felt he had grasped something, just one layer of paper away.

"Regarding that night, what else do you remember?"

"Very dark..." Inexplicable fear was brewing. Dominic could feel the shoulder under his palm beginning to tremble, as if returning to that night, yet even the narrator could not say what exactly he was afraid of.

Darkness is indeed terrifying, but not enough to make an adult fear it so much.

"Lei Sheng all night long; we did not see even a single flash of lightning."

It seemed as if some invisible thing was roaring and devouring.