Chapter 138

Hearing this, Qi Fei only felt the world spinning. Even with his imagination, he would never have thought that Qi Dongjun's words, that accusation that bound him like a curse for eleven years, had been spoken under such circumstances.

"If I told you that I told the police my suspicions at the time, would you believe it?" Qi Dongjun said, the magnolia tree outside the window shaking violently, and the petals being smashed against the glass by the rainstorm, "I just begged them not to tell you this truth. In order not to alert the enemy, the police never made public that the owner of the fingerprint on the knife was Xi He. In fact, for so many years, Xi He has disappeared without a trace, and no one has found him again..." He looked at Lu Man again, "Lu Man's testimony was not wrong. On the day your mother had the accident, I was with her. The only difference is that she was Xi He's caregiver and also my close friend. In order not to expose Xi He, she sacrificed her reputation to tell everyone she was my lover. You wronged her."

Lu Man, standing far away, heard this and just lowered her eyes slightly, saying in a low voice: "This is my atonement. If I could have discovered Xi He..."

"No one could have discovered it. We were all pawns played by him..." Qi Dongjun said sadly.

"These... why didn't you tell me from the beginning?" Qi Fei's questioning from the bottom of his throat was mixed with the saltiness of tears, "These eleven years, these eleven years I have always thought..."

"Because..." Qi Dongjun turned to look at Qi Fei, "That year you were only 16. Just like I insisted on separating you when you were three, I used all my methods to try to make Xi He disappear from your life." As he spoke, his gaze fell on that screenshot, "Just like I couldn't stop him from killing your mother, I couldn't stop his bond with you either," he said, "He still came back."

Qi Dongjun walked back to the desk and pressed the button, and the screen slowly lowered.

"Indeed, you are no longer a ten..."

Qi Dongjun seemed to have been prepared. He pressed the remote control in his hand. The moment his thumb pressed the remote, the light of the crystal chandelier extinguished layer by layer like a receding tide. The current sound of the old-fashioned cathode ray tube and the noise of the video tape's snow points tore open a crack in time and space.

The video was filmed in Ying Shuigen's house on Jiangting Island, and the image was already unclear.

Young Ying Shuigen was wearing a yellow jacket, gesturing back and forth at the snake on the ground with great seriousness. Those snakes were attracted by Ying Shuigen's attention. The rhythm of his stomping and the ringing of the bronze bell resonated with the frequency of the snake's tongue flicking. The snakes swayed left and right in unison, completely different from the chaotic scene Qi Fei saw at the crime scene initially.

"Why show me the video of this charlatan?" Qi Fei didn't understand Qi Dongjun's intention. However, as soon as he finished speaking, a person who appeared in the video immediately caught his attention. He stared at the screen with full concentration, as if electrocuted, and rushed to Qi Dongjun in one step to grab the remote control from his hand, paused the video, and then rewound the image, going back and forth several times.

Qi Fei seemed to have shielded out external information, still confirming the image in the video by himself.

Qi Dongjun knew what he was looking for, and a deep, thick voice came from the darkness: "Don't doubt it, it's her. Later I remembered, she once mentioned taking Xi He to Jiangting Island, saying there was a Golden Snake Great Immortal who could treat Xi He's madness. At that time, I just thought it was Zi Yun's desperation, so I perfunctorily advised her not to believe these charlatans."

Qi Fei's hand pressing the remote control stopped. Looking at a certain place in the image, tears fell silently.

"Last time, you asked me why I was looking for the Golden Snake Great Immortal. This is my real answer. A few years ago, Huang Daqiu showed me this video at a dinner party and asked if I was interested in knowing this master. I saw her in the crowd at a glance."

"When was this video taken?"

"It was the year before she was murdered. It wasn't the first time Xi He ran away. Just like when you were young and Zi Yun secretly took you to Nanling to find Xi He, later, she secretly took Xi He to Jiangting Island."

This was a conversation that belonged only to father and son. Beside them, in the projection, a woman with fair skin was behind the crowd, her temperament outstanding. Mainly, her brows and eyes were very similar to Qi Fei's. The woman in the image was Qi Fei's mother, Xi Zi Yun, who had been dead for many years.

"She never told me why she wanted to go there. I want to know if the Golden Snake Great Immortal has any connection to her death."

"Such important news, why didn't you tell me when I came last time?" Qi Fei asked.

Qi Dongjun's eyes were calm as he looked at Qi Fei: "Because, from the moment you were born, I secretly swore that I couldn't let you know about Xi He's existence. This is my duty as a father. Unfortunately, things went against my wishes."

Over Qi Dongjun's shoulder, Qi Fei saw Xi Zi Yun in the screen. That watermelon-red turtleneck sweater was so vivid in his memory. The situation of his mother wearing the sweater and cooking, waiting for him to come home from school in this living room, was as if it were yesterday. At that time, he didn't know that his mother's life had already entered a countdown.

Thinking of this, Qi Fei couldn't help but tear up.

"I'm sorry, Dad..." Qi Fei said this hoarsely.

Qi Dongjun, who had always been steady and forbearing, was rarely moved when he heard this. His face, like a stone statue, showed emotion. There seemed to be tears flickering in the bottom of his eyes, which were covered up by his action of pushing his glasses.

"Over the years, I have dealt with the Golden Snake Great Immortal and gradually learned that this person's rise to fame actually had an inseparable connection with Nanling. Nanling, Zi Yun—these two clues were enough for me to think of Xi He. But I had already demolished the nursing point in Nanling. I had been to that place many times, including the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. When the Golden Snake Great Immortal went to Nanling to see him, I sent people to follow him, but failed. The other party was very careful.

I tried to get out of the Golden Snake Great Immortal how he found the god, but he kept his mouth shut about it. 'It's really ironic. When Zi Yun took Xi He to find him, this person was just an unranked charlatan. It was the year of this video tape that he suddenly became successful and became the Golden Snake Great Immortal that everyone in the vanity fair tried to curry favor with.'"

Qi Fei listened and only felt that all the threads were leading to the source, and it seemed they were all held in Xi He's hands: "Mom took Xi He to find Ying Shuigen, but instead let Xi He find a puppet of his own..."

"That's right, Ying Shuigen became Xi He's puppet. This is my conclusion," Qi Dongjun said immediately, "Unfortunately, the connection between them was so secret. Although I have been circling with the Golden Snake Great Immortal for so long, I have never found Xi He's tracks..."