Published at 12th of August 2023 6:29 pm

Chapter 87 Cell Phone

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

In front of a farmhouse.

A fairly robust old granny was sitting on the mazha chair, squinting her eyes to block away from the sun’s blinding rays.

Her expression was filled with cheeriness, but the wrinkles crawling on her face showed that she was already way past her younger years.

A bright yellow turban covered most of her silver hair. She grabbed a bite of the sweet potato in her hand. She then saw the two youngsters moving closer to speak with her. The woman wasn’t at all stingy and grabbed two sweet potatoes, handing them over to the two, hinting for them to eat.

Ye Shangyu gratefully received a sweet potato, directly stuffing it in her pocket and simply not having any plans on eating it.

Bai Yan wasn’t as cautious as she was. Thinking that they also ate the food that a ghost served them, it wasn’t that different from this old granny. He took a bite out of the sweet potato, perceiving a sweet taste, its flavor also wasn’t bad.

After finishing it with two or three bites, the old lady gave him another one in response, and Bai Yan still accepted it with no sense of shame, not even feeling a bit embarrassed. You could say that he was extremely shameless.

As Bai Yan nibbled on his second sweet potato, Ye Shangyu opened her mouth and said, “Granny, do you know of a Dong Zi?”

“Dong Zi? That’s a boy from our village, do you know him?”

“En, last night, in the graveyard, we came across a boy. He was singing an odd nursery rhyme that said Dong Zi’s whole family was killed. Hearing it was unsettling enough to make people scared, this couldn’t be true, right?”

The old lady smacked her lips, gulping down the sweet potato in her mouth, “Of course it isn’t true. Dong Zi’s family is well. They all went to the city to live comfortably. Dong Zi’s father and mother found work in the city, so the older and younger members of the family moved to the city as well. It’s the same as what he told me.”

“Then, why did the boy sing it this way?” Thinking about it, Ye Shangyu also fished her sweet potato out, nibbling at it like a little hamster.

Seeing the young woman also start eating her sweet potato, the old lady felt extremely delighted.

As a result, she became more talkative, sighing as she said, “It’s pitiful to say that the boy you both saw in the burial grounds must have been Tie Zhu.”

“Tie Zhu’s parents died long ago. He also doesn’t have any relatives, so Tie Zhu grew up eating other families’ rice. Whoever had something to eat would give him some. He grew up like this.

Tie Zhu also didn’t have grandparents, so no one took care of him. He also didn’t attend school, spending his entire days running in the wilderness. Slowly, that person also became somewhat wild. Recently, his mouth has been spouting more and more nonsense, so don’t be intimidated by him.”

Seeing that the two remained silent, the old woman sighed and said, “Tie Zhu is a good child, so don’t blame him. If he was raised by his parents, he wouldn’t have turned out like this. Right now, all the capable people in this village went off to the city to work, and the remaining villagers are all tired and weary. They take care of their own grandchildren, but in all honesty, it’s a strenuous task for old tired people to take care of others.”

The two people nodded their heads to express their understanding. After chatting for a while, Bai Yan suddenly asked, “Granny, do you also have a grandchild?”

“It’s summer break. During the weekends, that child is holed up in his bed, playing. I’ll call him out for you to see.”

Recalling that her grandson climbed out of bed just to play with his phone earlier, the old woman knitted her brows and took a deep breath, yelling, “Grandson, come out and meet some guests! Don’t just stay in bed and play with your phone! You’ve been playing all day!”

“Gran, morning hasn’t passed yet!” Inside, a young boy said, “I go to class five days a week! I’m exhausted, so let me play for a while longer!”

“What are you playing to make you not listen to your grandmother’s words? Gou Dan(1)! Get out here!”

- Gou Dan (狗蛋) translates to dog egg in English. Chinese families usually give their kids embarrassing nicknames since it’s a common belief that a bad name is cheaper/easier to feed.

“Pu——”

Upon hearing a name like Gou Dan, Bai Yan couldn’t help but laugh.

Inside, there was a strong-and-honest-looking boy sporting cotton shoes. His cheeks were flushed as he loudly argued back, “Gran, don’t call me Gou Dan!”

Seeing her grandson finally come out, the old lady pouted and handed another sweet potato to Bai Yan, “This is my grandson, who doesn’t study all day and just stares at his phone from morning until night.

Usually, his grades would bring the class average down, and time and time again, at the end of the semester, their teacher would give him a special mention and criticize him. In the house, he also doesn’t do any work, even seeing his grandfather go to the field, he still wouldn’t help out. Our neighbor Lan Lan helps do work for her family, I don’t know how he could learn from his Sister Lan Lan…”

“Gran!” The young boy flew into a rage out of humiliation and immediately interrupted her, “Xu Lanfang is also older than me by two years. She also played with her phone before. She played with it more than me! Why are you telling me to learn from her?”

The old lady stuffed a sweet potato into the young boy’s mouth, saying, “Hasn’t she recently started to do work? Why can’t you watch and learn from good people? In Lan Lan’s house, her grandmother’s body can’t move well anymore, so she immediately stepped up to help out with the housework. How about you, if me and your grandfather suddenly can’t move around anymore, could you shoulder both housework and schoolwork?”

“…” The young boy was dumbstruck and was at a loss for words. It was also possible that he was too busy chewing his sweet potato so it was harder to speak.

However, the boy said nothing, but Bai Yan had something to say.

He directly added onto the subject matter, saying with a depth of feeling, “Grandma, you are so right! Boys should take responsibility! When I was Gou Dan’s age, my father had already died, so my mother raised our family on her own. Seeing my mom work to the brink of exhaustion, I just had to assume the responsibilities of all the housework. Of course, my grades didn’t fall behind, I even got top of the class every single time.

Grandma, what I’m saying are my real feelings. Boys should also taste a bit of bitterness to become better. Children shouldn’t be spoiled. Sometimes, if the child is too coddled, that child would become an ignorant and incompetent idiot…”

Bai Yan still wasn’t finished talking when Ye Shangyu suddenly paused from biting her sweet potato.

She looked at Bai Yan with a complicated look, her heart filling with confused energy. ‘If I weren’t mistaken, when I checked your family background, your father’s still well and good!’

‘When did your father die?’

‘How don’t I know this!’

Secretly in her heart, Ye Shangyu was saying how bad habits were hard to change as her face didn’t move to not expose him.

On the other side of this conversation, the young boy’s face was filled with ‘WTF’ when he heard Bai Yan flatly mention ‘Gou Dan,’ making his face turn red.

Although he was still in middle school, he wasn’t that foolish. He could see that this person was clearly doing it on purpose!

‘After eating food from my home, you still laid me out. Don’t you have any shame, you?’

Hearing Bai Yan, he was still brainwashing his grandmother, which made his grandmother want to firmly discipline him by confiscating his phone to not let him become an idiot.

The boy was so mad that there was steam coming out of his head. He stretched out his arm towards the sweet potato on Bai Yan’s hand, but in the end, him extending his arm… was unexpectedly not enough.

Bai Yan’s response was to nimbly plop the remaining sweet potato into his mouth and then touch the old lady’s hand in one fell swoop, doing this ever so naturally.

When the old woman wasn’t paying attention, Bai Yan exposed a provocative smile towards the boy, immediately causing him to become angrier.

Seeing how Bai Yan was quickly making him cry out of anger, Ye Shangyu secretly felt that this was no good, so she slyly kicked him.

Recalling what they were here for this time, Bai Yan exercised a bit of restraint, obediently shutting his mouth, finally refocusing that they were there to do their job.

Bai Yan had already made the boy too angry. Ye Shangyu felt that there was no hope for him, so she let Bai Yan chat with the old woman while she did her best to coax the young child.

Ye Shangyu waited until she had a better impression on the boy before sounding out, “You said earlier that Xu Lanfang also liked playing with her phone, what was she like before?”

“A few months ago, her grandma suddenly couldn’t work anymore, so she started to do it instead. She also used to love playing on her phone, and our grades were roughly the same…” The boy mumbled, “My grandma is still well, so I don’t need to learn from her!”

“What does she normally like playing on her phone?” Ye Shangyu said with patience, “Did she like looking at frightening things? For example, if there’s a story or movie that has a ghost.”

“She liked reading novels and watching videos… Oh right, she also liked scrolling through her feed, especially the short clips that give an insider look.” The young boy was reminded as he said, “Towards haunted things, she liked scrolling to find supernatural videos. Anyway, I don’t like watching these myself. I have zero interest in making people feel scared.”

Hearing Xu Lanfang had the habit of watching supernatural videos, Ye Shangyu’s eyes brightened, feeling that she made a discovery.

Finally, she posed another question at once, “Do you know which supernatural videos she usually watched? Which anchor did she like the most?”

“I don’t know…” The boy’s face was at a loss, “I don’t like watching them.”

“Then, do you know what her account name is? What username did she use when scrolling through these posts?”

“Um, her username is usually Guess Who I Am. I didn’t pay attention when she was scrolling, but it should still be this.”

Asking a few more questions and knowing that there couldn’t be any more questions that the boy could be asked of, Ye Shangyu finally let him off, absent-mindedly having idle chat with him.

On the other hand, Bai Yan’s talk with the old woman had stretched out for a long time, but there was still some gain in it.

Just like Jina and the others, the old lady also insisted that no one has gone missing.

But, from his experience with Dong Zi’s family, Bai Yan obtained a lot of insights, so he changed topics and stopped asking about the people who had disappeared, starting to ask who had recently left the village.

Sure enough, like Dong Zi’s family, ever since the last few months, a lot of villagers’ families moved away and left the village. Moreover, all their reasons were to live comfortably in the city.

Although Bai Yan had no idea what the circumstances of this world were, going to the city meant living comfortably, probably because the situation in the city was definitely better than in the village.

According to what Anchor Bai Cui said about this being a ‘left-behind children’ village, generally speaking, city rent was expensive and prices for commodities were high, so there were only adults that lived in the city to work. Workplaces provided full accommodation, so the children and the elderly were left in the village. Education in villages was cheaper, and the living costs here were inexpensive.

However, whole families moved to the city without any regard for their land and their old homes. This would happen only if the villagers all simultaneously won the lottery, but otherwise, being dragged down by having a family to feed, two parents couldn’t possibly afford the costs of moving the old and the young to the city.

Bai Yan carefully pondered on this and deduced that these people who had ‘moved to the city’ were the missing people mentioned in the post.

Talking to the two family members separately, Bai Yan and Ye Shangyu had their own gains.

While chatting, a boy covered in filth from head to toe walked over while carrying a ball.

Although granny was old, her eyesight was still quite good.

Seeing the boy from a distance, the old woman called out in a loud voice, “Tie Zhu, come over and eat some sweet potatoes!”

The ears of the boy carrying a ball were sharp, and once he heard that there was something to eat, he ran like the wind, not caring for the ball anymore.

Seeing that he was about to use his grimy little hands to grab a sweet potato, the old woman pulled out a handkerchief from her pants pocket, giving it to the boy to wipe his hands clean. After, she placed a sweet potato in his hands, “You need to clean your hands before you can eat, eating the mud all over your hands will make you sick.”

The boy carelessly nodded his head, grabbing a sweet potato and stuffing it in his mouth, not knowing if he remembered what she said or not.

After swallowing the sweet potato whole, the boy picked up the ball, patting it while also starting to sing the nursery rhyme he made up.

The old woman heard the boy utter ‘a curse of death’ to Dong Zi’s entire family and couldn’t help but wrinkle her brows.

She opened her mouth, intending to tell the boy to stop singing, but before she could utter a sound, the boy suddenly shut up out of the blue.

He looked at the old man walking over and giggled. He gazed at the old man, then looked back at the old lady and Gou Dan, with envy written in his eyes.

Soon, he abruptly hugged the ball and ran away in an instant. In a blink of an eye, he disappeared in the middle of the small trail.

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