Volume 1 / Chapter 70: Lǐ Wǎnyán Goes Home

There’s a kind of loneliness—where you’re surrounded by the bustling crowd of a lively city, yet none of it has anything to do with you.

As if you and everyone else exist in parallel worlds, never intersecting.

That was exactly how Lǐ Wǎnyán felt at this moment.

She had already returned the bedding she had borrowed from Ān Ruòsù, and now she was carrying her backpack, heading toward the direction of what she supposed was still “home”—a place that had grown increasingly unfamiliar.

Homeroom teacher Yè Wén had told her the school had taken care of everything.

Strangely enough, she wasn’t all that surprised. Perhaps she had already expected Ān Ruòsù to inform the teacher.

In her heart, she even felt a flicker of gratitude.

But though the matter had been resolved, her parents were still nowhere to be found.

The school had decided to let her stay in the dorms for free and planned to apply for tuition waivers and poverty subsidies on her behalf.

Before that, though, she needed to go home once to collect her things.

After all, if she didn’t pack up and leave soon, once the rent expired, the landlord might simply throw everything out as trash.

In this era, if you didn’t pay rent, the landlord had no obligation to safeguard your personal belongings. That was just how things worked.

Lǐ Wǎnyán’s home was in a subdivided rural house—modest even by countryside housing standards. Just a single square room, housing two bunk beds.

A thin curtain hung in the middle, serving as a partition.

She usually slept in one of the bunks, while the space below was crammed with various odds and ends.

The entire room was cluttered and dirty—exactly as she had left it.

There were muddy footprints on the floor, empty wrappers, old clothes strewn about.

Clearly, her parents had left in a hurry.

They hadn’t left together, but in the end, both had abandoned her.

Maybe each of them had assumed the other would stay behind to take care of their daughter.

“Two people who haven’t even grown up themselves—why did they get married? Why leave me with a broken family?” Lǐ Wǎnyán gritted her teeth. Her face twisted with pain and rage, but the tears came pouring down, unstoppable.

Back at home, she didn’t even have the energy to pack. She kicked off her shoes, climbed straight up to the top bunk, and collapsed onto the bed.

At school, she was always forcing herself to hold it together, pretending everything was fine.

During military training, she tried her best to forget everything.

But the moment she returned home, all her wounds were torn open again.

She remembered the slap and the punch her father had thrown at her from under the bed. She remembered how her mother had disappeared into the night without saying goodbye.

It made her feel like a discarded ragdoll—useless, unwanted.

The more she thought about it, the more it hurt—until she broke down completely.

She cried silently, sobbing without sound.

Hiccups wracked her body, making it hard to breathe.

She tried desperately to stop crying, but the harder she tried, the worse it got.

She couldn’t understand why life had to be this hard.

Would growing up make the pain go away? Or was life just always like this?

Then she thought of Mò Xuěyáo, of Wáng Jiālè, of Huā Yínyín…

Maybe she was the only one suffering.

Everyone had a different life.

Everyone was born to be treated “fairly”—or so they said.

She envied those who had whole families and happy childhoods.

Her own wishes weren’t even that big. That was all she ever wanted.

She didn’t have many cravings or toys she desired.

Just a quiet place to study in peace—that alone would make her happy.

The world outside the window was pitch-black. Not because the city lacked lights.

But because the window faced the kitchen exhaust of a restaurant, the greasy fumes had blackened the glass over time. They had to keep it shut year-round just to avoid choking on the smell.

It was dark. Damp. Cold.

Lǐ Wǎnyán felt like a sewer rat—barely clinging to life, yet stubbornly holding onto a shred of hope.

With that heavy resentment and faint melancholy in her chest, she drifted off to sleep.

She woke up screaming from a nightmare.

In the dream, her drunken father hacked her mother to death with a kitchen knife. When he sobered up, he panicked and stuffed her body into the wardrobe before fleeing the house.

Later, the debt collectors came—and hacked Lǐ Wǎnyán to death, right there in her home…

The dream had been bloody, terrifying, brutal.

She woke up drenched in cold sweat.

Trembling, she turned on the dim lamp and cautiously opened every cabinet in the house. Using a weak flashlight, she checked beneath every bed.

In the end, she even opened the refrigerator’s freezer.

Empty.

That, at least, brought a sliver of relief.

At least her mother’s body wasn’t hidden somewhere like in the dream—wasn’t chopped up and stuffed into the fridge like in those horror stories…

Still, her heart wouldn’t calm.

“It was just a dream,” she whispered to herself, glancing at the battered wall clock.

It was only 4 a.m.

But she couldn’t sleep anymore.

She turned on every lamp she could find, trying to make the room look brighter. As the cold sweat dried on her skin, she quietly began packing her things.

There was a brand-new red suitcase at home—her mother had bought it for her just a month ago, so she’d have something decent to bring to military training.

She only bought it to help her daughter save face.

Because her mother cared that much, it was hard to believe she would just walk away and abandon her.

Lǐ Wǎnyán didn’t own much. A few sets of clothes for the seasons, two thin quilts—it was just enough to fill one suitcase.

Then she found a plastic bag for the cotton quilt filler and stuffed it in.

Her backpack held the rest—odds and ends she would need, like her pencil sharpener, desk lamp, a few spare batteries, and three crisp hundred-yuan bills she found tucked inside the wardrobe lining.

Her old piggy bank, once full of coins, had long been smashed by her father—he’d taken all the change.

Maybe her mother had left behind those three hundred yuan on purpose.

That thought gave her a bit of comfort.

By the time she finished packing, it was already past 7 a.m.

She didn’t have many things, but it had taken forever.

More than packing her belongings—it felt like she had been packing away the last fragments of memory.

—Even if there weren’t many worth remembering in this place.

She squinted at the rising sun, took a deep breath, and dragged her suitcase behind her, shouldering her backpack, carrying a bag of bedding in one hand. After one last look around the now-slightly-tidied room, she stepped outside and knocked on the landlord’s door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me… Um, landlord… The rent’s about to expire, right? I just came to pay for the water and electricity before I go.” Lǐ Wǎnyán spoke with her lips pressed tight.

“Oh, it’s you. Don’t worry about it—someone already paid. Yesterday’s utilities are on me.”

“…Who?”

“Seems like… your high school principal?”

“I see… thank you.” Lǐ Wǎnyán gave a small nod and turned away.

As she stepped out of the village housing complex, she felt a strange lightness in her chest.

Like waking from a nightmare and walking toward the light.

Maybe leaving her parents wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

She stood on the sidewalk, clutching the 300 yuan in her pocket, deep in thought.

The white clouds above looked especially soft. The early sun bathed her in warm light.

Across from the run-down housing she’d just left stood a neat and orderly residential building.

Five or six stories tall, the buildings stood in perfect rows—a sight pleasing enough to cure even the worst perfectionist’s anxiety.

On one side, dilapidated slums. On the other, structured, clean apartment blocks.

Only one street between them.

The road buzzed with life. Even on weekends, breakfast stalls were packed—because many people in this city didn’t get weekends off.

Working from Monday to Friday, with barely a handful of days off all year—just to scrape by on meager wages.

But what could they do?

Life still had to go on.

Lǐ Wǎnyán looked up at the sun and smiled faintly, heading for the bus station.

To be honest, she didn’t really want to live at school.

It never truly felt like home.

There was no sense of belonging.

And she kept wondering—when she graduated after three years, where would she go?

But for now, there was no better option than the school.

At the very least, she could study there in peace, without outside disturbances.

To have a real place to call home.

It sounded simple, but in practice, it was incredibly hard.

She didn’t want to live in rentals like her parents had.

But who could afford to buy a home?

Even in this era, when prices were relatively low, it was still out of reach for a poor high school student like her.

With heavy thoughts in her mind, she walked absentmindedly down the road—so distracted she nearly tripped on a stone.

She managed to stay upright, but the sting of bitterness lingered.

She was already carrying so much—if things went on like this, she might truly break one day.

But who could save her?

…No one.

She had to shoulder it all alone.

That was where the pressure came from.

Just then, a girl with a single ponytail came walking toward her. Under the sunlight, her eyes seemed to glint with a faint hint of blue.

She held a well-behaved, quiet-looking tabby cat in her arms.

When she spotted Lǐ Wǎnyán, she paused in surprise, then waved excitedly and called out:

“Class monitor—?!”

Oh.

It was Mò Xuěyáo.