Sold into a ghost marriage? Four-year-old and his thuggish father go on a killing spree.

The man at the door was twenty-six years old, but he looked ten years older than his actual age.

His hair was a mess, like a bird's nest, greasy and plastered to his forehead. His cheeks were thin, with high, protruding cheekbones covered in a layer of rough stubble.

He was wearing an old cotton-padded jacket with holes in it, the cuffs were worn white, and his hands were tucked into the sleeves.

As he yawned and stepped across the threshold, he brought with him a damp smell and the sour smell of the bedding.

His eyes were listless as he glanced around the room, first noticing Cheng Fulai, then the kerosene lamp on the table.

Then he saw the little girl standing by the table.

Gu Yanqiu stopped in her tracks.

His gaze fell on Niannian's face—a thin, scarred, pale little face.

A strip of cloth was wrapped around his forehead, from which faint traces of blood seeped.

A pair of dark, bright eyes stared straight at him.

Those eyes.

Gu Yanqiu seemed to have been struck by something, standing motionless at the door.

Cheng Tiezhu gave him a shove from behind: "What are you standing there for? Come in!"

Gu Yanqiu stumbled and almost tripped on the threshold.

He went into the house, but didn't go any further. He stood about five or six steps away from Niannian.

"Tiezhu, what do you want from me?" His voice was lazy, but his eyes were fixed on Niannian.

Cheng Tiezhu slammed the note on the table.

See for yourself.

Gu Yanqiu walked to the table and picked up the note.

The light from the kerosene lamp shone on the old paper, soaked with sweat and snow.

He recognized the handwriting.

The only person he ever knew whose handwriting was written like this—

The strokes are straight and even, each one elegant and refined.

But the last few words were crooked and shaky, as if the hand was trembling violently.

"Gu Yanqiu, Chengjiawan Brigade, Qinghe County."

He flipped the note over.

The lettering on the back is smaller and more shaky.

"Niannian is his daughter; please, kind people, send her there."

Gu Yanqiu's hands began to tremble.

The note trembled in his hand like a leaf in the wind.

He raised his head and looked at Niannian.

Niannian was also looking at him.

Since entering the door, Niannian hasn't said a single word.

She was looking at the man.

This is the person her mother asked her to find.

She had imagined countless times what her father would be like.

Is he as tall as Uncle Zhang Dacheng? Is he as kind as Grandpa Cheng? Is he as loud as Uncle Cheng Tiezhu?

But she never imagined it would turn out like this.

Sloppy, thin, and listless.

I pulled him out of bed.

They only came after I called them three times.

Something was sinking inside her.

But she remembered her mother's words.

Mom didn't say, "Go find a good dad."

Mom said, "Go find your dad."

Whether it's good or not, let's find it first.

"You..." Gu Yanqiu's voice changed, no longer the lazy tone he had when he first entered the door—that tone was like a shell, now cracking piece by piece.

"Is your mother's name Song Wanqing?"

Niannian nodded.

Gu Yanqiu's Adam's apple bobbed suddenly.

"Is she...is she alright?"

When he asked that question, his voice trembled with barely suppressed emotion, like a string stretched to its limit.

Niannian fell silent.

The entire brigade headquarters was so quiet that only the hissing of the kerosene lamp and the north wind outside the window could be heard.

Then Niannian spoke.

"Mom is dead."

Three words.

Gu Yanqiu felt as if he had been hit on the head with a stick.

His body swayed slightly, and he braced himself on the edge of the table with one hand, his knuckles turning white.

"What...when?"

"Six days ago." Niannian's voice was calmer than that of a four-year-old, but her chin was trembling slightly. "The 20th of the twelfth lunar month, at night. My mother coughed up a lot of blood, and then she stopped moving."

Gu Yanqiu's hand slid off the edge of the table.

His legs went weak, and he slumped to the ground along the edge of the table, his back slamming heavily against the table leg.

A muffled thud.

"Impossible..." His lips trembled. "Impossible... How could she... I thought she..."

Cheng Tiezhu and Cheng Fulai exchanged a glance.

No one spoke in the room.

Niannian looked at Gu Yanqiu, who had fallen to the ground.

His shoulders were trembling violently, and he covered his face with both hands.

What seeped through my fingers, I couldn't tell if it was sweat or tears.

Niannian's lips moved.

She wanted to say something, but her throat felt like it was blocked by something.

She held it in for six days.

From the night my mother died,

When my grandmother put on my red wedding dress...

When it was time to be stuffed into the coffin,

After running barefoot in the snow all night...

When Uncle Zhang Dacheng picked it up,

When we ate corn porridge at Aunt Zhao's house,

When I sat on the back of Lao Zhou's bicycle,

When he was almost dragged away,

When it was time to eat the tea eggs that Grandpa Cheng had given us.

She didn't cry.

Not even once.

It's not that I don't want to cry.

You must not cry.

If you cry, you won't be able to walk.

If you cry, you won't be able to find your dad.

But now—Dad is right in front of me.

The person her mother had asked her to find collapsed to the ground, his shoulders trembling.

A thought arose in Nian Nian's mind—

I have arrived.

I have arrived.

Niannian opened her mouth, and her voice seemed to be forcibly pulled out from the deepest part of her chest, trembling, cracking, and carrying everything that a four-and-a-half-year-old child should not have to bear.

"dad……"

As soon as those two words were uttered, Gu Yanqiu lowered her hand from her face.

He saw Niannian's face.

The little girl's face was covered in tears.

Tears welled up from those bright black eyes, rolling down silently in large drops, flowing over frostbite, over abrasions, over the chin, and dripping onto the patched old cotton-padded coat.

She didn't cry out loud.

But my whole body was shaking.

"Dad...Mom is dead..."

"My grandmother sold me into a ghost marriage... stuffed me into a coffin... and put me next to someone who had been dead for three days..."

"I crawled out myself... My fingernails were all torn off... One of my shoes fell off... My feet were frostbitten..."

"I ran through the snow all night...nobody helped me...I was all alone..."

"But I didn't die... I made it out alive..."

She clenched her hands in front of her, her fingers, with their nails torn and wrapped in gauze.

She looked up, her vision blurred by tears, but her gaze remained fixed on Gu Yanqiu's face.

"Mom told me to come find you. So here I am."

"I've walked over a hundred miles. I've found you."

Gu Yanqiu's facial muscles were twitching violently.

His mouth was open, and a tearing sound came from his throat—as if something that had been accumulating for many years was being ripped open at this moment.

"Wanqing..."

He read the name aloud.

It's like reciting an old wound that can never be completely healed.

Then he suddenly reached out and pulled Niannian into his arms.

He hugged her too tightly, and Niannian's bones hurt from being pressed against his arm.

But she didn't push him away.

Instead, she stretched out her two small hands and grabbed his collar tightly.

She finally burst into tears.

It wasn't the silent tears of before—it was a loud, heart-wrenching, unrestrained sobbing that a four-and-a-half-year-old should be experiencing.

The sound of crying echoed in the mud-brick house of the brigade headquarters, leaking out from the gap in the curtain and drifting into the twilight of Chengjiawan.

The women who had been watching the commotion outside the door fell silent upon hearing the crying.

Cheng Tiezhu stood in the corner, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression a mixture of complex emotions and distress.

He glanced down at the note on the ground.

Song Wanqing's handwriting was faintly visible in the light of the kerosene lamp.

Cheng Fulai stood up from the edge of the kang (a heated brick bed), silently walked to the door, lifted the curtain, and went out.

As the curtain fell, he heard Gu Yanqiu's voice for the last time.

The voice was so hoarse it sounded like it had been dug out of the mud.

Hoarse, broken, and filled with the brutal self-tear.

"I don't know... I don't know anything... Why won't Wanqing tell me—"

His words ended there.

Because he knows the answer.

Why didn't Song Wanqing tell him?

He left on his own five years ago.

He left on his own.

He fled.

He fled back from that city and from that woman.

He thought he wasn't good enough. He thought he couldn't give her anything. He thought she would be better off than she was with him.

So he left. Without even saying goodbye.

Now Song Wanqing is dead.

His daughter—a daughter he didn't know existed—climbed out of a coffin, walked barefoot through the snow all night, more than a hundred miles, to find a good-for-nothing who had abandoned her mother.

Gu Yanqiu buried her face in Niannian's shoulder.

His shoulders were trembling violently.

Niannian leaned against him, her crying gradually subsiding into soft sobs.

Her little hands were still gripping his clothes tightly.

Like a drowning person finally grabbing onto a piece of driftwood.

No matter how broken, rotten, or unreliable this piece of driftwood is.

It is unique.

Outside the brigade headquarters, it was completely dark.

The smoke from the chimneys in Chengjiawan dissipated, and the lights from every household began to twinkle in the mountain valley.

The north wind howled, making the old red flag in front of the brigade headquarters flutter loudly.

Cheng Tiezhu stood at the door for a long time.

He sighed and glanced back at the father and daughter embracing each other inside the house.

Then he reached out and lowered the curtain, turned around and whispered to the crowd watching the commotion outside:

"Everyone's gone."

The crowd dispersed.

But Cheng Tiezhu didn't leave.

He stood outside the door, took out a crumpled cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag.

The cigarette butt glowed and faded in the twilight.

He was thinking about a problem.

Could someone like Gu Yanqiu possibly support a four-year-old child?

No.

To be more precise—Gu Yanqiu can't even support himself, so how can he support a child?

Cheng Tiezhu exhaled a puff of smoke, which was torn to shreds by the north wind.

He didn't know the answer.

But he knew one thing—he would never forget the look that little girl had given him.

That was the look in the eyes of a child who had crawled out of a coffin, a child who had walked more than a hundred miles alone in the snow.

There was no despair in those eyes.

There is only something resolute, unyielding, and unstoppable—

She wants to live.

No matter if her father is a lazy bum or an alcoholic, no matter how difficult the road ahead is, no matter how cruel the world is to her.

She wants to live.

Gu Yanqiu's low voice came from inside the brigade headquarters. It was hoarse and intermittent, as if he was asking something.

Then came the sound of chanting—very soft and weak, but very clear:

"Dad, what exactly happened between you and Mom?"