Chapter 88: 44.2

Chapter 44.2 – Isabella

Fengyang City was very large. Thirty-eight years ago, the special infection creature, ‘Heat Hurricane’, attacked the place and brought a massacre, only a quarter of the population was left and it hasn’t recovered until today. It had a large number of unused abandoned buildings and abandoned areas, and after a little tidying up, the conditions were poor and barely livable.

The streets were chaotic, and there were queues of Gleaning City residents everywhere, waiting for food and shelter to be distributed.

Fortunately, no one made trouble, they waited silently.

Shi Yuan followed Lu Tinghan to his home in Fengyang City.

The building was in a secluded corner with few people. Not far away, there was a huge windmill, one hundred meters high, with eighty meters of wind blades, which sprinkled shadows on the house when it rotated.

As soon as Shi Yuan opened the door of the house, he felt the difference.

—This was different from the home in Gleaning City.

The home in Gleaning City was always particularly clean and particularly cold, with Broken Copper and Broken Iron tidying up everything neatly. The duplex structure was beautiful, and the living room and dining room were spacious. Because of the lack of personal belongings, it always felt like a model room.

While this home in Fengyang City…

The single-layer structure was neither big nor small.

The dark wood floor was old, and it would creak when a piece of it was stepped on at the door. The walls were repainted, several places were of different colors and there were scratches, and the landscape paintings hanging on the walls were yellowed.

There were pen holders, matryoshka dolls, rulers, and sailing models on the tables and bookcases. Old books and magazines were piled together. There were also three or five pebbles in the empty goldfish bowl, all kinds of miscellaneous things.

This was an old house.

Even if it was cleaned up as much as possible, memories were still lazily rolling around here, shaking off a few traces from time to time.

Shi Yuan said, “This is…”

“It’s where I used to live.” Lu Tinghan turned on the light. “I was born in Fengyang City.”

The old house had only two rooms, a master bedroom where Lu Tinghan lived, and a second bedroom.

Shi Yuan opened the door of the second bedroom, desk, bookshelf, sketchbook, rocket model, single bed… The size of some things was designed for children at first glance.

Lu Tinghan said behind him: “I lived in this room when I was a kid. You can sleep here first.” He saw Shi Yuan looking around, his face full of curiosity, and added, “You can use whatever you want, just don’t break it.”

Shi Yuan said, “I will be careful, but what if I accidentally break it?”

Lu Tinghan said, “Then there’s nothing we can do.”

Shi Yuan got permission and started to mess with the things on the desktop. Lu Tinghan didn’t seem to be busy, but miraculously stayed, sitting on the bed and watching Shi Yuan toss.

So Shi Yuan took the rocket model and asked him, “Lu Tinghan, what is this?”

“Rocket.” Lu Tinghan told him, “A kind of spacecraft that can go to space, the person sitting in the rocket is called an astronaut.”

Shi Yuan: “Wow! Do you want to go to space?”

Lu Tinghan: “I thought about it when I was a kid, but then I found that it couldn’t be realized.” He didn’t know what he thought of, and added, “This model was the first thing I got it in science class, it’s from kindergarten.”

Shi Yuan asked, “Did the teacher give it to you as a reward?”

“No.” Lu Tinghan said, “There was a kid in the big class who bullied his classmates. During science class, I dragged him to the corridor and beat him. He cried and gave me his toys.”

Shi Yuan: “……”

Shi Yuan studied the rocket model for a while and learned about the fairing, engine, and booster. As for the principle of rocket lift-off, his brain was still unable to process this knowledge, and it shutdown, his tail curved out of a huge question mark.

Lu Tinghan stretched out his hand, straightened his tail, and controlled Shi Yuan to exit the shutdown state.

That’s it for the rocket model. Shi Yuan picked up a pebble on the table again and asked, “This one looks like the one in the fish tank outside.”

“It’s there.” Lu Tinghan said, “I used to raise fish at home, small tropical fish, my mother liked those.”

“Do you like fish?”

“A little. Later, the logistics staff helped change the water and accidentally poured a tank of fish into the sewer.”

Shi Yuan knew that the sewer led to the outside of the city, and said, “Then they should be alive in the lake outside the city, and there are a lot of small fishes.”

Lu Tinghan: “Probably not. Seven years ago, I commanded the air force to bomb a nearby lake and killed a school of infected fish.” He recalled for a while, “Speaking of which, the color was really similar to the fish I raised.”

Shi Yuan: “……”

There was also an old family portrait on the table.

In the photo, the man was handsome and the woman was beautiful. Lu Tinghan, who was a teenager, was sitting between them, with a white shirt and a suit vest, and the sun was shining in his gray-blue eyes. The three of them were obviously very close to each other, revealing the meaning of an elite family from head to toe, but they magically gave people… the feeling of not being close, like a few polite strangers.

Shi Yuan just stared at the photo for a few seconds, then Lu Tinghan took it away.

He said: “Look at it again next time.”

Shi Yuan flipped around again and found the badminton that Lu Tinghan had played, the chess board he put in the corner, and a small bag of seeds that he hadn’t had time to plant.

Lu Tinghan told him stories one after another.

Shi Yuan found several marks on the wall that recorded his height from low to high, written with “4 years old”, “7 years old”, “10 years old”…“15 years old”, and then there was no record.

Shi Yuan gestured. He was about the same height as the 14-year-old Lu Tinghan, and he already had to look up at the 15-year-old Lu Tinghan.

He asked Lu Tinghan: “Can I still grow taller?”

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Lu Tinghan: “It’s a bit difficult.”

“How difficult is it?”

Lu Tinghan said, “You weren’t as tall as my shoulders when you first came, and now you are still the same.”

“There should be a little bit of growth too, right? I drank milk several times.”

“Not even half a centimeter.”

“Okay, okay.” Shi Yuan was a little disappointed, stroking the scratches on the wall, trying to imagine what Lu Tinghan was like at that time.

Lu Tinghan was a busy person after all, so after he answered a phone call, he went out.

Shi Yuan sat on the bed and looked around the house.

The sunlight passed through the curtains and fell gently on the desk. Shi Yuan looked at the black pen holder and imagined how Lu Tinghan used to sit at the table and write words with a stroke of his tender hand.

He might—

He might stand in front of the old mirror, tie his tie carefully, and look back at the marks on the wall. He was already more than half of the height; he might find a friend to have a badminton duel to show the strange spirit of the Lu family’s unwillingness to admit defeat and smash back and forth; he might sit by the fish tank and draw sketches while watching colorful tropical fish. The windmill outside the house swept across the sky, and the shadows fell round after round, never stopping.

For a long time, Shi Yuan knew Lu Tinghan as a resolute abyss watcher and a firm and reliable general.

Lu Tinghan rarely talked about the military with him. It might be because of confidentiality, it might be that he didn’t want to worry him, or it might be that he didn’t want his tail to bend into question marks frantically… Even that time, Shi Yuan asked about his old friend, Lu Tinghan only said, “The sun was very good at that time.”

But this afternoon, since Shi Yuan walked into the house, something had quietly changed. It was strange that a person like Lu Tinghan, whose emotions were not exposed, could let others live in his old house.

Shi Yuan felt that even if it was only a little bit…

He began to really understand Lu Tinghan.

He was very tired physically and mentally after a long trip. Shi Yuan became sleepy after a while, and after taking a shower, he threw himself into bed, covering himself with a quilt.

He looked at the room full of objects and whispered, “Good night.”

It was like talking to the young man he didn’t know in the past.

A day later, Shi Yuan was notified and was asked to report to the work distribution center.

Shi Yuan got the new mobile phone that Lu Tinghan gave him, got the travel certificate, and went out early.

Before going to the distribution center, he was planning to visit 149 Maple Leaf Street first.

The residence of Isabella Garcia was there.

She was in poor health, and Shi Yuan was worried that she was in a hurry to use the money for the operation, so he had to give the money to her as soon as possible.

He went out with the money Cheng Youwen gave him. There were no buses in Fengyang City, only blue trams. When he looked out the window, there were still large solar panels and windmills. The energy towers were scattered high and low, and the signal lights were lit on in different colors.

After 45 minutes, he got off at Maple Leaf Street Station.

After passing through two small alleys, he came to No. 149. He didn’t see the house but saw a children’s welfare home, the children from Star Welfare Home in Gleaning City were sent here.

As the children chased and played, Shi Yuan turned around twice and asked a man sitting on the side of the road: “Excuse me, do you know where Isabella Garcia lives?”

The man just got sweaty on the construction site and waved his hand.

Shi Yuan asked again: “Do you know who I can ask?”

This time the man pointed to the right and said, “Go find Rolf, he is the landlord. He is smoking over there.”

Shi Yuan found Rolf. It was a thin man with a bad face and smelled of tobacco.

Shi Yuan asked, “Hello, do you know where Isabella Garcia lives?”

Rolf looked at him up and down, and slowly said, “…what are you looking for her for?”

“I have something for her.” Shi Yuan said, “I was entrusted by someone to give something to her.”

Rolf pointed to the welfare home: “She lives there.”

Shi Yuan was a little confused: “She works in a welfare home?”

Rolf sneered: “Don’t you understand? Her home was demolished and that place was rebuilt into a welfare home! You want to send her something? It’s a little late, she died eight years ago!”

Shi Yuan was stunned.

In an instant, everything came back to him.

He remembered that he had never seen Isabella, not a single phone call and not a video; he remembered that everyone had wanted to help Tracy save money, but Tracy flatly refused; he remembered that when the deposit was mentioned, Cheng Youwen said that Tracy’s surgery fee was enough, but his expression was very weird, and then he was given a copy of “Waiting for Godot”.

The safe in the theater was getting more and more full.

They sketched out a dream for Tracy about curing Isabella’s illness and going to her with the most perfect performance.

Rolf was still babbling: “You’re also in that what, what, Wild Rose Troupe, right? Their people have been here before, a very big man, a cripple on crutches, and a woman came to the funeral. I asked them how much money they could make from acting, and it wasn’t much at all! They were so strange, what’s the point of doing such things?”

“No,” Shi Yuan interrupted him. “You haven’t seen our stage play. If you have, you will definitely be moved by it.”

Rolf shrugged: “Anyway, it will be forgotten after six months or a year. No one remembers it, and anyone who remembers it will die.”

A gust of wind blew, the windmill accelerated and rotated, and the blue tram made a ding ding dong sound when it entered the station. When the troupe came here to attend Isabella’s funeral many years ago, it was probably the same scenery. When they came, they were sad, and they took away a dream when they went back.

Shi Yuan looked into the distance, an endless haze of brilliant light, and whispered: “But, I will remember – I will.”

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