In the boundless darkness, streaks of Eerie Glow seeped through. Long and narrow, they pieced together a cramped, enclosed little space.
Those wisps of light were like invisible sharp knives, their tips aimed at a man, piercing his flesh and passing through his organs.
Like someone abandoned in a wasteland, he watched in terror from a gutter as the light stabbed in from afar, his face pale as paper.
In a daze, Mo Jialin seemed to return to a time long, long ago.
In his memories, from the age of five or six onward, he had always hidden alone in the small storage room at home, peeking through the dim light filtering in through the door crack at his father's violence and listening to his mother's sobs.
Back then, he did not truly understand what domestic violence was, what a broken marriage was, or what the shadow of childhood meant.
He only knew that he often did not see his father for a long time. Just when his little mind was about to forget his father's face, that tall, thin man would Suddenly Appear at home again.
Yet whenever that nearly blurred face returned home, it was always bloodshot, savage, and twisted.
And his father's return would always make his already frail, sickly, and quiet mother shed tears of pain, along with the terrifying wails that ran through his entire childhood.
So, at some point, Mo Jialin had begun to like hiding in that little storage room at home.
When he was five or six, he would squeeze into the room and lean against its cold, damp walls. That unsettling environment instead gave him a faint, rare sense of comfort.
But after he turned ten, whenever his father came home, he would feel as though he could not breathe whenever