In the early 1990s,
a poster on the wall of a beauty salon by the street showed the King of Heaven, Aaron Kwok, smiling beneath a stylish side part, dressed in a bright red batwing sweater. From the speakers in a roadside shop came the nonstop sound of Heavenly King Andy Lau's new song, "The Legend of the Hungry Wolf."
The streets were bustling. The food stalls gave off a mixed aroma of hot-and-sour vermicelli and deep-fried sesame balls. Loudspeakers blared, one after another, "The owner of Jiangnan Leather Factory has run off!" and "For one yuan, you can't get cheated or taken for a ride!" Beneath the nearby tiled roofs hung red banners reading, "Good fortune in the Year of the Monkey! Happy New Year!"
But today, people's attention was focused on a story on page two of the "XX Business Daily." Its headline immediately caught countless eyes—or, as people would say in the future, it shot straight to the top of the trending list.
The headline was only six characters long: "Virgin Gives Birth!!"
Fortunately, the editor hadn't completely thrown away his scruples. The article that followed dutifully laid out the whole story.
It said that a young girl had neither gone swimming nor spent the night away from home. At first, she'd thought little of her irregular periods. After she fainted in class several times and examinations revealed no problems with her head, she was sent home to recuperate.
Then, one night, her mother discovered that the girl had opened the refrigerator and was eating raw meat. Her belly had also begun to swell rapidly, so her mother finally considered the possibility that she was pregnant. But when they went to the hospital for an examination, it turned out that the girl was still a virgin. (The article included an interview with the head of gynecology at a prestigious top-tier hospital.)
People who read the report reacted in different ways. Some marveled at the story; others scoffed, certain the girl must have led an improper life and bribed a doctor to lie. Still others lambasted the editor for making up a story with no regard for decency and sullying the reputation of a respected provincial newspaper.
But no one knew that, a week later, the reporter responsible for covering the story had inexplicably jumped to her death in the middle of the night. A month after that, the gynecology chief who had been interviewed accidentally pricked herself with a needle during an operation. She developed a serious infection and died.
Before her death, she once let slip to someone that there was something deeply unsettling about the girl. When she gave birth, she neither cried nor made a sound. She just kept smiling strangely the entire time. And what she delivered was even more bizarre beyond belief: it was a...
Meanwhile, the girl herself seemed to wither and age over the course of that summer, before finally vanishing without a trace.
Six months later, someone left a baby at the entrance to the local orphanage. Inside the baby's swaddling clothes were ten thousand yuan and a note. The note had just three characters on it, which were presumably the baby's name:
Fang Linyan.
A thousand words came down to just three: "I miss you!"
Before you continue