The old man was gone.
He had passed away without a sound.
The hospital staff came and went without examining him closely. He was a hundred years old. Any way he died would have been perfectly normal.
They issued a death certificate.
When he died, there was still a piece of meat stewed until tender in front of him, along with half a bottle of liquor. Strangely, though, A Wen, whom Lin Feng was playing, had never seen that meat before.
The old man seemed to have passed away while eating, drinking, and listening to the television.
Two days shy of a hundred. A death to be celebrated.
A Wen hired an opera Troupe to play lively music. It was an old county town anyway, without so many restrictions: they set off firecrackers, put up a canopy, set out tables, and ate and drank.
Looking at the familiar faces gathered together, all wearing traces of smiles, A Wen felt only estrangement.
Amid the music, some of A Wen's old friends came to comfort him. They said the old man had lived to a hundred without becoming incapacitated or suffering. He could still eat and drink, and had simply gone to sleep on his sofa at home and passed away.
It was a good thing.
A blessing.
Whatever anyone said, A Wen was still heartbroken. Since this was in first person, Lin Feng could do nothing but follow the story.
When others comforted him, A Wen said the old man had been full of life. On the morning he died, he had drunk three measures of baijiu, and that evening he had even asked A Wen to buy two pig's trotters to go with his liquor. How could someone like that die so easily?
Hearing that, the others had nothing more