I hadn't yet taken the five hundred yuan Xiao Xuan had given me to the Blind Old Man.
Mainly, the Urban Village was too far away. Even driving there took over an hour.
Work was also rather busy, with a lot to deal with, so I planned to take it to the Blind Old Man after getting through those two days, along with some food and drinks.
But I truly hadn't expected that life and death could sometimes come so suddenly, catching people completely off guard.
Two days later, when Song Xiaotian, Meng Yifan, and I went to visit the Blind Old Man, he had already passed away.
He had died at home, lying peacefully on his bed with both hands resting flat on his lower abdomen.
But because the temperature was so high, his body had already begun to stink.
We called the Funeral Home and made simple arrangements for his funeral, placing his ashes in the Columbarium in an urn we bought that was neither particularly good nor particularly bad.
After taking care of his funeral arrangements, we returned to his home to sort through his belongings.
We found a final letter by his bed.
The letter wasn't long, but its contents shook us.
It turned out that during the New Year holiday that year, on the night the Blind Old Man met Rat and Xiao Xuan, he hadn't actually gone out to collect rubbish. He had been planning to drown himself in the River.
We looked back over the Blind Old Man's life. Perhaps two-thirds of it had been a tragedy, while during the first third, he had actually been someone with limitless prospects.
A university student carried so much weight in those days, and he had been the only one in his village. He had even