A different Lü Family Gully

After leaving Li Family Village, Song Xiaotian and I planned to head to Lü Family Gully.

Lü Family Gully was Lü Zhengxian's hometown, and the two villages weren't far apart.

On the way, I asked Song Xiaotian why, since he used to be a cop, he hadn't anonymously reported the Old Lady for ordering Li Liang to poison the whole village.

Almost everyone in Li Family Village drank water from the wells, so the whole village had probably been poisoned.

That mother and son had probably already killed quite a few people.

If this got out, it would definitely make national headlines.

"You said it yourself. I used to be a cop. I'm not one anymore."

Song Xiaotian was perfectly calm. "If I were still a cop, my professional duty would mean I'd have to report them. But now I'm just an ordinary citizen. Why should I stick my nose into everything?"

I teased him. "Your sense of social responsibility is a little lacking, isn't it?"

Song Xiaotian laughed too. "I'm twenty-nine this year, nearly thirty. I was a cop for years and handled quite a few cases. There was one I came across years ago that I still remember vividly."

"A young man murdered someone. He got the sentence he deserved and was eventually executed. His parents were from the countryside, but they were educated people. They used to be village teachers."

"After their son committed murder, everyone in the village looked down on them. What they went through was probably a lot like what happened to Li Liang and his mother."

"In the end, his parents couldn't take it anymore. They took their little grandson, who was only a few years old, and the whole family drowned themselves in a river."

I was a little stunned.

The elderly couple had been village teachers when they were younger. They had their dignity, so I could understand them despairing enough to drown themselves.

But why take the child with them?

The kid was completely innocent.

Song Xiaotian looked at me and said, "After that young man was executed, his wife ran off. There was nobody to look after the child. If the old couple had already decided to die, just imagine what the kid's life would have been like afterward."

"He probably would've been miserable from childhood right through adulthood. So the old couple simply took him with them. The whole family could be reunited down below."

Hearing that left a bitter feeling in my heart.

It was nothing short of a tragedy.

"What the fuck is wrong with those villagers? Even gangsters know not to drag someone's family into it. Why keep tormenting their relatives?" I couldn't help venting.

Song Xiaotian gave a helpless laugh. "As long as you're alive in this world, people will criticize you, no matter how blameless you are. But they don't criticize us because we've done something wrong. They criticize us so they can look blameless themselves."

"I've seen too many people do utterly inhuman things, yet from a legal standpoint, they haven't committed a crime. There's no way to bring them to justice."

"I used to be an atheist, but I still believed in cause and effect. Those people are fucking sick. They bullied a widow and her son and drove her husband to his death. If they hadn't done that shit, would anyone have fucking poisoned them? They fucking deserved it!"

The way Song Xiaotian said it almost made me laugh.

But I had to admit he made a lot of sense.

He struck me as a guy who wore his heart on his sleeve, not some rotten cop. I couldn't help asking curiously, "Xiaotian, don't take this the wrong way. I'm just curious. How did you get fired?"

Song Xiaotian gave a meaningful smile, looking mysterious. "Guess."

I said, "Did your colleagues catch you with a prostitute during a vice raid?"

Song Xiaotian said, "Fuck you!"

We arrived at Lü Family Gully.

Although the two villages weren't far apart, they were worlds apart.

Li Family Village was poor and looked like a Ghost Village. Only the village chief's home was any better.

But in Lü Family Gully, every household had a decent house. There was even a road leading straight to town.

If I'd known Lü Family Gully had a road, Song Xiaotian and I could've taken a three-wheeler straight here first. We wouldn't have had to walk all that way along the mountain paths.

And Lü Family Gully really was bustling, with plenty of people around. It was clear that the villagers were living comfortably.

"Huh. This is weird."

Even Song Xiaotian looked shocked. "These villages are so close together. How come the poverty relief only went to this one?"

Deep down, we both already knew the answer. "Unless it was a private business funding the poverty relief, with a specific goal in mind."

The two villages had the same geographical conditions. No amount of poverty relief could have made Lü Family Gully this prosperous unless someone was pouring money into it without expecting anything in return.

There was no question who that person was.

Just then, a man of about fifty came toward us with a hoe over his shoulder. He was smoking and humming a little tune, apparently in a good mood.

We greeted him, offered him a good cigarette, and struck up a friendly conversation.

"Oh, you're here as tourists? Honestly, there isn't much to see around here." The older man was quite talkative.

I smiled. "We like this kind of unspoiled natural setting. We went to Li Family Village earlier, but honestly, it doesn't hold a candle to this place."

"Sir, how did your village become so well-off?"

The older man grew excited at the question. "Let me tell you, our whole village must've been blessed by our ancestors. A big businessman brought his charity work here and gave our village a ton of support."

"No wonder he makes so much money. He's got a good heart. He didn't just build us new houses-he built us a road too. That boss is a living saint."

I really wanted to tell him that the boss he was talking about wasn't a living saint. He was a living king of hell.

The reason he treated the villagers so well was that his family still lived here.

"Sir, do you know Lü Jun?" I asked.

Lü Jun was Lü Zhengxian's father. That was in the file.

"Of course I do. He's from our village."

The older man looked at us curiously. "Aren't you here as tourists? Why are you asking about him?"

Song Xiaotian reacted quickly. "We're reporters. We're here on vacation, but we also wanted to interview Lü Jun while we're here, about what happened with his son fifteen years ago."

The older man froze for a moment. "What happened with his son... You mean that kid Lü Zhengxian? What he did back then was no small matter. I know about it too. Why don't you interview me instead? Do I get paid?"

Seeing how eager he was for money, I quickly took out two hundred yuan and handed it to him.

His smile grew even brighter once he had the money.

Song Xiaotian took out his phone and pretended to film from the side, while I pretended to interview the older man.

He was extraordinarily talkative. He went on for ages without giving me a chance to get a word in, and everything he said was either pointless chatter or information we already knew.

One detail, however, gave me a little thrill.

He was fifty-one this year, which meant he had been thirty-six fifteen years ago. He was six years older than Lü Zhengxian, and the two had been close buddies back then. They had practically grown up together.

So he knew Lü Zhengxian very well.

I asked him, "Since you know Lü Zhengxian so well, do you know of any distinctive traits he has? Something that would make him easy to identify, or perhaps a habit?"