It was already dark.
The three of us were still keeping watch in the Spirit Hall, looking at Xie Guangming's memorial portrait.
There was a woman there, a collateral relative of Xie Guangming's. She seemed to be his niece.
His niece had been grieving the whole time and had been burning joss paper for Xie Guangming diligently.
Sometime after ten that night, more people arrived to mourn.
The newcomers were three women, crying just as sorrowfully. When we took a closer look, we discovered that all three looked exactly alike.
And all three looked exactly like the niece who was already there.
"Holy shit!"
The three of us almost thought we were hallucinating, but we quickly realized they were four sisters-quadruplets!
So the three women who had just arrived to mourn were also Xie Guangming's nieces.
Seeing how deeply all four sisters felt about Xie Guangming, I asked someone beside me about them.
The person beside me said Xie Guangming had had an older brother, but his brother had died young, leaving behind a wife and quadruplet daughters. The four girls had still been little then, and the family was poor. How could their mother have managed to look after them all by herself?
As it happened, Xie Guangming had come into a windfall around that time. Fortunately, he treated his family very well, so he had continued supporting his sister-in-law's family and paying his four nieces' living expenses and tuition.
Later, the quadruplets had done their family proud, getting into prestigious universities and then pursuing their careers abroad.
In fact, Xie Guangming had treated the quadruplets so well because he hoped that after he died, they would look after his disabled son.
Judging by how sorrowfully the quadruplets were crying at the funeral, they were probably people who knew