The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 175: Mistake

After I explained my plan, I said goodbye and went back to rest. In fact, I was hoping to get a look at the road where the car accident had occurred, since Lin Qizhong was a kid back then, and his observational abilities didn't come close to mine. I was also better at seeing if there had been a clever cover-up. I didn't bother asking the old lady, since I felt like Lin Qizhong was the one I needed, and the old lady probably wouldn't be able to find the place. I also felt that it was better to keep a low profile here.

I still had a bigger doubt in my mind that I hadn't yet expressed. I had been suppressing it, and tried not to think about it while I listened to the old lady's story. When I left and came downstairs, I saw my classmate and Lin Qizhong smoking by the door of the downstairs kiosk.

When I walked over and saw Lin Qizhong staring at me, the doubt became even more obvious.

This was a kind of feeling that couldn't be conveyed through words. There were a lot of details—the expression in his and the old lady's eyes, their gestures, their emotional states, and countless other details— that made me feel very strange.

After leaving and getting in the car, my classmate asked me what I thought, so I asked him, "Based on the atmosphere between them, and their facial features, do you feel like Lin Qizhong and his mother aren't really mother and son?"

When he heard this, my classmate turned pale and asked, "What do you mean?"

I shook my head and didn't say any more; it was just a feeling after all. My classmate thought it over, and began recalling the atmosphere I had mentioned, and the mother and son's facial features.

He was a cautious and meticulous person, and I saw him slowly start to understand what I meant. He stiffly turned his head towards me and asked, "Do you mean to say that the relationship between them is more like a couple than a mother and son?"

All the interactions between them were very similar to those of a mother and a child, but if they were together in the same room, you would feel that their constrained emotions and hatred for each other were equal. When it came to a mother and child, however, the hatred between the two was never equal. A mother's hatred for her son and a son's hatred for his mother were two completely different things. But for Lin Qizhong and the old woman, that kind of punishing oppression was the same. They acted more like a couple whose relationship had died out.

It wasn't that I was saying they were incestuous. It was more like they were in a real relationship, like husband and wife.

This feeling reached its peak when I saw Lin Qizhong in front of the kiosk.

What the old lady told me was probably true and credible for the most part. I was able to discern lies all too well now, so people who could lie in front of me needed to be extremely skilled in deception, and have a slight personality disorder. Many people had the same tells when they lied, so only those who had a distorted personality and weren't even aware that they were lying could deceive me.

But she didn't mention her relationship with Lin Qizhong, because such an obvious thing would surely make people more suspicious. The two people were so far apart in age that it made it difficult to understand the mystery. I also didn't know whether this abnormal relationship had anything to do with the essence of this matter.

I smoked a cigarette and calculated the time. The things the old lady and I discussed yesterday, combined with my own inferences, still had a common point. Time has always been the most easily ignored weakness of human beings. We say that when it comes to crimes of wisdom, almost all of the flaws are related to time, because people are inherently weak against things that can't be judged by the naked eye.

NanNan was involved in a car accident thirteen years ago. Lin Qizhong was probably around thirty-four now, which meant he must have been twenty-one back then. If he and the old lady truly had a mother-child relationship, then there was a seventeen-year time difference between the twenty-one-year-old Lin Qizhong and the four-year-old NanNan. Assuming the old lady gave birth to Lin Qizhong at the early age of seventeen, it was reasonable to believe she gave birth to NanNan when she was thirty-four-years-old. Such a thing was normal in the countryside, and there didn't appear to be any flaws.

The old lady was so old, however, that I couldn't judge her age. She could be anywhere from fifty to a hundred and twenty, but if the two of them weren't mother and son, then it was reasonable to think that they were husband and wife, especially if Lin Qizhong married her when he was twenty-one and she was over thirty. Even if it was four years before that when he was seventeen years old, it would still coincide with the age of getting married and having children in the countryside.

Marrying a twenty-seven or twenty-eight year old wife at the age of seventeen sounded like a wondrous thing, but the age difference would gradually turn into a tragedy. Human nature was unreliable, and even a woman would be prone to morbid emotions under the pressure of age.

If we continued with the assumption that they were husband and wife, then thirteen years later, Lin Qizhong would be thirty-four years old, and the old lady should be nearly fifty years old. If my guess was correct, then the old lady was aging abnormally quickly. It was most likely related to emotions, or other factors that I didn't understand.

It was possible that NanNan and Lin Qizhong had a father-daughter relationship, which would also explain another sense of doubt I had when I heard the story. In the countryside, picking up coal slack was usually done by kids under the age of eight, while those who were older than ten usually did farm work or worked for other families. No matter how old Lin Qizhong was at that time, he was definitely much older than NanNan, and shouldn't have been doing something as inefficient as picking up coal slack.

The old lady had land, which indicated that her family had been in the village for several generations. It wasn't like this strange relationship could be changed partway, so it was unlikely the couple forcibly changed their relationship into that of a mother and her child. The people in the village weren't fools, after all. There had to be some missing details about this relationship that I didn't know about, but either way, my gut told me that my theory was correct. All I had to do was ask someone.

But I decided at that time to let it go and just ignore it.

Even if I always performed an in-depth investigation into everything, there would always be some secrets and unimaginable ideas in this world. Exploring people's dark side might feel like you're not letting them off the hook, but in fact, the one you're not letting off is yourself.

While my classmate stayed awake that night, thinking about the problems I had raised, I slept soundly without a care in the world. The beer and a full belly— coupled with my ability to forcibly put any problems behind me— enabled me to sleep deeply. After drinking so much, I believe I even snored loudly. When I woke up in the morning, I found that my bed was full of all kinds of items my classmate had thrown at me from the upper bunk.

After I brushed my teeth and went outside to exercise, he finally managed to fall asleep, snoring even louder than I did. I ignored him as I stood on the edge of the cliff outside the dormitory—his dormitory was on the high ground, with a cliff about three meters away, and a downward facing slope— and looked down over the entire construction site.

The project was so huge that the whole mountain was riddled with holes, and I realized that humanity's ability to change the landscape wasn't the same as it was thousands of years ago. After looking at it for a while, I drove to the old lady's village, where she said she would meet me.

I set out alone without informing anyone, which was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.