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Parasitic Child: Chapter 21
Chapter 21: Message in a bottle
Liu Xingquan immediately saw the sedan parked by the roadside.
In front of a row of old, dilapidated public housing, this luxury car was excessively out of place. Every passerby without exception would pause their gaze on the car for a few seconds, showing expressions of curiosity or admiration. Liu Xingquan knew who the owner of this car was, which made him somewhat surprised.
“Auntie An…”
Before Liu Xingquan could approach the car, it started moving.
He vaguely saw the blurred figure of Auntie An Yuan behind the car window, then the car gradually drove away, and he could no longer see anything clearly.
In Liu Xingquan’s heart, the best mother in the world was his mother Luo Qingxi, and second place could only be Auntie An Yuan.
Liu Xingquan had always liked Auntie An Yuan. An Yuan was already the mother of two children, yet she still retained the innocence and liveliness of her girlhood. When he was young, Father Liu would often take him to the Yan family to keep Yan Zhen company. An Yuan would frequently join their games, and her cheerful laughter from back then remained in Liu Xingquan’s memory. She was very, very good to him, so much so that her attitude influenced those around the Yan couple, making Liu Xingquan, for a time, develop the illusion that he, like Yan Zhen, was also a young master.
During the most ignorant stage of childhood, he thought that the world in Yan Zhen’s eyes was the same as the one he saw. At that time, he had a kind of joyful pride. His academic performance had always been better than Yan Zhen’s, he was well-behaved, and whether at school or outside, he received more praise than Yan Zhen.
During elementary school, when the children got out of school, they would gather to play soccer. There was a group of older students who always took over their field. After several instances of this, conflicts arose between them and the older students. Children’s fights were just like that—shouting insults at each other, then grabbing and pushing. A rock scraped past Liu Xingquan’s forehead, and his head started bleeding. Yan Zhen stared at his forehead, then furiously charged at those older students. He tried to pull him back, but it was already too late.
The children’s brawl escalated. Several kids ended up crying on the ground. In the end, they were all taken away by teachers and school security. Amid the chaos, one child’s arm was broken. The situation began spiraling out of control. The parents of the injured child had some influence locally, and the matter even reached the education bureau.
He handed in his self-criticism to his homeroom teacher. His elementary school homeroom teacher took the paper and remained silent for a long time. Liu Xingquan nervously looked at the teacher and asked softly, “Will Yan Zhen and I be punished?”
“Think about yourself first.” The homeroom teacher sighed.
“…”
“Liu Xingquan, do you know what the word ‘Jie ji’ means?”
“I know its English is ‘class.’”
“Liu Xingquan, you are a very good child. I know you don’t want to be just a driver like your father.” The homeroom teacher said, “Class means the son of a driver can only be a driver, while the son of a boss will still be a boss. There’s an old saying: A phoenix gives birth to a phoenix, a dragon gives birth to a dragon, and the son of a rat will dig holes.”
“…”
The homeroom teacher said, “Yan Zhen has a lot of choices. But Liu Xingquan, you have far fewer opportunities than he does. I know you don’t understand now. But if you want a better future, there are some things you shouldn’t mess around with.”
He listened blankly to the teacher’s words. That was the only time the homeroom teacher, who had always praised him, had a heart-to-heart talk with him. Later, the school fight incident was resolved under the intervention of some parents. The two ringleaders were given serious demerits, three children were given warnings, and he and Yan Zhen were not punished.
Later on, the children with serious demerits caused more trouble and were expelled from school. It was said that they eventually became aimless drifters.
From that moment on, certain pressures from reality began to tightly grip the young Liu Xingquan. He gradually realized the difference between him and Yan Zhen. The world was not as bright and boundless as he had imagined, allowing him to soar freely. Yan Zhen was not someone he could compete with academically. From the very beginning, their starting lines had never been the same.
With a father like Yan An and a mother like Auntie An, Liu Xingquan had always suspected that Yan Zhen must have saved the world in his past life. In his imagined world, Yan Zhen was always surrounded by a dazzling, radiant light that was blinding yet enviable. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but fantasize—if the Yan couple were his parents, if he lived in that beautiful big house… But these fantasies would only last a few seconds before he would angrily curse himself.
Auntie An’s car had completely left the street.
This wasn’t just passing by. She had come to my home. That cramped, dilapidated home tucked inside the old public housing.
He stepped into the alley and saw neighbors gathered downstairs, clamoring. A neighbor turned back and saw him, shouting loudly, “Liu Xingquan! Your grandma is about to be taken away by the police!”
Liu Xingquan ran up the stairs. Two police officers were looking helplessly at his grandmother, who was rolling on the ground. His grandmother clutched her chest and shouted, “Murder! Murder!” His second uncle stood to the side, trying to persuade his grandmother while also speaking politely to the police.
Where’s Mom?
Liu Xingquan rushed into the house. The home was in complete disarray. Luo Qingxi sat pale-faced, surrounded by a few neighborhood women chattering away. “Aiya! Quanquan is back!” “Your son is back!” Amid the noise of the neighbors, Liu Xingquan silently grabbed his mother’s hand, filled with regret for not returning sooner.
“Your grandma is still making a fuss outside,” a neighbor said.
“She is not my grandma.”
“Liu Xingquan.” Luo Qingxi looked at the ground and said, “She is, after all, your father’s mother, your elder.”
“……” Liu Xingquan bit his teeth.
With the efforts of the two police officers, his second uncle finally managed to persuade Liu Laotai to leave. The crowd shook their heads, sighing at this shameless, money-grubbing mother-in-law. A few women commented that Luo Qingxi was simply too unfortunate. After some discussion, everyone summed it up with one sentence: “Once your Xiao Quan grows up, starts a family, and builds a career, your hard days will be over.”
Liu Xingquan remained silent.
He loathed his grandmother.
From as far back as he could remember, his grandmother was the embodiment of everything unreasonable and absurd. His grandfather passed away early, and his father had shouldered everything at home from a young age. His father was a filial son—whatever his grandmother asked, he would agree without hesitation, doing his best to fulfill it. His father was the eldest son of the Liu family, so all sacrifices were expected of him.
Ever since his father became Uncle Yan An’s personal driver, his grandmother became even more convinced that his father had latched onto a goldmine, an endless source of benefits.
Whenever relatives from the hometown needed a ride, it was always his father who drove Uncle Yan An’s car to pick them up. The moment that car pulled out, his grandmother’s face lit up as if the car belonged to their family. Anything that happened in the hometown, from building a new house to his aunt going to college, was inevitably handled and funded by his father. His grandmother had long grown used to it. If his father ever found himself unable to do something, in her eyes, it was as if the sky had collapsed and he was unfilial.
Once, he and Yan Zhen were bouncing a ball home when they happened to witness his grandmother throwing a fit because his father hadn’t found time to drive his aunt somewhere. Her voice was shrill and sharp, her words crude and unbearable, while his father simply lowered his head and murmured obediently.
At that moment, Liu Xingquan turned to look at Yan Zhen in panic. He had seen it. This was the ugliest, most disgraceful scene in his home, and his friend had seen it.
Yan Zhen still had that indifferent smile on his face, his jet-black eyes staring at Liu Xingquan as he softly said, “Your dad is really pitiful.”
Liu Xingquan could never forget the expression on Yan Zhen’s face at that moment. He felt suffocated, unable to breathe. Even if Yan Zhen had laughed loudly, mocking his father like he always did, it would have been better than those words of sympathy.
Yan Zhen was gentle. But to Liu Xingquan, that gentleness was like a blade stabbing straight into his heart.
The neighbors finally left his home. Luo Qingxi told him that because his grandmother had given money to his third uncle for investment, only for him to be scammed, all of it was lost. Among the money lost, besides his grandmother’s own savings, a large portion was borrowed. Now, debt collectors were coming to their hometown every day.
“Third Uncle got scammed—what does that have to do with us!” Liu Xingquan said.
“Second Uncle said he would try to persuade your grandmother.”
“She’s been like this for years.”
“Liu Xingquan, she is your grandmother.”
“I really wish she wasn’t!!” Liu Xingquan thought of last year’s New Year. It was clearly his cousin who had taken Grandma’s red envelope, yet Grandma insisted it was him, causing a huge family uproar. She had lightly said that as long as he admitted to it, they could let it go. He refused. His father even threatened to beat him with a feather duster, but he stubbornly refused to bow his head. In the end, someone saw his third uncle’s child spending large bills extravagantly on snacks outside, and only then did they stop forcing him to apologize. But afterward, Grandma still blamed his father for failing to teach his child properly, for disrespecting elders, for not knowing his place, making the whole family feel awkward.
“Xingquan…”
Right now, I just wish Grandma and her entire side of the family would explode and ascend to the heavens, Liu Xingquan thought.
That night, Liu Xingquan opened his school bag and took out a bottle. He had found this bottle while doing cleaning duty at school. Inside it were the only words that had brought him solace in recent days.
He uncorked the bottle, pulled out a sheet of paper, and unfolded it.
The letter read as follows:
………….
To my unknown pen pal,
I never thought that a message in a bottle could actually reach someone. I’ve heard that most of them either end up abandoned on some desolate, uninhabited planet or get swept away by void storms.
I’m surprised that my hopeless venting has somehow landed in a civilized world. I have a request—at least for now, please don’t tell me your race or your world. Let me keep a bit more room for imagination (though maybe one day, I’ll ask you to tell me).
Unknown friend from afar, let me tell you about my day.
Today, my friend Tita and I went to harvest fortune roots. Last night, I discovered a whole cluster of them down in the third-level sewer, but they weren’t fully mature yet, so I marked their location. However, when we went back today, all the fortune roots were gone.
You probably don’t know what fortune roots are. They’re a type of fungus found in our sewers. If cooked using special methods, eating one can sustain me for three whole days and nights without needing any other food. They love to escape from people like us, who go around harvesting them.
Luckily, the marker I left behind was still sending me signals. Following the signal, we weaved left and right through the sewer tunnels until we finally stopped at a narrow passage—and there were my fortune roots. This time, they wouldn’t be able to get away.
But they had already fallen into the hands of a group of zombie laborers. Those stupid zombie laborers mistook my fortune roots for corrosive grime on the passage walls. They went at them with electric shovels and disinfectant sprays, destroying them all.
Those idiots! That many fortune roots could have fed us for a whole month. But now, thanks to those zombie laborers, they are gone. Tita and I yelled at them in fury.
Then, their supervisor appeared, standing on top of an electric shovel. He glared at us. The moment I saw his uniform, Tita and I wisely backed off. That was a supervisor—not someone we could afford to mess with.
If he had wanted to, just a snap of his fingers and both Tita and I would have been captured, implanted with chips, and turned into zombie laborers ourselves, forced to join the sewer cleaning crew.
We left the sewers. Tita was frustrated, and so was I. After all, finding such a large cluster of fortune roots was a rare opportunity. Tita said he was sick of the sewers, sick of everything in the lower depths. He longed to escape this place and climb up to the world above.
I looked around. Above us was a heavy blanket of photochemical smog and an endless labyrinth of towering buildings, stretching so high that they seemed bottomless. Ash and electric arcs floated in midair. Countless ships passed through the murky, shadowed clouds.
Would the scenery be any different in the world above?
…….
Liu Xingquan finished reading the letter. He was certain that someone was using this bottle to write an ongoing sci-fi novel, and he was probably the only reader. The contents of this letter were completely different from the last one, but it was rather interesting.
He thought for a moment, then wrote a simple reply:
1. This strange zombie concept doesn’t really match your setting. It’s not classical at all.
2. I’d really like to know what fortune roots taste like.
He slipped his reply into the bottle. Tomorrow, he would hide the bottle under a hedge somewhere in the school garden. In just a few days, a new letter would appear inside.
He looked forward to seeing how this not-so-scientific sci-fi novel would unfold.
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