Chapter 61: Dinner
When the alarm clock rang, Shu Yao was still a little dazed.
She hadn’t expected to sleep so soundly during her lunch break.
In her memory, the last time she had had such a good quality sleep was before… on the cruise ship.
Perhaps humans were ultimately social animals, so as long as there was another presence accompanying her while she slept, even if the other person’s body temperature was not warm, it could still give her a great sense of security, subconsciously letting go of all vigilance, telling herself that it was safe to sleep like this.
She sat up in bed, her light-colored pupils rarely showing the calm and indifferent look that usually kept people at a distance. Instead, they were filled with a bit of a daze. She sat there for a few seconds before she reached out to turn off the alarm.
Then she poked the little pet that had turned its tentacles into a flower and had fallen by her pillow.
“Are you coming out with me, or are you going to stay at home and sleep a little longer?”
When humans were working 996 to earn money and support their families, pets should be basking in the sun and sleeping at home. This was the difference between a cute pet and a corporate slave.
But the little octopus, which was closing its eyes and still nestled in the bed full of her scent, had already extended a tentacle and started to wrap it around her fingers, moving itself onto her with great clinginess.
Shu Yao smiled.
Then she took the initiative to scoop it up, got out of bed, and went out to pick up the gift for the Zhou family. Before she went out, she specially sent a message to Zhou Wenbai, asking if they were at home now and if it was convenient for her to visit.
…
After she knocked on the door, the atmosphere in the Zhou family’s house was completely beyond Shu Yao’s expectations, and it was extremely lively.
Besides her, there were also Uncle Zhou’s other classmates and old friends in the living room. It was the National Day holiday, and this year, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day were combined into a long holiday. The first day of the holiday, everyone was stuck in traffic on the highway, so they decided to get together today and discuss going out to play tomorrow or the day after.
The person who opened the door for Shu Yao was Auntie Zhou. Her face was flushed, and if it weren’t for the woolen hat she was still wearing from her previous radiotherapy, it would have been almost impossible to guess that she had had such a serious illness.
The doctor had even very tactfully said that the time she had left was probably no more than three months.
“It’s Yaoyao,” Auntie Zhou smiled at her. Seeing the specially selected supplements she was carrying, her smile grew even wider. “Why did you bring something again? Come, come, come in. Old Zhou and his friends are just talking about going out tomorrow. Do you have a holiday? Do you want to join?”
Shu Yao followed her into the living room, greeted the familiar uncles and aunts, and after pulling at the corners of her lips to show a smile to the others, her gaze fell back on Auntie Zhou.
“I only have half a day off,” she said, and then asked, “Auntie, are you feeling better?”
Auntie Zhou couldn’t stop smiling. She pulled her to the other half of the hall, put down the things, and turned around in front of her. “Right? You can also see that I’ve been looking better lately?”
“I’m taking less than half of my medicine now,” she held Shu Yao’s hand and sat down on a chair in the dining room, and said to her, “I don’t wake up in pain in the middle of the night anymore. Old Zhou said he’ll take me for a check-up in a while. Maybe the cancer cells in my body have all been killed.”
Away from the air in the half of the house she had just entered, the smell of alcohol and smoke that filled Shu Yao’s nose had faded a lot, so much so that she could clearly smell another unique scent.
Extremely sweet.
If she had to describe it, it was like the grease left in the center of a blooming flower stamen, with white bones buried in the soil below providing nutrients. The excess nutrients caused the nectar to also have a unique greasy feeling.
Shu Yao even felt the little octopus, which had been nestled in her pocket, start to wriggle its tentacles restlessly.
Its reaction and the scent she smelled both pointed to Auntie Zhou.
Shu Yao tried her best to maintain her expression of listening to the good news from Auntie Zhou. When she was afraid that she would be bored and wanted to go into the room to call her daughter out so that people of the same age could chat together, she was pulled back by Shu Yao.
“It’s okay, Auntie. I came to spend more time with you,” she smiled and mentioned naturally, “I’m very happy to see you recovering so well. Did you use any new medicine developed by the hospital? Can you show me?”
At the mention of medicine, Auntie Zhou began to recall, then shook her head. “I think so? All my medicine is from the hospital, and Old Zhou is afraid that I’ll see the side effects on it and have a heavy heart at night, so he threw away all the labels and instructions—”
“The medicine recently is indeed different from before. Wait, let me ask him.”
As she spoke, she turned her head. “Old Zhou, where did you put my medicine box?”
The chatting in the living room stopped.
Zhou Wenbai walked over. The silver in his sideburns was still so obvious, but his whole person was not as hesitant as when he had been rushing home with the frosted cake in the dark of night. He even seemed to have found his backbone again, and his energy and spirit were much better.
He glanced at Shu Yao, and then asked his wife, “It’s not time for you to take your medicine yet.”
“Yaoyao said she wants to see the medicine I’m taking,” Auntie Zhou patted his arm. “Didn’t you put away all the instructions and medicine boxes? Find the ones I’ve been taking recently and show her. She’s a graduate student, and she’s working in a good unit now. She definitely knows more than you.”
Shu Yao quickly waved her hand and said no, but then she looked at Zhou Wenbai again. “I just know a lot of doctors. They told me that some new drugs lack some clinical data support. I’m just curious about which kind Auntie is taking.”
Zhou Wenbai was silent for a moment.
After a long while, he turned around, put on the reading glasses that were hanging around his neck, and muttered, “Then—then let me look for it… Yaoyao, you wait a minute…”
“Okay, Uncle Zhou. I’m not in a hurry. You can take your time.”
After Shu Yao finished speaking, she sat there and waited quietly.
…
Zhou Wenbai went into the room and stayed there for a full half hour.
It wasn’t until his friends outside urged him, asking him why he had left his guests and was dawdling in the room, that he came out with an apologetic look, and at the same time, he looked at Shu Yao with a troubled expression:
“Yaoyao, your aunt has taken too many medicines. The boxes and instructions are too many, and I’m slow at finding them. How about this, I’ll find them tonight and take a picture and send it to your phone?”
Shu Yao nodded and said okay.
Coincidentally, at this time, the flower fish called her and said that he was going to Situ Jin’s house. She looked at the time, said goodbye to the Zhou couple, who were busy entertaining guests, and said that she had to go to her unit for duty.
Before she went downstairs, she sent a message to the Zhou family’s daughter, Zhou Xiaonan, asking her to be sure to let her know if Auntie Zhou had any travel plans with Uncle Zhou or alone in the future.
After she walked out of the apartment building, the smile on her face disappeared.
She first called the flower fish back and told him to be more patient with that mermaid, because she was very timid. At the end, she added, “If you have time, see if she has any other special abilities.”
“Special abilities?” the flower fish wailed on the other end of the phone. “Are these [Parasites] so competitive now? Am I going to be expelled from the [Parasite] registry if I don’t have any skills?”
“Alright, stop complaining,” Shu Yao said. “I just have some guesses that need to be confirmed.”
The flower fish: “Got it, team leader, QAQ.”
Shu Yao hung up the phone, thought for a moment, and then called Lu Ren.
“Teacher Shu?” Lu Ren was a little surprised, as he had never received a call from her since she started working.
Shu Yao was also not used to calling people she didn’t know well directly, but after all, it was an emergency. “It’s me. I want to ask, did we get any new clues about the case of the fraud organization we were assigned to before?”
Thinking back now, she hadn’t seen Lu Ren post any new progress in the work group.
Lu Ren reacted. “Oh, that case. The higher-ups seem to have some concerns. Anyway, they didn’t let us continue to follow it. It might be assigned to another group. Teacher Shu, haven’t you been with the field team recently?”
Shu Yao replied that she was just asking.
She then said, “If it’s assigned to another group, can I continue to follow it?”
Lu Ren laughed and said tactfully, “I’m afraid not.”
The clues that could have been gathered suddenly broke off.
Shu Yao was a little annoyed. If she had known, she would have taken some time from her field team missions to investigate that fraud organization. Now she wouldn’t be so lost.
The special department had as many rules as it had secrets.
Just as the people from other groups were curious about her and her abilities, they would not surround her after she entered the office, let alone go to her field site to watch her control and kill the malignant [Parasites].
So she couldn’t go to her superior’s office and, according to her own will, ask to continue to follow this case, or to view all the current materials related to it.
For a moment, Shu Yao felt as if she were a headless fly about this matter.
She walked out of the Zhou couple’s community aimlessly, wanting to find her direction in this aimless walk.
It was unknown how long she had walked.
A slender figure in front of her accidentally stepped into a puddle on the roadside and was about to trip—
Shu Yao had originally wanted to avoid the splashing sewage, but when she saw the little girl about to fall in the corner of her eye, she still managed to control her body’s reaction with her reason and reached out to pull the girl’s arm.
After the other person had steadied herself, she habitually wanted to break free from this strange force, but when she looked up, she was stunned. “Sister?”
Looking closely.
It was the little flower girl she had met at that square last time.
Shu Yao let go of her hand and found that the little girl was staring at the gray water stains on her pants and was apologizing. She waved her hand and remembered to ask, “You’re not selling flowers anymore?”
When she was asked about this, the light in the girl’s eyes dimmed.
She opened her mouth, but couldn’t say anything for a long time. It wasn’t until Shu Yao realized that her question had touched on a sore spot and wanted to change the subject that she slowly said, “I don’t have to sell flowers anymore. My family doesn’t lack money anymore. My mother… she—she’s gone.”
“Mmm?”
Shu Yao realized that the sick person was her mother and couldn’t help but frown. “Gone? Did you call the police?”
The little girl’s face was pale as she nodded. “But they said that recently there have been too many people like her who have left home on their own and have been reported missing. They asked us to wait first, saying that maybe my mother will come back on her own…”
Speaking of this, she remembered that Shu Yao had been with the police officers at the square that day. A glimmer of hope rekindled in her eyes. She carefully pulled at the corner of Shu Yao’s clothes, her eyes filled with hope. “Sister, my mother didn’t leave on her own. She—she told us that all the people who participated in the rally went on a trip and disappeared. She wouldn’t go on a trip, and she wouldn’t leave me—”
“Sister, do you believe me, please?”
Shu Yao’s expression changed slightly. She squatted down and said to her, “I also have a family member who is very sick, but recently she also seems to have participated in some rally and brought back some very effective medicine. Was your mother like that before?”
The little girl hesitated and then nodded very slowly.
She looked at Shu Yao and said in a very low voice, “My mother said that those medicines… those medicines are definitely not normal, but she was in too much pain. She said she would only take them when she couldn’t bear it.”
“Do you have any leftover medicine or medicine bottles that you can show me?” Shu Yao asked.
The little girl nodded.
She saw that Shu Yao did not object and pulled at the corner of her clothes again. “Sister, please come with me. My mother is gone, and I’m the only one at home. I got your clothes dirty. If you don’t mind, I can give you some of my mother’s new clothes that she hasn’t worn.”
…
A few hours later.
Shu Yao was sitting in the car on her way out, listening to the flower fish, who had just returned from the Situ family, whining and complaining about how, although they were both fish, the fate of fish and fish was so different—
It started to rain again outside.
The rain drizzled on the car window, like a series of falling threads. And she was playing with a small, unpackaged white medicine bottle in her hand. The bottle cap was missing, and it was filled with countless red and blue capsules.
Occasionally, a capsule would fall out and roll into the crevice of the sofa. The little octopus, which was clinging to her wrist and was constantly monitoring these drugs disguised as medicine, which were actually sleeping monster eggs, would extend its tentacles and pick up the fallen drug.
It thought that Shu Yao was no longer interested in what had fallen, so it casually put the snack into its mouth.
Shu Yao’s expression was very cold, and she didn’t know what she was thinking.
After a while.
Noticing the little octopus’s small movements, she stuffed the medicine bottle in front of it. “If you like to eat it, then eat more.”
She smiled and touched its head. “Eat hard these days.”
Because she was worried that she would have to go somewhere later and might not have time to feed her little pet, it was better for it to eat its fill before she set off.
The little octopus was a little hesitant.
It had been eating very full every day recently, and the ever-present hunger was gradually dissipating.
But it didn’t feel comfortable. On the contrary, it had a strange feeling of being out of control.
Vaguely.
It had a premonition.
On the day it was truly full, it seemed that something more terrible than hunger would happen.
