Chapter 140: Bleeding for the Sake of Bleeding

After finishing the final diary entry, Qi Ran reached into the plastic bag hanging on the hook by the window.

The jagged edges of snack packaging scraped against her fingers. After fumbling for a moment, her fingertip finally touched a smooth, hard paper surface. She pulled the object out—it was an unopened portable notebook she had bought at the supermarket earlier. Two yuan. She didn’t care about the quality; as long as it could record words, it was worth its price.

Books are merely vessels for words. Their true value lies in the thoughts within.

She flipped through Xie Liang’s diary again, filtering out potentially useful information and recording it in the new notebook. As for those dissections and confessions, she didn’t spare them a single glance—not because she suspected Xie Liang’s words were feigned lament, but because she simply didn’t care about those useless words.

What was the point of reading them? The past was the past. As a spectator, whether she empathized with Xie Liang or with those who had died, it served no purpose other than causing herself distress. Better to avoid any emotional drain from the very start.

She wrote the first line in the brand-new notebook:

“One: In 1961, Xie Liang and the others achieved a breakthrough in researching a certain matter. The details were not specified, but judging by the timeline, it is highly likely connected to the No. 81 Western Mansion Incident of 1960.”

Xie Liang did not describe the breakthrough. Only a few fragmented words at the very beginning mentioned it. He said, ‘Now we shall become God.’ The only possibility Qi Ran could imagine was creation—or rather, creating humans. And wasn’t the case of the Ghost Birth Infant precisely an act of creating a person?

“Two: At the end of 1961, Tao Huanyu, Xie Liang, Chen Cheng, Li Yue, Sun Xiang, and others simultaneously launched operations in various locations. He hoped to change things through a gentler approach, aspiring to achieve it ‘bloodlessly,’ like the Glorious Transformation, causing no casualties whatsoever.”

“Just as their slogan proclaimed: Blood is the same blood, from the same roots and source.”

“They spread their ideology through books, newspapers, assemblies, speeches, and other means. The content of their ideology was not recorded and remains unknown. However, in these records, several books were repeatedly mentioned: On Paragons, Disease Takes Root, and The Lamb Family. Perhaps answers can be found within them.”

Qi Ran had tried searching for these terms on the forum, only to find that words like ‘Perfect Human,’ ‘Takes Root,’ and ‘Lamb’ were all prohibited terms. Even the phrase ‘let alone’ was forbidden. It took her a long time to figure out why: ‘let alone’ [任由, Rèn Yóu] in Chinese sounded like ‘people have’ [人有, Rén Yǒu], and the reason it became prohibited was probably because of a phrase on the first page of On Paragons—’People have Perfect Humans.’ Thus, groups discussing the book used the homophone ‘let alone’ as a substitute.

Upon realizing this, she couldn’t help but feel a bit speechless. That upheaval seemed to have a far greater impact than she had imagined, enough to necessitate such large-scale, enforced forgetting.

Her pen did not stop, continuing to record on the paper. The soft, rustling sound of the nib scraping against the page was pleasant to the ear.

“Three: In 1965, Xie Liang mentioned a name: Qi Si. During that first visit to the shop, the young man on the second floor had said, ‘As for what to call me, Qi Si will do.’ This man named Qi Si was likely very close to Xie Liang—a gut feeling. This man named Qi Si is connected to Qi Jianguo. Perhaps he is Qi Jianguo’s father. But there is no other evidence to support this; it remains mere speculation.”

Writing this, Qi Ran’s brows furrowed deeply. This was something she found difficult to understand. Logically, the first time she entered that shop and heard the young man on the second floor say his name was Qi Si and that he had connections to the Xie Family, she should have immediately thought of Qi Jianguo. Yet she didn’t. She hadn’t even entertained the suspicion, as if her brain had automatically dismissed the possibility.

Her first thought was a Lake Cutter. Could it be that she could only resist Qi Xin’s Lake Cutting, but was unable to evade the Lake Cutting of other Lake Cutters? But that speculation was also unreasonable. No matter how heaven-defying a Lake Cutter was, they still needed to be face-to-face with their target and strike when the target’s guard was down. No Lake Cutter in history had ever managed to cut someone’s Lake simply by using a name. Such a thing was simply too fantastical.

Regardless, she put a heavy emphasis mark next to the name Qi Si. She wanted to search the forum again, to see if she could find this name—but the awkward reality was, her cell phone was back in the rented room, and Jiang Zhique’s phone had no SIM card. Without a network connection, she couldn’t access the forum at all.

So she could only set it aside for the time being.

“Four: Xie Liang’s Syndrome was related to the concept of ‘Life Retention.’ Under certain conditions, he could return from death. Even before 1965, he had already died twice. Once from drowning, and once from having an iron nail driven through his throat in his sleep. Both murders were carried out by students at his university and had nothing to do with matters of The Circle. It was simply because Xie Liang refused to change his classroom attire and remarked that the grass-green color was too ugly and didn’t suit his aesthetic. Such words were considered shockingly Pro-American and utterly treasonous, so he had to be brought down.”

After returning to the country, Xie Liang seemed to maintain his previous lifestyle habits and sartorial tastes, indulging in hand-rolled cigarettes and whiskey. Where did he buy these things? How did he buy them? Yet another piece of criminal evidence.

But these two deaths didn’t affect Xie Liang much. With a somewhat macabre sense of humor, he deliberately arrived late the day after his second death, waiting until he heard the students in the classroom loudly proclaiming that this counter-revolutionary had been struck down by the people’s ideology. Then, right on cue, he walked into the classroom and announced the start of class. He even casually placed that iron nail at the lost and found.

When Qi Ran first read that part, she couldn’t decide whether to call him magnanimous or simply childish.

“Five: After the Tao Family’s destruction, in 1985, Xie Liang’s ideology underwent another change. He abandoned his previous non-bloody ideals. But this decision would soon cause him a lifetime of regret.” Qi Ran’s pen tip paused. “Because a nonexistent war began. That war was waged for the sake of bleeding, simply to bleed. The battlefield did not exist in reality, nor did the conflicting ideologies. It was all just to kill off more patients. Like a cold, colossal meat grinder, turning everyone, regardless of high or low status, into a sludge of flesh and blood.”

“That nonexistent battlefield was located at the Tao Family Old Site. Later, it came to be known as—the Tao Family Ancient Mansion.”

(——————)

“Raise your arm.”

Liu Xu raised his hand. The young nurse expertly rolled up the sleeve of his patient gown, then bound his left arm with a yellowed rubber band. A brief wipe with a cotton ball soaked in iodine, and the fine, sharp needle pierced beneath the skin.

After a slight sting, the young nurse withdrew the needle, removed the rubber band, pressed a clean cotton ball onto the needle hole, patted his other shoulder, and said, “Move along. Next.”

“Big Sis, your technique reminds me of my second uncle,” Liu Xu couldn’t help but say.

“Your second uncle is a nurse too?” The young girl paid no mind to his ‘Big Sis’ form of address.

“Nah, he’s a vet. Every time he finishes giving a pig a shot, he pats its butt and says, ‘Off you go,'” Liu Xu quipped.

“Are you upset I didn’t pat your butt? Please do not harass the medical staff, thank you.” The nurse rolled her eyes. She had already finished writing the records on the paper, her handwriting as illegible as a doctor’s prescription. “Next!”

Liu Xu was speechless. He could only take the paper resentfully and stand up.

The next person to enter was Hyena. Liu Xu sidestepped to let him pass. After they brushed shoulders, Liu Xu’s hand quietly clenched. Then, with a composed expression, he walked out of the ward. He passed the line that was still queuing and went to the washroom. Entering a stall, he crouched down. He knew the surveillance camera was in the upper right corner, so his current angle perfectly blocked the view with his body.

He looked at his palm. There was a folded-up note.

Heaven knows how Hyena managed to contact Paper Cutter, but he had done it. Liu Xu revised his opinion of Hyena slightly. Thinking about it this way, maybe the Kindergarten Quintet wasn’t entirely useless after all.