The so-called farm was a village nestled against a mountain. While the soil there wasn’t suitable for growing crops, it was perfect for cultivating Chinese medicinal herbs. The shrewd villagers began switching to growing herbs, which proved quite profitable over the years. Neighbors followed suit, some with three mu, others with five, and gradually the village became known for its medicinal herbs. Many herb merchants and wholesalers would come regularly each year to make purchases.
Yan Huaishan was among the first to spot this business opportunity. He felt that the current small-workshop approach of individual households was inefficient. Ambitious as he was, he wanted to consolidate the village’s resources, transforming the scattered self-sufficient villagers into his employees—establishing a Chinese medicine company that would both purchase from others and maintain its cultivation bases.
Though the idea was good, implementation proved to be a long journey. First, his existing business already required enormous time and energy. Second, there were layers of procedures, countless approvals, and the need for villagers’ consent. By the time he died, he hadn’t seen the company break ground.
The subsequent developments were all facilitated by Lin Xirong. By the time Lin Ling entered high school, the base had officially begun operations, and Lin Xirong was rarely home, spending most of her time at the base.
During the summer break of her second year in high school, Lin Ling went to the farm to escape the heat. Yan Tuo was also there, earning his graduation “social practice” credits.
The base had a three-story building covering a large area, used for storage and preliminary processing of medicinal herbs—washing, slicing, drying, and so on. On her first day, Lin Ling decided to climb up and down the building twenty times daily for weight loss.
Right from the start of her running routine, she noticed the building wasn’t just three stories: there was space below ground level, though the stairway leading down was locked behind an iron door. It was said to store discarded machinery and substandard herbs scheduled for destruction at year’s end.
This brought to mind dark basements, cobweb-covered old equipment, and scurrying rats. Lin Ling had zero interest in what lay behind that iron door.
That day, when she went down to the bottom floor, she found the iron door unlocked, slightly ajar, with what seemed to be Lin Xirong’s voice coming from within.
Lin Ling felt a spark of joy—she hadn’t seen Lin Xirong for quite a while. She loved this “Aunt Lin,” who was the most gentle and caring person to her in the whole world.
She excitedly trotted over and through the large iron door. Inside was a completely different world from outside—dark, silent, cluttered. Discarded furniture and machinery were piled everywhere, with dust floating in the beam of light from the door gap.
Lin Ling doubted her ears—how could Lin Xirong’s voice be here? She was a high-level executive, the big boss; even for inspections, she wouldn’t come to such a ghostly place.
She was turning dejectedly to leave when suddenly, from deep within, came a man’s agonized scream.
The scream arose suddenly and lasted only a second or two, but it was painful. Lin Ling’s hair stood on end, but being timid, she could only whisper shakily: “Who’s there?”
No answer came, but after a while, low, mournful sounds emerged, too faint to make out clearly. Lin Ling hesitated, then moved toward the sound on light feet.
Looking back, it was fortunate that surveillance cameras weren’t common in those days, or she would have been discovered immediately.
At the end of the first basement level hung very heavy plastic curtains, the kind large shopping malls use in winter for soundproofing, heat retention, and wind blocking. Light came from behind the curtains.
Lin Ling swallowed hard and lifted the curtain to enter.
There was another stairway leading down—the basement had more than one level.
As she crept down several steps, the sounds became clearer.
It was a man crying and begging, his voice weak and spent, as if that earlier scream had consumed all his strength. Lin Ling heard him say: “Please, let me go. I’ll give you all the money. I have a daughter, An’an’s only in ninth grade. If I die, she’ll be helpless, an orphan. What will become of her?”
Then he cried again, devastatingly.
Lin Ling trembled all over, thinking she’d stumbled upon a crime scene—someone being robbed and murdered.
Suddenly, she heard Lin Xirong’s voice, gentle and kind: “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of your daughter.”
Aunt Lin? Lin Ling’s mind went blank: How could it be Aunt Lin? How could Aunt Lin be robbing and killing people? She’s so rich!
The man’s screams came again, accompanied by the thudding sounds of clubs striking flesh and bone. Even without seeing it, Lin Ling could imagine the unbearable scene. She collapsed on the stairs, hugging her knees and shaking uncontrollably. During this time, she heard several more exchanges.
One was Lin Xirong saying: “Be careful, don’t kill him, leave him barely alive.”
One was Xiong Hei saying: “Understood, I know the limits.”
Xiong Hei had appeared suddenly by Lin Xirong’s side in recent months, a tower of a man with fists as big as a child’s head. His real name was Sun Xiong, but due to his bear-like build and dark complexion, he was nicknamed “Black Bear.” Lin Xirong said Xiong Hei was a bodyguard she’d hired from out of town—in business, revenge was common, so it wasn’t unusual for bosses to hire a few bodyguards.
The remaining two statements came from the beaten man.
The first was: “My bones, my bones are broken… I’ve done nothing to wrong you, heaven… heaven help me, An’an, An’an…”
The second was: “May you die terrible deaths, terrible deaths…”
The weak moaning repetition of “terrible deaths” gradually faded. Lin Ling took a long while to calm down before shakily descending a few more steps.
The space below was empty of people, but there was a pool of blood and a thick trail of blood extending outward, growing fainter with distance. Xiong Hei had dragged the person away, with Lin Xirong following.
Lin Ling stood before the blood pool, trying to convince herself: This must be a bad person, someone who had harmed Aunt Lin, so Aunt Lin was taking harsh revenge—vigilante justice was illegal, of course, but adult matters were complicated, perhaps… perhaps Aunt Lin had no choice.
Reason told her to turn back immediately, climb the stairs, exit through that iron door, pretend she’d seen nothing, that nothing had happened. But her legs wouldn’t obey, trembling as they carried her down to the floor and further in—she wanted to know where they’d dragged the man. Aunt Lin had ordered to “leave him barely alive”—did she want to follow television dramas, keeping him alive for prolonged torture?
Or perhaps, in her heart, she simply couldn’t believe Aunt Lin would do such terrible things, and needed to see with her own eyes to accept it.
The second basement level was quite large, divided into different sections with storage rooms and cultivation rooms, though many weren’t fully built. There were many corridor intersections, and Lin Ling didn’t know which way to turn. After wandering, she came to a cultivation room—a dead end.
Lin Ling tried the handle, and surprisingly, it turned.
She couldn’t find the light switch, so she peered in using the corridor light.
The first thing she noticed was the smell of soil. In the middle of the room was a large area without cement or flooring, just raw underground soil, divided into three equal plots each about the size of a single bed. Each was covered with an arch-shaped plastic canopy, like miniature versions of common greenhouse tunnels.
The three mini-greenhouses weren’t adjacent but spaced about half a meter apart, with red brick paths between them.
How strange—what precious Chinese herbs needed to be grown underground with protective membranes? Though Lin Ling knew little about medicinal herbs, she knew “all things grow by sunlight.” She’d never heard of growing things in such a deep basement.
She approached the greenhouse nearest the door, crouched down, and lifted the plastic membrane to look inside.
Empty, as if the seeds hadn’t yet sprouted.
She lifted the second one.
Also seemingly empty.
The second wasn’t empty. If she had looked more carefully, she would have noticed slight movements under the soil, rather like a giant earthworm hidden below.
She lifted the last one.
As soon as she did, her whole body jerked in shock—not exactly from fear, but from the unexpected sight: inside lay a naked middle-aged woman.
The woman lay flat, arms spread at her sides, face pale and quite ugly, with protruding brow bones, a wide nose, and a short chin, looking almost like an ancestral ape at first glance. She was clearly alive, and breathing, and because the soil was loose, her body was half-sunken, making her look like a breathing relief sculpture.
Why would someone sleep here, and naked? Lin Ling felt embarrassed, but with a teenage girl’s curiosity, couldn’t help glancing at the woman’s private areas.
Was she a factory worker who came here to slack off and sleep? But who would sleep like this? What a pervert!
Lin Ling grew frightened again, a voice in her head saying: Forget it, leave quickly.
She rose in panic, and as bad luck would have it, her legs were stiff from crouching too long. Standing too quickly, she lost her balance and fell into the greenhouse. In her flailing, her hand pressed against something cold and soft—the woman’s leg.
This disturbance affected the woman, who made a “huh” sound in her throat. Though her eyes remained closed, her upper body rose to a 40-degree angle from the ground.
In the light from outside, she saw clearly: the woman’s back—not just her back, but down to her waist—was covered in brownish-red, sticky blood filaments pulled from the soil, dense and numerous, probably thousands of them.
The other ends of the sticky strands disappeared into the soil, and as the woman sat up, an indescribable stench of decay washed over them.
Lin Ling’s mind went blank with shock. After a second or two, just as she was about to scream—
Someone from behind clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her to a corner. Lin Ling felt herself crash against a broad chest as a low voice spoke in her ear: “Don’t scream, someone’s coming.”
Yan Tuo?
Why was Yan Tuo here?
Lin Ling gripped his arm dazedly, hearing his pounding heartbeat. Looking up at his face, Yan Tuo hadn’t yet graduated college then and hadn’t completely shed his youthful appearance, though he was beginning to look like a man. His expression was very grave, and he nervously licked his lips.
Indeed, someone was coming. As footsteps approached, the corridor lights went out one by one. Xiong Hei’s voice came: “I’ve turned off all the lights, and closed the door too.”
As he spoke, his head peeked in.
Lin Ling was so nervous she almost stopped breathing, but fortunately, Xiong Hei only glanced at the greenhouses and didn’t notice the dark corners before closing the door.
Everything was dark inside and out now, and the footsteps could no longer be heard. The room was as quiet as an underground tomb.
Lin Ling hadn’t spoken with Yan Tuo for a long time, but this sudden encounter and their now-shared secret made her feel closer to him. Trembling, she whispered: “What is this?”
In the darkness, she heard Yan Tuo’s answer.
“I don’t know either.”
…
The farm incident marked the first step in her later collaboration with Yan Tuo.
“If it weren’t for that time… when the iron door in the farm’s basement wasn’t locked and I went in out of curiosity, would I be living more freely now?”
Yan Tuo said: “There are no ‘ifs.’ It was fated for you to discover it, predetermined. Get some sleep now.”
Lin Ling didn’t move: “Yan Tuo, why do you think Aunt Lin adopted me?”
Yan Tuo remained silent. In recent years, Lin Ling had asked him this question more than once.
To be honest, he felt Lin Xirong did not need to adopt Lin Ling. If she wanted a child, she could have easily found one nearby in the city—cute, pretty, whatever she liked—after becoming familiar with Lin Ling, he’d heard her scattered memories of her hometown—what necessity was there to go to such a remote place to bring back such an ordinary child?
There must have been a reason.
He didn’t share this thought with Lin Ling, just as he hadn’t told her about this visit to Nie Jiuluo: though they were partners who should share everything, he maintained some reservation with Lin Ling, partly due to his innate sense of insecurity, and partly because he felt Lin Ling’s nature was somewhat too soft.
Living alongside a woman like Lin Xirong, one couldn’t be a soft little lamb.
Moreover, he had the same question as Lin Ling.
Why had Aunt Lin kept him?
After she directly or indirectly caused his sister’s disappearance, his mother’s paralysis, and his father’s death, why did she still keep him, raise him, and even treat him well?