The September rain fell shattered upon the camphor leaves, rustling softly.
Pu Yu stood at the narrow alley entrance overgrown with moss, holding an old umbrella.
The umbrella ribs had loosened, and rainwater dripped from the edges, splashing into brief, circular ripples at her feet.
The depths of the alley were hazy, as if leading to some unknown realm.
Pu Yu reached into her pocket, her fingers brushing against the letter softened by the damp air.
—It was the one her mother had slipped to her before passing away, saying that if she ever found herself with nowhere to turn, perhaps only the address on the letter could offer her a temporary refuge.
She had staked her seventeen-year-old self, along with her entire uncertain future, on this unfamiliar small town.
Betting that a stranger she had never met would be willing to take her in.
Three days earlier.
That suffocating evening.
A cup filled with scalding tea was hurled fiercely toward her.
“All I asked was for you to meet Chen Laoban’s son, and you actually dared to call the police and accuse him of abducting a minor?!”
Pu Yu sidestepped, and the teacup crashed against the wall behind her, shattering with a piercing sound as the tea stains trickled down in a messy trail.
“Old Pu, let’s talk this out properly. Don’t scare the child.”
The soft voice of her stepmother, He Shuowan, interjected, “Xiao Yu, you have to understand your father. We’ll soon have three children to support…”
“Those are your children,” Pu Yu interrupted her, turning her gaze back to her father. “Dad, your children with her are not my responsibility.”
Pu Zhiming’s face turned ashen, his chest heaving violently as if choked by her words.
“I’m your father! We’re only doing this for your own good! Do you think studying will guarantee success? How many college graduates can’t even find jobs? Isn’t it better to marry early and live a stable life?!”
Pu Yu lowered her eyes, her gaze fixed on the faded tips of her worn shoes.
“I’m only seventeen. I can’t get married. I want to study.”
“Study my ass! I don’t have the money!”
“I’ll go back to Grandma’s to study,” she finally looked up at her father. “The high school in town has low tuition.”
“Grandma?” Pu Zhiming was taken aback.
The man’s brow furrowed tightly, as if struggling to search his memory.
After a long pause, he sneered, his tone dripping with undisguised coldness:
“You mean Li Suhua? That old woman with no blood relation to us? We haven’t been in touch for ages, yet you remember her so clearly!”
At that moment, Pu Yu felt the air around her grow colder.
She remembered how her mother had occasionally mentioned how Grandma had scrimped and saved to raise her father. Now, all that remained was a dismissive “old woman with no blood relation.”
She took a deep breath, forcing back the moisture in her eyes, mustering all her strength to keep her voice from trembling. “I don’t care about any of that. Give me the tuition and living expenses for my final year of high school, or I’ll go to your workplace and ask your superiors to judge.”
“Would a father who forces his seventeen-year-old daughter to drop out of school and marry for a dowry still be allowed to work in a state-owned factory?”
“And you, Aunt He,” she turned to her stepmother, her tone eerily calm. “Aren’t you most proud of your son attending that government kindergarten? Tell me, if I stood outside the school gate every day, holding a sign telling him how his mother forced his sister to marry for money, what would the teachers and other parents think? Would he ever be able to hold his head up in class again?”
Pu Zhiming’s eyes widened instantly.
He stared at his once-docile daughter in disbelief.
He Shuowan’s well-maintained face suddenly paled as she shrieked, “How dare you!”
“What do I have to fear?” Pu Yu lifted her face, the light reflecting a desperate resolve in her clear eyes. “You’re already selling me off—what else do I have left to lose?”
Having reached this point, He Shuowan had no choice but to weigh the pros and cons.
It was just a matter of spending a little money to sever ties, so whether Pu Yu lived or died would no longer concern the Pu family.
She tugged at Pu Zhiming’s sleeve with deliberate urgency. “Go get the money from the wardrobe and make her leave quickly!”
At the mention of the wardrobe, a flicker of complexity passed through Pu Zhiming’s eyes.
His lips trembled slightly, but in the end, he said nothing. With heavy steps, he walked into the inner room and retrieved a red bag carelessly placed inside the wardrobe.
Soon after, a neat stack of brand-new bills was roughly thrown onto the floor.
Pu Yu bent down, silent and deliberate, picking up each bill one by one, carefully collecting them.
Two thousand yuan exactly.
It was enough.
Without another glance at the livid couple, she walked toward the cramped corner separated by a cloth curtain, gathering her meager belongings.
Old clothes, old books, and a tin box containing her mother’s photo and letters.
The transfer procedures were quickly completed.
Pu Yu stood alone at the bus station like a worn-out piece of luggage.
Severing ties was painful.
But if she didn’t, she would be dragged into an endless swamp until she rotted away.
Clutching the precious two thousand yuan for living expenses, she transferred through three buses from the city center.
Around her were the clamor of voices, the grating calls of touts over cheap speakers, and a mix of indistinguishable smells.
She could only hold her backpack tightly, wary of everything around her.
The final leg of the journey was on a dilapidated minibus with springs nearly poking through the seats.
After two hours of bumping along uneven roads, it finally delivered her to a remote town shrouded in rain.
This was the place.
The address on the letter.
[At the end of the small alley called ‘Wind Chime Lane,’ south of Baiting Town…]
She had only vaguely heard her mother mention it a few times during her naive childhood. Her father had an extremely strained relationship with this foster mother, and her mother had secretly sent meager living supplies each time, leaving only ordinary greetings like “take care of yourself” in the letters.
Now, this elderly woman who was practically a stranger…
Would she accept this sudden burden?
Pu Yu’s heart pounded violently in her chest, almost leaping out.
She set down her suitcase and raised a slightly trembling hand.
Knock knock—
From inside the door came a rough shout and the grating sound of chairs scraping against the floor!
Pu Yu’s heart tightened, and she instinctively took half a step back.
Creak—
The door was yanked open from the inside.
A strong smell of smoke mixed with damp mildew assaulted her senses.
A man with a fierce glare stared at her impatiently. “Who are you?!”
Pu Yu was startled by the scene, her heart racing wildly, her voice stuck in her throat.
Her gaze swept past the burly man’s shoulder, quickly scanning the courtyard—the walls were scrawled with shocking demands to repay debts, the ground littered with a few crooked broken chairs and shattered teacups, and at the center of this chaos stood a young man.
He wore a nearly soaked black T-shirt, the fabric clinging tightly to his spine, the outline of his shoulder blades sharp as if ready to break free from all constraints.
His originally black, tousled hair was dampened by the rain, sticking messily to his forehead.
He lowered his head slightly, his face almost swallowed by the shadow cast by the eaves, leaving only a sharp, tense jawline visible.
The men surrounding him were clearly not the friendly type.
Pu Yu’s gaze briefly met the boy’s as he suddenly looked up, their eyes colliding in the murky air.
His eyes were hidden behind the shadows of his hair, making it impossible to discern his emotions.
Only an unfathomable darkness remained, like the sea on a rainy night.
“I’m talking to you! Are you mute?” The man who had opened the door spoke with even more hostility.
Pu Yu snapped back to reality, realizing she might have stumbled into serious trouble.
Instinctively, she wanted to flee, but her gaze fell upon the isolated, helpless figure of the boy, and her feet seemed nailed to the ground.
It wasn’t out of some noble sense of sympathy.
Rather, it was an almost instinctive tremor, a shared sense of vulnerability.
“Um… Officer Li from the police station asked him to come over as soon as possible.”