HLnovel Chapter 22 Ding, the elevator is going down.
Chapter 22 Ding, the elevator is going down.
"You're overweight! Get out! Get out now!"
"Are you trying to kill us?!"
"Why are you pushing and shoving? Can't you wait for the next one?!"
In the packed elevator, the people in front kept pushing the bearded man, trying to get him out.
"No, you can't do this to me! I'd rather die than leave!"
The bearded man roared, grabbing at the people around him with his hands and feet, holding them tightly.
"Don't even think about pushing me out; we'll die together!!!"
"let me go!"
"Get out! Get out!"
They screamed frantically, pulling at the bearded man with all their might. The people behind them, in a panic, kicked the people in front of them, trying to get them all out. The elevator trembled precariously between the ropes.
In a moment of desperation, Zhang Manyu pulled out a utility knife and stabbed it directly into the bearded man's body through a gap in the crowd.
“If you don’t leave, I’ll kill you!” she shouted, her face contorted with rage.
"what!"
The bearded man cried out in pain, and one hand loosened its grip, but he quickly recovered and grabbed another person's clothes, while his legs wrapped even tighter around his body.
Seeing that he still refused to leave, Zhang Manyu's eyes reddened, and she stabbed him several more times with her hand.
The man with the long beard was pale, his eyes rolled back, veins bulged on his neck, and he was convulsing. His clothes were quickly soaked, and blood dripped into the elevator.
Even so, he refused to let go, still holding on tightly, as if he would rather die than let others die with him.
Yan Shuzhou was terrified by the scene. He huddled stiffly next to the button, letting the chaotic crowd squeeze him.
Just at this critical moment, a pair of hands suddenly pushed him from behind!
Bang!
Yan Shuzhou crashed heavily to the ground, his knees making a dull thud. At the same moment, the elevator's shrill alarm stopped.
He turned around in disbelief and saw his father's hand still not withdrawing.
Yan's father smiled smugly, his eyes showing no remorse for pushing his son out, only the relief and pleasure of finally getting rid of a piece of trash.
His mother held his younger brother tightly, not giving him a single glance.
With the overweight warning gone, everyone relaxed, even the man being held by the bearded man stopped struggling, eagerly awaiting the elevator doors to close.
Yan Shuzhou knelt on the ground in a daze. The shock was so great that his expression went blank. A loud bang filled his ears, and all the complex and noisy sounds left him, turning into the buzzing of mosquitoes.
Suddenly everything went black before his eyes, and he felt as if he was about to die. The sense of impending death made his brain instinctively urge his body to breathe. As the darkness receded from his center, he looked ahead with tearful eyes.
He saw dozens of people he spent every day with huddled together, shoulder to shoulder. The dim yellow light of the elevator cast countless shadows, blurring their faces and making their expressions look dark and cold, like evil spirits from the deepest hell crawling out of the mud and whispering.
In a daze, he heard evil spirits warning him not to approach or step inside.
Their cold, hard expressions and vicious tone suggested that if Yan Shuzhou dared to step inside, they would devour his flesh and skin him alive. Yet, as the door began to close, they were overjoyed.
The doors on both sides of the elevator slowly closed, and the figures on both sides began to disappear. Gradually, he could only see his parents standing in the center.
Those few short seconds felt like an eternity, as if a lifetime had passed in the blink of an eye.
Yan Shuzhou recalled his childhood in the orphanage, where he was often hungry and cold, sitting alone on a dilapidated swing, waiting day after day for someone to adopt him, longing for a home of his own.
He finally found a family who couldn't have children and wanted to adopt him. He washed his face, which the director had praised for its good looks, acted well-behaved and clever, and tried his best to look like a thoughtful and good child. Then, full of hope, he walked into the new family.
His adoptive parents gave him the strictest education.
Because he didn't get first place in the exam, his father whipped him with a rattan cane until he was covered in blood, then locked him in the attic for three whole days without a drop of water. No matter how much he apologized and begged for mercy, no one paid any attention to him.
Because of an improper act of etiquette at the dinner table, he was ordered by his father to take off his clothes and kneel on the cobblestones in the pouring rain. He eventually collapsed in the middle of the night and had a high fever that lasted for a week.
The mother who gently stroked his head on the day of his adoption would sit in front of her dressing table every day to meticulously dress herself up, and have servants warn him not to shout so loudly when he was being punished, as it would affect her makeup.
When he was suffering from severe stomach pain due to hunger, he was advised to listen to his father, and then the expensive steak was fed to the smooth-furred cat.
This is true at home, and it's also true at school.
No matter how well a child from an orphanage pretends, he still doesn't fit in at a prestigious school. But he has a face that attracts girls, so he is bullied by people with more power and influence.
Most aristocratic children wouldn't do it themselves, as it would be unseemly, but they would pay outside thugs to teach them a lesson, tearing their clothes and punching and kicking them.
Yan Shuzhou was often in a terrible state, but he never dared to tell his parents. He was afraid they would think he was a burden and throw him out, leaving him homeless.
But eventually, the truth came out, and the fact that he was being bullied was discovered.
He will never forget the disdainful look in his adoptive parents' eyes.
"He's just an outsider's bastard, a good-for-nothing. He's a disgrace to the Yan family. He can't survive without us. If he were our own son, he would never be like this."
He lowered his head in utter shame, for he had let his parents down and brought them disgrace.
They're right. Without the orphanage, he wouldn't have lived to be adopted, and without his adoptive parents, he wouldn't be alive today.
Compared to being a beggar with broken limbs outside, what does being beaten a little here matter? They're just a bit harsh; at least he can still have love.
He originally thought this was just a form of education, that his parents wanted him to do well, and that as long as he worked harder, he would gain their approval. However, in reality, less than five years later, they had their own biological son.
He then realized that even though they had adopted him, they had never given up on having a child of their own all these years.
The son, whom she had given birth to at great expense and effort, even at the cost of ruining her own health, was born without having to follow any complicated etiquette. He didn't need to be number one in his class to receive praise, and everything he wore had to be a designer brand. Top chefs brought back from abroad prepared all sorts of delicious food for him.
Once, he was slapped hard by his parents for simply stopping his younger brother from tearing up his textbooks.
"So what if your brother tore up a few of your books? It doesn't matter if he smashed up your room! We didn't bring you back so you could bully him like this! You ungrateful wretch!"
He lay on the ground, looking at his younger brother hiding behind his mother, and made funny faces at him with a grin.
Only after that did he realize that he and his brother were worlds apart, and that the shallow blood ties between them were a chasm he could never cross no matter how hard he tried. All his previous fantasies were just a joke.
It turns out, it was all a lie.
The education is fake, the attention is fake, and the love is fake.
Even so, he silently endured it, only daring to cry in the quiet of the night.
After all, their younger brother is their own flesh and blood, so it's only right that they treat him well. What is Yan Shuzhou anyway? The fact that they remembered to raise him is already quite kind of them.
So he lived in the house like a ghost, silently trying to please everyone. As long as he was careful with his words and actions and didn't do anything wrong, he wouldn't be thrown out, right?
……
...Is that right?
Yan Shuzhou's eyes were wide open, his hands nervously pulling at his hair, his lips bleeding from being bitten, making a "hoarse" sound.
His head was facing the elevator door, but his back was hunched in an extremely unnatural posture, as if a silent dormant volcano had suddenly come to life, with high-temperature magma, hot enough to burn everything in the world, surging wildly beneath the surface, turning mountains and rivers upside down and cracking the earth.
The parents' faces completely disappeared into the gaps.
Yan Shuzhou's head slammed heavily to the ground, veins bulging on his neck, tears streaming down his face, his body convulsing, and a heart-wrenching cry of a dying man escaping his throat.
"Ughh ...
"Boom."
The door was closed.