Zheng Wei's return from his lost track caused him to almost lose contact with the brothers Zheng Xin and Zhang Xiaolong. However, he still provided the place where they used to hang out, which was a small Internet cafe near the urban-rural fringe of Blue Lake District.
The three of them basically call that place home.
The police spent almost no effort and found Zheng Xin there, and arrested him overnight for interrogation. Zheng Xin confessed to his crime of killing Zhang Xiaolong.
Zheng Xin claimed that he and Zhang Xiaolong had a very good relationship at one time, because Zheng Wei stopped playing with them, and the two became sworn brothers at the end of last year. And because of the excitement of Zheng Wei going to learn cooking, the two met together after the Spring Festival.
Go south to work.
When they arrived in a developed city in the south, the two people with no academic qualifications and more specialized skills had no choice but to find a hard-working job. They worked more than ten hours a day and actually didn't make much money. They no longer had the carefree happiness they had before. At the end of the day,
I just want to collapse and sleep, I have no other thoughts.
The two of them felt bored out of their minds. Calculating accounts was not as good as the old days, when they could occasionally make a small fortune to improve their lives.
The two of them were on the verge of retreating. At this moment, a girl in the factory who was also from Hongshan Township in Lanhu District met the two of them. They were at the age where they were in their prime of life. They used to live in their hometown and no girls were willing to talk to them.
, finally found a decent-looking girl who was willing to make friends with them, but it was impossible for the two of them to talk to each other.
Both of them wanted to develop that girl into a girlfriend. Zheng Xin was more thoughtful and taller and better looking than Zhang Xiaolong. After some of his coquettish manipulations, the girl became closer to him. Although Zhang Xiaolong
He didn't have any eyes on Zheng Xin, but he had been hanging out together for a long time. Even if he fell into the trap at the time, he would understand it later.
About a week before the incident, Zhang Xiaolong took some money that Zheng Xin saved and bought a ticket to go back to Blue Lake. Zheng Xin was very angry that Zhang Xiaolong left without saying goodbye and took away his hard-earned money.
Later, when he wanted to develop further with that girl, he was rejected again, and he kept asking Zhang Xiaolong why he left him without saying goodbye...
Zheng Xin was very angry, thinking that it must be Zhang Xiaolong who called the girl and said something bad about him. He felt that he was an unreasonable person. The girl did not choose him, so he should not interfere randomly. As a brother
, you should be happy for your brother, how can you deliberately cause trouble behind his back?
The girl rejected her completely. After much thought, Zheng Xin decided that there was no point in staying there anymore, so he used the last money he had to buy a hard seat and returned to Zhonghai.
Zheng Xin wanted to find an explanation from Zhang Xiaolong, and mainly wanted to get back the hundreds of dollars he had saved.
Zheng Xin had a relatively clear idea of Zhang Xiaolong's "work trajectory", and sure enough, that night he met Zhang Xiaolong at the junction of Binjiang Avenue and the street where the crime occurred.
Since the two of them had been working as a car door puller for a long time, they knew how to avoid surveillance cameras. Although they had a big argument in the street, they tried to hide in the shadows. At this point, the plastic brotherhood between the two parties completely broke down. Zheng Xin asked Zhang Xiaolong to take over.
His money was returned to him, but Zhang Xiaolong said he had no money.
The two started fighting, and then Zheng Xin took out the dagger he had prepared and stabbed it into Zhang Xiaolong's abdomen. Then he hurriedly pulled out the dagger and ran away. The dagger was thrown into the river by Zheng Xin, and his body was stained with blood.
He took off the bloody clothes and washed them. Because they were all black, there were no obvious traces under the street lights.
Then, Zheng Xin was robbed while escaping in a hurry...
Throughout the interview process, the police emphasized many times that although these two men were adults, in fact, left-behind children and children from divorced families accounted for more than 70% of juvenile crimes. Both men have committed crimes in recent years.
They are wandering on the edge of crime, lacking the restraints of family education and family affection, and have a very vague concept of illegality and crime.
Afterwards, Lu Beicen found a sociologist from the Academy of Social Sciences to conduct an interview on this issue. The expert said: People have always been good and evil, and it is constant social and legal moral education that guides people to develop in the direction of good.
, Only by actively restraining one's own behavior can one become an adult with a sound personality.
Whether it is Zheng Xin or Zhang Xiaolong, these are all missing. They have lived in the dark corners of society for a long time, and the boundaries between good and evil and morality have long been blurred, let alone the law.
Lu Beicen is actually deeply aware of these realities. Her adoptive parents were laid-off workers from a company in Xiajiang. They lived in the factory’s dormitory since she was a child. When she was in the fifth or sixth grade of elementary school, the company was undergoing restructuring, and the factory’s employees
There are many laid-off workers. After a year or two of chaos, their children began to go to middle school, and most of their parents began to go south to work to make a living.
Once adolescent children lose their restraints, they are like kites with broken strings.
The No. 2 Middle School in the county where Lu Beicen attended was the only junior high school in the county. It was more like a typical hodgepodge. The school had no choice but to divide the classes into classes according to their grades, trying hard to keep the talents of the first two classes, and there were six classes in between.
In the struggle, there are also two cowherding classes. As long as there are no fights or troubles, this is the basic requirement of the teachers and school leaders.
Many students in the cattle-herding class dropped out of school. By the third year of junior high school, the two cattle-herding classes were merged into one class. There were also very good students who were affected by family changes and lacked discipline, and ultimately failed to enter high school.
Even stepping on other boundaries.
When Lu Beicen and Fang Nan were in elementary school, they had a mutual good friend named Yuan Fang.
In junior high school, it was the time when her hair first bloomed and she began to transform from a little girl into a graceful young girl. Yuan Fang was also very beautiful, and her figure was fully developed, unlike most of their girls who were still skinny.
Yuan Fang was the most favored by her male classmates at that time, and there were so many boys who wrote love letters to her. In the beginning, Yuan Fang's parents were very tight-knit, and they almost always picked her up and off from school, not under their parents' noses.
Below, in the sight of the teacher, everything went smoothly.
In the second grade of junior high school, Yuan Fang's parents went through the whole process of being laid off and divorced. Yuan Fang also turned from a little princess into a poor child with only one grandma to take care of her. Both her parents went to the south to work.
Soon, Yuan Fang fell in love with a boy in the cattle herding class. No matter how Lu Beicen and Fang Nan tried to persuade her, she just thought that boy was good and said that he was the only boy in the world who loved her.
In the third grade of junior high school, Yuan Fang suddenly dropped out of school. Lu Beicen and Fang Nan couldn't believe it. Although Yuan Fang's grades had declined, she had a good foundation and could still catch up as long as she studied hard.
The two of them met to see Yuan Fang, only to find her lying at home with a bloodless face, having almost lost her life due to an abortion.
Lu Beicen and Fang Nan were busy studying. In addition, Lu Beicen's family was actually experiencing a big change at that time. They just managed to cope with it by restraining their minds on the textbooks every day.
After graduating from junior high school, Lu Beicen came to Huxia and attended a private high school. Occasionally, he got a little bit of news about Yuan Fang from Fang Nan's letters. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he had a bad fate. He is now twenty-six years old and married. Divorced and married again, the boy who said he was the only one in the world who cared for her has long gone.
Thinking of her middle school days, Lu Beicen always remembered a pair of eyes, because the gaze of those eyes helped her survive a period of uncertainty.
In the first year of junior high school, her adoptive father and her adoptive mother beat her the hardest.
The adoptive father who was laid off from work had nothing to rely on all day long. He only beat them and drank alcohol. The adoptive mother was busy working for a living at that time. Sometimes she did not dare to go home after school. Boys from the cattle herding class would approach her and ask her to come with her. Eat out.
One day, she met her neighbor's brother. The brother took her out of the group and took her to eat alone. He looked at her with gentle eyes.
She will always remember that look in her eyes. With a little smile, she opened her schoolbag and looked at the red check marks inside. Then she helped her pack the schoolbag with a gentle but firm voice: "Good boy, you have to study hard. , our mothers are not easy, don’t hang out with those people in the future, I will watch you."
Lu Beicen was very confused at the time. The brother next door was a negative example in the mouth of the adults in their entire factory compound. Even his adoptive mother shook her head slightly and sighed when she talked about him. She didn't dare to ask, and she didn't know. She asked where to start, but her intuition told her that perhaps his difficulties could not be disclosed to outsiders.
A long time later, especially now that he thought about it, Lu Beicen suddenly understood that his father had died young, his mother was illiterate, and he had a younger brother and a younger sister to raise. From very early on, he had to establish a family and maintain the family. The family's livelihood has been reduced. The coldness and ruthlessness he showed in the past are probably more because he is worried about being tricked. A family of four cannot even keep a foothold. The dormitories in the factory area have always been overcrowded.
From that day on, Lu Beicen seemed to suddenly become clear-headed, but she would probably never forget that look in her eyes. Later, many times when she met him on the road, he would smile at her so gently. , in fact, he is not much older than her, right? Probably three or four years old.
On this midsummer night, with heavy rain pouring down, Lu Beicen thought of this person again, this person who had disappeared from her life. She had not heard from him for a long time. The dormitory in the factory area had also been demolished, and her former neighbors were gone. I know where she moved to, it has been ten years since she left there.
She didn't know when she would wake up without that gaze that impressed her heart, or she would simply sink. The watershed of fate always appeared inadvertently. Cause and effect, good and evil, were intertwined. Not distinguishing is the root of the complexity of human nature.