When A Snail Falls In Love

Lin Qingyan Extra Part 1.2: Before the Angel Killer case

One day, the clerk from the school's general office called Lin Qingyan to answer the telephone.

It was his previous head teacher. Her voice was as warm and gentle as ever, but Lin Qingyan had gotten quieter.

As the conversation drew to a close, the form teacher's voice was choked with emotion, "Qingyan, how did you turn out so badly? I've heard that you are always keeping company with those hoodlums, and your heart is no longer in your studies. How could you change so drastically?"

For the first time in his life, Lin Qingyan felt a deep, raw pain. How could he have succumbed to this point?

A 15-year old youth, what could he possibly say?

After hanging up, Lin Qingyan walked in the direction of the classroom, his head a jumble of thoughts. At that time, he had grown very tall, and was skinny and fair. He was usually gloomy and reticent, so his classmates would often detour around him whenever they encountered him. As he walked past the teachers' dormitory, he saw Du Tie walking into the dormitory with his hand on the shoulder of another short, male student. Lin Qingyan recognised him as being a first year student. His face was thin, his eyes were huge, and he normally had a naive smile on his face. His family situation was also very dire.

Lin Qingyan stood in the dappled sunlight under the big tree, staring blankly as the dormitory door shut behind Du Tie. After a while, he saw that the curtains had been pulled shut.

Lin Qingyan had only eaten a steamed bun and two big bowls of vegetable soup at noon that day. Suddenly, he felt nausea roiling in his stomach. He held on to the tree, and vomited everything up.

From that day onwards, Lin Qingyan began to study with a great ferocity. Despite the fact that his surroundings were chaotic, despite the fact that Du Tie mocked and ridiculed* him, he stubbornly achieved the best results in the entire village, and gained entry to the best high school in the county. After that, even the muddleheaded gang leader who sat next to him patted him on the shoulder, and told other people: "This is my pal! He's super awesome! From now on, no one in Dao will dare to bully you."
*(冷嘲热讽 – literally, frigid irony and scorching satire)

Of course, Du Tie also had no opportunity to bully him. In fact, when he entered high school, he did not encounter Du Tie for a very long time.

The final time they met, was after many years, when he had inherited President Qin's total estate. He had transformed into a rich Hong Kong merchant and had returned to the village to make an investment. At that time, he had already become so familiar with the skill of killing people, so much so that it was like second nature to him, and his mastery of the skill was superb.

He intentionally stayed in Dao for a month, and Du Tie also disappeared for the entire month. That period of time, during the day, Lin Qingyan would participate in the various activities organised by the village government. At night, he would return to his villa basement, where he would watch Du Tie howling in anguish. He was also the only person whom Lin Qingyan slowly tortured to death. In the end, the body was cut into small pieces and burned, and he scattered the ashes under the big tree in the school compound.

　　——
These would all happen later, and Lin Qingyan's entire high school life was filled with silence and hard work. There were also quite a few girls who handed him love letters, but he never replied to them.

Lin Qingyan, all alone, entered University.

He was all alone in the world, because his grandfather had sold the family home with its two ramshackle rooms in order to raise the money for his first year of university education. From then on, the two of them lived in abject poverty. Moreover, when he went to Xi'an City during the summer vacation to look for work, his grandfather took sick and died in a grass hut by the side of the field. By the time he returned, the body had been in a state of decay for a great many days, for no one had come across it in the field.