It’s Him – Ch12

Li Yugui

Li Yugui was the most suffering among all the victim’s families, not just because she nearly died at the hands of the murderer.

When she was a child, no one cared for her when she had a high fever, which led to her brain not functioning as well as others. From a young age, she was slow to respond, not treated well at home, and could not grasp the importance of studying to fulfill her self-worth at school. Because of her poor intelligence, she was often bullied by classmates, tormented, and even disliked by teachers.

Thus, a simple summary of her first twenty-three years of life includes “patriarchal values, rural family, early love, and forced to marry into another family due to early pregnancy.”

Young Li Yugui had just entered the world of adults and did not understand its rules. Clumsy and awkward, she bumped into life, suffering many blows, hoping only to be loved.

In the end, she found herself stuck in a chaotic marriage with no one to love her.

After giving birth to her child, she suffered for a while. Her domineering mother-in-law often used her out-of-wedlock pregnancy to criticize her, despising her lack of intelligence. She would say that the child she gave birth to would definitely be a fool, and that her son could find anyone better than her.

Her incapable husband, who only boasted and complained about how she had gained weight, would say everything was delayed because of her pregnancy, hindering his career.

The young Li Yugui couldn’t understand that she had only moved from one hell to another.

Perhaps for a normal person, a child in such circumstances would be the source of their misery.

But Li Yugui wasn’t a normal person. She was single-minded. If she had seen a psychologist at that time, she would have realized the severe psychological trauma she accumulated in her earlier life. But she didn’t. She just longed for love. She tried to please everyone, loved everyone, and hoped to receive the same in return—she wanted her parents to love her, her mother-in-law to love her, and her husband to love her. But the world doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t operate on the idea that if she loves others, others will love her back. So, she kept yearning but could never get it.

At that time, Li Yugui’s life, as vast as a black hole, found its first genuine love when she lowered her head.

For the first time in her life, she tasted that pure love, that high concentration of love, which filled all her emptiness.

Such a small and soft life—her child had no demands on Li Yugui. Even though she couldn’t speak, she could express her love. When she couldn’t see Li Yugui, she would turn her head with effort, her eyes constantly searching until they found Li Yugui, and then she would smile.

While breastfeeding, the baby would look up and smile at her mother. Her joy was so simple—her child

When others held her, she would always turn her head to find her mother. As long as she could see her mother, she didn’t need anyone else to hold her.

In her world, Li Yugui was the most important person, irreplaceable. Li Yugui was the most important person in the world, and no one could compare.

For the first time, Li Yugui felt such intense, pure love.

Her husband occasionally acted like he was playing with a kitten, whimsically wanting to hold the baby.

The baby, who never cried, would immediately start crying.

It was as if the baby was expressing through her actions that she loved Li Yugui, sticking close to her.

The baby couldn’t feel Li Yugui’s flaws. In front of her, the young Li Yugui’s twisted soul was stretched for the first time, and the love of the young Li Yugui finally had a place to safely land.

That love filled the emptiness she had been seeking for recognition all her life. Every day, she felt herself becoming happier. Just looking at the child made her uncontrollably happy. This was something she had never felt before.

Every day, she was so happy. She couldn’t help but want to kiss her baby’s little cheeks, and every time she did, the baby would giggle.

It felt like being loved by Li Yugui was the happiest thing in the world.

When the baby turned two, Li Yugui left that so-called home. Li Yugui had begun to experience normal emotions. She hated her parents, her mother-in-law, her father-in-law, and her husband. She hated how they belittled her intelligence in front of the child.

She hadn’t become smarter, but she clumsily and seriously wanted to give her child a better environment.

Her baby never thought she was stupid. The child would ask her all sorts of questions and feel that she was amazing when she provided answers.

Mother and daughter depended on each other, living happily every day. They would buy discounted fruits at the supermarket in the evening and share them.

Occasionally, they would pass by a cake shop. The two would calculate how much money they had and plan to buy a small cake at the end of the month.

When her daughter turned four, Li Yugui started thinking about sending her to a good kindergarten. She had already saved some money, but she also wanted to send her daughter to dance and piano lessons. At that time, she noticed a nearby factory where night shift workers had trouble getting food, so she began selling small dumplings at a stall.

Her daughter was particularly good with money, helping her with collecting and giving change.

Everyone who came to buy the dumplings would say how smart her daughter was.

Being loved and loving, Li Yugui began to slowly build a healthy relationship with the world.

But all of this ended in an extremely tragic way.

Things turned very bad for Li Yugui. The injuries she suffered were severe, both physically and psychologically.

She was the only one who had seen the murderer. Although she didn’t see his face, he had said one sentence to her.

She didn’t want to forget that day. In fact, she was afraid of forgetting it.

She couldn’t return to a normal life anymore. At that time, she met Zhang Mingcai, who had learned how to deal with such pain and even hired a psychologist for her.

The psychologist couldn’t solve her pain. No one could.

But the psychologist did help her in one way. At the time, hypnosis was quite popular, and the psychologist agreed to perform hypnosis on her.

“You’ll uncontrollably vomit when you hear his voice.”

She stopped selling dumplings and started working as a phone customer service representative, constantly calling people and listening to them talk. After work, she would go to crowded places, just to listen to people speak.

For a long time afterward, she would hear auditory hallucinations—the words she had heard when she lay on the ground, bleeding from her body.

When she walked through crowds, when she ate, when she slept.

But she never vomited. She knew it was a hallucination.

Occasionally, she would hear someone who sounded similar, but she quickly realized it wasn’t him.

That person, like a wicked ghost, had vanished from the crowd and never appeared again, as if he had never existed.

Until one day, she had another daughter.

Li Xun was actually a very independent child, very smart, with excellent grades, and didn’t give her any trouble. This was her first time going to school.

In the teacher’s office, she was listening to Li Xun’s homeroom teacher talk about how serious the situation was. Li Xun was at risk of being expelled.

She started to plead, saying she hadn’t educated her child well, that Li Xun was still young, and that she hoped they would give her a chance.

At that moment, a voice drifted from behind her.

“This child is very smart. You can’t ruin her life just because of one mistake. If it’s troublesome for you, why don’t you let her come to my class?”

The voice was soft, falling into her ears like a thunderclap.

She hadn’t experienced auditory hallucinations in a long time. It had been so long, and this voice sounded so unfamiliar that she didn’t even react to what had happened.

Her hands involuntarily started shaking, starting from her heart, down to her stomach, where the wound had healed long ago but now ached. She could almost smell the fragrance of osmanthus and the thick smell of blood from that night. In her ears, she could hear the sound of blood gushing out, and her daughter’s cries. Her stomach began to cramp, and every part of her body was frantically conveying the same thing.

That voice. Her brain couldn’t completely confirm it, but her body remembered the murderer.

She started to uncontrollably vomit.

Apologizing, she left the office.

Now a middle-aged woman, Li Yugui had long figured out the rules of this world.

She didn’t call the police. She called someone else.

“I’ve found him.”

There weren’t many people who could help her, because her persuasion wasn’t strong enough.

Not many believed she could remember the murderer by his voice alone, and hypnosis was too unreliable.

But someone was still willing to pay, and Zhang Mingcai took matters into her own hands. She went to the school as a cleaner to see what was going on with the person.

Until something exploded online about past and present lives.

They still didn’t know what was going on online.

Zhang Mingcai found that after the person saw what was online, they started burning things in the dormitory.

Zhang Mingcai recognized from the incomplete pieces that they were missing-person notices.

The missing-person notices from that time and some reports about the case…

They weren’t solid proof, but why would anyone keep those?

And the person went to the bank to withdraw money, clearly planning to run away.

The two middle-aged women made their decision to accelerate the plan.

Originally, Li Yugui was planning to wait until Li Xun finished the college entrance exam and let her go on a graduation trip before starting.

But now there was no time.

They could only capture the person and lock them in the basement early.

Zhang Mingcai was more rational. She was actually afraid of making a mistake.

But right now, she was the least rational.

Teacher Zhao, the most rational person in the room, said, “I really didn’t kill your children.”

“As for how the door of this basement opened from the inside, I guessed it could open. I touched it, and it opened. Whatever you can think of, why couldn’t I?”

“How could it be such a coincidence that you rent a house, find a basement to lock me up, and it just happens to be the same basement the murderer used back then?”

“If you don’t believe me, you can call the police for a blood test. If this really is a murder scene, there will definitely be a lot of blood marks.”

“Why do you think I’m the murderer? I originally thought it was because of the murderer’s sketch online, but you had planned all this before that.”

If Li Xun were here, she would have noticed that Teacher Zhao had changed his focus.

He was still explaining in the same patient manner that he wasn’t the murderer.

But now, his focus was on: why did they think he was the murderer?

He was genuinely curious about this matter.