When my mother was two months pregnant with me, my father died. Birth, aging, sickness, and death are all part of life.
People might sigh and say that my father passed away too early.
But if I tell you that my father's death was the biggest unsolved mystery in our village for the past twenty years, I'm sure you'd be interested in hearing the story.
To be precise, it happened twenty-three years ago.
That year, my father died. The first person to find him was already gone.
When he was alive, people in the village called him "Dummy."
They said that when Dummy was young, he was not only handsome but also very hardworking.
He was a remarkable young man.
He was always the first to go out and work in the fields.
Because of his diligence, he was the first to discover my father's body.
I once imagined the scene that morning.
With a hoe on his back, he walked out of the village.
He saw something hanging on a willow tree.
When he walked closer and took it down, he must have been greatly shocked.
Just thinking about it sends shivers down my spine.
It's understandable that Dummy, the person who experienced it, was left dumbfounded by the scene.
I didn't witness it, but over the years, this incident has been talked about by people in our area, and I've heard from outsiders that the situation was truly brutal.
The skin of the body was intact, but the flesh was completely gone!
Later, the village party secretary walked ten miles to the county police station to report the case.
The three police officers who arrived at the scene were so shocked they couldn't stop shaking.
One of the female officers even vomited on the spot.
A life is a serious matter, so this was an important case. Soon, more police officers arrived, and they set up a blockade in the surrounding area.
They called in soldiers from several nearby villages who had military experience to search for the body, but there was no trace of it.
No bloodstains were found, nor any remains of the flesh after the skin had been removed.
The police naturally interrogated my family, but there were no clues.
My mother said that my father had shown no signs of unusual behavior when he went to bed that night, and she didn't know when he left the house.
The police then focused on the butchers within a few miles.
They rounded up the butchers and people who slaughtered livestock regularly to interrogate them.
But they were all cleared of suspicion.
They had no motive for committing the crime, nor did they have the opportunity.
Almost all of them had alibis. Finally, the most experienced butcher in our area said to the police:
"Look at the method used to skin the body.I can certainly skin a pig, but it would take years of experience to do it this cleanly and neatly.
How many times do you think he had to skin something to be able to do this?This is far more complicated than skinning a pig."
The police spent a lot of effort on this case, working in our area for more than a month, but there was no progress.
It eventually became a cold case.
When I was in college, I liked browsing the Internet forum.
That's when I posted my long-standing doubts online.
Since there were no pictures, many people didn't believe the truth of my story, but some netizens engaged with me.
Among them, there were a few who speculated it might be due to a feud or a love triangle.
Then one day, a netizen who identified himself by a phone number left a comment:
"This is a mysterious sacrificial method, just like the Red-Clothed Boy incident."
This was a version of the story I had never heard of before, but as soon as I saw it, I was drawn to it.
I immediately replied and sent a private message to the user, but he never appeared again.
I checked his account, and the registration date was the same day he replied to me.
That was also the last time he logged in.
I dialed the phone number listed in his profile, but it was a disconnected number.
After my father's death, for our farming family, his passing was like the collapse of the family's main support beam.
This made our already poor family even poorer.
In desperation, my grandfather and mother sent my older brother to be adopted by another family.
He was only three years old at the time.
The family he was adopted into was relatively well-off but could not have children, so my brother went to live with them in exchange for three sacks of fine wheat flour and two bags of osmanthus cakes.
After that, my mother took on the responsibility of the family, using a small plot of land to care for me, who had just been born, and my grandfather, who had poor health.
When I graduated from college, I responded to the country's call and became a village official back in my hometown.
It seemed like a job with potential, but in reality, it was a very uncertain career.
One day, while I was at the village committee mediating a dispute between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law, my neighbor, Madam Wang , came running over.
She was panting and looked very anxious. I asked her:
"Madam Wang, what's wrong? Why are you in such a hurry?"
"Yezi, hurry up and come back! Your big brother is back!" Madam Wang said.
"My big brother?" I was stunned for a moment.
"Yes, the big brother you were sent away when you were born!" Madam Wang replied.
The family of the person who adopted my brother saw that I had important matters to attend to and let me continue working on the village dispute for now.
After I went back home, I found that many people had gathered around my house.
My mother was standing in the yard, crying with tears in her eyes.
My grandfather was puffing away at his cigarette.