1.
In the mountains to the south, it rains torrentially every spring, and the dampness envelopes the closed town, and the villagers hardly go out except to go to the temple.
The boy walked out of the temple and sat on the wooden steps to change his rain boots.
He suddenly found that the group of spider silk outside the corner of the room was gone. And in the morning, they were still hanging there sticky.
He looked further into the distance and saw mottled footprints.
"Sousuke, umbrella."
The old woman in the temple came out barefoot and opened the umbrella for the boy.
He always felt that Sousuke was a pious child. Like the adults in the village, he came to the temple every day to worship and offer incense no matter what the weather was like.
This is an homage to the long-standing beliefs of the village. At the same time, she didn't like the girl adopted by the Sosuke family, and never saw her come to the temple with Sousuke. It may also be due to foreign reasons.
The xenophobia made the mother-in-law resent the girl.
"Be careful on the road."
Sousuke waved his arms wide and his mother-in-law rushed into the rainstorm with an umbrella.
2.
Pushing open the wooden door, Sousuke put his umbrella on the wooden steps at the door.
His clothes were wet, and the mixed smell of rainwater ran down the hem of his clothes and down his calf.
Mother sat in the room and greeted him with a smile, "I'm back."
A guest came to the house, and my mother got up and introduced it.
"This is Mr. Yingu who just arrived. He passed by here and encountered a heavy rain. He stayed with us."
Sousuke said "oh" and went straight into the room to change his wet clothes.
When he turned around and closed the door, he saw Yingu looking at him with a grim and calm expression.
"This child, so rude..." The mother was half complaining and half apologizing.
"I met a stranger." Yin Gu took a puff of cigarette, and the white smoke rose and dissolved in the surrounding damp.
"How many days will you stay, sir?"
Yingu looked down at his fingers, "At most three or four days, wait for this torrential rain to pass."
"May I take the liberty to ask, are you a traveler?"
"Well, I'm a bug master."
"Insect Master?"
"There are many worms in this world, some people can see it and some people can't. I make a living by studying these worms."
"That's it."
Sousuke walked to the gate, threw the umbrella against the stone pavement at the gate a few times, and then took it into the house.
3.
At night, Yingu heard someone knocking on the door of the guest room. After opening the door, I saw Sousuke sitting at the door respectfully.
"Mister insect, please heal my sister, she is ill."
4.
Chika is not Sousuke's younger sister.
She came to the village when she was six years old, and seemed to have come from home.
She was barefoot, her clothes were covered in muddy water, and her hair was greasy. Yet the village has little contact with the outside world.
A boy jumped down from the tree when he saw her.
"You're not from this village, are you?"
Qianhua could still hear him talking at the time, and nodded in response.
"what's your name?"
"Thousand Flowers."
"I'm Sousuke. Do you have a place to live now?"
Qianhua shook her head in embarrassment.
"Then I'll go back and ask my mother if she's willing to take you in."
It has been seven years since Qianhua came to this home.
She is very capable and can embroider beautiful patterns on clothes.
When I grew up, I also helped to fetch water and cook.
Last summer, Qianhua began to gradually lose her hearing until she couldn't hear anyone at all.
Only Sousuke could communicate with her by gestures and be her interpreter. People in the village started talking about this foreign girl.
It was said that the gods were punishing her for never going to the temple. Some people also say that his parents abandoned her when they knew she would be like this.
Perhaps sensing this gaze, Qianhua became autistic.
I no longer communicate with others except Sosuke, but every time Sousuke persuaded her to go to the temple to pray to the gods to make her sick, she said in sign language,
"My original village has its own gods."
5.
Qianhua sat opposite Yingu and looked at him with a complicated expression. Yingu got up and said, "I'll take a look first."
He observed Qianhua's ears with a magnifying glass, and then sat back across from her.
"Is Qianhua's disease because of 'worms'?"
Sousuke asked aside.
"So to speak. After each of us is born, until we die, a medium of sound is shrouded around our body, through which we can hear the world. We can hear other people's voices. However, there is a worm called 'cage weaver', which enters the host's body and feeds on the medium we transmit sound. People who eat the medium naturally lose their hearing."
"Then why is Qianhua alone infected?"
Yingu did not answer Sousuke, but continued to look at Qianhua.
"Can this disease be cured?"
"Even if the 'Cage Weaver' is killed now, the lost medium cannot be regenerated, so there is no way to heal."
After Yingu finished speaking, Sousuke suddenly fell to the ground.
6.
The rainstorm did not stop the next day, Sousuke and his mother went to the temple, leaving Qianhua at home.
Yingu pushed open the door of Qianhua's room and saw her sitting in the room sewing Sousuke's torn hem.
She embroidered with very fine stitches, and sipped the thread in her mouth as she threaded the needle.
Yingu leaned on the door frame, lit a cigarette, and sat in front of Qianhua.
"Can you actually hear me?"
Qianhua suddenly raised her head, and the thread fell out of the needle's eye.
"I heard it yesterday. What was that?"
Qianhua pointed at the silk that Yin Gu was holding in his hand, and the end of the silk was wrapped around his middle finger.
"Can you see it? This is called cage wire."
Yingu wrapped the cage wire around his hands and continued to say,
"It is the silk spit out by the 'cage weavers'. They spit out the cage silk after eating the medium, and the cage silk can also transmit sound to each other, so even without the original medium, if there is a cage silk between people, they can communicate with each other. comminicate.
"It's just that the owner of this cage wire is no longer there. It will be abandoned soon, and it will no longer be able to transmit sound. So I can't live here for a long time. When I first came to this village, I found it at the gate of the temple. It. So I guess the 'cage weaver' is in the temple...
"When I say this, you should understand. 'Cage spiders' actually appear in groups. They each parasitize in different hosts, and weave cage silk between them to form a huge web. Allow them to communicate with each other. You never go to temples, you don't have 'cage spiders' in your body, and naturally you don't have cage silk on your body, so you can't communicate with the villagers who are hosts. But the medium that the villagers eat can't be regenerated It is also impossible for the villagers to give up their beliefs. There is no way for you to fit in here. If you want to live a normal life, you have to leave the village."
Qianhua stood up and said, holding her sewn clothes, "I'll go and deliver an umbrella to Sousuke."
7.
Qianhua ran all the way with an umbrella, the clogs got stuck in the mud, and the muddy water splashed on her calf.
She groped and ran to the temple, looking at Sousuke who was about to go out from a distance, she muttered to herself.
"But I still can't let Sousuke go, so I can only accept the world in which he exists."
Sousuke couldn't hear these voices. He just stood at a distance on the wooden steps and waved water at her, so she ran closer, ran to the temple gate, and put away her umbrella.
Qianhua pointed to the inside of the temple, then pointed to herself, and finally put her hands together in a pious manner.
8.
"What happened to the last thousand flowers?"
Yin Gu looked at the curious old friend who was sitting in front of him, and slowly lit the cigarette.
"Afterwards, Qianhua accepted the village's beliefs, as if she had been forgiven by the gods as the villagers said, and gradually regained her hearing."
"Actually, she herself knows what's going on. Really, it's obviously not her fault, but she is willing to take the initiative to become the host in order to integrate into others."
"For a closed village, you don't need to communicate with the outside world. Even if you only rely on cage silk, you can only communicate with the villagers and it will not affect normal life. Besides, those villagers are not wrong."
"But in a few years, the 'cage weavers' can't find a new medium for food and will die. Those cage silks will also be worn out and no longer able to transmit sound. By then, not the whole village will be silent. in?"
"Yeah, but hearing loss alone is far more terrifying than being silent together. Qianhua would probably think so."
Yingu took a puff of cigarette, and the white air dissipated in the heavy dampness.
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