Global Collapse

Chapter 468 Love and Hate Between Two Generations
"Speaking of which, I haven't seen what's inside this thing yet." Gu Mian said as she reached her hand towards the fat man's buttocks and pulled out a tattered file folder from under him.

Gu Mian rubbed the dark brown file folder in her hand.

To be honest, apart from the shape, this thing is completely unrecognizable as a file folder.

Perhaps because it has been in a damp underground environment for many years, the writing on the surface has become completely blurred. Fortunately, the seal is still firmly attached, and the contents inside are still there.

It feels thick to the touch.

"I almost got buried underground trying to get this thing," Gu Mian said, reaching out to break the sealed seal. "If it's just a stack of useless scrap paper inside, I'll go to the supermarket, buy a few bombs, and blow up the school."

The fat man looked over, holding a thick photo album: "But the doctor's supermarket doesn't seem to sell bombs..."

At this moment, Gu Mian had already opened the seal of the file folder and reached in to touch the contents.

The fat man sitting on the sofa opposite Gu Mian watched as Gu Mian first pulled out a piece of paper the size of a palm.

The paper was facing away from him, so the fat man could only see the blank back.

Immediately afterwards, he saw Gu Mian stare at the front of the paper for a long time, her face changing from calm to strange, and finally to an expression he couldn't quite describe.

It was as if they had seen something extraordinary.

It seems the school is safe.

What is it...?

The fat man craned his neck curiously to see what Gu Mian was holding, but before he could even glance at it, Gu Mian slammed the object onto the table in front of her with a "thud".

Now the fat man understood.

That's a photograph... Hmm, the person in it looks kind of familiar...

"So why are there childhood photos of you underground at Songcheng Academy?" Gu Mian looked at Chu Changge across from her, maintaining her smile.

If he wanted to see photos of Chu Changge when he was a child, he didn't need to go underground to snatch them; the orphanage's photo album was full of them.

In Fatty's eyes, Gu Mian's current expression was exactly the same as the "smiling" emoticon on QQ.

"Ha...ha..." The fat man gave an awkward laugh. "Xiao Hong probably slipped it in secretly when we weren't looking, right, Xiao Hong?"

He glanced at the corner as he spoke.

Little Red Head, who was standing in the corner as punishment, was shaking his head like a rattle drum.

At this moment, he saw Gu Mian pull out another photo from the file folder. Gu Mian stared at the photo for a long time, and the expression on her face changed from strange to as if she had eaten shit.

Could it be that there are photos of me when I was a child? Just as the fat man was sneaking closer to Gu Mian and glancing at her, Gu Mian handed him the photos: "There are also photos of your dad."

Upon hearing this, the fat man was struck dumb, and he reached out his trembling hand to take the photo from Gu Mian's hand.

He looked down and saw a familiar face in the faded photo, smiling brightly at the camera.

The person in the photo was quite young then, more sunny than the mature man he remembered, and looked handsome yet frivolous.

But these are not the most important things.

The fat man's hands were trembling like leaves. He held the photo for about three minutes before stiffly raising his head: "How did you know..."

“Your dad is my homeroom teacher,” Gu Mian said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise, why do you think I would dare to bring a fat guy home the first time we met?”

At this point, Gu Mian looked at the fat man with an almost surprised expression: "Did you really think you were hiding it well?"

The fat man's lips twitched: "That's right, I thought I hid it incredibly well..."

Wang Shenxing was Gu Mian's math teacher and homeroom teacher when she was sixteen. Coincidentally, he went on a spring outing with Gu Mian's class when she was sixteen.

At that time, Gu Mian had not participated in such activities for many years. In the past, whenever his classmates went on outings, he would lie by the window and watch the others leave the school in long lines. The long lines of students from the whole school were very long and took more than half an hour to leave. Gu Mian would lie by the window and watch for more than half an hour.

Then he sat alone in the classroom waiting for people to return, from the early morning when it was just getting light until noon, and from noon until it was completely dark, until the classroom lights were turned on, and he saw people returning to school one after another.

The students who returned were all limping. I heard they had walked over a hundred miles. The students who returned cried and said they would never participate in such an activity again.

But the next time they went out excitedly, leaving Gu Mian alone in the empty school.

When Gu Mian was sixteen, she got a new homeroom teacher surnamed Wang.

"It'll be alright." He remembered his math teacher saying that to him, and he also remembered the joy and excitement he felt at that moment.

Because of Gu Mian's own reasons, his previous teachers were unwilling to let him participate in group activities, and Gu Mian never made such a request.

But the new teacher is different.

He has always been very kind to Gu Mian, to the point that Gu Mian feels he is her long-lost father.

But he has his own child. Gu Mian often saw a picture of a cute little chubby boy on his desk. He would smile and tell Gu Mian that it was his son, Wang Xianzhi.

Just like the teacher said, Gu Mian was indeed unharmed that time; it was someone else who was in trouble. When she was sixteen, Gu Mian carried her dying math teacher for five kilometers through the mountains in the middle of the night before they finally escaped, but it was too late.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, he was already dead.

"Your dad was very good to me when he was alive," Gu Mian said, resting her chin on her hand as she recalled the past. "If it weren't for me, he might... What are you doing?"

At this moment, the fat man's eyes were red and he was wiping his nose by pinching the corner of Gu Mian's white coat.

Gu Mian patted his shoulder: "Don't cry, Wang Xizhi."

"His name is Wang Xianzhi!"

Surprisingly, this fat guy looks rather plain, but his name is quite artistic. If you put that name in a romance novel, he could probably be the male lead.

Gu Mian pushed the fat man's head aside with disdain: "I didn't expect you to look nothing like your dad."

The fat man wiped his nose by clutching Gu Mian's clothes again: "Actually, my dad isn't my biological dad. He took me from the orphanage when I was five years old..."

As he spoke, he looked at the photo in his hand: "Ever since I was a child, I felt that he was different from others. When I was very young, he told me the passwords to all his bankbooks, as if he might die at any moment... Later, he told me that there was something important that he would tell me when I was a little older..."

"But year after year, I grew up so much, and by the time I was almost graduating, he still hadn't told me that important thing. It was as if he had decided not to tell me..."

"But I kept waiting, and as I waited, he died."

As Gu Mian finished speaking, another large clump of snot appeared on her clothes.

Gu Mian: "..."

"Later, when I was sorting through my father's belongings, I found that he had been secretly observing someone for the past few years... I always felt that what he wanted to tell me but didn't was this..."

"That person is me?" Gu Mian peeked out.

“It’s you,” the fat man sniffed, “but I didn’t know you were his student back then. I foolishly searched for three years before finally finding you. Three years ago, I found you in a bank. I originally wanted to directly establish a relationship with you, but before I could even get next to you, two armed robbers came in from outside, and I was so scared that I ran away immediately… The second time I saw you was in an internet cafe, but before I could even approach you, I saw a kid next to you who had an epileptic seizure due to an electrical fault in his computer, and I was so scared that I ran away again… After that, I didn’t dare to try to establish a relationship with you anymore.”

Gu Mian could roughly guess what would happen next.

This peeping tom has been secretly spying on me for three years. If it weren't for the fat man's car breaking down on New Year's Day this year, he might still be following and spying on me now.

Well, he might have died a long time ago.

After all, spying during an event can be deadly.

There was a thick stack of files in the folder. Chu Changge sat opposite him without saying a word, and Gu Mian reached out to touch the contents of the folder again.

This time he found another photograph.

This time it was his own...

Gu Mian silently looked at the photo in his hand. It was a photo of him as an adult, and he looked about the same age as he does now.

But the person in the photo didn't resemble him in either clothing style or behavior, and Gu Mian was quite certain that he had never taken this photo.

At this moment, the fat man also leaned over and stared at the photo in Gu Mian's hand.

The photo showed Gu Mian's face, but the person in it looked gloomy and listless, as if they had no interest in anything.

The fat man craned his neck: "Doctor, is this your photo? It doesn't look quite like you."

“No,” Gu Mian denied immediately, “I never took this photo.”

Moreover, judging from the underground area, it was clearly sealed off for many years, so the photo must have been placed there many years ago, when Gu Mian was only a teenager, and it's different from this photo.

At this moment, the fat man remembered the previous "Gu Mian's twin brother theory", but now the twin brother theory no longer works. The person in the photo was already in his twenties many years ago, and his age is different from Gu Mian's.

He stared at the photo, frowning. "It might be a relative of yours, your brother? Or it could be a photo of your father when he was young..."

But it's rare to find two people who look exactly alike.

The photos are so faded that it's impossible to tell when they were taken.

The background behind the figures is completely dark, making it impossible to determine the era based on the background.

There were only these three photos in the file folder.

The remaining pages were a dozen or so consecutively numbered pages, clearly torn from a book.

However, this is not the most important thing right now.

Gu Mian rubbed her forehead a few times, feeling a bit of a headache: "I don't know why there are my photos in that godforsaken place."

As he spoke, he took his own photo away and stared at the two remaining photos on the table: "Do you know why these two photos ended up underground at the event? Don't tell me you don't know."

The fat man looked like he was about to cry: "Doctor, I really don't know!"

(End of this chapter)