Pokémon: World of Wonder

Chapter 322: End of the Red Dust

As time passed, Jiang Ye felt as if in a trance, it was time to go home for vacation.

Sitting on the high-speed train back home, he not only did not feel more homesick, but instead felt very impatient, especially when he thought about being forced to do a lot of things he didn't like after returning home.

The experts in the video said that this is a serious mental illness called hollowness syndrome, and that children who have lived an unhappy life since childhood will suffer from this disease.

Forget it, he is too lazy to care about these things anymore.

Jiang Ye understood that he was just a millstone, and everything he had was like beans piled on the millstone, which, pulled by the donkey of time that never stopped and never went backwards, slowly reached the visible end.

And he is just one of the many people who have frequently struggled in this process, trying to make the process more comfortable, and he has completely given up struggling.

Back home, at the dinner table, his mother was concerned about his daily life, while his father was always repeating the same old principles: don't bear grudges against others, don't bully others, do what you should do, and know how to speak.

This set of things has been constantly instilled into his mind since elementary school. His father has been repeating it to him for more than 20 years, but what about Jiang Ye himself?

He just felt that he and his father were not from the same world at all. All these things of his, his more than 40 years of life experience, and the so-called theory that he had eaten more rice than he had eaten salt.

In this era of Internet information explosion, it is like the garbage on the roadside that no one cares about. It is a thing that has long been played out.

But for some so-called filial piety and respect for parents learned from childhood books, Jiang Ye kept responding and agreeing with "hmmmm".

After coming back in the morning, his father took Jiang Ye to visit someone's home in the afternoon.

An ordinary woman, who looked similar to Jiang Ye. In the end, the two exchanged WeChat accounts, saying that they wanted to chat and get to know each other slowly.

On the way back, his father said as he drove, "Don't be picky. Girls, as long as you're not lazy and are willing to work hard, the rest doesn't matter."

It sounds as if Jiang Ye's marriage is just to marry a laborer to work. This is pure male chauvinism, and he also tries to instill his self-image into Jiang Ye's view of marriage.

His father always wanted him to inherit the family business, pass on his skills, and become a decorator. For this reason, he could only study hard and then go to work in other places to escape.

Now, he started talking about some fallacies that were both infuriating and laughable to Jiang Ye after years of reading, and asked him to follow his arrangements.

Jiang Ye took a sip of water and did not reply. Silence was Jiang Ye's silent resistance, but they always regarded it as a tacit agreement.

Day after day, Jiang Ye was pulled forward by the donkey of time until the wedding night, one of the four major joys in life.

The woman he married was not the one his father had mentioned before, but someone he had been arranged to marry last month out of many blind dates after they didn't like each other.

Does he like her? Jiang Ye didn't know. At this happy moment in his life, he watched the table after table of people toasting each other and saw the hypocritical smiles on their faces.

He now had only two feelings in his heart, numbness and nausea.

Under Sili's encouragement, his fiancée took the initiative to kiss Jiang Ye.

The next second, Jiang Ye came to his senses and found himself standing at the door of the operating room, with two unfamiliar old men and women and his parents next to him. His parents already had gray hair at the temples.

Looking at these two old men and women, Jiang Ye finally realized that they were his father and mother.

Soon after, the light on the operating room door turned from red to green, and a female nurse came over holding a child and handed it to Jiang Ye. Jiang Ye held the child with a smile on his face that a father should have.

But no one knows the bitterness in his heart. He has such a meager salary, and this child's life from birth to now has been completely brought into this world by Jiang Ye and his wife to suffer.

He was born to be like himself when he was a child, accepting his parents' way of life, growing up cautiously, and being told all kinds of things by his elders. Maybe he would inherit their numbness and pain, or maybe...

Children are just like what the older generation said, money-eating beasts. Jiang Ye’s current salary can no longer meet the family expenses.

What to do? For the sake of his so-called family, he could only start doing heavy physical labor with his father to earn money.

As he grew older, Jiang Ye became a pillar of the family, and his attitude towards his father became colder and colder. Just as his mother said, their family were all stubborn.

Jiang Ye did not choose to understand his father. Just like his father understood his grandmother, he could not go along with them.

Until he and his father passed away while looking at each other coldly, Jiang Ye, under the guidance of his mother, held a banquet in the countryside. At such a sad moment, a group of strangers came running over with tears in their eyes.

Jiang Ye was the only one who didn't shed a single tear throughout the entire process. He just felt as if he had broken free from something, and his mood even improved a lot.

The sun and the moon alternated and went back and forth, and the donkey of time pulled Jiang Ye forward non-stop, so fast that he simply couldn't believe it. His mother left, his children rebelled, and his wife's parents left.

In the end, even his sister who was away died unexpectedly. Jiang Yewo sat on the recliner, with his hands folded on his legs, looking at the wrinkled skin and faint age spots on his hands.

He suddenly remembered a book he had read on the Internet many years ago when he was in college. The name of the book was "To Live".

In the past, he didn’t know why life was so hard and why it was always full of hardships.

Now, he understood, this was what it meant to be alive.

There is no special meaning in being alive; being alive is a kind of endurance.

To live is to live, just live like this until the donkey of time pulls him, the millstone, to grind away everything he owns, just live like this until his last moment the beans turn into dust.

Jiang Ye slowly closed his eyes. At least, he had insisted on doing something he liked in his life. Even if he did not achieve anything, everything was over now.

A very slight breeze flowed in from outside the house, a feeling that this old man had not felt for a long, long time.

……

All his senses were becoming sensitive while slowly fading away. He could clearly feel the pulse of life and his heartbeat was slowly slowing down. This feeling made Jiang Ye's mind extremely clear.

It was as if he had suddenly returned to his youth and strength, but his body was still uncontrollable and unable to move. He couldn't even lift his eyelids. He could only listen quietly and feel their words and their mixed emotions.

Until everything became faint, until the last sound of the flute sounded.

Jiang Ye opened his eyes again.