Nurse Yu hesitated for a long time, glancing toward the room at the very end of the corridor several times before finally telling
"Yu Jian never knew his father. I raised him on my own."
"The child was very well-behaved and never gave me any trouble. On top of that, I was always busy with work, so he spent most of his time alone at home."
"At some point, he gradually stopped wanting to talk to me. I felt guilty, so I'd buy him lots of things and encourage him to go out and play with other kids."
"The first real incident happened when he was seven. I was at work when I got a call from our neighbor, saying Yu Jian had gotten into a fight with their child and nearly stabbed him in the eye."
"I was furious. When I got home, I beat Yu Jian. But I realized that while I was hitting him, he just stared at me with this… terrifying look in his eyes."
"He was crying, but he didn't make a fuss. He didn't scream or beg for mercy. He just looked at me with those eyes, as if he was asking why I was doing this to him?"
"After that, things kept happening. It was like this child was fundamentally repelled by other people. The moment he saw other children, it was as if he turned into a different person — he wanted to destroy their happiness."
"After he started school, he mellowed a little, but nobody wanted to be his friend. His personality grew more and more violent and withdrawn. He'd say no more than five sentences to me a day. By middle school, he basically stopped talking to me entirely. Just looking at me was enough to fill his eyes with irritation."
Nurse Yu's voice choked as she spoke, feeling that she had failed catastrophically as a mother.
"Your son is withdrawn and violent, and when he fights, he tries to blind other people. It's as if he despises everyone, including you." Chen Ge furrowed his brows. Yu Jian and Ming Tai seemed like they had been cut from the same mold — other people's joy filled them with inexplicable rage, and seeing other people's happiness only reminded them of their own suffering.
This kind of mentality was incomprehensible to ordinary people, yet it undeniably existed.
It was like two children encountering a beautiful butterfly at the same time. One child marveled at the butterfly's beauty and cried out in wonder, while the other reached out, crushed the butterfly in his grip, and tore its wings apart.
Chen Ge didn't know when Ming Tai had found Yu Jian, but judging by the way the Old Town had been set up, Yu Jian was probably the child with the highest compatibility with Ming Tai. The evil god had very likely latched onto Yu Jian's body and completed the curse inside that rented apartment in the Old Town.
In other words, there was a high probability that Ming Tai was still hiding inside Yu Jian right now.
"After Yu Jian started middle school, that was the darkest period of our lives. He wouldn't talk to me. He was alone all the time, and it seemed like he was doing something on his own."
"I'd hit him, I'd scream at him. He never fought back or talked back. He just watched me with that cold look — it wasn't the way you look at your own family. Maybe at some point, he had simply stopped seeing me as family."
"It was around that time he started staying out all night, running away from home. I scoured all of Hanjiang trying to find him."
"He probably hated me from the bottom of his heart. No matter how many times I went looking for him, he'd just leave again. During that stretch, he got into all sorts of trouble — some of it even drew the police."
"Once he finished middle school, he started disappearing for entire nights again. I knew it couldn't go on like that, so I contacted a private high school with very strict discipline and paid a lot of money to enroll him."
"In the new environment, Yu Jian did improve quite a bit. I finally started to have hope for life again."