Return to Hometown 08

Fang Zhiyi slowly raised his head.

The doctor pushed up his glasses again. "Is your family under a lot of financial pressure lately?"

Fang Zhiyi bit his lip and nodded.

"Then I'll personally give you this medicine for now... It can help improve your mental state. When your mind is better, naturally, your luck will improve too..."

Looking at the bottle of pills handed to him, Fang Zhiyi took it without the slightest hesitation.

"But you can't take too many. You can only take one pill at a time, understand?" the doctor continued to ramble.

Fang Zhiyi's phone rang. On the other end was his mother's anxious voice: "Zhiyi, come back quickly! Your dad's leg clearly hasn't healed, but he insisted on going out to work, and he fell again!"

Fang Zhiyi hurried home, only to see that the relatives had come over again.

Seeing him return, his eldest aunt frowned: "I told you not to save him back then, but look how much trouble you've caused now!"

His uncle, smoking a cigarette to the side, sighed: "He's just here to collect debts, sigh."

"Your dad is already like this, and he's still thinking about making money. How old is he? Fang Zhiyi, have a heart!"

Fang Zhiyi walked into the inner room, feeling full of guilt when he saw his father with his head wrapped in white gauze.

Instead, Fang's Father said, "It's fine, your old man can still work!" His smile made Fang Zhiyi feel even worse.

The relatives' sarcastic remarks drifted in from the living room. Fang's Father sighed, "Just pretend you didn't hear them."

Fang Zhiyi nodded.

The phone rang.

"Hey, we're short on people for moving things today. Are you coming or not?" The voice on the other end was clearly impatient.

"My dad fell and got hurt, I..."

"Not coming, right? Then don't even think about getting paid for the first two days!" The other party hung up the phone directly.

Fang Zhiyi froze for a moment and looked at his father. Fang's Father rubbed his head, and seeing his son looking at him, he smiled again, "It's fine, go do your work!"

Fang Zhiyi gritted his teeth and jogged out the door.

When he ran downstairs, he happened to hear a few neighbors gossiping.

"You know that family renting the apartment, right?"

"Yeah, I heard their son has mental problems. He can't even find a job."

"A psycho?"

"He's dragging down his parents, too."

"If I were like him, I'd be better off dead."

Fang Zhiyi's footsteps slowed down. He cast a gloomy glare at those gossiping women, and upon seeing him, they all unanimously shut their mouths.

Although Fang Zhiyi hurried over, the foreman had already found someone else to take his place. Fang Zhiyi humbly asked for his wages from the first two days, but the burly foreman glared at him and started cursing.

The anger that Fang Zhiyi had suppressed in his heart for so long finally erupted. He raised his fist and struck.

At this moment, his mind was filled with rage. All the repressed emotions since he woke up exploded out of him.

By the time he was pulled away, the foreman was already bleeding from the head.

Fang Zhiyi was taken to the police station. The police told him sternly that he needed to pay the other party a sum of money before they would agree to settle.

Through the glass window, he saw his parents who had rushed over. They were carefully apologizing to the foreman's family, their faces full of fawning and humility.

Fang Zhiyi's heart was pierced with pain.

At this moment, an unthinkable thought arose within him.

If everything is my fault, then... maybe it would be better if I just lived in a dream.

His recent dreams had become clearer and clearer, with countless faces constantly appearing in his mind... In his dreams, he was powerful, not a piece of trash like he was now...

Looking at the pill bottle in his hand, Fang Zhiyi's hands trembled slightly.

The doctor said he could only take one pill at a time...

"Oh no! The young man who hit someone took pills!" A sharp voice pierced the silence in the police station.

A moment later, Fang Zhiyi heard the clamor around him.

There were sounds of people urging, his parents' anxious cries, and... voices of cold mockery.

He heard the sound of an ambulance approaching, and then he fainted.

A doctor wearing a mask peeled back his eyelids, flashed a penlight, and an inexplicable emotion flashed in his eyes: "The patient is just unconscious, you don't need to worry."

As the crowd dispersed, Fang Zhiyi's surroundings fell silent once again.

Time ticked by, minute by minute. The bespectacled doctor was on duty today. He sat at his desk rubbing his temples, muttering to himself.

Suddenly, his office door made a sound, as if something had bumped against it.

The doctor opened his eyes and looked at the door. The door slowly opened, and a limp figure collapsed inside.

The eyes behind the lenses locked tightly onto the person standing in the doorway.

Fang Zhiyi stepped over the orderly lying on the floor and plopped down opposite him.

"Mr. Fang, it seems your mental state is acting up again..." A scalpel stabbed straight toward the doctor's face, but he merely tilted his head slightly to dodge it.

"You are really quite interesting. To think you deliberately created a whole world just to keep me here?" Fang Zhiyi narrowed his eyes and laughed. "Honestly, at first, I almost believed it was real."

The smile on the doctor's face did not diminish: "Oh? I'm quite curious as to how you found out. I observed everyone around you; you shouldn't have noticed any flaws..."

"You're not from our world, are you?" Fang Zhiyi asked.

"What makes you say that?"

"You really don't understand the parents of people like us... Even if I lay in a hospital for a year, they would definitely try to save me. But if I stayed home for a week, my mom would get annoyed with me. How could she possibly still think about cooking for me? It was too fake."

The doctor suddenly realized: "It was my oversight."

"If I'm not mistaken, you can't kill me directly. Instead... you have to make me give up hope myself... so that I die in the mental world, right?" Fang Zhiyi pointed at his own head.

"Smart indeed... Did you know from the very beginning?"

"Not exactly..." Before Fang Zhiyi could finish speaking, his hand moved again. A pair of scissors hidden in his sleeve thrust fiercely toward the doctor in front of him, but the doctor unhurriedly extended a single finger to block the scissors.

Fang Zhiyi surprisingly couldn't push it forward even a fraction of an inch.

"You guessed correctly. If you voluntarily give up your life... this matter would be perfectly resolved..." He still wore a gentle smile on his face. As he spoke, the entire office began to lose its color. The paint on the walls kept peeling off, and everything started to dissolve. Even the orderly lying on the ground, whose fate was unknown, blended into the same color as the floor.

"But since you found out, then you can stay here forever... What a pity. You originally could have properly enjoyed some familial love before you died..."

"To hell with you!" Fang Zhiyi's other hand smashed toward the doctor from the left, but the doctor blocked it effortlessly.

"I'm a bit curious, how were you certain it was me? And you deliberately took the pills just to get to the hospital?"