novelraw Chapter 54 Hometown
Chapter 54 Hometown
Everything went more smoothly than expected.
The elderly guard at the gate of Malan Middle School was easy to talk to. After they explained their purpose, he let them in and even thoughtfully told them which floor the Student Affairs Office was on.
They went up to the second floor of the administrative building.
The Student Affairs Office happened to have someone on duty—a male teacher around fifty years old.
Jiang Ran explained his purpose with great sincerity, saying that a close friend of his had been out of contact for a long time and he was extremely worried, hoping to obtain the other party’s home address or contact information.
At first, the duty teacher was unwilling to help them look anything up. But the moment he heard the name [Qin Feng], his expression changed drastically.
“You know Qin Feng?”
The sudden seriousness in the teacher’s attitude caught Jiang Ran off guard.
He nodded.
“Yes, but I haven’t been in touch with him for a long time. Do you remember him, sir?”The teacher hesitated, as if wanting to speak but holding back.
In the end…
He sighed and looked out the window.
“How could I not remember that poor child. More than ten years ago, I was still teaching and served as the homeroom teacher for his class.”
“Qin Feng was extraordinarily gifted, incredibly intelligent—one look and you could tell he was a rare talent. I liked him very much.”
“[It’s just a pity… if I remember correctly, it was about ten years ago that Qin Feng’s father passed away. After that, the child withdrew from school and disappeared. No one knows where he went.]”
What?
Jiang Ran straightened in his seat.
Qin Feng’s father… still died?
That didn’t make sense.
If Qin Feng’s father had truly died in an accident ten years ago, then young Qin Feng—who knew about it in advance—should have been able to prevent the tragedy quite easily.
What’s more, the worldline shift had been so drastic. By all logic, that cross-temporal rescue should have succeeded.
This was far too strange.
Jiang Ran frowned.
On this current worldline…
[The person who should have been saved wasn’t saved, while someone who shouldn’t have died ended up dead.]
Where exactly did the problem lie?
He could think of only two possibilities:
(1) Qin Feng’s father’s death had hidden circumstances and was not an accident.
(2) The time-traveling text Qin Feng sent was not meant to save his father, but concealed some other secret.
For a moment.
This unfounded speculation sent a chill down Jiang Ran’s spine.
He still refused to believe that Qin Feng could be so sinister and calculating.
He would rather believe that there were hidden circumstances behind Qin Feng’s father’s death—that Qin Feng had tried his best to save his father and failed—than believe that even this supposed excuse was nothing but an act.
Now was not the time to dwell on this.
Find Qin Feng first!
“Sir.”
Jiang Ran pleaded again.
“Could you please give us Qin Feng’s home address? We’d like to ask around among the neighbors.”
Hearing this, the teacher from Student Affairs fell silent once more.
After hesitating for a while.
He finally turned on the computer and began searching the student records.
“Strictly speaking, information like this is student privacy and shouldn’t be given to you…”
He picked up a fountain pen and copied something down onto a sticky note.
“But over the years, I’ve often worried about that child too. If you really do find Qin Feng, please give him my regards.”
After finishing, he capped the pen and handed over the note.
“This is the home address registered in his student records. I also wrote down his parents’ phone numbers. I tried calling them before, but they’d already become disconnected. You can try again yourselves.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Thank you very much!”
Jiang Ran and Wang Hao thanked him repeatedly and left with the sticky note.
The address written on it pointed to a remote rural village. The two of them decided to keep driving.
While the car was moving.
Jiang Ran dialed the two phone numbers written on the note.
As expected, both were disconnected and unreachable.
Sigh.
He let out a breath, reclined the seat, and closed his eyes.
Qin Feng’s father hadn’t been saved after all.
This was something Jiang Ran had never imagined.
Qin Feng had gone to such lengths, deceived his best friend, wagered everything at the final moment—only for it all to come to nothing.
Not only had his father not been saved, Qin Feng himself had vanished, and the butterfly effect had even dragged Cheng Mengxue into death…
What was all of this for?
Was any of it really worth it?
…
The road conditions grew worse and worse as they headed toward the village.
After the concrete-paved road ended, all that remained was muddy, sunken dirt paths. The car rocked violently as it drove.
“My god, does this Qin Feng live up in the mountains or something? What kind of garbage road is this!”
Wang Hao’s road rage flared nonstop.
Jiang Ran, on the other hand, had long been mentally prepared.
When he had known Qin Feng, he already knew that Qin Feng’s family conditions were very poor. His mother had to work several jobs to support him and pay for his schooling.
Qin Feng had said that when his father was still alive, their living conditions were fairly decent.
Though he didn’t know what his father did outside, he always managed to bring back some money—not enough to be rich, but at least they had no worries about food or clothing in the village, and tuition and living expenses weren’t a problem.
But on this [Worldline 1]…
Qin Feng’s father was still dead.
That also meant that the poverty of Qin Feng and his mother would not have changed in any way.
The old Jetta drove to the entrance of the village. Wang Hao parked by the roadside, and the two of them walked into the village on foot.
Following the alley numbers, they turned this way and that, until they finally arrived at Qin Feng’s registered home address—
“This is…”
“What the hell happened here?!”
Looking at the ruins before them, Jiang Ran and Wang Hao couldn’t help but exclaim.
On this plot of land, there wasn’t a single standing house. All that met the eye was collapsed wreckage.
Broken bricks, rotted beams, weeds growing wild—and [charred black burn marks] covering the fractured walls.
If it were merely a collapsed house, that wouldn’t have been strange.
Many villages across the country had been abandoned, with few residents left. Large numbers of houses collapsed without anyone managing them.
But this self-built house was clearly not an old collapse. The pervasive, time-stained charring unmistakably proved—
There had been a fire here. The house had burned down.
In an instant.
A sense of danger washed over them.
Wang Hao sucked in a breath.
“Damn… was there a fire here?”
“Probably,” Jiang Ran said, glancing around.
“But look—neighboring houses are all intact. Only Qin Feng’s place was burned.”
“Of course, it’s also possible that everything burned back then, but other families kept living here and rebuilt on the ruins.”
“And from what that teacher said, Qin Feng went missing ten years ago. Naturally, even if the house burned down, there’d be no one to deal with it.”
Wang Hao nodded after hearing this.
“That makes sense.”
Behind them, the tapping sound of a cane gradually approached.
The two turned around to see a stooped elderly man walking with a cane.
Wang Hao pointed subtly.
“Judging by that leisurely pace, he’s definitely a local. Let’s ask him about this house, yeah?”
Jiang Ran was thinking the same thing.
He stepped forward.
“Sir, hello. We’re Qin Feng’s friends and wanted to ask you about his family.”
The old man was a bit hard of hearing. He turned his body sideways, gesturing for Jiang Ran to repeat himself.
After Jiang Ran shouted the same words again, the old man trembled on his cane, eyes widening.
“Qin Feng? That’s Yongxiao’s kid!”
“Yes, yes.”
Jiang Ran echoed him. That matched.
Back when they were in school, Jiang Ran had seen Qin Feng fill out countless forms—family member surveys, student records, applications, and so on.
Those always included parental information.
So Jiang Ran remembered that Qin Feng’s father’s name was Qin Yongxiao. The “Yongxiao” the old man mentioned could only refer to him.
“Ah…”
The old man let out a long sigh.
“That family’s child… they’re all people with bitter fates.”
Wang Hao was quick on the uptake. He smoothly pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to the old man, and lit it for him.
“Grandpa, could you tell us…”
“What exactly happened to Qin Feng’s family?”