The door of the 2nd hand shop opened and Han Fei turned to the door. A man holding a delivery box stood dumbly at the door. His expression was dull and his mouth was slightly tilted.
“Pingan?” Han Fei was surprised to see the deliveryman. “What time is it, why haven’t you gone home?”
Wang Pingan raised the delivery box and shouted, “I brought fried chicken.”
“You’ve brought food for me?” Han Fei’s heart warmed and he quickly invited Wang Pingan into the shop. After he opened the delivery box, Han Fei saw that the boxes of fried chicken had cracked and there was a visible shoe print on them. “Someone has attacked you?” Han Fei walked around Wang Pingan. The man’s clothes were stained with mud and sauces.
“Fried chicken.” Wang Pingan didn’t care about his dirty clothes. He carried the hot packs of fried chicken like treasures and placed them on the table. “I can’t finish them. Give, give you some; give father some.”
Staring at the 2 giant boxes of fried chicken which were heavily damaged, Han Fei shook his head. Wang Pingan wouldn’t have bought so many fried chicken for no reason, something must be behind this.
“Can I borrow your phone?” Han Fei accepted Wang Pingan’s phone and logged into the delivery platform. Wang Pingan had gained 2 new bad reviews and compensated the customer full price for their orders.
“You’re still so happy after you’ve lost money?” Han Fei made some calculations. The earning Wang Pingan that night was nullified by that one compensation.
“Fried chicken… delicious.” Wang Pingan opened one of the packs and handed Han Fei a bottle of cola that had lost its fizz. Then he started to enjoy the food on his own. Wang Pingan had no worry and no fear. He munched on the fried chicken, his lips stained with oil.
Looking at Wang Pingan, Han Fei had a surreal feeling. He didn’t expect that there would be such a ‘normal’ person inside this abnormal world.
‘Thankfully I’ve walked out of the illusions or else I might have accidentally killed you.’ Destiny had changed. Han Fei ate the chicken. These 10 minutes were the most relaxed period of his entire day. After they finished the first box, Wang Pingan took out the second box of chicken. He wanted to have a taste of the other flavor but he also wanted to save the second box for his father.
“You better go home and share the second box with your father.” Han Fei grabbed the second box of chicken and placed it back into the delivery box. When he reached into the delivery box, he realized the bottom of Wang Pingan’s delivery box was filled with bowls of white rice.
‘Why are there so many bowls of white rice? And they’re all cooked?’ Han Fei was confused, “Pingan, did you buy these white rice yourself?”
“Delivery, all delivery.” Wang Pingan pointed at his phone. “Can’t find address. House, house full of dead people.” Han Fei suspected he had heard wrongly. The previous minute he was enjoying a warm moment with Pingan and now everything changed.
“Dead people? Dead people ordered the delivery?”
“Dead people.” Wang Pingan was still smiling happily. The fried chicken lost its flavor immediately. Han Fei handed the napkin over to Wang Pingan to help him wipe his hand. Then he had Wang Pingan sit before him. “Where are you supposed to deliver all these white rice?”
“Upstream, Head River, white city.” Wang Pingan answered with difficulty. Han Fei grabbed the man’s phone and soon he discovered something terrifying. Every night, someone would order bowls of white rice from Head River and they would order the rice from the same shop.
Han Fei took out his own phone to call the number of the restaurant, it rang for a long time and there was no answer. He tried to call the same number with Wang Pingan’s phone, but it only rang twice before it was picked up.
“Did something happen to you?” A man’s voice came through the line, the man sounded very nervous.
Han Fei’s eyes darted about. He took the phone and walked deeper into the shop. “The address you gave me is not right, why is the house filled with dead people?”
There was a crash on the other end of the line and then the call ended.
After a while, the same number called Wang Pingan back. Once Han Fei answered it, he could hear the boss’ worried breathing. “Brother, I didn’t mean to scam you but only you would accept the order now.”
“So… why are there so many dead people?”
“I really don’t know! Head River is where the rich people live. There was a family who liked to order from us but from a certain day onwards, they only ordered white rice and stopped ordering the dishes. I was curious so I asked around. I found out the whole family was kidnapped and then killed by the kidnapper! However, the other deliverymen swore the family was still alive when they made the delivery after the supposed massacre of the family!”
“The people are dead but they still order rice every day?”
“I don’t know! Regardless, until now they will still order white rice every night. And recently more customers started to order white rice at night! They came from all over the place, many delivery people didn’t dare to accept such orders anymore. Only you didn’t seem to care about it. Wait a minute, why do you sound different from before?”
“Guess who I am.” As Han Fei said that, the man hung up the phone.
“The boss didn’t sound like he was lying.” Han Fei returned to Wang Pingan’s side. He looked at the bowls of white rice that covered the bottom layer of the box. “The boss said that the number of customers who ordered white rice at night has increased recently, are they all dead people?”
Looking through the info on the shop, Han Fei realized with a shock that the shop was also owned by the mall boss. The boss also had a lot of real estate along the river. However, for the past 2 years, his luck had been sliding. Most of his businesses shut down and the only ones that remained were the Mall, Five Grains Restaurant and River Private Hospital.
“Pingan, how many of such orders have you received? Orders for just white rice.” Wang Pingan scrolled through his phone and proudly showed Han Fei his delivery records. When Han Fei saw the records, his face was green. No wonder Wang Pingan had worked through the night, most of his delivery involved delivering white rice.
‘It’s the ghosts who have been keeping this man alive…’ Han Fei looked through the phone. Wang Pingan had even made a delivery to Han Fei’s neighbourhood before. The address was the room on the 3rd floor where the hanging woman was.
“Are there any problems with these white rice?” Han Fei took out a pack and looked through it with chopsticks. The rice was half-cooked and the rice was mixed with joss sticks and paper money ashes.
“Pingan, you need to stop accepting orders from River Head. You might survive once, but it doesn’t mean you’ll survive every time…”
Wang Pingan, who always listened to Han Fei, hesitated. He asked a very strange question. “Must dead people be ghosts? Why must we be afraid of dead people? Those who bully me are living people.”
“The living people might be after your money but the dead will be after your life.” Then Han Fei was suddenly reminded of something. Be it Wang Pingan who made the night delivery, or the old lady who did good deeds every day, they didn’t seem to be afraid of ghosts. And the ghosts in the memory world also left them be.
‘The altar owner was taught that good people have good karma since he was young but when he tried to do good things, bad things kept happening to him. He was corrupted to become the scariest monsters. However, in his memory world, his subconscious has protected these good people. Until now, he probably still believes good people have good karma, at least that is true in his memory world.’ Han Fei glanced at the good people title that he had. Then he turned to Wang Pingan, “Pingan, if you insist on making these deliveries, then you have to promise me one thing. You will bring me to visit these people after the sun comes up.”
“Which people?” Wang Pingan didn’t quite understand Han Fei. His eyes were glued to the other box of fried chicken.
“All the people who have ordered white rice at night. Bring me to their homes. If there is no danger, then you can continue taking these orders.” Han Fei had his own plan. He had seen the people who had died to the altar in the altar owner’s illusions. Now he planned to meet them in person in the memory world.
7 comments:
Thanks for the chapter!
I'm still baffled that this is the author's idea of an autistic person. I can only think of two reasons, either the author has no clue and didn't bother to look it up, just another person who has made his own conclusion from misinformation, or it was a mistranslation.
This silly, somewhat pitiful dude issuffering from MR, mental retardation. His intelligence level is way down there and his cognitive functions are shit on every level. Meanwhile, someone with autism are usually normal to above average in the intelligence and cognitive department, if he was autistic, he would have no issue finding his way around, he wouldn't fail to understand things and he would certainly not be clueless about ghosts or what's happening to him. Also, delivering stuff would probably make him quite uncomfortable as that involves some interaction with strangers and a lot of new places. Meanwhile, this person is clearly having zero issues with interacting and places with a lot of people or new places. He just isn't good at it because he's, well, retarded.
Nah, I just don't appreciate people going around spreading misinformation. Someone reading this might even think that's what autism is.
I have autism myself, I have some issues with social interaction, focus(depending on what it is) and reading expressions. I am also uncomfortable in new places, I can't stand crowds, big cities make me sick. I often get obsessed with some stuff, easily lose track of time when I do something fun, have a hard time starting and hard time stopping and I need to plan everything and easily get upset if told to do something out of the blue, it takes time to absorb this and come to terms with it, also, depending on what it is, if someone promises something or something is planned, I get extremely upset if it suddenly changes or doesn't happen as it should(unless I was the one who changed this), one such thing can ruin an entire day and leave me in a testy and bad mood, I've even had cases where I refuse to do something if it was too abruptly changed. My autism isn't really that severe, I can function normally, working full time and often doing a better job than most, but still need some help and special consideration from time to time.
Well, the point is, no one likes being mislabeled. I don't care if they use autism or any other condition or thing, but at least have the basic respect of not spreading misinformation.
I'm getting a bit tired of your complaints. Your posts here aren't going to change anything.
I don't know if 'Autism' has a different classification in China. Different countries have different classification systems - North America uses DSM, Europe uses ICD, and who knows what's standard in China? I did take a look at the translated version of Wikipedia's chinese article on autism, and in one section it states (with a medical citation needed tag) that about 30% of autistic children are moderately to severely mentally handicapped. Also, I've seen some older scientific papers that estimate around 75% of austistic males to be mentally handicapped.
So such a perception is probably fairly common. Maybe that means that the term 自閉症 used in this WN encapsulates both autism and mental retardation, or maybe just the colloquial use of the term includes both.
At this point it's something you should take up with the translator rather than complaining about the author.
China in general doesn't have a nice view of mental illness.
fuck off
Get the hell out of this
In short since his symptoms are different from yours, you don't consider him as being on the spectrum. Your symptoms aren't the same as my sister's so you're not on the spectrum either to me. Being autistic doesn't give you a pass for being an asshole.
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