"That day, I asked for leave early and set out after lunch, but the bus broke down halfway, and by the time I reached Wanli Town, it was already dark."
In the dark desert,
there were no lights, no glow, just the howling wind rushing by.
It whipped up the darkness, lashing against her face, a raw pain.
She walked alone through the uninhabited desert,
the road long obscured by the sand and especially hard to see at night. She used the desert poplars at the roadside to guide her, running home as if flying.
"I was very scared; sometimes when I saw the shadows of the desert poplar trees, I would panic, thinking it was a person standing by the road. Sometimes I'd hear my own footsteps and hallucinate, feeling like someone was following me. The wind whistling, sounding like someone crying, but when I looked back, there was only the wind…"
A girl not yet sixteen walking alone at night, and the weather was terrible...
In the audience, Qiao Dongyang's throat tightened.
