Old Things in Quanxu

"Old Things in Quanxu" Xu Zhiheng never thought that he would see a white skeleton dug out of the ground when the school playground was being renovated. It was an early autumn afternoon. The lights of the police car shone on the playground track, the police cordoned off, and the class teacher told them to stay in the classroom and not go out, but she went anyway. She stood behind the crowd and saw that when the skeleton was lifted out of the mud pit, half of the rotten braided rope was still hanging on the arm bones and wrists. The criminal police team came to the school to investigate for a week. They said the deceased was a male who died about thirty years ago and was no more than twenty years old. The cause of death was heavy blow from external force. Someone buried him here for a long time. Xu Zhiheng's sister works in the Criminal Investigation Brigade. She brought home several copies of files, including one: In 1996, a young man disappeared, and the person who reported the case was his mother. The report record said "This person has been missing for seven years." The young man was nineteen years old and had worked in a hunting farm in Shoukang County before leaving. Attached to the file is a photo of him - wearing an old leather jacket, with thick eyebrows, looking at the camera with eyes that seemed to be smiling, but also looking away. Someone wrote two words on the back of the photo with a ballpoint pen: Yu Wen. Xu Zhiheng found his family. They live in an old residential area in the west of the city, and his middle school certificate is still hanging in the house. His sister, who was already in her forties, dug out a box of old things he left behind, and inside there was a notebook with the first few pages missing. The first page read: "Today I heard someone digging a hole in the back mountain." The writing was neat and unedited. The notebook records his daily life - the schedule of the hunting ground, the dates with his girlfriend, and the secret he discovered: the underground passage in the hunting ground leads to a long-abandoned hotel that is being demolished. He wrote: "She wanted to leave here. But the boss said, don't come back if you leave." The last page of the notebook is incomplete. The handwriting suddenly became scrawled, with heavy strokes, as if written in a hurry: "She didn't come to work today. I have to find her." There was no follow-up after that. Xu Zhiheng began to look through the old things in his home. In a stack of old photos her mother had hidden, she saw her grandfather wearing hunting overalls standing next to a truck. The year - 1996 - was written in pencil on the back of the photo. That same summer, Yu Wen disappeared. She began to look again at her grandpa's old house, which she had been accustomed to since she was a child. The man who took her hiking, bought snacks, and taught her about plants was not even forty years old when he took that photo in 1996. What Xu Zhiheng didn't know was that the past that she was approaching was also gradually approaching her in a way that she hadn't noticed. --- "Old Things in Quanxu" A young girl searches for the truth among the ruins of the past, only to find that she is becoming a part of that history. Intention: A person's exploration of the past is actually determining the coordinates for his future direction.