Empty House for the Rest of My Life

Lin Xu, an office worker who lives alone, has lived in an old apartment for three years. Every rainy night, footsteps can always be heard from the vacant room on the top floor. My neighbor Su Xiao suddenly disappeared three years ago. Residents in the community unanimously stated that she had moved away long ago. But the intermittent records of water and electricity consumption, the inexplicable appearance of old bookmarks on the window sill, and the fleeting figures of people late at night constantly reminded Lin that the story was not simple. He insists on restarting the investigation of the old case. The kind Aunt Chen downstairs repeatedly persuades him to let it go. The police in the area passively avoid the investigation. All the neighbors are deliberately avoiding the past, and everyone hides secrets. A burned and broken diary peeled away the first layer of illusion. Lin Xu thought that the girl was secretly imprisoned by her neighbors. As he dug deeper for clues, he suddenly discovered that his memory had been tampering with itself for a long time. A past event that he had deliberately forgotten three years ago surfaced. The residents of the entire community, together with the police and Su Xiao himself, joined forces to weave a long scam just to help him escape guilt. When the memory returns, the lies wrapped in good intentions leave another layer of secrets that are difficult to see through. There are no ghost elements in the whole story. It uses collective concealment to tear apart the real dilemma of human nature and self-deception. Concept: This work is based on the weird mystery of an old urban building, peeling off the suspense surface to explore the self-salvation and self-escape of human nature. The most untrustworthy thing for people is never other people's lies, but their own memories that have been tampered with by the subconscious. The protagonist is trapped in fear and investigating mysterious cases, thinking that he is a sober person searching for the truth. However, he does not know that from beginning to end, he is the one who is tenderly protected by everyone and lives in self-deception. The novel breaks the inherent routine of "suspense must contain guilt and harm" and writes the gentlest and cruelest truth about the world: The concealment of the world is not evil, but the tacit understanding of adults to protect the truth; the tampering of self-memory is not a pathology, but the most instinctive escape from guilt. The real suspense is not in the strange noises in the empty house or the hiding in the neighborhood, but in the fact that we spend our lives selectively remembering and letting go, using lies to forgive ourselves, and using illusions to settle down in life.