When he was seventeen, Jian Qinghe's world cracked open, and the police stood outside the door with a child.
"Your brother."
The boy was as thin as a malnourished reed, but his eyes were brightly black. When he looked up at Jian Qinghe, his eyelashes cast a shadow under his eyes, like a wet baby bird.
Jian Qinghe remembered that it was such a rainy night when her mother left home. Her red high heels stepped through the stagnant water and never came back.
When the smell of alcohol and crying in his memory came back to him, and when the child who called him "brother" showed eyes similar to his mother's, Jian Qinghe found that he was making the same mistakes again - he hated the blood flowing on Jian Yang's body, but couldn't resist the small hands that grasped the corners of his clothes.
He began to observe the creature who called himself his younger brother late at night: Jianyang would arrange the paints he threw in order by color, would sit at the door of his room with his knees hugged during thunderstorms, and would look at him with that wet look - the same look with a sacrificial look as the alcoholic woman in his memory.
It wasn't until he found a bloody cotton ball in Jian Yang's schoolbag one day that Jian Qinghe realized that blood is the gentlest curse and the cruelest redemption.
"Brother." Jianyang stood on tiptoe and wiped the blood from his cheek, his fingertips were cold. "Now we are complicit."
Purpose: Blood is not a gift of fate, but a shackle that needs to be re-examined