One summer night in 1995, the weather was so hot and humid that the whole village looked like a burnt brick kiln, with no wind and a thick air as if it had been frozen.

Normally, at ninety o'clock in the night, there were hardly any people moving around in the village. On that day, the villagers, who should have gone back to their houses to rest, sat on the dam in front of the house with a pampa fan in their hands, and complained about the damn weather while enjoying the shade.

"I really don't know what kind of madness this is, I've never seen such a hot day in so many years." A woman with a baby in her arms straddles a small bench, sweat running down her neck and into the collar of her dress.

The shirtless husband stood aside, listlessly fanning the two of them, and from time to time he reached out to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead. It may be because the air is so stuffy that the baby, who has not yet learned to speak, feels very uncomfortable, and cries with a sharp voice, as if the parents' mood is not annoying enough.

"Oh, my little ancestor, please don't cry." The woman gently patted the baby in her arms and tried to lull him to sleep, but the more she did so, the louder the child's cry became, reaching almost every corner of the village.

After a while, the woman finally lost her patience. She got up and shoved the child into her husband's arms, and said angrily, "I'll go out for a walk, this child is going to drive me crazy." ”

"Huh." The man was a little worried, and hurriedly grabbed his wife's arm and asked, "It's so late, where are you going?" ”

The woman frowned and shook off her husband's hand, "Go talk to Xiaojuan." Anyway, it's so hot tonight, everyone will definitely not be able to sleep. ”

"Then you come back early, be careful on the road!" The man admonished uneasily. The woman straightened her clothes, answered nonchalantly, and turned to leave her house.

When I came back from Xiaojuan's house, I didn't know what time it was at night, and there were still many sleepless lights in the village. The husband and children were no longer on the dam, and the home was surprisingly quiet.

"Could it be that these two are already asleep?" The woman muttered as she walked into the room. As she walked, she suddenly felt that something was wrong, why was there so much blood on the ground? And the further you go inside, the more blood stains.

"Zhiquan? Are you asleep? The woman stood in the doorway, calling her husband's name softly. She looked down at the bloodstains that stretched from the back room to the outside, trembling with fear, not daring to take another step forward.

"Wang Zhiquan, you squeak when you hear it." The woman asked again, her body already paralyzed, and she could barely stand by holding on to the door frame. At this moment, the baby's cry suddenly sounded, breaking the silence of the night. The woman gritted her teeth and rushed into the innermost room almost as soon as she rolled on.

Seeing the sight in front of her, she immediately collapsed on the ground. She couldn't believe that she was just going out to chat with friends, how could such a terrible thing happen in her own home?

The man's body lay on its back next to the cabinet, covered with countless knife wounds, almost stabbed into a human flesh sieve. Blood splattered everywhere, and the killer didn't seem to hide his intentions, and the bloody footprints stretched out from where the corpse was lying on its back. The intermittent dripping of blood on the ground suggests that the killer may have also suffered knife wounds during the struggle.

The baby lies in bed crying tirelessly, oblivious to what is happening around him. When the murderer committed atrocities in this room, this innocent little life just watched his father being killed by the gangsters, and watched an entire family shatter in an instant.

It didn't take long for a group of sleepless villagers gathered in front of and behind Wang Zhiquan's house. News of the "demon's" killing soon spread through the village.

The police immediately cordoned off the scene of the crime, examined the body, learned about the damage to the victim's property, and traced the murderer's escape based on the bloody footprints left at the scene.

Just when people were busy and the rumors were intensifying, an exciting news came from the village police station: Wang Zhiquan's murderer had surrendered.

When Qi Tao walked into the police station with blood stains covered in blood and red eyes to turn himself in, no one would have thought that this usually polite and honest man would do such a brutal thing.

According to his own confession, on the night of the crime, he had been hiding near Wang Zhiquan's house to secretly observe the situation and look for a suitable time to make a move. Not long after Wang Zhiquan's wife left, Wang Zhiquan went into the house with the child in his arms and went to sleep.

Because the weather was too hot at that time, and the village had always been safe, Wang Zhiquan did not close the door after returning home. Qi Tao followed Wang Zhiquan into the house, engaged in a fierce fight with him in the innermost bedroom, and finally killed him with a knife and fled the scene.

Perhaps realizing that what he did could not escape the punishment of the law, after hiding in the nearby woods for several hours, Qi Tao went to the police station to confess his crime. However, it didn't end well. When the police asked why Qi Tao killed Wang Zhiquan by such cruel means, Qi Tao suddenly fell silent, and no matter how the police asked, he no longer spoke.

"Qitao, we all live in the same village, we all know your essence very well, you will never do such a thing for no reason. If there's anything hard to say, just say it, and we'll try to get you leniency. The director persuaded him bitterly. He watched Qi Tao grow up, and he didn't believe that this young man who had once made the whole village proud could be such a mad person.

After being silent for a long time, Qi Tao raised his head as if he were awake from a dream, with a resolute expression on his face. "I don't have anything to say, damn that man, I didn't do anything wrong......"

"You!" The director was so angry that he slapped the table and pointed at Qi Tao's nose, "Let me ask you again, why did you kill Wang Zhiquan?" What kind of hatred has to be stabbed in him so much? ”

"That person should die, that person should die, that person should die......" Qi Tao no longer answered the director's question, and kept repeating this sentence in his mouth, and the whole person looked like he was possessed by a demon.

Early that morning, with a muffled thunderstorm, the torrential rain that had been held all night finally raged. The stuffiness in the air was taken away, and the restlessness in my heart was extinguished, but the people of Longjing Village still couldn't sleep.

This peaceful, idyllic little village has ceased to be peaceful at some point.

Although Qi Tao surrendered, not only did he not show any remorse for his murder, but insisted that Wang Zhiquan deserved it.

After a court trial, Qi Tao was sentenced to death for intentional homicide and deprived of political rights for life. Qi Tao accepted this result, as if he had been determined to die from the very beginning of the crime.

Although Qi Tao never explained the reason for his killing, all kinds of rumors spread in the village. Some people say that Qi Tao has become abnormal since he lost Li Tianyu, and it just so happened that Wang Zhiquan also liked Li Tianyu for a while, when Qi Tao went to the city to study at university, Wang Zhiquan liked to chat with Li Tianyu when he had nothing to do, and Qi Tao hated Wang Zhiquan because of this, so he killed him.

Some people say that Wang Zhiquan must have done something to be sorry for Qi Tao, and that incident may be related to Li Tianyu's sudden suicide, otherwise Qi Tao would not have stabbed a person into a sieve like crazy.

Some people also say that Qitao, who lost Tianyu, didn't want to live for a long time, but he just wanted to go to hell with a cushion before he died. It just so happened that Wang Zhiquan was unlucky and was chosen by Qitao as the object of the funeral.

No matter what people guess, the truth is only known to Qi Tao himself. It's like Li Tianyu threw himself into the icy river with an answer that only he knew, ending his life at the age of twenty. Qi Tao also fell on the execution ground with a criminal motive that could not be told to outsiders, allowing the villagers to call him a "madman".

After Qitao's accident, Li Tianhua took great care of his family, and every year when he went back to the countryside to sweep Li Tianyu's grave, he would visit Qiye's grandparents and leave them some living expenses. Qiye had a good relationship with Li Tianhua when he was young, and Uncle Li was very close, but for some reason the relationship became estranged when he grew up.

After listening to Uncle Long's talk about the old things in Longjing Village, Gu Song felt very depressed. However, through Uncle Long's narration, Gu Song was also more convinced of a speculation, that is, something unknown must have happened between Qi Ye and Li Tianhua.

Since Li Tianhua has such a good relationship with Qiye's father, he has been financially supporting Qiye's family for so much time after Qitao's death, and left a business card, so that Qiye can ask him for help at any time when he is in trouble.

So Qi Ye is really in trouble now, and he is being collected by loan sharks, he can borrow money from Li Tianhua generously, and I believe that Li Tianhua will be very willing to help him solve this problem.

But according to Qiye's statement when he was first interrogated, he was not familiar with Li Tianhua at all, and suddenly asked Li Tianhua to borrow money, and he was not sure, and he didn't know if the other party would lend him money, so he showed that panicked appearance in the surveillance, which was obviously lying. In other words, Qi Ye went to Li Tianhua at that time really not to borrow money, or not just to borrow money.

After thinking for a while, Gu Song continued to ask Uncle Long, "As far as I know, on March 24, 2004, there were ...... in your village" As soon as he finished saying this, Gu Song suddenly felt that this day was a little unusual.

March 24, isn't this the death day of Li Tianyu? A murder occurred in Longjing Village on this day, is this a coincidence, or is there another story? Since it was Li Tianyu's death day, Li Tianhua, who would go back to the countryside every year to sweep Li Tianyu's grave, should have been in the village at the time, maybe it had something to do with this case.

It seems that we really have to find someone to investigate the unsolved case back then.