Marlowe's Luminous Shadows Chapter 1

My name is Marlowe, and I am a fool.

My original name was not Marlowe, but Gouya, but I was lucky enough to be picked up by Miss Chen San and renamed Marlowe.

I'm actually not a fool. My mother often praised me for being smart. But then she died, and probably my intelligence was buried with her.

The fifteenth day of the first lunar month of the ninth year of Yuanxi, the Lantern Festival, should be the most unlucky day in my life.

On this day, my mother was buried. My bad-a** father wiped away a few tears and took me to find Cassidy Ren.

Cassidy Ren is an old lady with a black mole on the corner of her mouth. She smiles narrowly and swings a piece of silk around. She looks a bit like the mother in the building where the bad guy's father often hangs out.

She walked up to me and circled around me, touching me from head to toe with her big, oily hands. She also forced my mouth open to take a look. She was so strong that it made my bones hurt, so I bit her. She took a bite.

"Ouch!" She yelled, but she was not angry. She was smiling and nodding with satisfaction.

"How are you willing to sell such a fair girl?" she was asking my bad guy father.

"No matter how good-looking he is, he's just a loser. If you want it, I'll go to the next house and ask." The bad guy looked very anxious. I didn't know what he was anxious about, until I saw a woman and a boy standing behind him.

I know that woman. My father brought her back. I remember that my mother was very angry that time. It was the first time that curse words came out of her mouth when she was always reading poetry.

My mother said, "Vixen."

My mother is recognized by the neighbors as a good-tempered person, the most gentle and soft-spoken. That was the first time I heard her have such a mean tone.

My mother likes to read poems and lyrics very much, and she also likes to take me to read them together, but my bad guy dad always doesn't like it, and he will be particularly irritable at this time.

He scolded his mother, "Don't think you are still a young lady from the Duke's palace." After scolding her, he beat and kicked her again. After he had scolded and beaten her enough, he told her that she was hungry and asked her to cook.

It was as if my mother was born to be angry with him and serve him.

I want to speak for my mother, but usually I get slapped on the ear before I can even say the first sentence.

It was my mother who beat me. I couldn't believe it and tried to make her blame herself with tears, but she didn't. She just held up her bruised body and took me out of the room.

In fact, I know that she is worried that I will cause more severe beatings and scoldings from my bad father.

Cassidy Ren pinched my face, and the pain pulled me out of my memories. I heard her say: "One or two at most, both at this price."

After waiting for a while, when my feet were going numb from standing, the bad guy dad spoke.

He said, "Okay."

It turns out that I am only worth one tael of silver. It turns out that in this world, a person's life can be measured in terms of silver.

That's right, isn't my mother's life worthless because of the collapse of the Duke's Mansion?

When I was very young, I was thinking that I didn’t want to live like my mother, who was beaten, scolded and trampled on. The way she lay on the ground avoiding the punches and kicks of her bad father didn’t look good at all.

I want to live a better life, at least now that I have left my bad guy dad, I can start over.

So, while following Cassidy Ren around, I asked her: "Are you going to take me to that kind of beautiful building?"

There are beautiful women in the beautiful building. I have seen them all smiling. They must be very happy.

I also want to live happily.

But Cassidy Ren did not answer my words. Instead, he took me into a house. Before entering, I saw a plaque hanging on the small door, which read "Chen Mansion".

Cassidy Ren took me to a small alley, asked me to stand there and wait, and then left.

I think she should have gone to find a buyer. After all, buying and selling people is not the same as buying vegetables and meat. It’s just that I used to be a vegetable buyer with my mother, and now I have become that vegetable.

It was very dark, and there were no lights in the alley. The courtyard wall was so high that not even the moonlight could come in. It was quiet all around. I suddenly felt a little scared, my heart was beating fast, and I was worried that there was a ghost.

What a scary ghost, a female ghost with long hair and white clothes, a bloody mouth, and a long tongue.

I was so frightened by my imagination that I shivered, and began to regret that I shouldn't have read a book on ghosts and myths with the dog next door in the past two days.

Why hasn't Cassidy Ren come back yet? I'm so afraid that I actually start to miss her big fat hands, at least they are warm.

Suddenly there was a gust of wind, and the cold winter wind hurt my ears like knives. Just as I was about to raise my hands to rub them, I heard a rustling sound, mixed with a few other sounds.

"Uh-huh..."

The terrifying appearance of the female ghost once again appeared in my mind. The more I listened, the more I felt that the sound was like a ghost that was coming to seek my life. So I raised my hands to cover my ears and closed my eyes tightly, trying to pretend not to hear.

"Hmm...ahhhh..."

"Keep your voice down!"

I was startled by a sudden low voice, which sounded like a man.

Is it Cassidy Ren who brought the buyer back? I thought so, but I forgot about my fear and took a few steps in the direction of the sound.

After all, people are never scarier than ghosts.

I touched the wall and walked around a corner. The sound gradually became louder, and the voice that I thought was a female ghost became clearer and clearer.

! ! !

I poked half of my head to take a look, and my eyes widened in shock.

Opposite the corner is a small pavilion that looks abandoned for a long time, with weeds half a meter high.

And among the weeds, a two-headed and eight-legged monster grew!

I was so frightened that I almost shouted, my vision blurred for a while, and I suddenly took a step back, but I didn't notice that I stepped on a piece of gravel and made a "click" sound.

The two-headed monster all turned to look at me. The moonlight shined through the clouds and onto their faces. Only then did I see clearly that they were not monsters, but two people entangled together.

A man and a woman were leaning against the pillars of the pavilion. The man's head was even raised from the woman's legs. He stared at me, as if he wanted to eat me.

"Where does this thing without eyes come from?" he cursed.

The woman seemed to think that his voice was a bit too loud, so she stepped back to the ground with a panicked look on her face, went up to cover his mouth, and turned to me and asked, "Which yard are you from?"

I stared at her white breasts in a daze. She noticed my gaze, shouted, and hurriedly buried her head in adjusting her dress.

"Are you a fool?" The man picked up a stick and walked a few steps toward me.

"What should I do? I was discovered. I told you to go outside but you didn't go outside. It's fine now. If I told you to go outside, you would be punished. I...I'm afraid I won't survive."

"What are you talking about? How is it possible? How can I be willing to let you die?" The man comforted her, then stretched out his hand and pinched her waist, and walked up to me with a stick in hand, "Say! From that courtyard?"

His eyes were frighteningly fierce, exactly the same as Butcher Wang's eyes before he killed the pig.

I looked at the stick in his hand, which was thicker than my arm, and felt that it would fall on me in the next second. I trembled immediately, my mouth trembled so much, and I couldn't speak.

Why hasn't Cassidy Ren come back yet? I desperately hope she can appear now, but she just seems to have disappeared. Even the fragrance of makeup and powder can no longer be smelled.

"A mute?" the man asked.

The woman finally got dressed. It was a beautiful dress that I had never seen before. She took a few steps, hugged the man, and looked at me sideways.

"Looks like a fool, he probably won't tell anyone."

You are the fool, I thought to myself, but fear still occupied most of my mind. I saw the man raising the stick and aiming it at my head to smash it down.

He told the woman: "I can't risk your life."

So you want to kill me?

I don't want to die.

Thinking about it, I finally screamed and fluttered like a duck scalded to death by boiling water.

The man was shocked by my movement. His face became strange and his tone was very hesitant: "Is it possible that he is really stupid?"

I saw him gradually retracting the stick, and suddenly I had an idea. If I were a fool, they would probably spare my life.

So, I imitated what I had done before, screamed again, and added two more movements of my own, holding my head and turning in circles.

In fact, it was very strange to act stupid like this. It felt like a stone had settled in my heart, feeling painful and stuffy.

They stopped talking and just looked at me spinning around. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the man's still suspicious expression. I gritted my teeth, got down on the ground, and started to crawl like a dog again. As I crawled, I yelled: "Where are my bones?" Where are my bones?"

The floor was cold and hard, and my legs, which were already numb from the cold, felt like ice cubes that were about to be broken when I bumped on them, which hurt my bones.

However, as long as I can survive, I still want to go to a beautiful building and be a beautiful woman.

I climbed around and around, and saw his increasingly relaxed face. I breathed a sigh of relief, and wanted to continue crawling into the mud. I could follow it and turn to the alley I had just come from.

I climbed very focused, and my heart felt like it was about to jump out of my head. I saw my hand touched the base of the wall, and I could get out immediately.

There was another gust of cold wind, and I didn't bother to cover my ears. I already grabbed the wall with my hands.

But the next moment, my hope was shattered.

The dull stick hit me hard on the back of my head, and in a daze, I heard the man say.

"Dead people cannot speak."