Chapter 213

Wen Rugui had been running around for the last couple of days and barely got any rest. His voice was even more hoarse than before.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

Nevertheless, he felt that he must say something right then. “Comrade Jiang, please calm down. We are not sent here by Jiang Huarong. Quite the contrary, we might be able to help you.”Jiang Danhong’s eyes reddened. She had a mocking look on her face. “Help me? What exactly can you possibly do for me?”Jiang Danhong paused, glanced over at them again, and said, “What if I ask you to take me with you and help me leave this place? Can you do that?”Wen Rugui went silent for a little bit and said, “We can’t do it right at this moment, but we will do our best afterward.”Jiang Danhong looked at Wen Rugui with a frown. After a long while, she finally said, “Fine. I’ll trust you this one time, but I don’t trust this guy next to you!”Pu Jianyi, “? ? ?”What did he do?Why didn’t she trust him? Did he look like a wicked man?Since Jiang Danhong distrusted Pu Jianyi so much, Wen Rugui had to ask him to step out temporarily, while he stayed behind to ask Jiang Danhong about what had happened back in the days.As he listened seriously to Jiang Danhong’s narrative, he learned that her parents had sacrificed their lives in Korea back in 1952, all for their country. Both of them became war heroes, and as the family had yet to split up back then, she and her little brother were naturally adopted by Jiang Huarong, their uncle.Lo and behold, just a year after her parents’ sacrifice, her little brother died from an illness. The dowry that her mother had saved for her disappeared too with her brother.Her maternal grandfather was a gentry in the village back then, and her mother, as the single child at home, brought with her a lot of dowries when she got married.Wen Rugui frowned and asked, “How old were you back then, Comrade Jiang? And do you think there is more to your little brother’s death?”Jiang Danhong recalled what had happened, and her eyes could crack from anger. “I was just 6 years old back then, but I could still remember some things. I remember that my little brother only had a slight fever, and he was in good spirits. However, he died just like that the next day. I had wanted to go see him then, but they wouldn’t let me.”After her little brother was buried casually, she was not able to see him all the more.Wen Rugui continued his questions. “What about your dowry? From what I have learned, Hero Hung, your mother, had given away most of her possessions to the army. Is that not true?”Jiang Danhong explained, “Yes, most of her possessions were donated but not all of them. She saved a portion of her dowries for me and my little brother. There were quite a few pieces of jewelry and gold bars. She worried that something might happen to my father and herself, so she had kept those things to provide for us.”Those provisions had, however, turned into the reasons for their hardships.She remembered that there was a lot of gold, but she had never seen them again after she had been adopted by her uncle. She had inquired about them when she was old enough, but her uncle merely told her that she remembered wrong and that there were never any gold bars.He worried that she would mention the gold to others, so they locked her up and starved her. Starved and terrified, she dared not bring up the gold bars again.Wen Rugui frowned when he heard that. “Comrade Jiang, are you willing to testify against Jiang Huarong, if necessary?”Jiang Huarong was much worse than he had imagined. No amount of paper would be enough to list out all of his crimes!Jiang Danhong was so emotional that her hands shook, and there was a crazed look of excitement in her eyes. “Are you really going to report Jiang Huarong?”Wen Rugui nodded solemnly. “Yes.”Jiang Danhong looked up and laughed out loud. She laughed so hard that tears were coming down her cheeks. “That is awesome! I never thought I would live to see this day!”Her parents died. Her little brother also died. On top of those, her dowries were gone. Everybody thought that her uncle was a great man and had treated her as if she was his own. She was the only one who knew that he was a monster.But she wasn’t able to say anything about it. Nobody would believe her. If she dared to ‘spread the rumors’, she just might have followed in her little brother’s footsteps.She had laid low all these years and pretended to be docile. But her uncle and his family still did not let her off the hook.