Zhou Lin

Part of the settings in this chapter are taken from the movie "Blind Mountain". Any similarities are not coincidental.

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Few people know that there is a place called "Blind Mountain" within the federal territory.

Even the residents who live there don’t know why Blind Mountain is called Blind Mountain. Of course, they have no interest in studying these things.

This is a very simple small mountain village, poor, isolated, and backward... The villagers' living standards and way of thinking seem to be out of touch with the outside world for decades or even hundreds of years.

The residents in Blind Mountain basically live a self-sufficient life. Most families make a living by farming. The few businessmen are also locals and do some small business.

The largest and only "official" in the village is the village chief. He directly leads the four police officers in the village police station - yes, there is not even a "police station chief" in this place. In fact, the law enforcement officers here are There is no formal establishment in the federation... The four police officers are more suitable to be called the village chief's personal armed forces than police officers.

Anyway, if something big happens in the village, everyone will go to the village chief to resolve it. It’s just a matter of minor troubles... Basically, it depends on who is the one who gets the upper hand. No one will call the police.

This system similar to the "county grandpa" has lasted in Blindshan Village for many years.

We are very familiar with this power system. It goes without saying that everyone understands that the son of the village chief will be the next village chief. As for whether the son of a police officer can continue to be a police officer, it depends on whether they are "sensible" .

At first glance, there aren't any big problems in this village. Although their system is different from the outside world, the fact that they have been able to live in peace for so many years shows that this set of things at least works in this small place.

However, under this surface of peace, there is actually a terrifying evil hidden...

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In the spring of 2215, a woman named Afaf came here.

This year, she is twenty-three years old.

Afaf, who had just graduated from college and entered the society, the first thing she wanted to do was to travel around the world. Unfortunately...she fell into the clutches of human traffickers as soon as she came out of her hometown of Ismailia.

After several twists and turns, she was sold into this blind mountain.

On the first night he came here, Afaf was raped by his buyer...a local farmer in his forties. During the violence, the other party's elderly parents were nearby, responsible for holding Afaf down. Fu's hands.

Like all families in Blind Mountain, this family has been frugally saving money for many years, just to "buy a daughter-in-law" from human traffickers and pass on the family line to their son.

In their view, this is a normal thing. The buyer's old mother herself was also trafficked to this village back then.

After spending a nightmarish night, before dawn the next day, Afaf climbed out of the window to escape and ran to the village police station in Blind Mountain.

As a result, in less than an hour, under the order of the village chief, she was "escorted" back to that house.

The police officers in the village were already familiar with this kind of thing, and everyone in Blind Mountain... was familiar with this kind of thing.

They told Afaf that she was already a member of that family and if she ran away, her "husband" had the right to break her legs.

In this way, this nightmare that seems to never wake up continues...

More than nine months later, Afaf gave birth to a baby girl.

Although when she learned that she was pregnant, she thought about suicide and beat her belly hard to kill the child. However, as the little life slowly grew in her belly, her motherly instinct and her "husband" family Her softened attitude allowed her to endure it.

Unfortunately, before she could take another look at her child... on the night she gave birth, her "husband" threw the newborn girl like garbage into the river outside the village, where she drowned alive.

The reason he did it was simply because it was a girl.

In the eyes of the people in Blind Mountain, raising girls is a very stupid thing. When they are raised, they belong to other people's families. In other words... they don't regard women as human beings at all.

In the eyes of these villagers, women are just tools for reproduction. After completing the task of giving birth, they still have to take care of the children and do farm work, otherwise they will waste the food at home.

After losing her child, Afaf collapsed. She hit the wall, went on a hunger strike, and committed suicide. However, the villagers in Blind Mountain were obviously familiar with dealing with this situation. They imprisoned her and let some people who were accustomed to village life live every day. The woman came to persuade her and told her that as long as she endured it, she would have the possibility of escaping.

But actually... that's not possible.

Because this village is located in a remote place and is surrounded by mountains on three sides, it is almost impossible to escape on foot, and transportation is in the hands of the villagers; in addition, on the only road out of the village and in the county closest to Blind Mountain, They all have the village chief's spies, and these relevant personnel naturally have interests in dealings with the villagers of Blind Mountain Village, the human traffickers gang, etc.

There was also a woman who was abducted and fled to the county town with great difficulty, but in the end she was caught in the street by the chasing villagers and dragged back alive; even though she cried desperately and begged passers-by for help when she was caught, It was useless... the people who came to arrest her were all experienced people. While testifying together that she was "sick in the mind" and threatening passers-by to "mind their own business," they packed her into the car and took her away as quickly as possible. away from the scene.

In most cases, things end there.

Even if there are passers-by in the county who think something is fishy and call the police, the villagers are not afraid; Blind Mountain will encounter "federal official inspections" every few years, whenever they encounter such "outsiders from the village" , the whole village will unanimously report to the outside world, and all the women in the village who still have the tendency to run away will be gathered and hidden, and there has never been any trouble in these years.

Let's talk about Afaf... In the end, she gave in. In order to escape from this hell, she was determined to live in humiliation.

A year later, she gave birth again, this time to a boy, and she didn't know whether she should be happy or sad.

After having a child, Afaf gained a certain degree of freedom, and her "husband's" family didn't look at her too closely, because they all understood that not everyone could be cruel enough to leave their children and run away alone.

Afaf really can't do this...

Unknowingly, she had gradually become accustomed to life in this mountain village, accustomed to being beaten and scolded, accustomed to waking up early and working late every day to take care of the children, doing farm work, and being used like a servant.

Until one day in early 2219, an amazing turning point came.

Four years after she was abducted, Afaf's father successfully found this remote mountain village and saw his daughter on the street as soon as he entered the village.

The angry man naturally wanted to take his daughter away, but he was surrounded by the family who "bought" his daughter and the villagers at the entrance of the village.

The buyer's family had a very firm attitude: "You can take the person away, but the child must stay. In addition, we originally bought her for 20,000 yuan. In the past few years, she has been eating and living with us, and we have refused to keep her." Forget it, you have to return the 20,000 to us before you can receive the money."

When they made these demands, they seemed confident. They didn't know what the law was and what was not legal. They really thought that what they did was taken for granted - they spent money to buy a daughter-in-law, then the daughter-in-law is theirs, and there is no such thing as rape. ; The drowned child is his own, so he has the right to dispose of it as he pleases; of course the daughter-in-law he bought must be treated as a cow or a horse, or else he will have free rice?

This is their logic. Although it seems unbelievable to those of us who are accustomed to the rules of civilized society, it seems to them to be natural.

"Ignorance" is like an onion, only the outermost layer is "pathetic". If you continue to peel it off, you will see how hateful and terrible it is.

That day, Afaf and her father did not make it out of the blind mountain. They were imprisoned together in the village police station.

This kind of "relatives coming to the door" is indeed the first time in Blind Mountain in so many years. Although these villagers are ignorant, they are not bold enough to kill an adult outside the village.

Therefore, the village chief still has to hold a meeting with the "respectable" villagers in the village to decide how to deal with this matter.

It just so happened that at noon that day, several traffickers who often visited Blind Mountain Village came again. This time they abducted three women, one of whom... was named Anaye.

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It was four o'clock in the afternoon.

"I said...is this going to be the end of the road, right?" The bumpy mountain road and the poor suspension of the small trailer made Lieba, a tall and burly man, feel uncomfortable while riding, and he could not concentrate on listening to Shi Sanwen's lecture. "Could it be that bowl of 'thick noodles' that deceived us before dying?"

"Ugh—" Saleh, who was sitting in the passenger seat, almost vomited when he heard the word "rough noodles."

"Hey, hey... don't throw up on my car." In order to facilitate the lecture, Shi Sanwen had already sat in the back seat at this time, sitting side by side with Hunter Ba. As soon as he heard Saleh's dry words There was a sound of vomiting, he immediately reminded.

"Yes... I'm sorry..." Saleh was already a little motion sick from the jolt, and the death of the gas station manager came to mind, and he couldn't bear it. "I tried my best to hold it back... but you guys Can you please stop mentioning that person..."

"Yeah, there's nothing to mention." Zhang San, who was driving, also took advantage of the situation, "Don't worry, just in case, I went to check their account books at the gas station. The store manager His confessions are all true... I have also confirmed the coordinates he gave me through my own intelligence network, and there is indeed a small mountain village there that is not marked on the map."

"Tch... I should have told you earlier." Lie Ba said, "I also saw that this dilapidated road is particularly desolate, and I couldn't even see another car after driving for so long, so I asked this question."

"Actually, it's quite normal." Zhang San responded again, "The village is very isolated. Not to mention the Internet and communication towers, it doesn't even have running water... If it weren't for the construction of small power stations that became very simple after the energy revolution, they would probably There's not even electricity." He paused, "In a village like this, there are probably no more than ten households with cars, and more than half of them are probably traders. They only drive through this road when they go to the county town to sell goods. Where could we meet by chance?"

When he said this, something happened to break into his sight.

"Hey~ look, isn't it here?" Zhang San had excellent eyesight. He was quite far away from the village entrance, and he had already seen the road sign at the village entrance through the blurred windshield in front of the car.

It was a rather old-looking iron plate with two large Chinese characters written on it - "Blind Mountain".