Chapter 60 Silkworm
Choi Mingzhi opened his eyes.
Today is another new day.
A new, uneventful day.
Cui Mingzhi pressed the alarm clock, and the time showed 6:50. He slowly climbed out of bed.
Brush your teeth and wash your face.
Put the milk in the microwave for 30 seconds, take out the toast and spread the jam on it.
Cui Mingzhi took a bite of toast. It would be even better if there was a fried egg in it. But there was no adult at home today, so no one fried eggs for him.
His stepmother was kind, at least she did what was necessary for her appearance. She fried four eggs every morning for everyone.
Now Choi Ming-chi really wants to eat fried eggs.
But there was no adult at home, no one was there except him.
Maybe this should be worth being happy about.
Cui Mingzhi finished his toast, drank the milk, and put the cup into the sink. He looked at the time. It was 7:15. He was about to leave for school.
He walked to the door and then turned back to the living room, where a paper box was placed on the table. He lifted the lid and saw three silkworms lying in the box. They had eaten all the mulberry leaves and were looking up blankly.
Cui Mingzhi sighed. He returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were only two mulberry leaves left in the plastic bag. He picked up the mulberry leaves and threw them into the paper box. The silkworms immediately climbed up greedily and began to nibble on them.
This mulberry leaf is only enough for half a day.
How long can the silkworms stay hungry? He thought, there are no mulberry trees nearby.
He looked at the clock. It was 7:20. He had to leave for school.
During the break, his classmates gathered around him again to discuss games passionately, but he had no intention of joining in the discussion and just made some "hmm" and "ah" noises to agree with them.
"Choi Ming-chi, are you worried about something?" a classmate asked him. As soon as he said this, he was stopped by other classmates. Someone whispered that because Choi Ming-chi's family went on a trip, they left him alone.
"That's too much." The classmate was indignant, and the other students were also indignant. Cui Mingzhi ignored them and just let himself go in a daze.
At the end of the third class, he asked his classmates: "Do we have mulberry leaves in our school?"
"Mulberry trees? We don't have any in our school."
Cui Mingzhi scratched his head and sighed. Where can I get mulberry leaves?
"What do you want mulberry leaves for?"
"My brother's silkworms. They're not here, so I have to help take care of them."
His classmates looked at him as if he were Cinderella, "Cui Mingzhi, you are so miserable."
"Go, go, go, think of a solution for me."
Finally, his classmate Bai Lianlian told him that silkworms can be fed with lettuce leaves. "If there are no mulberry leaves, you can use lettuce leaves as a supplement."
OK, lettuce leaves then.
At least it's easier than mulberry leaves.
After school, he went to the market and bought a bag of lettuce. When he got home and opened the carton, he found that all the mulberry leaves were gone. The three silkworms looked up at the sky miserably, looking as if they were starving to death.
He tore off the lettuce leaves, wiped off the water and put them into the paper box, laying out the leaves one by one. The three silkworms lowered their heads to touch the leaves, but they did not eat them. After a while, the three heads raised up again, as if to protest Cui Mingzhi for giving them fake food.
"There are no mulberry leaves, only lettuce." Cui Mingzhi said to the three silkworms, "My three ancestors, you have to eat it whether you want to or not." He covered the paper box and went back to his room.
The next morning, Cui Mingzhi opened the paper box. The three silkworms looked up at the sky stubbornly, refusing to yield, and did not eat a single bite of the lettuce leaves.
During the break at school, Cui Mingzhi opened the web page on his mobile phone and started searching "How long will silkworms last before they starve to death?"
After searching, he found that many people who raise silkworms are worried about the lack of mulberry leaves. "Where can I find mulberry leaves? My silkworms are starving to death!" "Save my silkworms!" "Please give me mulberry leaves, please give me mulberry leaves!!" Such posts appeared one after another.
He scrolled through the webpage and soon found the answer: some silkworms would starve to death in two to three days, while others could survive for five days. The conclusion was certain: if you didn't want the silkworms to starve to death, you had to get some mulberry leaves.
But where the hell was he supposed to get mulberry leaves?
If this picky eater didn't have commercial value, it would have gone extinct long ago! Extinct!
In the afternoon physical education class, due to venue constraints, Class 1 and Class 2 attended together.
During the free time of warm-up activities, Yan Zhen came to him and asked him, "Cui Mingzhi, did you see anything strange when you left my house last time?"
"What?"
Yan Zhen frowned slightly, as if thinking about how to describe it, and then he said, "Jelly."
"What?"
"Yes, jelly, something like jelly." Yan Zhen gestured, "About this size."
"...I don't remember you giving me jelly to eat."
"Oh." Yan Zhen responded, he muttered "That can't be eaten either" and left.
Speaking of which, his friend has been acting a little strange lately. But Cui Mingzhi is not in the mood to care about his friend right now. He is still thinking about the mulberry leaf problem.
"Mulberry leaves?" Yan Zhen turned around and said, "Why don't you just buy them online?"
Cui Mingzhi clapped his hands. Why didn't he think of that? Nowadays, shopping websites have everything.
But how did Yan Zhen know that he needed mulberry leaves? Cui Mingzhi blinked, probably a classmate told him.
He is indeed a reliable brother.
Cui Mingzhi quickly placed an order on Taobao. He chose a store with good reviews and bought two large bags, which would at least provide food for the silkworms for the next few weeks.
He returned home in the evening. He opened the paper box and saw three silkworms holding their heads high, refusing to yield. They did not even touch the lettuce leaves, vowing to fight to the end.
"Three ancestors, please have a bite."
The three silkworms hold their heads high and uphold their integrity.
Cui Mingzhi closed the paper cover and went online to check again "How long does it take for silkworms to starve to death?" The mainstream answer online was still that they can starve to death in as little as three days.
Now these three have been hungry for two days.
Tomorrow, just tomorrow, the mulberry leaves will arrive.
The delivery logistics on the phone showed that it had been collected. Cui Mingzhi sighed and hoped that everything would go well tomorrow.
But God seemed to be against him.
During the break on the third day, Cui Mingzhi stared at the logistics information in amazement. The mulberry leaves he ordered were returned. He had to call the courier anxiously, and the courier replied that the courier order was wrong and the entire batch of goods had to be returned and re-sent. This meant that his mulberry leaves would arrive on the fourth day.
"This won't work!!!" Cui Mingzhi shouted, "My silkworms have been hungry for almost three days!!"
"It doesn't matter if you go hungry for another day."
"What's the matter?"
"If you starve to death, I'll compensate you. It's just three silkworms. How much money can they be worth?"
Cui Mingzhi was so angry that he wanted to curse at that moment. The courier hung up the phone. He turned around in a circle in a hurry. The silkworms couldn't starve any longer. He had to get mulberry leaves.
After asking many classmates, Cui Mingzhi finally got some information. His classmate told him that there was a mulberry tree on the open-air terrace of Room 102, Building 36 in the neighborhood next door.
"If you want to pick them, you have to be careful. This family is very fierce. Once someone secretly picked mulberry leaves from their house and was chased and scolded by the family."
Even if that family was a scourge, Cui Mingzhi had to go there. The result was just as his classmates had said, that family was indeed very scary.
An old lady and an old man were chasing him with a cane while continuously attacking him mentally. They looked to be in their sixties or seventies, so how could they run so fast?
Because he was being chased so quickly, he fell down, but at least he was young and managed to escape the community flexibly. His knees were scraped, but he harvested a small bag of mulberry leaves, which could at least keep the three silkworms alive until tomorrow.
When he got home, he opened the paper box. The three silkworms still held their heads high like martyrs. He wiped the mulberry leaves clean and put them in the box. As soon as the three silkworms smelled the mulberry leaves, they immediately started to chew them.
They look delicious.
They might have starved to death.
He looked at them, and an uncontrollable sadness came to his heart, and the silkworms became a little blurry. He wiped his eyes, but tears dripped down drop by drop.
"Dad..." He murmured, covering his face with his hands and sobbing silently.
The doorbell rang shrilly.
Cui Mingzhi opened the door and Yan Zhenzhen was standing at the door.
He said, "I think I should go to your house to take a look. Have you seen that fruit..." Yan Zhen looked at him in surprise, "Are you crying?"
Cui Mingzhi turned his face away, but tears still fell unstoppably.
"what happened?"
Cui Mingzhi closed his eyes, trying to hold back his tears. He took a breath and said, "Yan Zhen, I want to tell you something."
"What?"
"Maybe it sounds ridiculous to you."
"explain."
"Actually, my dad, my stepmother, and that kid Zhang Yiyang have been missing for four days."
Yan Zhen didn't seem surprised. He just stared at him with his dark eyes. "Then what? Tell me in detail."
"Four days ago, the three of them were at home, but I heard them talking outside ." Cui Mingzhi wiped his eyes, "Then I heard a bang, and then there was no sound outside."
“…”
"I opened the door and all three of them were gone. But the money, clothes, and documents were all in the house. They just disappeared out of thin air!"
"I see. After the three of them disappeared, was there a puddle of water on the floor?"
Cui Mingzhi looked at him in surprise: "Oh, yes, it seems that my stepmother was cleaning the kitchen before she disappeared. How do you know? The point I want to say is later." He took a breath again, "I think the three of them turned into silkworms!!!"
"ah?"
"It's hard to believe, but I can only tell you this," Cui Mingzhi said distressedly, "They disappeared, and suddenly there were three more silkworms in the house. I can only conclude that the three of them turned into silkworms!"
"..." Cui Mingzhi felt that Yan Zhen's expression was as if he was looking at an idiot, but he didn't mind because this conclusion was indeed hard to accept. "They really turned into silkworms!"
"Oh, what I want to ask is, where is the puddle of water on the ground that day?"
"I mopped the floor and flushed the dirty water down the drain." Cui Mingzhi repeated, "Why do you keep changing the subject? What should I do now? The three of my family have turned into silkworms!!!"
Yan Zhen stared at him with an idiotic look, and then he said, "Say it again, what did you do with the dirty water?"
“It went down the drain.”
