short series

Deep Alley in the Small Town

share time: 2026-03-01 06:06:59

Guixu Bookstore in Wuzhen's deep alley has been open for twenty years, run by Lin Qiutang—she always wears a dark blue cheongsam and never smiles. Recent graduate Gu Xiaoyang comes to find his mother, who has been missing for ten years. On the day he rents the bookstore's attic, he finds half an old photo on the windowsill: his mother and Lin Qiutang stand together in front of the store, with a 1999 calendar in the background. When he presses Lin about the past, she suddenly smashes a teacup and yells, "Your mom is long dead." But that night, Xiaoyang sees Lin sneaking into the abandoned house at the alley's end, where the piano piece *Für Elise*—taught by his mother—drifts out. Meanwhile, old residents warn him, "Don't touch Lin's past." Then he finds a blood-stained diary in the bookstore's夹层, with the last line: "Winter 1999, I hid her in the abandoned house's cellar..."

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