Hearing singing in this environment?
The hairs on the fellow villager's body stood up immediately.
Not to mention him, Lin Fan also felt a little scared.
But when she saw Sister Xu take out the compass, look at it for a while, and shake her head at her and John Woo, she knew it was not about that.
Since it's not that, she isn't so scared anymore.
From here on, Lin Fan took the lead and led a few people to follow the sound.
Before long, other people also heard the singing, there were men and women, old and young, quite a variety.
Lin Fan couldn't tell the direction, so he just followed the sound. After turning several turns, the scene in front of him suddenly became bright. After another turn, a group of people came into view.
They sat and stood, gathered and dispersed naturally in groups of three or five.
Some elderly people were holding their children while doing handicrafts, some were chatting, young people were carrying things and building shelves, and some children were dancing and singing around the fire...
Everything seemed comfortable and comfortable, warm and happy.
If we ignore the current environment...
"Dad! Mom!" The fellow villager recognized the familiar figures in the crowd and rushed over.
Lin Fan exchanged a quick glance with Sister Xu and John Woo before following suit.
"Son? Why are you back?" When the old lady saw her son rushing towards her, her already smiling face smiled even wider.
"Mom, why are you here?" The fellow held his mother's warm hand, and then looked at the old couple who were fine from head to toe, and finally breathed a sigh of relief. "Where's the child?"
"Look, they're playing over there." The old man nodded towards the fire.
When the fellow villager turned around, he saw his son sitting on the ground, playing something. He quickly walked over and hugged him in his arms.
"What are you doing..." The fellow looked at the harmonious yet weird scene in front of him, and for a moment he didn't know where to start.
Lin Fan looked at the scene before him and felt a strange sensation. He whispered to Wu Yusen, "If we ignore their clothes and replace them with animal skins, would this scene resemble..."
It's like a scene from a primitive tribe, so lifelike.
Except for the parents of their fellow villager, everyone else acted as if they didn't see them coming. They maintained their previous expressions and continued doing what they were doing.
John Woo had already seen Ma Baobao using a rope to secure the wooden frame, and after making sure that everyone else was safe, he walked over.
Even when he walked right up to her, Ma Baobao was still focused on the task at hand and didn't react at all.
Helpless, Wu Yusen could only call him. "Baby Ma?"
Ma Baobao looked up at the strangers in front of him, his eyes full of confusion, "Who are you..."
"We are from the police station. Your company reported you missing, so we came to investigate." John Woo used the same excuse again.
"Lost contact?" Ma Baobao was stunned for a moment, then quickly smiled. "No, no, how could I be lost? I'm fine here, and my work is going smoothly. I don't know how well it's going. Don't worry."
After saying that, he started tying the wood in his hand.
Lin Fan frowned slightly, thought for a moment, and asked, "Isn't your work expected to be completed in four months? How far along are you now? Can you finish it on time?"
"Sure," Ma Baobao continued working, looking up and smiling, "It's almost done. The new line has been basically installed and is being connected these days. It's time for some final debugging and testing, which should take less than two weeks."
Lin Fan breathed a sigh of relief.
Seeing how seriously he was working, she almost thought the job he was talking about was tying wooden frames.
But then again, why was he, a foreigner repairing pipelines, going underground with a bunch of old men and women to tie wooden frames?
Lin Fan couldn't put it into words, but he always felt a strong sense of weirdness.
"You had an ex-girlfriend, do you remember her?" Sister Xu decided to complete the task first.
Hearing this, Ma Baobao finally stopped what he was doing, stood up, and showed a helpless expression. "What happened to her? Did she harass the neighbors? Or did she call the police?"
As if suddenly realizing something, his eyes widened. "Could it be that she called the police to look for me? You lied to me and said it was the company that was looking for me? I was saying, why would someone from our company suddenly look for me? Clearly, the boss wanted me to stay away from him before."
Lin Fan and John Woo looked at each other.
There is no problem with memory and logical ability.
"No, your ex-girlfriend has passed away." Sister Xu replied coldly.
Ma Baobao didn't expect this answer. He was stunned at first, then showed an angry expression, "What are you talking about? Don't say such things!"
"Really? Your ex-girlfriend has been dead for more than three months." John Woo took out a screenshot of the news on his mobile phone.
When he knew that there was no signal here, he made preparations in advance.
Ma Baobao read the news carefully, his brows furrowed so tightly that they could kill a mosquito.
Wu Yusen snatched the phone from his hand and asked the question. "Can you tell us why you didn't answer her call? This is related to the cause of her death. Please answer truthfully."
Ma Baobao was stunned, his eyes glazed over. "Did I kill her because I didn't answer the phone?"
He shook his head slowly, muttering, "I didn't expect it, I didn't want to, I didn't know..."
"Baby Horse!"
As soon as Sister Xu's voice came out, Ma Baobao suddenly woke up. His expression was filled with guilt, sadness, helplessness and regret. He didn't look very well.
"She's a rather paranoid person by nature." Ma Baobao sighed, looking at the burning bonfire and the singing and dancing children. "I tried to adapt, but it was so difficult to adjust. So I decided to just give up and break up. It's better than getting married and becoming a couple with unhappy spouses. We'd both be unhappy, and then we'd have to get divorced, which would hurt the children."
Lin Fan listened quietly and felt that Ma Baobao was not the scumbag she had imagined.
If it were her, she might make the same decision.
"But I told you, she's a paranoid person..." Ma Baobao lowered his head, tears flickering in his eyes, as if he was missing someone, "so this breakup didn't go smoothly."
"I explained the reason to her in detail, saying it would be good for both of us, but she found it hard to accept. She said she would change, but her behavior became more and more paranoid. I simply couldn't stand it," said Ma Baobao, shaking her head.
Lin Fan disagreed with this paragraph.
Breaking up is definitely good for Ma Baobao, but his ex-girlfriend obviously feels bad and is unwilling to let go.
But there's no need to say that.
"So, after I'd said everything I needed to say and realized I couldn't communicate properly with her, I just moved out," Ma Baobao sighed. "She couldn't find me, so she went to the company to keep watch over me, which caused a lot of trouble at work. My boss almost fired me."
"Just then, there was this outsourcing job available, so I volunteered." He smiled helplessly. "But after she found out I'd left, she stopped coming to the company. She called me every day, saying the same old things. I got so annoyed that I just blacklisted her."
...This cause and effect is simply amazing.
"So, on the day she had the accident, all the text messages and phone calls she sent were because you blacklisted her and didn't know the situation, so you didn't receive any of them? It wasn't that you saw her threatening messages and deliberately ignored her?" Lin Fan couldn't express his feelings and could only sigh that it was fate.
Ma Baobao was stunned when he heard the date. "That day? No! I blocked her for about a week, then unblocked her. But I haven't heard from her since, so I thought she'd figured it out..."
Ma Baobao was afraid that they wouldn't believe him, so he took out his cell phone and showed it to them.
The ex-girlfriend’s phone number was not on the blacklist, but her last call record was a week before the incident.
He sighed deeply, drowning in guilt towards his ex-girlfriend.
Lin Fan quickly searched through the dates of Ma Baobao's business trip. It was a week later, and three days later, before the date of his ex-girlfriend's accident. Calculating the dates, she was no longer on the blacklist when the accident happened.
Ma Baobao didn't look like he was lying. Besides, if he was on the blacklist, his responsibility would be less than if he wasn't, so there was no need for him to lie.
In other words, he blocked his ex-girlfriend's number when the signal was normal, which resulted in him not being able to receive calls.
When I released her number again later, the signal was not connected and I still couldn't get through.
Although if there had been no signal problem at the time, Ma Baobao might still have blocked the person because of the phone harassment, but at least when his ex-girlfriend got into trouble, it was not because of his subjective will to refuse to answer the call, but because of the poor signal.
Lin Fan felt better. "Then you haven't known that the signal here can't connect to the outside world?"
"Can't connect?" Ma Baobao was stunned. "How is that possible? We're here to repair the network, how could we not be able to connect? Isn't the signal that bad?"
He showed them his cell phone with some displeasure.
Lin Fan and the other two leaned over to take a look. They had no idea what this guy was looking at. The signal position on his phone was a big red cross. Couldn't he see it?
Watching Ma Baobao calmly put his phone away, Lin Fan stole a glance at John Woo and Sister Xu.
How do we proceed from here?