After the system ran, I took off with my family

Chapter 315 The murderer's miserable and hateful life

Amidst everyone's expressions of disbelief, Zhou Maowen sneered, then slowly opened his mouth and told everyone about his tragic and hateful life.

Before becoming wealthy, the Zhou family was just a farming family in a village near Luochuan County.

Zhou Maowen's father is the only son in the family. He has been working in the fields with Grandpa Zhou since he was a child. When he grew up, he would go to the town to find work during the slack season.

Zhou Maowen's mother was the only daughter of a poor scholar in the town, and she was very good at needlework.

After her parents passed away, she fell in love with Zhou's father, who was looking for a job in the town. They got married soon and lived a pretty good life.

Unexpected things happen in life. When Zhou Maowen was seven years old, his grandfather unfortunately contracted tuberculosis. The already tight family situation became even worse. Every penny had to be carefully calculated, and even food and clothing became a problem.

Over time, Zhou's mother, who had never suffered much, gradually could not bear such a hard life.

Finally, one day, Zhou's mother stayed at home on the pretext of feeling unwell. After everyone else went out, she used her slender hands, which were used to embroidering, to bring a bowl of sweet water mixed with croton powder and coaxed the seven-year-old Zhou Maowen to drink it.

While Zhou Maowen was squatting in the toilet, she picked up her bag that had been packed long ago and ran away secretly with him.

From then on, Zhou Maowen became a motherless child. He was blamed by his father for not taking good care of his wife. He was chased and bullied by the children in the village every day. His ears were filled with the gossip of the adults in the village, and he became more and more silent.

They all said that Zhou's mother was very charming, embroidered at home every day, and never went to the fields. It was obvious that she was not a good woman to live a good life, so it was no wonder that she ran away with someone else.

Half a year later, Zhou's father went to the county town to find a job and met an old man who had fainted on the roadside. Seeing that there was no one around, Zhou's father had to carry the old man into the city to find a doctor.

It was also a stroke of luck that this old man turned out to be the father of a wealthy businessman in Yunzhou City.

In order to repay Zhou's father for saving his father's life, the rich businessman not only gave Zhou's family one hundred taels of silver as a thank-you gift, but also brought Zhou's father to the provincial capital, let him work as a waiter in his own teahouse, and asked the owner of the teahouse to teach him personally.

Zhou's father was an ambitious man. He seized this opportunity and was able to stand on his own in just two years. He also hooked up with the owner of the grocery store next door and Liu, the daughter of Li Guiyuan.

After the two got married, Zhou's father resigned from his job as a wealthy businessman and returned to Luochuan County with his new wife. He used his savings to open a teahouse in the county town, and the Zhou family became the richest family in the village.

However, for the young Zhou Maowen, he was first abandoned by his mother, and half a year later his father left him and ran away to the provincial capital, and did not return for two years.

Now that he finally came back, he brought back a stepmother with him, and he began to resent Zhou's father.

His stepmother, Liu, was a sweet-faced person with a bitter heart. Not only did she torment him secretly, she also often falsely accused him of disrespecting his elders.

Zhou's father already had resentment towards his son, and after listening to Liu's instigation, he became even more displeased with Zhou Maowen.

In this situation, Liu was pregnant, and Zhou's father was so happy that he naturally had no time to distinguish the truth from the falsehood of Liu's words. Every time he did so, he would just whip Zhou Maowen with a whip and make him kneel in the main hall all night.

The old man of the Zhou family contracted tuberculosis and died more than half a year later. Only Old Mrs. Zhou in the family felt sorry for her grandson.

Unfortunately, Old Mrs. Zhou had no say in the family, and her own health was not good, so she could not protect him at all.

In this way, Zhou Maowen gradually became a nobody in the family and a punching bag for his stepmother.

Until one day, when Zhou Maowen was cleaning the room for his stepmother Liu, he accidentally caught a glimpse of the unfinished embroidered handkerchief on the table.

There was a lotus embroidered on the handkerchief, which was as beautiful and lifelike as the one embroidered by his mother who eloped.

He stared at the lotus on the embroidered handkerchief, his knuckles turning white from exertion and then slowly relaxing. Finally, he suppressed all his emotions and silently picked up the work at hand.

Half a month later, on a very ordinary night, Liu, who was seven months pregnant, went to the main room to get some water to drink.

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, he stepped on the slippery ground and fell heavily, with his bulging abdomen hitting the hardwood threshold hard.

Zhou Maowen slept soundly that night, and even the heart-wrenching cries outside the yard could not penetrate his dreams.

Later, perhaps because of the miscarriage, Liu's belly stopped moving, and Zhou's father had to pay attention to this son whom he disliked again.

A few years passed, and Zhou Maowen reached the age to get married and have children, and his father gradually let him take care of the trivial matters of the teahouse.

With the help of a matchmaker, his marriage was quickly settled. The woman he chose was Wu, the only daughter of the owner of the embroidery workshop opposite the teahouse.

After marriage, the two spent some sweet time together. However, one day at noon, when Zhou Maowen went to visit his wife at the embroidery workshop across the street, he saw his wife talking to a strange man.

At first, he didn't think much about it until he met the man again when he and his friends went to Yunlai Restaurant in the east of the city for dinner.

The man was standing at the stairs, wiping his chest with a handkerchief, while the waiter was at a loss and apologizing.

It seems that the waiter accidentally bumped into the man when serving tea and spilled the tea on him.

The private room Zhou Maowen booked was on the second floor. When he passed by the man, he casually glanced at him and suddenly froze in place.

He stared at the handkerchief in the man's hand. On the handkerchief, a red plum blossom was vivid, but the red color stung his eyes.

Yes, his wife's name was Hongmei, and she loved to embroider a red plum blossom on her handkerchief.

Looking at the familiar embroidery on the handkerchief, he clenched his fists, desperately resisted the urge to step forward and question her, and turned around and went upstairs with difficulty.

After eating a tasteless meal, he hurried back home, opened the cabinet where his wife kept her underwear, and looked at the stack of handkerchiefs in the cabinet that were so familiar to him, his face gloomy.

Zhou Maowen stood in front of the cabinet for a long time, and the expression on his face gradually changed from anger and hatred at the beginning to calmness.

The dark eyes were like a quiet deep pool, so cold that it was frightening.

Two months later, Wu suddenly caught a cold and took a long time to recover.

Zhou Maowen invited doctors from all the pharmacies in the county, and personally prepared medicine for Wu every day, taking care of her day and night.

His father-in-law, mother-in-law and neighbors all admired his deep affection, but no one noticed that he secretly mixed a medicinal ingredient that was incompatible with the symptoms into the medicine.

After enduring this for a month, Wu, who was only 19 years old, finally died.

Zhou Maowen stood in front of his wife's mourning hall without eating or drinking, as if he had aged several years. But when there was no one around, he always stared at his wife's coffin with hatred in his eyes.

Before the Mid-Autumn Festival of the second year after Wu's death, Zhou's father planned to accompany Liu back to her mother's home in the provincial capital to visit relatives.

Two days before departure, Zhou Maowen went out early in the morning and did not return until the evening.

Two days later, Zhou's father and Liu set out for the provincial capital. Halfway through the journey, a group of extremely vicious bandits appeared on the official road where bandits rarely appeared. While fleeing in panic, the two accidentally fell off a cliff and died.