NR | Chapter 14

Tian Yuqing opened the car door and tossed me a black backpack from Lao Gen’s hands. “Put the jade casket away. No matter where you go, you have to keep it with you. If you think the time on the road is too boring, you can also try cracking it to pass the time.”

I packed the jade casket away, slung the backpack over my shoulder, and got out of the car. He Yu was already standing in front of the second car waiting for me. He smiled and came over. “Buddy, I didn’t know you were this ruthless. How did it go? From the looks of you, you must’ve squeezed a lot out of Tian Yuqing, right?”

On the surface, He Yu looked like the most innocent one of all. I actually felt he didn’t care what the truth of this trip was. He was just carrying out an ordinary assignment, and he treated every detail along the way with a whatever attitude. He was probably younger than me, but it was hard to say whether he had been through more than I had.

“It’s fine, you don’t need to be too nervous. Think of it as a rare adventure. At most we’ll stay there for a month, and when we get out we can still grab a hot pot meal. It definitely won’t delay you going back to school.” He Yu comforted me in a carefree way.

To be honest, his words really did soothe me a little.

If I was going to make friends in this strange team, the only one I could trust was He Yu. Not just because he was more honest, but because I realized he was clean, so clean that he didn’t fit in with this group at all.

The night before, I had first gone up against those big shots, then gotten trapped in a ghostly maze, and my body and mind had both taken a heavy beating. By the time I got on the car, I fell asleep not long after.

I slept extremely soundly, from afternoon all the way until the next day’s faint dawn light. I perfectly missed the service area and two meals. The moment I woke up, my stomach started rumbling. Luo Ayao, surprisingly, hadn’t slept at all. Instead, he was looking out the window with a fully alert expression.

“Do you always sleep like that?” he asked out of nowhere.

I didn’t have any weird sleeping habits. I didn’t kick people, steal blankets, or snore. Maybe I ground my teeth a little now and then, but it was usually very quiet. Could it be that I had really been too exhausted this time and done something to disturb him?

I felt a little embarrassed and was just about to apologize when I saw Luo Ayao turn back to me. With one hand he grabbed the backpack from the floor, picked out a few pieces of bread and some sausages, and tossed them to me. “Sleeping so dead to the world isn’t good.”

I tore open the bread bag. “This guy shouldn’t be under anyone’s control.”

Luo Ayao glanced at me, smiled a little, then turned back to look out the window.

I instantly felt like I had been looked down on. The expression on his face was even more insulting than if he had cursed me out.

He Yu was dozing in the back seat with the notebook in his arms. I bit down on the bread and helped him recline the seat, then set the notebook and fountain pen he was holding in his arms to one side. Looking at that notebook, I felt a little strange. Why was this guy so precious about it? Ever since I met him, I had never seen that notebook leave his hands.

“That punk surnamed He is a direct descendant of the old Wenbi Lu school. The old Wenbi Lu school recorded every strange and unusual thing they ever saw in their notebooks. They treated those records like priceless treasure, so of course they had to carry them on them every day,” Luo Ayao said.

I shot him a look. “I know you know a lot, thanks for the lesson, but I’m not that curious.”

After that, I stopped paying Luo Ayao any attention and hurriedly used the water to wash down the bread in a few bites. After wiping my hands with a wet wipe, I opened the black backpack, took out the jade casket glowing with a pale white light, and started studying its complicated lock core.

The jade casket had two lock cores, one above and one below, like a jiu lian huan lock[[1]]. The front end was completely embedded into the two lock cores. This was my first time seeing a design like this. My preliminary guess was that I would probably have to remove the entire lock from the lock core before I could use the method for solving a jiu lian huan to crack the jade casket.

I took the thin wire from the flat case again and probed into the upper lock core. As I fiddled with the wire, I closed my eyes and listened for sounds. That would help me understand the mechanism inside the lock core. If I could fully imagine how the mechanism worked, I should be able to find a way.

After pressing my ear against the jade casket for ten minutes, I straightened up and shook my head. My brain felt like a mess. Those sounds collided with one another like someone was smashing countless stone walls with my head. The wire in my hand had reached its limit, but it still hadn’t found the bottom.

How many layers of mechanism were there in this thing?

I realized that cracking this casket might really not be something that could be done in a day or two. Tian Yuqing had not been exaggerating after all. The complexity of this casket was completely beyond my imagination.

“Hear anything?” Luo Ayao asked.

I took a deep breath and organized my thoughts. “It’s extremely complicated. I can feel every layer of rolling iron beads, like a modern combination safe. Those iron beads act like the code, but I don’t know how they should be arranged, or what the pattern is. My wire is too short. I need to replace it with a new one.”

Luo Ayao didn’t react much. He said, “No need to rush. You’re smart. Maybe by the time we get to Gansu, you’ll have figured something out.”

Hearing how certain he sounded, the tension in my chest slowly eased. I settled down and put the jade casket back into the backpack. Even though the highway was already smooth enough, there was still too much noise for me. My hearing hadn’t reached that exceptional level yet.

After eating and drinking my fill, and with a long stretch of road still ahead of us, I wrapped my clothes around me and closed my eyes again. For me, sleeping was the greatest joy in life.

When I woke again, I didn’t know how many hours had passed, but the scenery around us was completely different. The convoy had left the highway and gotten onto a national road. Outside the window, low buildings had started to appear, along with mountain ranges in the distance wearing patches of scattered white snow.

It should have been a town. The road signs and the store information along the roadside made me realize that we had reached somewhere in Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, but I wasn’t sure of the exact location, because while I was asleep, the convoy had uniformly turned off the navigation, and all the vehicles were following the first car completely.

The convoy moved along the road through the mountains, and the scenery around us kept changing. Through the car window, I could even see endless snow mountains appearing on the horizon. The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away, as the saying goes, and I had no idea how far away they really were.

“Seriously, how much longer are we going to keep winding around like this? This is killing me. If we keep circling like this, I’m going to throw up.” He Yu opened the window and leaned his head against it to get some air.

The mountain roads were making my own head spin too, so I leaned over the back seat and pressed myself against He Yu to look out the window and get some air. That tiny bit of fresh air did have some effect on the two of us.

Seeing us crowded into the same window, the driver smiled and said, “Hang in there a little longer, we’ll be there soon.”

Sure enough, right after he said that, I saw a row of low white houses appear halfway up the mountain. There were already many cars parked in the courtyard. Judging by the license plates, they should all have been tourist vehicles from different places, stopping here to resupply and rest.

The convoy stopped. Tian Yuqing got out and handed the owner a cigarette, and the owner immediately broke into a beaming smile and waved us toward the back courtyard to park. As I passed the two of them, I heard them chatting in the local dialect about something. Anyway, I didn’t understand a single word.

Luo Ayao started packing up his bag in the front seat. As soon as the car came to a stop in the back courtyard, he got out wearing his pajamas and carrying his backpack. He Yu and I also started gathering our things. We silently zipped up our down jackets, picked up our luggage, and jumped out of the car.

“This place is a little out of the way, Xiao Gan. When you sleep tonight, remember to lock the doors and windows, or you might get dragged off by ghosts.” He Yu hooked an arm around my neck and started telling all kinds of ghost stories to scare me.

I rolled my eyes at him and shoved him away. “My skin’s thick and my flesh is rough, female ghosts won’t be interested. Female ghosts prefer your delicate-skin type more. Don’t worry, I’ll stay far, far away and won’t disturb you guys.”

“How the hell are you this bold? You’re gonna dump me and run, and you still call yourself my brother?” He Yu slapped me, and I slapped him right back without backing down. Then the two of us wrestled while heading upstairs, making the guys who were organizing the gear crack up.

That damn guy had known how to hold back when we weren’t familiar with each other a few days ago, but once we got close, he turned into a crazed mule.