NR | Chapter 11

Back in the car, the chill that had seeped into me seemed to be swept away at once by the air-conditioning and heater. He Yu had already been woken up by our noise, but he clearly didn’t have any grumpiness after being disturbed. Instead, he stared curiously at Lu Ayao, who had just gotten into the car.

Tian Yuqing had said he was going to ask for help, but in the end he had only brought Lu Ayao. After we got in, the convoy turned around and got back on the highway, and my mood was pretty complicated. There was no way I was going to sleep now. Whatever Lu Ayao had just said had only brought me more mysteries.

He Yu kept shooting me looks several times. He wanted to start a conversation with me, but Lu Ayao was also in the car, and his expression was grim. He Yu was very wary of him and didn’t dare say too much.

I rolled the copper coin in my fingers, turning it over and over. After thinking about it for a long time, I decided to ask first. “What did you mean by what you just said? What does whether you’re involved in this have to do with me? We don’t seem to know each other.”

Actually, even if I had seen him before, I probably wouldn’t remember. There were so many people who came to my house to visit during New Year’s in the past. I used to hide in Fourth Brother’s shop and watch TV just to avoid socializing. Who could remember all these old, useless, rotten little things.

Lu Ayao glanced at me, then shifted into a more comfortable position. He said, “Don’t overthink it. You don’t know me, and you’ve never seen me. It’s just that I know you unilaterally. The Tian family knows about this too, so tell me, how did that brat Tian Yuqing trick you into getting on the car?”

He knows me?

I had never realized I was that well known. How could he know me? Was it at school? Hard to say. But someone from his kind of family would still go to school like an ordinary student?

So I said half in doubt, “He told me my Fourth Brother ran into some trouble in Gansu, and that my Fourth Brother wanted me to go help. Do you know what happened to my Fourth Brother?”

Lu Ayao laughed. “Your Fourth Brother didn’t have anything happen to him, and he didn’t need you to help with any troublesome matter either. Tian Yuqing just made up such a simple lie and tricked you into coming. That guy is clever, not to be underestimated, but if your Fourth Brother knew, he’d be jumping up and down.”

“How do you know Tian Yuqing was lying to me?” I asked.

Judging from Lu Ayao’s attitude toward Tian Xiao in the beginning, their family probably didn’t have much contact with the Tian family either. But why was he so certain there was no problem on the Gansu side?

Lu Ayao burst out laughing. “I guessed.”

That left me speechless. My throat felt clogged, and I couldn’t get a word out.

But Lu Ayao soon said, “Relax. You can trust me all you want. I’d never hurt you. If you can’t sleep, I’ve got a story I can tell you.”

The convoy got onto the Lianhuo Highway. As the sky gradually brightened, a light rain started falling in the air, but our speed didn’t slow down because of it. He Yu and I, on the other hand, had completely lost any sleepiness, because before we reached the first service area, Lu Ayao told me about an experience the Lu family had in the 1970s.

The Lu family branches were scattered, which was a distinctive trait of their household. The collateral and direct lines had very little contact.

Lu Ayao’s granny, Lu Xiaosu, had a very open way of thinking. She should probably be counted among China’s first batch of single-leaning women. From a young age, she traveled alone all over the country, and she had real skill, so I thought she should count as the most mysterious woman among the Five Masters[[1]].

My maternal grandfather had also said that there had been a period when the Five Masters were very famous. In truth, it had little to do with those men directly. It was largely because of the “yin granny” Lu Xiaosu. That woman was mysterious enough, and capable enough.

My grandfather said Lu Xiaosu was the kind of woman who was like a kite. Even if a man accumulated eight lifetimes’ worth of virtue and got the chance to grab her string, at most he could only make her turn back and look once.

Lu Ayao had been picked up by Lu Xiaosu at a train station and taken back to Suzhou. He was already two years old then. No one knew whether he had been abducted or had simply gotten lost and wandered around the station. In any case, his biological parents were basically impossible to find. He didn’t go into detail about this, and I didn’t ask.

At first, Lu Xiaosu had thought it was simple. She hadn’t expected that a child would be so hard to raise. Very quickly, she discovered a serious problem. She could eat anything herself, but making a two-year-old child go hungry and follow her around living off the northwest wind was far too cruel.

Her business depended entirely on her mood too, so she hadn’t saved much money. When Lu Xiaosu was young, she had even paid out of her own pocket to prepare straw mats for those who had starved to death by the roadside. Then she would find a good burial site, wrap the rotting corpses one by one in the straw mats, carry them over, and bury them together.

So the little savings she had scraped together over two years were completely spent in less than a week.

Lu Ayao pulled his pajama collar tighter. “That period was pretty hard. In winter, we could only drink water to fill our stomachs. The money went too fast, and before long we couldn’t even afford a single bag of rice.”

“Until a guest came to the house. That person carried three bags of rice over. He looked like he had already walked a very long way. Granny was very grateful and wanted to keep him for a drink of water, but after putting down the rice, he wiped the sweat off and left.”

I suddenly had an inexplicable premonition.

Then I saw Lu Ayao turn back to look at me. “That person was your maternal grandfather.”

My grandfather was kind and easygoing. He didn’t have the Tian family’s scheming, nor the Tan family’s obsession with power, and he also lacked the Liu family’s ruthlessness. He was steady, honest, and down to earth in everything he did, so the other four families basically all went to him for help. But I never expected that even the elusive “yin granny” had kept in touch with him all along.

Lu Ayao said, “The Lu family never owed anyone anything. Only this time.”

He fished out two more copper coins from his pocket and motioned for me to hold out my hand. I spread out my palm, and he tossed the coins down, then said with a smile, “Add in the one from earlier. Three bags of rice in exchange for me accompanying you on three stretches of road. I’ll keep you safe and charge nothing.”

I was still trying to make sense of what he said when He Yu suddenly slapped me on the arm. He neatly helped me stuff those copper coins into my pocket and put them away. Then he muttered, “What are you spacing out for? Who cares if it’s true or not, just take it already. What a great opportunity.”

Lu Ayao was still there at the time, so I was too embarrassed to ask He Yu. Later, when we reached the service area, he told me that when the Lu family gave copper coins, it meant they had taken the job. From that moment on, no matter what happened, Lu Ayao would put my safety first.

I thought to myself, making it so mysterious, isn’t he just a bodyguard?

He Yu was suddenly much more relaxed. He seemed to trust Lu Ayao a great deal. “With him here, this trip will be so much easier. You haven’t seen what the Lu family can do. Have you ever heard the saying from the trade? ‘To set the burial site, one should look to the road of the Nine Springs[[2]].’”

I had heard that a lot before. It was actually a rhyming verse that circulated among clients who had hired people to read houses and yards before the founding of the country. Someone had even turned it into a tune. I was very familiar with the folk version:

Seek the dragon, explore the tomb, search for waters to stay or go,

set the pole to watch the sand, set the direction to point to heaven,

Golden Lock, Jade Pass, walk between yin and yang,

to set the burial site, one should look to the road of Nine Springs[[2]].

But the folk version had been passed down from mouth to mouth, and with so many retellings, mistakes were inevitable. This version had once misled a large group of people into thinking that simply finding traces of water and planting a pole in the ground was enough to find a good grave site, or even detect a large tomb. But that wasn’t the case at all.

The original version I heard from my maternal grandfather was fundamentally different from the folk version. It was actually a rhyming verse that separately described the Five Masters’ unique skills.