Chapter 20 Evil God Independent of Other Civilizations

Seeing this, I could basically understand what had happened to Dong Can in the valley. No matter what the so-called secret was, the reason why Dong Can finally lost hope must have been because he fell in love with a woman.

For the Zhang family, it seemed difficult to understand the workings of love. With regards to Little Brother, I had been with him for so long but had yet to see him show any of the desires people should normally have.

According to common sense, no matter how holy a person was, they would never be so abstinent unless they were drugged. Even if he liked to do something as ordinary as planting flowers, enjoying himself was also a kind of desire. But what Little Brother liked to do most was be in a daze. That is to say, if he had a desire, his desire would be to sit still.

According to his usual behavior, it seemed that he was never interested in any women, didn’t do anything like masturbation, wasn’t particularly concerned about food, and didn’t show any interest in any information.

Of course, even if he was interested, he wouldn’t show it. At this time, I suddenly had a very vicious thought—if there was a chance to see him again, I would have to feed him some big Spanish flies (1), although I didn’t know if his constitution made him immune to them.

Based on what I had seen, I always felt that those from the Zhang family seemed to be the kind of people who were extremely rigid and didn’t show their feelings, but Dong Can broke my assumptions.

I know that only the disillusionment of love can make such a well-trained, thoughtful, and extraordinarily skilled man discouraged by the outside world. And the fate of this woman must have been very disappointing.

I couldn’t help but think of Fatty. He was a person who was very good at handling pain. Although happiness and sadness were only two emotions, they couldn’t be sold for money. But people like Fatty also had difficulties, so it was no wonder that the Zhang family had their own troubles.

I think what happened was that Dong Can fell in love with a local girl during his stay in Kangbaluo, but she died in an accident or something else happened to her. Although Dong Can solved the village’s problem, he lost his reason for staying there.

As it turned out, the plot of third-rate adventure movies shown on TV at eight o’clock was very common in real life.

**

Poker-face found that the grout poured into the gap between the fixed stones of that room was actually concrete.

This was a kind of mud-like concrete that was extremely hard and had a very fast setting speed, especially in such a cold place. It was important to note, however, that no matter how fast it condensed, it couldn’t bypass the process of water turning into ice, so these stone walls had to be kept warm before they could be sealed.

How could such a mountain village use concrete to seal its walls?

Poker-face’s initial judgment was that there was something off about this place, but everything so far made him feel that this might not be the case so he directly asked the leader why there was concrete here.

The leader’s answer was very complicated and involved a very important thing, but in order to keep the narrative smooth, I’ll put it aside for now.

Next, Poker-face asked about the girl again since he felt that everything should be connected to each other.

After asking several more times, the leader finally told him that the girl was the woman Dong Can fell in love with. The reason why Dong Can wanted to stay was to save her, but he failed in the end.

When I got to this part, I had been in the lama temple for seven days. After days of reading, analyzing, and sorting, I was quite tired and still wasn’t used to the food in the temple. At this point, I think I reached my limit.

The environment here was pleasant for me. Although the cold at Motuo made it almost impossible for me to go outdoors, the warm barrier formed by the charcoal stove and felt made the room feel very comfortable. I was also accustomed to the strange smell of the quilts here and slept very comfortably.

If it had been before, I would have found a way to go down the mountain at this time to eat something different since eating butter zanba (2) every day was really beyond what my stomach could handle.

But I had experienced so many things before that I would never leave something unfinished. This was because I knew that even if I left for only one minute, there may be countless changes. But as long as I was here, it was entirely possible to control some of those changes.

In this world, if there are some secrets that can’t be known, then even if these things are on your desk, you have to believe that there are countless eyes waiting for you to leave your desk, even if it’s only for a second.

So, I asked my man to find a way down the mountain to buy some vegetables and flour and then find a Han cook and bring a pot back to the lama temple.

Because the food was very different, I asked the cook to make some bean rice for me at first, and then I secretly asked him to put some bacon in there.

I didn’t look at the information again for a while. I went to pick it up and read it several times, but I immediately felt very tired every time I did. Since I had read too much initially, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

Old Lama had become a good friend of mine during this period and was also very interested in what I was looking at, so I often discussed some details with him. During that time, tourists would come from all over the country, and he would often go out to meet them at the temple gate. Since I didn’t come out all the time and didn’t know some of the guests, he was responsible for introducing me.

The dining hall of the lama temple was the most crowded place. I saw strangers whom I had never seen before scattered throughout, and not all of them were from the temple. I brought my meal to the dining hall, planning to talk with someone while eating, but I noticed that something was wrong.

There were a lot of strange people in the temple, all from Hong Kong or Guangdong (it was easy to see their Cantonese flavor). They seemed to be a group of tourists, and they were all eating in the dining hall.

Old lama told me that this group of tourists arrived the third day after I showed up. That was the time when I was the craziest and almost always ate in my room so I didn’t know they had arrived.

This group of tourists from Hong Kong, called “Green Home”, was a team organized by a Hong Kong travel website. The webmaster of this website had a good relationship with Old Lama and seemed to have known him for a long time.

They were going to stay here until next month because they were going to a deeper place in the mountains to photograph the snowy scenery. But the best time hadn’t come yet, so they would rest here in the meantime.

This group of people came every year, and Chen Xuehan had been their guide several times.

I didn’t care too much about them and just greeted them a few times. Although my life could be more interesting now that there were some people who weren’t lamas here, I didn’t want to get caught up in too many other things along the way.

The arrival of these people made the dining hall seem so crowded that many lamas in the temple went to another room and used it as a temporary place to eat. I thought for a moment and figured it might be more meaningful to discuss the information I had compiled with Old Lama so I also went to that room to eat.

When I got there, something even more surprising happened. I saw that Old Lama wasn’t there, but there was a group of foreigners staying there.

Of course, there weren’t as many foreigners as there were in the Hong Kong group, but there were six or seven of them. It was probably to avert suspicion. None of the lamas was in the room. After all, the old lamas were very wise and had very high levels of cultivation. They spent a lot of time in meditation and couldn’t be in a noisy environment all the time.

I went to ask the other lamas what was going on and how this remote lama temple became a motel. It seemed like after I came here, so many people had also come along.

The lamas also said that they didn’t know. Even though the lama temple wasn’t isolated from the world, it was rare for people to crowd here except for a few fixed teams. It may be that I was more prosperous and my feng shui had changed here, so the population ended up thriving here.

I couldn’t figure out where Old Lama was, but under the current circumstances, he may have gone to the top of the lama temple. That was a place we had no right to enter.

I asked a young lama to convey my message to Old Lama and to tell him that I also wanted to participate in their discussion. After all, I was the one who had sorted out all the information. But the young lama told me that he would inform me when and where to meet Old Lama, as I couldn’t just go see him at any time.

Bored, I strolled through the various courtyards (3) in the temple. While trying to avoid places with people, I eventually walked to a special courtyard.

This lama temple had numerous courtyards. It may be an exaggeration, but the number was really very large, and they were all very small, with some as small as a well.

Before I went to this courtyard, I had already passed three or four courtyards where human voices could hardly be heard. In other words, this was a relatively deserted part of the temple.

There were some mottled Buddhist murals on the walls surrounding this courtyard. But since they were open-air murals, they had been worn down to such an extent that only a few colored sections remained, which made it impossible to make out the patterns on them. At this time, I saw a figure from behind. I was certain that this person was just sitting there in a daze since he didn’t really seem to be looking at anything.

But I didn’t dare go over, because I was too familiar with the back of that head. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I was in a trance or if I had entered another time and space.

This was Little Brother’s back. He was wearing a black snowsuit jacket and quietly sitting on the stone in the courtyard, surrounded by snow. He didn’t seem to be cold at all; instead, it was more like he was finally at peace with the world.

<Chapter 19><Table of Contents><Chapter 21>

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TN Notes:

(1) The insect is the source of the terpenoid cantharidin, a toxic blistering agent once used as an aphrodisiac (Wu Xie, you perv lol)

(2) Tibetan barley bread

(3) Characters were “天井”. It’s kind of like an atrium. Would look something like this.

****

Updated 12/9/2021

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