Chapter 3.21 I’m Coming (Extra)

I had just sent Tang Song on her way. To be honest, when I had been speaking with her, I was cold all over.

At the old house in my hometown, in the room where Uncle Three had lived before, I saw the money-suited playing cards (1) Uncle Three and I use to play when I was a child. At that time, I was really naïve and thought that the complicated game he had taught me was really just a game. I opened Uncle Three’s drawer this time and found that the old cards were lying in the innermost part, and the rubber bands had lost their elasticity. It was only then that I realized that something was wrong.

The Water Margin (2) characters on the card were very simple and rough, but after each character was arranged differently, their lines would form different intersections when viewed in the sun. The children’s song that Uncle Three taught me to recite in those days had the different arrangements and combinations of these cards.

Now that I thought about it, the song was too long for a kid of my age at the time. I was afraid I wouldn’t have remembered it so deeply if I hadn’t compiled all the “Water Margin” character’s stories.

This was Uncle Three’s earliest calculation. I figured he just wanted to have another backup by teaching me this song, but when I deciphered the meaning of it, I knew he had set a trap.

In fact, Poker-Face had prevented me from investigating for the same reason. For thousands of years, the Zhang family forged historical documents, falsified various clues in history, and pointed these clues to the ancient tombs they found. Most of these ancient tombs had become traps the Zhang family had set.

So much time had passed that after the Zhang family’s decline, the truth and falsity of these clues and traps became unrecognizable. With my skills and abilities, if I rushed to investigate myself, I’d soon disappear from the world.

Uncle Three had similarly understood this point after a lot of life and death experiences. Suffering from an invisible enemy that would never meet him head-on, he had only one fanatical thought at that time. He wanted to really face that invisible force once. As a result, he began thinking about how to set traps.

First, he needed a trap that couldn’t be broken or easily escaped from. The Zhang family used ancient tombs as their basic trap structures because large ancient tombs were often built by tens of thousands or even more than a hundred thousand people, and were firmly concealed and naturally divided.

I didn’t know how he found Seven Fingers, or whether Seven Fingers even existed at all and was just a smoke screen.

After that, Uncle Three set a total of three traps and placed the three things he thought were the most important in them. These three traps had a common feature, which was “hidden from the outside and confusing on the inside”. Once the trap was started, it was difficult to find your way outside the trap again, and you would be “separated” from the world. This made it almost impossible for the outside world to rescue you, so even if all the houses were torn down, it was still impossible to violently enter.

For example, if the entrance of a trap was designed like this, once you entered, it would be filled with 170 tons of cement, and the entrance would then be located in the center of a newly formed hundred-story building. After the cement had solidified, it would be impossible to go in from the original entrance unless the whole hundred-story building was blown up.

Such a trap was basically equal to entering and being unable to leave. The only hope was that hunters set aside an entrance for themselves so that they could harvest their prey.

There was no logic to the entrance and exit here. It was on the other side of a certain wall here, and the password for opening this wall was different every hour. Only I knew the equation.

If my calculations were correct, the last text Xiao Hua sent when he entered this space should mean that Black Glasses was already in place. He was responsible for opening the entrance from the outside, and should be behind one of the walls in this room now. I turned on the radio, used the static to look for his nearby cell signal. I found the wall, and then began knocking on it with a steel bar.

I was relieved when I heard the echo from behind the thick wall.

Acting was exhausting. It took me a long time to restart the trap, draw so many strange pictures on the wall, and replace the ring on Lu Sha’s body with a GPS. In order to convince others that Lu Sha had been trapped here for so many years, I specially found a corpse with long fingers.

I waited a long time before this prey appeared.

It even took a long time to get the gas lamps working here. When I first came here, they were all rotten, and it took a lot of energy to make the old gas valves work.

The first time I pulled Tang Song’s face, I knew she was wearing an excellent human skin mask. But she had cried too much, which was a big mistake when wearing that kind of mask, because it was difficult to restore the mask’s original density after it swelled up and dried.

I found this surprising, because crying showed her soft inner side.

She was an interesting girl. I didn’t think she would actually swallow the ring. There was also the scar on her hand, which she had gotten from training. When she subconsciously hid her hands, it also showed that she had really been panicking.

I laughed as I recalled everything. How could I possibly memorize that picture in three hours? It had taken me a long time to paint it. If they knew those pictures were different forms of my WeChat QR code, I bet they would cut me into thin strips and send me to Guangzhou.

But I really didn’t expect to meet a girl here, or that she had such a strong will to survive.

The internal collapse of such a tight organization had already started, and the Wang family’s internal structure seemed to be experiencing some long-held problems.

It was all because of the current era. It was so beautiful.

I could lay low and stay here for a few weeks, but the plan had already started. Plus, those who came out of Kangbaluo— those who collected fingers— should have already moved.

This was the first counterattack. I’m coming.

(End of the full text of the 2015 New Year’s Special)

<Extra 3.20> <Table of Contents><Vol 11 Chapter 1 Ten Years Later>

****

TN Notes:

(1) Thought to be the ancestor of both modern playing cards and mahjong tiles. These cards are also known as Water Margin cards. Too much info to put down, so here’s the wiki article

(2) It’s a 14th-century Chinese novel attributed to Shi Nai’an. Considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, the novel is written in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese. Also translated at “Outlaws of the Marsh”, “Tale of the Marshes”, or “All Men Are Brothers”. Info here

****

YESSSSSSSSSSSS WE’RE DONE WITH THESE NEW YEAR’S SPECIALS (for now). I know you’ve all been waiting for it, and next up is…. TEN YEARS LATER!!!! woohoo! Just a bit of warning. I’ll be making it Vol 11 on this site (I do what I want lol) but it’s really just a short story ~146 pages. To give you some scale, these 2 New Years Specials I did were ~200 pages combined. I might take tomorrow off so I can catch up on Reboot, might not. Depends on how many episodes I can get through tonight lol

Tiffany’s extra:

• Wu Xie’s Private Notes: Chapter 4 Er Yuehong