I glanced at it. The white thing was very dirty, but some dust fell off when Kan Jian’s marbles hit it, revealing a bit of hidden color below. It appeared to be a logo, which was probably the brand of the paraglider. It was in German and looked a little familiar. I thought it over carefully and realized that the words were actually a German name. I had been in contact with this company before.
When I was in Tibet, I had profound dealings with the employees of this company. The company had actually acquired Qiu Dekao’s company and inherited many of his projects.
I was kind of surprised that this company was so interested in the Wu family. In fact, I appeared so frequently in Qiu Dekao’s company’s data that they even joked that there was a department dedicated to researching me. They interviewed me many times and offered me great terms, but I couldn’t say too many things or make money off of the things I did in the past.
However, the company’s previous research direction had something to do with Qiu Dekao’s plan in China. Uncle Three and the whole listening to thunder thing had nothing to do with them, so why did they suddenly appear here?
A lot of very complicated things must have happened in this forest back then. The scent markers for this path seemed to point to the Wu family’s special skills, and there was also that space under the tree and this parachute in the woods. Everything happened over a very long time span. The royal poinciana and tulou must’ve been built and planted at the same time (probably around 1890), the space under the tree was excavated after liberation, the skins on these trees may have been set up as path markers nearly five years ago, and then the parachute must have landed here around three years ago.
There were at least four groups of people who had explored or messed around in this forest for more than a hundred years. I decided to call the royal poinciana planters and tulou builders the “path marker expedition team”, because they planted the royal poinciana as path markers through the forest and then built a tulou over the entrance to the calling spring. They were actually marking the route to Thunder City.
When it came to this team, I could only make blind guesses. First of all, they did things on a large scale and had a lot of patience. It was extremely prudent, intelligent, and extremely patient of them to plant trees to mark the path. They wanted to hide Thunder City, but also leave some information for future generations.
In any case, they must’ve known that it would take fifty or sixty years before the next batch of people entered here with clues to find Thunder City. That was three generations. This “path marker expedition team” either had magnificent minds or an extreme purpose.
The second team was the Kuomintang spy troops who retreated into the mountains.
Because of the unique poisonous gas in the forest, this team hid underground and built a perfect underground bunker. Based on the amount of silver dollars we had seen, this team must’ve been quite large at that time. But we didn’t know what had happened to them. In addition, there were clear traces of holes being drilled into the team members’ heads. Did this spy force enter the forest at that time just to listen to the information in the thunder? Or were they influenced by the nearby Thunder City while being stationed here and drilled holes into their own skulls?
The third team seemed to be people from the Wu family, and there was a good chance that it was Uncle Three. There were those in the Wu family who were good at raising dogs, so they must’ve moved through the forest canopy and marked the key points with animal skins.
The fourth team was a German team who wanted to use paragliders to pass over the whole forest from the air. This German team obviously didn’t know about the third team’s path and could only take risks.
I came up with a simple story in my head. Back then, an expert team from the late Qing or early Republic era discovered the secret of Thunder City. They didn’t want to let other people know about it, but they also needed their descendants to find Thunder City in sixty years’ time. As a result, they set up the royal poinciana trees. Sixty years later, high-level Kuomintang officials discovered this clue (maybe they were the descendants), so they sent a team into the forest to follow the signs and try to find Thunder City. But the team disappeared after they entered Thunder City. Uncle Three, who was investigating thunder, discovered what they did in this valley after conducting his field investigation. So, Uncle Three went into this forest to investigate and found the installations (the secret rooms under the trees) that this spy unit had set up in those days. But the forest was very dangerous. On the one hand, Uncle Three probably wanted to make use of the installations. On the other hand, he wanted to move around more freely and conveniently, so he used dogs and scent markers to find the path. The German company wanted to buy information on this route from Uncle Three, but he refused, so they had to take a risk and use paragliders.
Poker-Face and Black Glasses were the fifth wave of people.
It actually sounded quite reasonable.
Kan Jian figured out a way to bring the paraglider over to us, while the rest of us continued looking for marks around the royal poinciana.
To my surprise, no matter how much we searched this time, we couldn’t find Poker-Face’s mark at all. As time went by, we became more and more anxious, but we really couldn’t find it.
In fact, this was a very normal thing. People who hid things had a much higher advantage than those who were looking for them. But the other three people kept looking at me. It made feel uncomfortable, as if I had made some sort of mistake. I couldn’t help thinking, maybe we won’t find it. Maybe it’s not here because Poker-Face finally decided to go to the calling spring. In other words, he gave up on this route. Maybe when he got here, he gave up and chose to go to the calling spring instead.
Off to the side, Kan Jian quickly pulled the paraglider over. We found that there weren’t any bones wrapped up in the fabric. A lot of people crashed into trees or cliffs while gliding, and many people fell to their deaths before opening the paraglider’s sail. If the sail was opened, then the person was probably alive, so it was normal for there not to be a body.
We climbed back up the tree trunk again and Liu Sang asked, “Do you have any idea which direction to go in?”
“I have to rely on your ears for that,” I replied.
MereBear's Translation 