Chapter 70 Turnover

Thinking up to this point, I finally calmed down a little bit. If Xiao Hua and Poker-Face’s sudden disappearance before wasn’t forced, then that was essentially saying that they had left me to deal with such a mess without telling me. This didn’t make any sense. But if my analysis was done from the perspective that they had been forced, and it was related to Black Glasses, then that meant that they really had no other way.

It could at least prove that they were acting autonomously rather than falling off the cliff and dying without me ever knowing what happened to them.

In my early years, I never trusted all the inferences I made, so they rarely affected my behavior except for extreme situations. But later, I found that my inferences were basically accurate most of the time. I believed in the principles of causality and reasoning and could prove what I had inferred by seeing it with my own eyes.

Director Tie saw how anxious I was and told me that a team would lower the “fisheye ring catch” equipment into the cave in another fifteen minutes in order to scan the area and render a 3D model of it. This was the software special effects companies used now, and many map companies installed it in cars that drove all over the city. Everything scanned by the cars’ radar would be calculated together with the cameras to generate three-dimensional data in real time.

If the equipment scanned all the way down, it could sweep the whole cliff, including every fine crevice. And if Xiao Hua and Poker-Face were still on the cliff, we definitely wouldn’t miss them.

I nodded while thinking to myself that this was an era of the musket being replaced by the cannon.⁽¹⁾ It was so different from the equipment I used to use back in the day.

Later, I watched the whole process on the computer. This equipment really was amazing. Wen Binghui had set up a satellite antenna, so as the equipment scanned the area in circles, the data was directly sent to the server and then transmitted back to the computer for display. Anyway, it was all high-tech stuff.

As the cliff was rendered in clear detail layer by layer, we all found that there were many things on the cliff that we couldn’t see before. First, there were extremely deep crevices, all of which were inlaid with mummies that looked similar to Jin Xingsan. When we passed by them before, we merely thought that they were shadows, but those crevices were actually very deep. It was impossible to determine whether they led into the mountain, but there definitely wasn’t any problem hiding four or five people in them.

In addition, there were very primitive rock paintings in many places on the cliff, but the color was black so it was very difficult to notice them with the naked eye if you didn’t have electronic equipment.

I asked for a copy of the screenshots that had been taken of these rock paintings because I wanted to take a closer look at them, but at this time, my exhaustion hit me like an avalanche and my mind couldn’t seem to function.

Wen Binghui’s new camp had been set up in a sparse forest nearby, so I walked over to it, hung up a hammock, and then wrapped myself in my clothes. As I lay there in the sunshine, listening to the noises of the others, I fell asleep within seconds.

When I woke up, I was met with the magnificent sight of dusk in the Kunlun Mountains. The light here made everything look like it was under a filter, and I sat there in a daze before I realized that I had been woken up by the loud noise of a helicopter.

I still felt a little dizzy. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had woken up and felt clear-headed. When I climbed out of the hammock, I walked towards the white helicopter with red stripes on it and saw a woman getting out. She was wearing a jacket and had her hair tied up.

It was Xiuxiu. It had been a long time since I had seen her, but she had become a mature woman.

I crossed my arms and put my hands in the opposite sleeves of my jacket—the temperature in the Kunlun Mountains dropped rapidly at night—before casually wandering over to look at her. Xiuxiu walked past me and gave me a look, but didn’t seem to recognize me. After communicating with Wen Binghui for a while and watching me staring at her, she looked at me again and finally recognized me.

“Big Brother?”

Am I really that hard to recognize? I wondered.

As I looked at her and she looked at me, my heart was filled with all kinds of emotions.

Xiuxiu had brought in some new team members and introduced them to the old ones. Fatty hadn’t woken up yet. Xiuxiu was capable and mature, but still full of energy even though she was completely devoid of the youthfulness of the past. I watched the whole process from the sidelines at first, but then I went to the edge of the camp where there were some chairs the locals had brought. I sat and watched the sun set over the river valley and the distant Kunlun Mountains.

I was sitting there in a daze, holding an enamel mug with medicated hot milk tea that Director Tie had given to me, when Xiuxiu came over and sat down next to me, “Don’t you want to shave your beard?”

I touched my chin and gave a wry smile, “I’ll shave tomorrow morning.”

“Do you want to go back to the city to get a thorough checkup? I heard that you were in close contact with that snake. Are you sure that only your tongue was parasitized?” She asked me.

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to go. I heaved a big sigh, “Fatty and I can’t go back like this.”

“Then you can cooperate with Director Tie tonight and the helicopter will send you to the city hospital in the morning. You can come back after you get a CT scan.”

Dusk was drawing to a close and night was coming again. The people here seemed to fear the darkness to a certain extent, so the camp was illuminated with very bright lights.

I shook my head and said to her, “You’re busy. Just call me when the evening meeting starts. I’ll get it checked out myself. Also, help me contact the crematorium in the city. When Fatty wakes up, we’ll send Jin Wantang off.”

Fatty had been carrying Jin Wantang’s corpse on his back when he came out of the cave and it was still sitting in a pile of luggage.

She sighed and handed me something before turning and leaving. I took a look at it and found that it was a toothbrush and toothpaste.

To make a long story short, I smelled myself, but it was hard to tell if I had bad breath or not. I eventually squatted by the stream to brush my teeth and wash my face, the water so cold that it made my teeth tremble. I also shaved my beard while I was at it.

In addition to Director Tie and Wen Binghui, there was another person from the old team who was willing to stay. That person was called Zhao Qiao, and he was a middleman in the business. People called him Colonel Qiao because he looked like a colonel from an anti-Japanese film. This was a man whom Xiao Hua had used a lot in recent years. He left home to become a Taoist priest when he was younger and had been helping Xiao Hua deal with the special guqin⁽²⁾ business ever since he returned to a secular life. I didn’t really know the specific details.

Since the other teams were going back at this time, Wen Binghui had to deal with reporting the deaths. But I won’t discuss that here. The new team had two women and six men.

One of the two women was a team leader and doctor while the other one was a climbing expert. The doctor was about thirty-four or thirty-five years old and her name was Xiao Ling Guan. The expert’s name was Ming Er Nagqu. I didn’t know which ethnic group they belonged to. All six men were in the business, but I’ll introduce them one by one later when I have the chance.

Xiao Ling Guan gave me a checkup. The little snake that had been removed from my tongue before was put in a bottle. When she picked it up and looked at it carefully, she was amazed, “This snake doesn’t have any eyes. It must have been living in the depths of the cave where there’s no light all year round so the eyes degraded.”

“You also know a thing or two about snakes?”

“Things in the depths of caves are generally isolated from the outside world and evolve independently. If the ecosystem is stable, they’ll look similar to how they looked hundreds of millions of years ago. Do you know what living fossils are?”

Listening to her tone, I figured that this elder sister might be the argumentative type, so I didn’t bother saying anything. She continued, “According to the others’ testimonies and what you’ve told us, I think that it’s a multi-body parasite and you should still have it in your body. This one might be a female. It enters through the tongue and then develops little by little, working its way down the throat from the tongue to the spine. Since it’s parasitic, there should still be some snakes in your body.”

“She spit into my mouth. If there were any in my stomach, I’d already have a perforated stomach by now.”

“Open your mouth,” she said to me. I opened my mouth and she stuck a pair of tweezers deep into my throat. “If there are wounds behind the tonsils, it means that other snakes have entered your body from behind your tonsils. At most, you’ll feel a bit of a sore throat.”

After digging for a while, she said to me, “There are multiple snakes still stuck in the holes behind your tonsils.”

When I looked at her, she said, “Don’t move, I’ll use the tweezers to pull them out.”

No, what if they’re poisonous? I said to myself, but she had already started. I suddenly felt something twitch in my throat and then she pulled out a white, worm-like snake.

<Chapter 69><Table of Contents><Chapter 71>

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TN Notes:

(1) Musket being replaced by the cannon is an idiom that basically means equipment has improved enormously.

(2) Guqin or qin, is a long zither with seven strings that are plucked with the fingers.

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Literally my face as I’m working on the last few paragraphs:

I thought we were done with this nonsense! (╯°益°)╯彡┻━┻