Chapter 5 Opening 5: Young Boy in the Field

The young boy finally woke up after we had pinched his philtrum for a long time. Fatty took a hair dryer and let the warm air blow on the back of the boy’s neck and hair until his face slowly became flushed. Then, Fatty mixed up a hot drink using wine and sugar and poured it down the boy’s throat.

After about fifteen minutes, he finally opened his eyes and was able to speak.

“Where’s your flying saucer?” Fatty asked.

“I’m a courier,” the boy said. “The lanterns you ordered have arrived.”

Fatty and I looked at each other as the boy continued, “They’re in the ditch. I was just hit by a car.”

We frantically called an ambulance, and when it arrived, we put the young boy in the back. Fatty went with them, but before leaving, he said emotionally, “Couriers nowadays are so young.”

Poker-Face and I immediately followed the direction the young boy had pointed out, and sure enough, we found an overturned delivery van in the embankment on the side of the road. It was almost completely upside down.

The vehicle that caused the accident must have been quite big, but it had already run away. The ground was covered in debris from the headlights.

Poker-Face and I braved the rain and went down to look inside the van. We saw that it was full of cardboard boxes, some of which were already wet. I reached out and tried to pull some out but found that they were too tightly packed together. Poker-Face asked me to help him, so the two of us jumped into the field and grabbed the side of the van, trying to overturn it with our core strength.

We couldn’t do it since the van must have weighed about 1.5 tons with all the cargo inside, but a car suddenly stopped by the side of the road and the people inside came over to help us. With the additional four or five people, we were finally able to flip the van back over.

We thanked the people for their help and then pushed the van back to the open lot next to the farmhouse. By this time, the rain had finally stopped. Poker-Face and I were completely drenched, so we took off our shirts and hung them on some branches to dry. Bare-chested, we started removing the goods from the van one by one.

I opened one box and found that it was filled with all kinds of wax paper lanterns. I didn’t remember buying these kinds of lanterns and I didn’t know who sent them, either. Many of the lanterns were wet, so we folded them and started hanging them everywhere in Xilaimian.

Even though they were all made of wax paper, I felt that it was safer to hang them up to dry in case the paint on them started to bleed.

The cat still hadn’t left yet and was looking at us calmly from the same spot it had been at before.

After everything was done, I couldn’t help thinking about who might have sent these lanterns. Could they have been a kind gift from some former customers?

Fatty was still at the hospital dealing with the courier boy, so he probably wouldn’t make it back after all that heavy rain. Poker-Face and I went into the kitchen and cooked ourselves some noodles. As we stood in the kitchen eating, I asked Poker-Face, “What do you think about the UFO? It’s not you, right?”

Poker-Face shook his head, but said faintly, “It should be someone else.”

“Someone who can run all over the mountain like this… is it a Zhang family member?”

When we arrived in Fujian, there weren’t as many displaced Zhang family members who came to visit.⁽¹⁾ I was relatively calm at first, but I felt that it was abnormal not seeing any of them for a while now. It was about time for one of them to come bother me.

Plus, this thing with the lanterns was also very strange. I turned on my cell phone and looked at the picture I saw on the website before. I found that the lanterns painted in the picture were exactly the same as the ones that had been sent.

The note below the drawing said: “Ancient souls may be encountered on ancient roads.”

Not good. If someone from the Zhang family is responsible for this, they’re definitely out of their mind.

The cat snuck into the kitchen, walked over to Poker-Face’s feet, jumped onto the stove, and then looked at the bowl in Poker-Face’s hand. I tried to shoo it away since we had a lot of smoked fish hanging above our stove, but it just hissed at me.

I squatted down and hissed back at it, finally managing to scare it away.

But as I looked at it, I suddenly realized something. While it was possible that the cat could have walked forty kilometers to get back here, it was more likely that someone had sent it back.

But who had that much free time?

<Chapter 4><Table of Contents><Chapter 6>

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TN Notes:

(1) The term “visit” that Wu Xie uses here is “省亲” which is to visit one’s parents. I think it’s more of an olden term for when a woman was allowed to go visit her parents after she was married. Like she had to get permission from her husband or something.

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Super sorry for bailing yesterday. But on the bright side, Restart Part 4 is now in pdf and epub format. I just stuck it in the same doc with Restart Part 3. You know where to find it~~

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