Chapter 14 Traveling Notes

I wasn’t in a hurry to find Deren. Although I was curious why a Deren had suddenly reappeared, I knew that my purpose for being here was simply to travel.

But traveling in Tibetan areas was a little special—eating, drinking, and looking at the scenery all required physical strength. Although it was very tiring to build things here, the physical exertion was actually very normal. My shoulder muscles quickly swelled up, and when I was in the hot spring earlier, I felt as if I was a little bigger.

I got dressed and went straight back to work, deciding that I would ignore the overflowing water and start work on the attic above.

But after making a batch of boards and testing their strength, I realized that this job would take a long time. It’s hard to explain the difficulty of building in a place like this, but I’ll try. The first problem had to do with the foundation. This place was full of rocks, and I didn’t want to make holes to act as anchor points for the foundation because that would destroy the geological structure here (truthfully, I wouldn’t be able to penetrate the rocks even if I wanted to).

The original plan was to build a second-floor room directly above the shack, but I found that the wood wasn’t up to standard. It would definitely crack if we simply used it as flooring, so I needed more lateral beams to act as a support.

I didn’t have enough wood for the beams. If I used what I had to make them, then I wouldn’t have enough material for the floor and façade.

So, the best course of action was to go to Motuo and buy steel beams.

But as soon as those beams were put up, the second floor would become extremely heavy and two more pillars would need to be added under the shack for support. And the best place to put these two pillars was right in the hot spring, which was too unrealistic.

Moreover, I had already put down straw on top of the shack. When I first laid it down, I thought that this second-floor room and the shack would be connected kind of like how a staircase was. The room on the second floor would be set up against the mountain while the shack below would act as its skirt.

The whole building should be set up against the mountain to form one side of the “凸” character, but this brought us back to the first problem: there was no way to lay the foundation.

As I was thinking hard, the young German girl suddenly showed up. We drew sketches for a long time before she eventually asked, “Actually, is it possible to just scrap the whole idea?”

I immediately got lost in thought.

Was it possible to just forget it? For me, this was a constant struggle I had to endure throughout my life.

Just forget it.

“You’re right,” I suddenly said to her. “Who cares about the second-floor room?”

“Then what about the wood you’ve already cut?”

“We can use it to make a beautiful staircase that can reach this hot spring,” I said.

When Poker-Face and Fatty arrived, I was already designing the stairs.

That day, Fatty continued to connect the bamboo water pipe while the young German girl took one of the other workers and used the wood to make a large square bath. There were a lot of stones on the outside while the inside was waterproofed using a collage of wood. Then, beams were erected between the two structures below. It was originally supposed to be covered with glass so that the prototype of a sunbathing room would be formed, but the lamas here brought up a lot of linen and spread it directly over the top, forming a bathing place that seemed like an open-air bath but wasn’t.

Now, countless linen cloths in varying colors were hanging down from above.

The wooden collage bath needed to be oiled and sealed to prevent leaks, which took a long time. We had more than forty people on the construction site that day, so the rough shape was completed by evening. But when night came, everyone just ignored that the bath was still leaking and connected the bamboo water pipe from the hot spring and began filling it with water. When the workers saw where the water was leaking, they covered some of the linen in a local sticky mud and plugged the holes.

It probably wouldn’t leak now that it was plugged, so everyone started testing the bath out. The water soon filled up, and the whole room became humid.

These dark-skinned, muscular people couldn’t stop playing in the water at all. They were so happy and lively that it almost seemed like there was no tomorrow.

I made a rule with everyone that the girls would soak in the morning, the boys in the afternoon, and the lamas in the evening. But before that, we’d definitely have to renovate this place tomorrow.

They asked me if they could go to the area above the little shack to see the snow-capped mountains and all soak together. After thinking about it for a moment, I ultimately refused. In any case, we wouldn’t be able to stay here long so I wanted to enjoy it by myself first.

That evening, dinner for the three of us was delivered to the open-air hot spring on the cliff by the young lama. As the three of us finally soaked in the water together, I could see that Poker-Face’s tattoo was slowly starting to appear and Fatty had about six or seven strings of beads around his neck that he had dug up from various tombs in recent years. The medicinal properties of this hot spring must be strong enough to exorcise evil spirits and cure corpse poisoning, I thought to myself.

The young lama mentioned again that Deren had returned, and I began to realize that this Deren must have wanted to see us, but he was reluctant to take the initiative to approach us first.

I didn’t answer him, instead thinking to myself, forget it. Let’s keep him waiting.

As we looked out at the setting sun, it was silent and peaceful. The sunset that night was very beautiful, as if yellow-orange, fiery red, purple-red, and all kinds of other colorful pigments had spilled over the clouds. The whole sky was filled with the bright colors of the setting sun, as if the blue dome of heaven was splitting apart.

It wasn’t something that could be captured on a cell phone camera; you could only see it with the naked eye.

“Little Brother, the statue that you carved back then seems to have disappeared. Have you found it?” Fatty asked Poker-Face before jokingly adding, “Are they going to turn against you? Where could such a valuable statue have gone?”

Poker-Face looked into the distance and shook his head, “That’s their stone.”

That statue was a beacon I saw on my journey to find him, a beacon for him to pursue his own life. But for the lamas here, it was just another statue carved from stone.

“But the statue is very heavy. Where is it? They couldn’t just throw it down the mountain, could they? Wouldn’t that harm the flowers and plants?” Fatty wondered.

Poker-Face looked at the rocks around the hot spring. My eyes widened in shock as I thought to myself, fuck me. Did those people smash it apart so we’d have rocks for the hot spring? I’ve committed a grave sin! I immediately wanted to check the rocks one by one, but after checking for a few seconds, I suddenly decided to let it go.

It was their stone.

Although I hoped that the statue had merely been moved to an abandoned room in the temple, if it had really been broken apart and spread around us, then I suddenly felt that it was acceptable.

It almost gave the place a zen-like feeling.

The young lama had been continuously giving us tea, but when the snow-capped mountains in the distance turned into black silhouettes, he bowed and prepared to go back down to the temple. We had only built part of the stairs so they weren’t completely finished just yet. When the young lama reached the edge of the cliff, he suddenly turned around and said to us, “Deren Lama’s common name is Zhang Haike. Maybe you all are familiar with him.”

<Chapter 13><Table of Contents><Chapter 15>

****

Ya’ll, this was literally my face (mostly b/c my brain read that as Zhang Haiyan first before I remembered which one Zhang Haike was lol. Thought our boi was revitalizing the Poker-Face temples for a moment).

If you need a refresher, Haike is the one that looked like Wu Xie and almost killed him in Vol 8 (and his sister was the bitch that almost got Fatty and Wu Xie killed in Tibetan Sea Flower)