Chapter 17 Traveling Notes

There should’ve been a sleepless night ahead of me, but Poker-Face told me not to worry.

As I watched him calmly fall asleep, I figured that although the whole situation was odd, it must be different from what I had originally thought.

And thinking along those lines, after drinking so much butter tea, Fatty and I would have been poisoned long ago if someone truly wanted to kill me.

I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling, which was a bit rotten. It seemed to be snowing heavily outside again because I could see small snowflakes falling through the cracks.

Looking at that small notebook again, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the sincerity with which it had been made was genuine.

I woke up the next day and found that everything was covered in snow. We sighed, put on our Tibetan robes, and followed Poker-Face to the hot spring garden. I saw that the people who had been following us had picked a lot of Gesang Meiduos⁽¹⁾ from all over the place and embedded them in the stone crevices using a special mix of dry moss. These flowers could apparently survive on the water vapor coming from the hot spring garden.

There were a lot of stones here, so we were able to use them to build the sides of the bath and the seats on the side where people could sit while they steamed themselves. Overnight, countless small flowers of varying colors appeared between the stones. This kind of beauty unique to Tibet suddenly made this hot spring garden seem extremely wild.

The whole top of the hot spring garden had also been elevated. I always thought that it was a bit low before, but now it stood about six meters high. The linen cloths at the top were blown around by the wind so they couldn’t stop any snow from falling down, but they also ensured that the people below wouldn’t be drenched in heavy snow.

The hot spring garden had originally looked strange with the cloths overheard, but now that they were more elevated, the whole place looked extremely divine. All the cloths even had scriptures written on them, making them look just like giant prayer flags.

I can’t describe how picturesque the snow falling from the fluttering linen clothes overhead was. Rather than a traditional sense of beauty, it was a very special kind of beauty, one that was unique to Jila Temple.

There were flowers everywhere, covering all the stones we had piled up yesterday. When I looked at our hot spring on the cliff in the distance, I saw that it was covered in flowers as well.

Both places had been decorated by people sometime last night.

“There are some very capable people here,” I said to Fatty.

He squatted down to look at the flowers next to him, “This is really fine work. These roadside wildflowers have grown into the rocks here. They must have been collected from low-altitude places and then replanted here. Since these stones are warm, the flowers are able to survive.”

“This place has been designed to be very aesthetically pleasing. The stones, Gesang Meiduos, and linen prayer flags overhead are all very common things by themselves, but even if they’re put together, they won’t look so divine unless they’ve been purposefully designed that way,” I said.

A gust of wind blew, flipping the linen cloths over and sending a flurry of snowflakes tumbling down. But before they could land on our heads, they all melted and turned into dew.

I looked at Poker-Face. He touched the stones and said to me, “Actually, he wants you to dig down.”

“There must be a space below. But if there’s a space, then that means that there are secrets. And if there are secrets, then we have to check them out. But if we do that, our trip will be ruined,” I said to him.

“There’s a lot of gold buried under Jila Temple.” Poker-Face looked at the wooden bath and added, “It’s at this spot. It’s income from when the Chamber of Commerce was doing business here for many years. Before the temple was built, the excess gold was made into gold bricks and used as the foundation, except for some that were used to take care of the expenses.”

I looked at Fatty, and Fatty looked at me, “Gold bricks as the foundation? Wouldn’t they oxidize?”

“There’s a liquid medicine that protects the gold,” Poker-Face said.

Fatty and I looked at each other again, both feeling a little dizzy. I secretly wondered if it was because the smell of sulfur was too strong.

“So, this fake Zhang Haike set up this scheme in the hopes that we would dig here and find the gold brick foundation?” Fatty asked. “Why is this fake Zhang Haike so kind?”

“He probably thinks that I forgot about it,” Poker-Face said.

I rubbed my face, “How much is there, about two or three catties?”

“When it was dug, the number of Buddhist ritual tools placed down there would indicate how many levels were down below. One level is about three meters high,” Poker-Face said.

I looked at Fatty, “H-h-how many levels are there?”

“I-I-I-I don’t know. You presided over the digging. Don’t you know?”

“I-I-I-I-I…” As I looked at the snow as far as the eye could see, the colorful Gesang Meiduos all around, and the sacred prayer flags overhead, my mind was a little confused.

“Pinch me, Mr. Naïve!” Fatty kept banging his head against my chest.

I looked at the bath, where the hot spring water kept seeping down over what must be layer upon layer of old gold that was black and yellow in color.

“If we tear this down and keep digging, we’ll find the golden bricks.” Fatty lay down on the stones again, “My God, no wonder when I was standing here, I felt as if the gravity of this place was greater than anywhere else. The area below us is a place where time and space are massively distorted.”

I looked at the Gesang Meiduos beside me and asked Poker-Face, “Who the hell is that person? Couldn’t he just tell you that there’s something buried down here, and the thing that’s buried is gold?”

Poker-Face didn’t answer.

I thought about it for a while before suddenly looking at Fatty, “Fuck me, I got it.”

Fatty got up and looked at me, “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Naïve. But as someone who went to college, can you tell me if this gold is Little Brother’s? That’s all I want to know.”

“Does this Zhang family member feel that his patriarch is running a farmhouse because he’s forgotten that he has a source of income?” I asked Fatty. “But he can’t ask Little Brother directly, so in order to save Little Brother’s face, he decided to try this method.”

“Why can’t he ask?”

“Just think about it,” I said. “If your dad is someone with a lot of self-esteem and you discover that he’s secretly delivering food, would you directly ask him, ‘Dad, are you short of money recently?’ This definitely wouldn’t work. The old man has a lot of self-esteem, so he’d simply tell you that he’s fine and he’s not short of money. If you want to give money to honor your father, what would you do?”

“Just say it.”

“I’d secretly put the money in his pocket. When he asks me where it came from, I’d say I didn’t know. If I refused to confess, he’d simply think that it was a pleasant surprise, some money he put in his pocket before and ended up forgetting about,” I said. “The nature of that situation is similar to what’s happening here—this is a way to give Little Brother money.”

“He thinks that Little Brother is suffering with us,” Fatty suddenly realized what I was saying. “But the cashier is already the highest position in our company. Just think about it—you’re the waiter and I’m the cook, but the cashier only needs to point to the QR code.”

Then he looked at the wooden bath, “How should we go about doing it? Do we need to tear it down?”

“Demolish it?” I looked at those Gesang Meiduos, which had been carefully dug out from the grassland at the foot of the mountain one by one and shaped here bit by bit with dirt and moss.

If we wanted to tear it down, then all these flowers would have to be replanted again.

I looked at Poker-Face, who shook his head. I nodded in understanding and said to Fatty, “Forget it.”

Fatty looked at me, “Really?”

I wrapped my Tibetan robe tightly around my body and blew out a puff of white air.

<Chapter 16><Table of Contents><Chapter 18>

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TN Notes:

(1) “Gesang Meiduo” is the Chinese phrase for the Tibetan “flower of happiness” (also called “Kelsang Metok”, “shrubby cinquefoil”, or “Dasiphora fruticosa”). It’s said to bring good luck and hope to people who see it. The Gesang Meiduo is a kind of common flower growing on highland areas with altitudes of about 5,000 m. According to this website, the flower’s message is “the one in front of you is far better than your dream girl”. It’s the symbol of love and happiness and an everlasting pursuit of all the Tibetan people, so it’s believed that whoever finds this flower with eight petals finds their life-time of happiness.

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Pic added 12/3/2022 (fan translation courtesy of me).