Chapter 2: The Fake Film Crew

Li Douzhan's house was considerably more luxurious than Cao Chuan's — at least it had a full kitchen and bathroom, a two-room place of about thirty square meters, and as for the floor, it was the first floor, convenient for him to haul goods around normally.

Cao Chuan went in and first cleared a sleeping spot for himself, shoved all those machine-struck coins and manure-pit porcelain under the bed, dug out a set of Li Douzhan's bedding and laid it out, and only then sat down to wait for the drinks.

Once the food and wine were laid out, the two first clinked cups and drained them dry; after drinking, Cao Chuan directly pulled out his wallet, fished out the card, and tossed it over: "You know the password, it's my birthday. This settles what I took from you back then — whether it's enough or not, this is all there is."

Li Douzhan rolled his eyes and stared at Cao Chuan, and only after a long moment sneered: "Heh heh," chewed a mouthful of shredded pig ear, then added: "The moment I saw you today I knew something was off, that haggard look, like you'd just had a miscarriage or something. Go on, keep pretending — there'll come a time when you'll be yelling and hollering to tell your bro."

Cao Chuan smiled faintly and raised his cup: "Come on, let's have another."

After the night passed, the two rose early in the morning; Cao Chuan helped Li Douzhan load the goods for his stall onto the electric tricycle, then went back to shower and eat, and afterward strolled out, looking leisurely enough.

No particular aim, just wandering through Hangzhou in winter, his chest full of a stifling weight he could share with no one, and it wasn't until he returned in the afternoon that he realized the stroll hadn't really solved anything — even if this was his first long holiday in years.

That night, tossing and turning in bed, he finally decided to go check out the temples and Daoist abbeys in the area the next day. Who knew, maybe some bodhisattva or deity could lend him a hand and take this thing off his finger — a certain someone was no longer a materialist, not since that one moment three months ago.

A night with nothing to say; rising early, he turned down Li Douzhan's suggestion to work the stall together, and after heading out the two went their separate ways. Cao Chuan slung on a travel bag, felt a bit cold so he dug out a windbreaker and wrapped it on, went straight to the west bus station, randomly boarded a minibus, and was carried all the way to the foot of the Mu Mountain scenic area.

Right now he just wanted to find a place with no one around, then quietly wait for the ring to act up. The mental preparation over these past few months was already solid enough; his only fear now was that some kind of disturbance might happen and be seen by someone.

So he veered off the main road and wandered along the scenic trails, taking in the sights as he went, admiring Mu Mountain's cascading waterfalls and flowing springs, its sea of clouds and strange rocks; meandering and circling, he'd walked who knows how far, the mountain path growing steeper and steeper, until inadvertently, after climbing a precipitous trail, he saw a stretch of abandoned stone terrace halfway up the mountain.

After roaming a circle around the empty and deserted mid-mountain, Cao Chuan thought this spot wasn't bad — lovely scenery, suitable for playing dead. So he set down his bag, found a rock on the open ground and sat down, and turned over the ring on his finger.

Inside the ring's mirror surface, that thin yellow line had, at some point without him noticing, already fully connected into a complete circle, and was still spinning ceaselessly.

"That can't be right — nothing actually happened?" Cao Chuan muttered, and as he spoke, he used the thumb of his right hand to gently rub the black mirror surface on the back of his left finger.

At that very moment, his pupils suddenly began to shrink back; a pitch-black point burst forth before his eyes, instantly expanding into a faint white ring of light. The surrounding light dimmed sharply, and Cao Chuan himself, in the instant that white light expanded, was already swallowed up within it.

Fine weather and warm sun, drinking wine and eating meat — every last man of Pingfeng Stronghold, young and old, was gathered in the mountain yard right now, eating and drinking with abandon.

The Great Lord, official name Zhou Tong, was thirty-five years of age; a few years ago he'd taken over the seat from the dying Old Stronghold Master, and in the years since taking the position, the stronghold had been fairly prosperous.

The Second Lord, Chen Huoding, with leopard-like bulging eyes and a bristling beard across his fierce face, was right in the middle of bickering with Lü Accountant.

Zhou Tong watched as Chen Er Dangjia ran out of words and began huffing and glaring, so he let out a hearty laugh, stood up, raised his wine bowl, and bellowed: "All you brothers — drink!" With that, he threw his head back and downed the bowl of homebrew in one gulp; the rest of the crowd, too caught up to keep arguing, raised their bowls one after another and drank deeply in unison.

Before Master Zhou could even sit back down, every person in the entire mountain yard, as if touched by an immortal's finger, instantly fell dead silent. Everyone, like clay statues or wooden puppets, remained rigidly frozen in their previous motions; a full sixty percent had their mouths wide open, and dozens of pairs of eyes stared fixedly at a patch of flat ground in the very center.

The magnificent light-and-shadow effect had completely stunned the scene.

In that very instant just now, a blinding white ring of light had burst forth from the center of the yard, with something inside seeming to revolve; the next moment, the ring of light suddenly expanded outward, and then in the blink of an eye vanished without a trace, as if it had never appeared at all — except that an extra person had appeared right there on the spot.

The very first moment his feet touched solid ground, Cao Chuan already saw the middle-aged man in front of the armchair across from him — a thick blue cloth robe, hair bound up in a topknot, around thirty-some years old, square face, thick brows, a short tuft of beard beneath his chin, staring at him with a face full of agony, as if this fellow was suffering from hemorrhoids, his eyeballs practically bulging out.

Below the middle-aged man was a short, fat man in a black robe.

Hair also bound in a topknot; as for his image, you could apply the label "1.58-meter version of Zhang Fei" — his dark face all a mess of wild whiskers, his build clearly solid at a glance, broad-shouldered and thick-backed, dressed in a short workman's outfit, looking very much like a capable fighter.

However, after appraisal, Cao Chuan concluded that this was a sick man. Because his arm had been trembling the whole time, and the bowl he was holding was constantly dripping water onto the ground; he thought this man might have had polio.

The empty mid-mountain had in an instant transformed into a walled square, with several stone houses added; beyond the square, along the mountainside stretching out behind, glimpses of eaves could be seen among the green; surrounding him was a circle of short men with hair bound in topknots. "Did I stumble onto a fake film crew? Where's the director?" For a split second, Cao Chuan thought he was on a set.

"So it's crossing over — damn, this really is some noble character, the ring actually brought me to ancient times!" The next moment, a certain someone finally understood.

Although among the various outcomes he'd imagined, crossing over ranked near the bottom, still, all things considered, compared to system activation or some old grandpa showing up, this result didn't seem too bad?

The unknown is the most terrifying thing; in this moment, the hesitation and stifling weight of many days were swept clean away, and Cao Chuan instantly felt the stone in his chest vanish without a trace. The shock and incomprehension brought by crossing over — he couldn't spare the time to marvel at that just yet; over twenty years of life experience was reminding him that the first problem to solve right now was probably this circle of people around him.

Hair bound in topknots, coarse cloth long gowns, fierce and vicious faces, filthy and grimy; he even spotted blades, axes, and spears on racks in the distance — they really looked like a bunch of bandits out of a period drama, and the makeup was painted on quite meticulously too.

Just as Cao Chuan was slowly turning his head to look around, a sharp shriek shattered the silence across the scene: "It moved!"

With a roar, like a heap of corpses after the director shouts "Cut!", the dead men all sprang into motion in an instant.

Cao Chuan compared it with his own secondhand Hangzhou dialect and roughly figured that the shout just now was probably the two words "It moved"; though the pronunciation was a bit odd, he could barely make it out.

Fort Master Zhou was now also inclined to believe that the one before him was a living person, and upon a closer look, a young man at that. Pale-faced and beardless, long hair draping his shoulders, dressed in a strange grass-gray front-buttoned long robe, tall and large in stature, a full head taller than the men of the stronghold.

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