Chapter 311: Legend of the Shadow

The summer mountain wind blew through the lamp hanging in front of the house. The bulb and the masses of insects around it swayed together, casting dappled light and shadow. At first I thought I was seeing things, but after the wind passed, the shadow was still there.

I stared at it. At first, a few glances gave me no particular feeling, but the more I looked, the colder my back became. Could it be that someone had hanged themselves in Agui's house? I fought off my dizziness, sat up, rubbed my eyes, and looked more carefully.

When I looked again, the shadow had vanished. Behind the window, it was pitch black—nothing at all.

An illusion? I furrowed my brow hard and asked Agui, "Who lives behind that room?"

Agui looked and said, "It's my son."

"Oh." Something flickered in my mind, but nothing came of it. I just felt dizzy again and thought to myself, It must be his son looking over here. I've had too much to drink; my vision is getting strange.

It was getting late. Agui looked at his house and said he was going back to rest.

Fatty paid the information fee of thirty per thousand characters. We said goodbye to him and entered the house. As soon as we got inside, Fatty grumbled, "Damn, just a couple of sentences, and that bastard managed to squeeze three hundred bucks out of me. The wisdom of the working people is truly boundless."

I said, "Who told you to play the rich guy? Flaunting your wealth in a poor backwater is the lamest thing you can do. And you're still complaining? Lame of the lame."

Fatty muttered a few words, calling me a hypocrite and a phony, but I didn't have the energy to argue with him. For ordinary people, it's not easy to fall asleep at night when you first come to Guangxi; we hadn't slept well the previous nights either. But tonight, with the alcohol, we were pretty groggy and soon fell asleep. The sleep passed without incident, and we didn't wake up until after eleven the next morning.

After eating the lunch Agui made for us, we followed his daughter to the address Brother Chu had given us. It took less than ten minutes to get there.

It was a very old stilted wooden building, with black tiles and yellow mud walls, only one story. It looked a bit smaller than the other wooden buildings—come to think of it, all the houses here seemed to be like this. It appeared uninhabited, blending in with the other houses in the village, very inconspicuous.

Agui's daughter was puzzled about why we were there. We pretended to take photos, and Fatty gave her some money to send her away first. Seeing no one around, we tried to climb inside.

The wooden building was built on a hillside, with its back against the mountain. The windows were all broken, and the door was firmly locked, with faded door god pictures pasted on it. We pushed a couple of times but couldn't even create a crack.

"Do you remember this wooden building?" I asked Poker-face.

He touched the wooden pillars and the door, then shook his head. I sighed. By then, Fatty had already pried open a window on the side and waved at us: "Quick, we can get in here."

"So skilled, have you done this before, you bastard?" I cursed.

"Who do you think your Fatty is? I'm a master of analogy, you understand? Grave robbing and burglary differ by only one character." Fatty said as he urged us in. One of us kept watch while we sneaked in through the window, then closed it behind us. Once inside, my heart was pounding wildly—it was extremely thrilling. My pants even got caught, and I was almost bare-assed. I thought to myself, Breaking into a living person's place is way more stressful than robbing a dead person's grave.

Inside the wooden building, it was a bit dim, but the layout was very simple. First, I saw a large dining room similar to Agui's, connected to a stove. Many tools hung on the walls, all rusty.

"Little brother, I never would have guessed you used to be a farmer," Fatty said, picking up a hoe. "Hoeing grain at noon under the sun—you're the hoeing, and I'm the noon."

We ignored him and saw that there was a wooden wall partitioning the area. Behind the wooden wall should be the room Brother Chu said he found. This kind of wooden building only has one room; it had to be right.

There was no door, only a very old curtain, the dust on it caked and mottled. Poker-face frowned, looking around, seeming a bit hesitant. But after only a few seconds, he lifted the curtain and walked in.

I was also a bit tense. This person who seemed to drift in the void had finally found a place of his own, but he didn't remember a thing. I wondered if fate was playing a joke on him. But I didn't have time to think it through; Fatty pushed me in.

As soon as I entered the room, I was hit by a musty smell. It was very dark inside; I couldn't see anything clearly. I vaguely saw Fatty trying to open a window, only to discover the room had no windows at all.

We hadn't expected this situation. No one had brought a flashlight, so we could only tie back a section of the curtain to let the outside light in. In the dim light, we could see the room was cramped. A set of shelves lined the walls. We first saw some books and some boxes. The shelves were mostly empty, and dirt was scattered on the floor. Besides these things, there was only a wooden bed and a wooden table. The table was an old student desk. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust.

The air in the mountains is very clean, so not much dust had accumulated. If this were in a big city, the dust here could be shoveled up for farming. This also confirmed that no one had been here for a very long time.

"This is your room?" I was a bit surprised. Looking at the room, it felt too ordinary. This was where Poker-face lived? For someone like him, shouldn't the room be weirder?

But on second thought, I couldn't really imagine how it should be weird. He was a human after all; people always sleep in beds, not coffins. The clues wouldn't be written on the walls; they should be among these furnishings.

We walked inside. Fatty approached the cabinets and found basically nothing. He muttered to himself, "I never figured you for a dirt-poor farmer."

Although there weren't many things in the room, it looked quite messy. The boxes and books weren't neatly arranged; possibly they had been rummaged through when Brother Chu came. I picked up a book at random and found it was very damp, an old thread-bound edition. I flipped through it; the pages were a bit moldy. I wondered, How could there be a book like this? The only things that looked halfway decent were the bed and the table. Thinking of this, I immediately walked over to the writing desk to look for the photos Brother Chu had mentioned.

When I reached the desk, I saw the dust-covered glass on top. Beneath it, I could faintly make out many photos. It seemed Brother Chu hadn't lied to me.